Reporters Without Borders has published the latest 2016 report on press freedom where Britain has fallen yet again with the organisation making the following statement about press freedom in Britain:
“Terrorist attacks have led to the adoption of draconian security legislation. The government reacted to the London public transport bombings in 2005 with a Terrorism Act the following year that restricts freedom of expression. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) adopted in 2000 allows the authorities to obtain the phone records of journalists in cases of threats to national security. Worse still, despite a law protecting the confidentiality of sources, the police have since 1984 been able to ask the courts to order media outlets to hand over unpublished journalistic source material “in the interests of justice.”
It is hardly surprising that Britain has fallen 4 places in 2016 behind such countries as; Tonga, Belize, OECS (Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States), Samoa, Ghana, Suriname, Namibia, Jamaica, with Burkino Faso and Botswana just behind, given recent legislative actions by the Conservative government since 2010.
The Guardian revealed in January 2015 that the British intelligence agency GCHQ described journalists as a “potential threat to security” and that huge quantities of emails of many journalists were among interceptions that went as far back as 2008. It was only the result of the Edward Snowden leaks that as many as 70,000 emails from journalists captured by Britain’s surveillance agency became known.
On the 15th October, Gordon Raynor, Chief Reporter at The Telegraph said– “Investigative journalism will be stopped dead in its tracks and local newspapers may be driven out of business when new laws restricting Britain’s free press come into force next month.” He continues – Media organisations face “the most substantial threat to press freedom in the modern era” as a result of the “menacing” laws passed in the wake of the Leveson Inquiry.
An independent report into the implications of the Crime and Courts Act, which came into force on November 3, says that The Telegraph’s landmark investigation into what turned out to be the most explosive political scandal in decades over MPs’ expenses would have been all but impossible under the new regime.
Britain sitting at number 38 flatters reality.
‘Freedom of Press’ is published by the US-based Freedom House, an NGO established in 1941 that has been ranking countries worldwide since 1980 in relation to democracy, human rights and press freedom. In May 2014 it reported that Britain has slipped down the global rankings for freedom of the press to 36th place.
According to Freedom House, “only 13 percent of the world’s population enjoys a free press—that is, where coverage of political news is robust, the safety of journalists is guaranteed, state intrusion in media affairs is minimal, and the press is not subject to onerous legal or economic pressures.” Although Britain is ranked as safe in press freedom terms one has to wonder given the very heavy handed behaviour by the government at The Guardian over the Snowden files and state surveillance over journalists more widely.
Meanwhile, without any sense of shame, US President Obama, the leader of the ‘free-world’, having presided over continual declines in press freedom sees the USA drop to a pitiful 41st place has the Whitehouse Briefing Room release the following statement (first paragraph):
“On World Press Freedom Day, we thank the journalists around the world without whom democracy could not flourish and whose courageous work helps hold authorities to account. These are the men and women who work to ensure that debate on public issues can be, in the words of Justice William Brennan, “uninhibited, robust, and wide open.”
One glaring component missing from all these so-called press freedom reports is that the biggest economic trade deals in the history of humanity are due to be signed in 2016 …. in total secrecy. In the EU, the European Commission is making the secret Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) trade deal even more secret than any normal person would think possible by the introduction of a new rule last year that means politicians can only view (some selected) TTIP text in a secure ‘reading room’ in Brussels. That is, of course, only after their mobile phones, memo pads, and pens have been taken away and two guards ominously placed in the room to ensure no notes are taken. And even then only after signing confidentiality agreements that threaten prosecutions for any leaks.
In the US, the same ‘reading room’ exists. As The Independent reports:
“In the basement of the US capitol, there is a room, a locked soundproof room, and the only people allowed in this room are US senators, and they can’t bring their assistants, they can’t bring their phones, they can’t even take notes in there. Inside this room is not the codes for our nuclear weapons, it’s not CIA files, it’s not the documents that tell us an alien landed in Roswell. No, in this room is the text of a trade deal (TTIP).”
Press freedom?? This type of secrecy, designed by corporations and the unelected politicians of the EU Commission would have made Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany proud. The EU Commission have now become completely independent of the politicians who represent the 508 million citizens of the 28 nation bloc where millions sign petitions and protest on the streets, get arrested and/or fined in their thousands and yet remain unheard. This is extreme press freedom censorship in every sense of the word. It says something when citizens have to rely on people like Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Edward Snowden for any real information on the matter – and both of them are in hiding from British and American police.
And so we come back to RWB who that as it turns out, is financed by none other than the US Congress and by various agencies tied to the US government – who coincidentally are conducting the talks on TTIP.
As GlobalResearch reports: “If we go to the RWB website to find who stands behind these self-anointed judges of world press freedom, we find nothing. Not even their board of directors are named, let alone their financial backers. Their annual published Income and Expenditure statements give no clue who stands behind them financially. RWB’s former Secretary General Robert Menard admitted that the budget for the organization was provided by “US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy.”
Unfortunately, Reporters Without Borders are pretty much in the same boat as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists amongst many others who have thoroughly important sounding names but in the end prove to be little more than propagandists for their masters.
We asked Reporters Without Borders why there had been no mention of TTIP in any of their reports. At the time of publication, we have received no reply.
May 8, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | Freedom House, Human rights, Reporters Without Borders, TTIP, UK |
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A document in the American Archives, reporting the widespread famine and spread of epidemic disease in Iran, estimates the number of the deceased due to the WWI famine to be about 8-10 million.
One of the little-known chapters of history was the widespread famine in Iran during World War I, caused by the British presence in Iran. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Britain became the main foreign power in Iran and this famine or–more accurately–‘genocide’ was committed by the British. The document in the American Archives, reporting the widespread famine and spread of epidemic disease in Iran, estimates the number of the deceased due to the famine to be about 8-10 million during 1917-19 (1), making this the greatest genocide of the 20th century and Iran the biggest victim of World War I (2).
It should be noted that Iran had been one of the main suppliers of food grains to the British forces stationed in the empire’s South Asian colonies. Although bad harvests during these two years made the situation worse, it was by no means the main reason why the Great Famine occurred. Prof. Gholi Majd of Princeton University writes in his book, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, that American documents show that the British prevented imports of wheat and other food grains into Iran from Mesopotamia, Asia, and also the USA, and that ships loaded with wheat were not allowed to unload at the port of Bushehr in the Persian Gulf. Professor Majd argues that Great Britain intentionally created genocide conditions to destroy Iran, and to effectively control the country for its own purposes. Major Donohoe describes Iran of that time as a “land of desolation and death” (3). But this event soon became the subject of a British cover up.
Britain has a long record of its several attempts to conceal history and rewrite it in their own favor. The pages are filled with conspiracies that were covered up by the British government to hide its involvement in different episodes that would tarnish the country’s image. One of the clear examples is the “Jameson Raid”; a failed coup against Paul Kruger’s government in South Africa. This raid was planned and executed directly by the British government of Joseph Chamberlain under the orders of Queen Victoria (4) (5). In 2002, Sir Graham Bower’s memoirs were published in South Africa, revealing these involvements that had been covered up for more than a century, focusing attention on Bower as a scapegoat for the incident (6).
The records that were destroyed to cover up British crimes around the globe, or were kept in secret Foreign Office archives, so as to, not only protect the United Kingdom’s reputation, but also to shield the government from litigation, are indicative of the attempts made by the British to evade the consequences of their crimes. The papers at Hanslope Park also include the reports on the “elimination” of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya; records that show ministers in London knew of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya and roasting them alive (7). These records may include those related to Iran’s Great Famine. Why were these records that cover the darkest secrets of the British Empire destroyed or kept secret? Simply because they might ‘embarrass’ Her Majesty’s government (8).
A famine occurred in Ireland from 1845 until 1852 which killed one fourth of the Irish population. This famine was caused by British policies and faced a large cover up attempt by the British government and crown to blame it on ‘potatoes’ (9). The famine, even today, is famous in the world as the “potato famine” when, in reality, it was a result of a planned food shortage and thus a deliberate genocide by the British government (10).
The true face of this famine as a genocide has been proven by historian Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy published by Palgrave MacMillan (11). A ceremony was planned to take place in the US to unveil Coogan’s book in America, but he was denied a visa by the American embassy in Dublin (12).
Therefore it becomes obvious that Britain’s role in Iran’s Great famine, which killed nearly half of Iran’s population, was not unprecedented. The documents published by the British government overlook the genocide, and consequently, the tragedy underwent an attempted cover-up by the British government. The Foreign Office “handbook on Iran” of 1919 mentioned nothing related to the Great Famine.
Julian Bharier, a scholar who studied Iran’s population, built his “backward projection” estimation of Iran’s population (13) based on reports from this “handbook” and, as a result, ignored the effect of the Great Famine on Iran’s population in 1917. Bharier’s estimations were used by some authors to deny the occurrence of the Great Famine or to underestimate its impacts.
By ignoring Iran’s Great Famine in his estimations, Bharier’s work faces four scientific deficiencies. Bharier does not consider the loss of population caused by the famine in his calculations; he needs to ‘adjust’ the figure of the official census in 1956 from 18.97 million to 20.37 million, and this is despite the fact that he uses the 1956 census as his primary building block for his “backward projection” model. He also ignores the official growth rates and uses his personal assumptions in this regard, which is far lower than other estimates. Finally, although Bharier frequently cites Amani’s estimates (14), in the end Bharier’s findings contradict those of Amani; notably Bharier’s population estimate for 1911 is 12.19 million while Amani put this figure at 10.94 million.
Despite deficiencies in the population estimates offered by Bharier for the period of the Famine and its earlier period, his article offers useful data for the post-Famine period; this is because these figures are generated from 1956 backward. That is to say, numbers generated from 1956 to 1919 are thus credible because they do not include the period of famine. Moreover, this portion of Bharier’s data is also true to that of the American Legation. For example, Caldwell and Sykes estimate the 1919 population at 10 million, which is comparative to Bharier’s figure of 11 million.
Gholi Majd was not the first author to refute Bharier’s figures for this period. Gad G. Gilbar, in his 1976 article on demographic developments during the second half of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, also considers Bharier’s estimates inaccurate for the period.
In an apparently biased review of Majd’s work, Willem Floor confirms Bharier’s model (15), despite its apparent deficiencies, and takes a mocking tone toward the well- documented work of Gholi Majd to undermine the devastation caused by the British-instigated famine in Iran, to the point of total denial of the existence of such a genocide. Floor also offers inaccurate or untrue information to oppose the fact that the British deprived Iranians from honey and caviar in the north, as he argues caviar was haram (religiously prohibited), while no such fatwa has ever existed in Shia jurisprudence and all available decrees assert that caviar is halal or permissible under the Islamic law. There was a rumor made up by Russians at the time, saying that Caviar was haram and Britain made full use of this rumor.
Another criticism made by Floor was to question why Majd’s work does not use British archival sources. A more important question is why Majd should have used these sources when they totally ignore the occurrence of the famine in Iran. The fact that Majd used mainly US sources seems to be reasonable on the grounds that the US was neutral toward the state of affairs in Iran at the time, and made efforts to help by feeding them (16).
*Sadegh Abbasi is a Junior M.A. student at Tehran University. As a student in history he has also worked as a contributor to different Iranian news agencies.
References
1. Majd, Mohammad Gholi. The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran: 1917-1919. Lanham : University Press of America, 2013. p.71: https://books.google.com/books?id=5WgSAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA71&lpg.
2. Sniegoski, Stephen J. Iran as a Twentieth Century Victim: 1900 Through the Aftermath of World War II. mycatbirdseat.com. [Online] 11 10, 2013. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://mycatbirdseat.com/2013/11/iran-twentieth-century-victim-1900-aftermath-world-war-ii/.
3. Donohoe, Major M. H. With The Persian Expedition. London : Edward Arnold, 1919. p. 76.
4. Nelson, Michael and Briggs, Asa. Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera. London : Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2007. p. 97: https://books.google.com/books?id=6ISE-ZEBfy4C&pg=PA97&lpg.
5. Bower, Graham. Sir Graham Bower’s Secret History of the Jameson Raid and the South African Crisis, 1895-1902. Cape Town : Van Riebeeck Society, 2002. p. xii: https://books.google.fr/books?id=VFYFZKRBXz0C&pg=PR23&lpg.
6. Ibid. p. xvii.
7. Cobain, Ian, Bowcott, Owen and Norton-Taylor, Richard. Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes . The Guardian. [Online] 03 17, 2012. [Cited: 10 10, 2015.] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes.
8. Walton, Calder. Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire. New York : The Overlook Press, 2013. p. 15: https://books.google.fr/books?id=f2cjCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&lpg.
9. Warfield, Brian. History Corner: The Great Irish Famine. wolfetonesofficialsite.com. [Online] [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.wolfetonesofficialsite.com/famine.htm.
10. Britain’s Cover Up. irishholocaust.org. [Online] [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.irishholocaust.org/britain’scoverup.
11. Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
12. O’Dowd, Niall. Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British. IrishCentral. [Online] 08 06, 2015. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.irishcentral.com/news/proving-the-irish-famine-was-genocide-by-the-british-tim-pat-coogan-moves-famine-history-unto-a-new-plane-181984471-238161151.html.
13. Bharier, Julien. A Note on the Population of Iran, 1900-1966 . Population Studies. 1968, Vol. 22, 2.
14. Amani, Mehdi. La population de l’Iran. Population (French Edition). 1972, Vol. 27, 3: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1529398.
15. Floor, Willem. Reviewed Work: The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919 by Mohammad Gholi Majd . Iranian Studies. Iran Facing the New Century, 2005, Vol. 38, 1.
16. Fecitt, Harry. Other Theatres of War. westernfrontassociation.com. [Online] 09 29, 2013. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/the-great-war/great-war-on-land/other-war-theatres/3305-dunsterforce-part-1.html.
Related:
Iran as a Twentieth Century Victim: 1900 Through the Aftermath of World War II
May 8, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Iran, UK |
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Founding political myths provide reassuring points of reference but they do not provide the full, or even, real reason on why major historical moments occurred. As is popularly known the American Revolution was triggered specifically by the Boston Tea Party in defiance of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773. Yet in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, historian Professor Steve Pincus argues it was a series of economic policies, enforced by the British parliament from the 1760’s onward that made no small contribution to the colonialist’s rebellion against King George’s tyranny.
Recently in the United Kingdom a commemoration was held to mark hundred years since the Gallipoli expedition during World War One. The British Empire had intended to defeat the Ottoman Empire’s forces by sailing through the straits of Dardanelles and then move on to occupy Istanbul for the latter then to be parceled out to its ally, Imperial Russia.
The ‘Asia Minor Agreement’ between the Entente Powers of the British Empire, France and Imperial Russia divided the Ottoman Empire among themselves but after the Russian revolution (and the subsequent withdrawal of Russia from the war) this agreement became popularly known as Sykes-Picot. The British Empire’s failure to breach the Ottoman Empire’s positions at Dardanelles compelled it to fish around amongst the latter’s suzerainty in search of disgruntled groups who would be tricked into executing Great Britain’s dirty work of defeating the Ottomans and breaking up their Empire. Hence we today have the legend of the “Arab Revolt” as championed and jointly led by the British agent T.E.Lawrence aka “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Similarly when one attempts to ascertain the origins of the United States and the Saudi Arabian decades old alliance, the meeting held between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Kingdom’s founder, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud on board the USS Quincy on 14th February 1945 at Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal is widely regarded as the symbolic starting point. Hitherto, Ibn Saud had been the British Empire’s most reliable and favoured ally or desert stooge.
Since capturing Riyadh, what is now Saudi Arabia’s capital, with British weapons in 1902 Ibn Saud had dutifully and faithfully done the Empire’s bidding. Whether it was attacking the Ottoman’s Empire’s representatives in the Arabian desert or dispatching the recalcitrant Hussain Ibn Ali from the Hijaz, (the western part of today’s Saudi Arabia) in the mid-1920’s after he had refused to accept the Britain’s Zionist colonial project in Palestine; the Empire knew it had a loyal servant in Ibn Saud.
But with the Empire’s resources stretched during World War II, some British diplomats as early as 1941 were attempting to encourage American involvement in Saudi Arabia. The Empire believed it could no longer afford to subsidise Ibn Saud as well as soundly account for its own domestic and other imperial undertakings. According to two British biographers of the Saudi clan, David Holden and Richard Johns, British diplomats “had attempted in the dark days of 1941 to interest the United States Government in taking on some of their financial burden in Saudi Arabia” to no avail.[1]
Two academic studies by Dr. Barry Rubin also confirm it was the British who made the initial approaches to the United States. In the summer of 1941 the Minister-Counsellor in the British embassy in the United States, Neville Butler was attempting to encourage the State Department’s head of Near East Affairs, Wallace Murray to purchase more oil from Saudi Arabia. In a meeting in late July 1941, Butler suggested to Murray that it was “most important” that Ibn Saud knew he had friends in the United States to which he can rely on for assistance.[2]
Several weeks later on August 21st the Americans rebuffed British approaches to subsidise Ibn Saud. Yet this did not stop the British from trying to work out a way of enticing the Americans to take some responsibility in the Middle East. The British remained adamant that the Americans should and must be involved in the Arab World, as the “Foreign Office was trying to work out some division of economic opportunity and political responsibility to avoid being overwhelmed by the United States.”[3]
In other words, for the British, the issue was how to financially cut the Americans into the Middle East. As such, if the Americans were to be appropriately cut in, they would, it was thought, inevitably burden more imperial responsibility for policing the Middle East without threatening other British interests.
But why choose Ibn Saud? Why didn’t the British stealthily offer Iran, Iraq or any other oil wells which the British had carved countries out from i.e. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, etc?
It appears that Saudi Arabia was the nation chosen by British imperialists to ingratiate the Americans with largely because the British clearly felt that they had enough oil in Iran and Iraq to satisfy their needs and therefore could afford to portion out Saudi Arabia to the Americans. More so, with the Empire’s oil needs met in Iran and Iraq there was no need to develop Saudi Arabian oil fields. This was noted by American officials who reported that the British “blessed with ample oil supplies from Iran and Iraq” had no interest in developing Saudi reserves.[4]
Furthermore, In Rubin’s book on American-British rivalry in the early 1940’s in the Middle East he observed that:
“The British, far from seeking to exclude American interests from the region, were attempting to work out a method for providing America with some responsibilities in the Middle East in order to make it a reliable partner in helping to shore up existing British interests.”[5] This responsibility ultimately culminated in transmuting Ibn Saud from a British puppet into an American puppet.
In other words if existing British interests were to be given a second American guard in the region then the Americans too needed something real or “ample” to defend. As Butler argued “Americans are not likely to accept responsibilities in the Middle East unless they first have increasing material interests there.”[6] The historian John Keay states that the “the British were to be seen simply as inviting US collaboration in the face of a new global peril.”[7] The peril was later identified as communism.
After the Americans acquiesced in accepting British invitations to embrace and subsidise Ibn Saud with a lend-lease package other narratives began to be concocted to explain the new geo-political alliance between the USA and Saudi Arabia. One narrative recently advocated by the BBC’s legendry Adam Curtis in his documentary on the meeting at Bitter Lake, is that a quid pro quo was agreed between Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, whereby the former would provide military security in exchange for ‘controlling’ the latter’s oil. But the U.S. oil needs have always largely been met by trade with western hemisphere nations.
Another narrative peddled mainly by British historians bestowed Ibn Saud with the vision, foresight and indeed the ability of reading the desert runes in that he “sensed a coming change in the regional balance of power”[8] or Ibn Saud possessed the “familiar bedouin eye to the main chance which dictated a prompt accommodation to the new facts of life”[9] and this therefore was why he struck a deal with the United States rather than the British Empire. Obviously, Ibn Saud’s sublime intuitions dovetailed neatly with British strategies.
When Roosevelt finally met Ibn Saud in 1945 at Great Bitter Lake it was on the back of almost four years of diplomatic shenanigans between British and American diplomats. When a British diplomat did complain in 1945 of the United States usurping the UK’s long established alliance with Ibn Saud he was rebuffed by central government because “London ‘was glad to see the Americans with a substantial stake in the Middle East.’”[10]
The meeting at Bitter Lake has now come to symbolise the founding of the American and Saudi Arabian geo-political relationship when it most likely represented the ceremonial handover and makeover of a pliable British stooge into an ever more pliable American stooge. In many respects the meeting can also be seen as a belated, decades-old, addendum to the Sykes-Picot carve up: American power was allowed to wiggle into the Middle East alongside the British with its own piece of Saudi booty.
[1] David Holden and Richard Johns, “The House of Saud” (London : Pan Books, 1982), pg.127
[2] Barry Rubin, “Anglo American Relations in Saudi Arabia, 1941-1945”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 14 (1979), pg.254
[3] ibid., pg.255-6
[4] ibid., pg.262
[5] Barry Rubin, “The Great Powers in the Middle East 1941-1947” (London: Frank Cass, 1980), pg. 38-39.
[6] ibid., pg. 39
[7] John Keay, “Sowing the Wind: The mismanagement of the Middle East 1900-1960” (London: John Murray, 2003) pg. 334
[8] Lawrence James, “Churchill and Empire: Portrait of an Imperialist” (London: Pheonix, 2013) pg.326
[9] Holden & Johns, op., cit. Pg. 135
[10] Rubin, “The Great Powers in the Middle East 1941-1947”, op., cit., pg. 64
May 7, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | BBC, Saudi Arabia, UK, United States |
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On 26 April Israel’s new Ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev, spoke at the Oxford Union. Three days later I sent a 300-word letter to The Oxford Times about his speech, and a street protest against him that was held outside the building.
Any newspaper has the right to edit letters. In addition The Oxford Times sets a limit of 300 words. I write lots of letters to the paper. Usually they are on other subjects, and nearly always The Oxford Times publishes them in full.
On 5 May the paper published some of my letter about Ambassador Regev. Unusually it had been edited to less than half its length. The choice of which sentences to delete robbed the letter of all of its evidence and much of its force.
Below is the full letter as I sent it. In [brackets and italics] are the sentences that The Oxford Times deleted. Draw your own conclusions!
MARK REGEV’S APPEARANCE AT THE OXFORD UNION WAS NOT BALANCED
Thank you everyone from Oxford University Palestine Society and Oxford Palestine Solidarity Campaign who, at scant notice, protested outside the Oxford Union on 26 April.
The Union had invited Mark Regev, Israel’s new London ambassador, to speak. Regev was spokesman for Israel’s defence ministry during its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. [He notoriously defended Israel’s massacres of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in 2008–09, 2012 and 2014.
In 2008–09 Regev claimed Israel’s use of white phosphorus in the Gaza massacres didn’t break international law. He defended Israel bombarding hospitals, schools, homes, mosques, churches and a UNWRA aid store. He claimed Hamas kept weapons in mosques and carried them in ambulances. After the 2008–09 massacres the UN Goldstone report found no evidence for Israel’s claims, but accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.]
The Oxford Union holds debates between high-calibre speakers. It could have invited Regev and a seconder to debate against equal opponents. A Palestinian advocate such as Hanan Ashrawi or liberal Israeli such as historian Professor Ilan Pappé of Exeter University would have been suitable. Or Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow, who knows the Middle East and lives in Oxford.
Instead the Union let Regev address an audience and then answer questions. [Few students, however bright, can match Regev’s experience, guile and cold cunning.] The Union treated previous Israeli ambassadors the same: Daniel Taub in 2014 and Ron Prosor in 2010. Each got off lightly.
[Regev told his audience only anarchists or Marxists distinguish between criticism of Zionism and prejudice against Jews. He claimed to support a two-state settlement! In fact his government keeps seizing Palestinian land and pouring illegal settlers into East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Online the Union repeated Regev’s propaganda but no audience criticism. It betrayed the interests of Israelis, Palestinians and students.]
May 6, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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On May 5, reports without verification said Syria’s al-Kammouneh refugee camp in Sarmada near Aleppo, close to Turkey’s border, was bombed – dozens killed or injured.
US-supported terrorists control the area. No party claimed responsibility. Witnesses allegedly reported tents on fire, widespread debris and scattered body parts.
An dubious unnamed source claimed “many martyrs and body parts… a very bloody scene. There are absolutely no armed men there. They’re all civilian refugees, homeless people living on the street.”
UK government owned and operated BBC suggested Syrian or Russian responsibility while admitting “this has not been confirmed.”
Anti-government video released raises questions – showing some tents burned, smoldering and destroyed, nearby ones unaffected.
No casualties are visible, no body parts, no bomb craters, no munitions debris. Was the incident staged anti-Assad propaganda to provide greater justification for regime change?
Were US, UK, French, Turkish, Saudi, and/or Israeli dirty hands involved? Were terrorists they support responsible for what happened? Was what happened committed on the ground, not from an aerial bombardment as reported?
The incident like many others is a war crime. Why would Syrian or Russian warplanes bomb a civilian site when their mission is liberating the country and protecting its people?
Deputy State Department spokesman Mark Toner pointed fingers the wrong way, saying “(w)e’ve seen early claims that this was a regime strike…” Backtracking he added “we want to be absolutely sure before we level blame at somebody.”
UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond unjustifiably blamed Syria’s military, shamelessly saying “(t)he Assad’s regime contempt for efforts to restore the cessation of hostilities is clear for all to see.”
Fighting in Aleppo province continues despite the temporary declared ceasefire. In a cable to Vladimir Putin, Assad thanked him for his courageous support, comparing the battle for Aleppo to Stalingrad during WW II, saying:
“Despite the brutality and cruelty of the enemy, and the great sacrifices and pains, our cities, towns, people and army will not be satisfied until they defeat the enemy and achieve victory serving the interests of Syria, the region and the world.”
Expressing typical American arrogance, Toner called Assad’s statement “totally unacceptable,” demanding he observe ceasefire despite continued US-supported terrorist attacks.
Russia blocked a one-way UK-drafted Security Council resolution, blaming Syria for terrorist violence in Aleppo.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.
May 6, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Philip Hammond, Syria, UK, United States |
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With the war in Syria raging in its fifth year, and the Islamic State wreaking havoc throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it’s clear that the entire region has been made into one large theater of conflict. But the battlefield must not be understood solely as a physical place located on a map; it is equally a social and cultural space where the forces of the US-UK-NATO Empire employ a variety of tactics to influence the course of events and create an outcome amenable to their agenda. And none to greater effect than propaganda.
Indeed, if the ongoing war in Syria, and the conflicts of the post-Arab Spring period generally, have taught us anything, it is the power of propaganda and public relations to shape narratives which in turn impact political events. Given the awesome power of information in the postmodern political landscape, it should come as no surprise that both the US and UK have become world leaders in government-sponsored propaganda masquerading as legitimate, grassroots political and social expression.
London, Washington, and the Power of Manipulation
The Guardian recently revealed how the UK Government’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit (RICU) is involved in surveillance, information dissemination, and promotion of individuals and groups as part of what it describes as an attempt at “attitudinal and behavioral change” among its Muslim youth population. This sort of counter-messaging is nothing new, and has been much discussed for years. However, the Guardian piece actually exposed the much deeper connections between RICU and various grassroots organizations, online campaigns, and social media penetration.
The article outlined the relationship between the UK Government’s RICU and a London-based communications company called Breakthrough Media Network which “has produced dozens of websites, leaflets, videos, films, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and online radio content, with titles such as The Truth about Isis and Help for Syria.” Considering the nature of social media, and the manner in which information (or disinformation) is spread online, it should come as no surprise that a number of the viral videos, popular twitter feeds, and other materials that seemingly align with the anti-Assad line of London and Washington are, in fact, the direct products of a government-sponsored propaganda campaign.
In fact, as the authors of the story noted:
One Ricu initiative, which advertises itself as a campaign providing advice on how to raise funds for Syrian refugees, has had face-to-face conversations with thousands of students at university freshers’ fairs without any students realising they were engaging with a government programme. That campaign, called Help for Syria, has distributed leaflets to 760,000 homes without the recipients realising they were government communications.
It’s not hard to see what the British Government is trying to do with such efforts; they are an attempt to control the messaging of the war on Syria, and to redirect grassroots anti-war activism to channels deemed acceptable to the political establishment. Imagine for a moment the impact on an 18-year-old college freshman just stepping into the political arena, and immediately encountering seasoned veteran activists who influence his/her thinking on the nature of the war, who the good guys and bad guys are, and what should be done. Now multiply that by thousands and thousands of students. The impact of such efforts is profound.
But it is much more than simply interactions with prospective activists and the creation of propaganda materials; it is also about surveillance and social media penetration. According to the article, “One of Ricu’s primary tasks is to monitor online conversations among what it describes as vulnerable communities. After products are released, Ricu staff monitor ‘key forums’ for online conversations to ‘track shifting narratives,’ one of the documents [obtained by The Guardian ] shows.” It is clear that such efforts are really about online penetration, especially via social media.
By monitoring and manipulating in this way, the British Government is able to influence, in a precise and highly targeted way, the narrative about the war on Syria, ISIS, and a host of issues relevant to both its domestic politics and the geopolitical and strategic interests of the British state. Herein lies the nexus between surveillance, propaganda, and politics.
But of course the UK is not alone in this effort, as the US has a similar program with its Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) which describes its mission as being:
…[to] coordinate, orient, and inform government-wide foreign communications activities targeted against terrorism and violent extremism… CSCC is comprised of three interactive components. The integrated analysis component leverages the Intelligence Community and other substantive experts to ensure CSCC communicators benefit from the best information and analysis available. The plans and operations component draws on this input to devise effective ways to counter the terrorist narrative. The Digital Outreach Team actively and openly engages in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and Somali.
Notice that the CSCC is, in effect, an intelligence hub acting to coordinate propaganda for CIA, DIA, DHS, and NSA, among others. This mission, of course, is shrouded in terminology like “integrated analysis” and “plans and operations” – terms used to designate the various components of the overall CSCC mission. Like RICU, the CSCC is focused on shaping narratives online under the pretext of counter-radicalization.
It should be noted too that CSCC becomes a propaganda clearinghouse of sorts not just for the US Government, but also for its key foreign allies (think Israel, Saudi Arabia, Britain), as well as perhaps favored NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, or Doctors Without Borders (MSF). As the New York Times noted:
[The CSCC will] harness all the existing attempts at countermessaging by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies. The center would also coordinate and amplify similar messaging by foreign allies and nongovernment agencies, as well as by prominent Muslim academics, community leaders and religious scholars who oppose the Islamic State.
But taking this information one step further, it calls into question yet again the veracity of much of the dominant narrative about Syria, Libya, ISIS, and related topics. With social media and “citizen journalism” having become so influential in how ordinary people think about these issues, one is yet again forced to consider the degree of manipulation of these phenomena.
Manufacturing Social Media Narratives
It is by now well documented the myriad ways in which Western governments have been investing heavily in tools for manipulating social media in order to shape narratives. In fact, the US CIA alone has invested millions in literally dozens of social media-related startups via its investment arm known as In-Q-Tel. The CIA is spending the tens of millions of dollars providing seed money to these companies in order to have the ability to do everything from data mining to real-time surveillance.
The truth is that we’ve known about the government’s desire to manipulate social media for years. Back in February 2011, just as the wars on Libya and Syria were beginning, an interesting story was published by PC World under the title Army of Fake Social Media Friends to Promote Propaganda which explained in very mundane language that:
… the U.S. government contracted HBGary Federal for the development of software which could create multiple fake social media profiles to manipulate and sway public opinion on controversial issues by promoting propaganda. It could also be used as surveillance to find public opinions with points of view the powers-that-be didn’t like. It could then potentially have their “fake” people run smear campaigns against those “real” people.
Close observers of the US-NATO war on Libya will recall just how many twitter accounts miraculously surfaced, with tens of thousands of followers each, to “report” on the “atrocities” carried out by Muammar Gaddafi’s armed forces, and call for a No Fly Zone and regime change. Certainly one is left to wonder now, as many of us did at the time, whether those accounts weren’t simply fakes created by either a Pentagon computer program, or by paid trolls.
A recent example of the sort of social media disinformation that has been (and will continue to be) employed in the war on Syria/ISIS came in December 2014 when a prominent “ISIS twitter propagandist” known as Shami Witness (@ShamiWitness) was exposed as a man named “Mehdi,” (later confirmed as Mehdi Biswas) described as “an advertising executive” based in Bangalore, India. @ShamiWitness had been cited as an authoritative source – a veritable “wealth of information” – about ISIS and Syria by corporate media outfits, as well as ostensibly “reliable and independent” bloggers such as the ubiquitous Eliot Higgins (aka Brown Moses) who cited Shami repeatedly. This former “expert” on ISIS has now been charged in India with crimes including “supporting a terrorist organisation, waging war against the State, unlawful activities, conspiracy, sedition and promoting enmity.”
In another example of online media manipulation, in early 2011, as the war on Syria was just beginning, a blogger then known only as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” rose to prominence as a key source of information and analysis about the situation in Syria. The Guardian, among other media outlets, lauded her as “an unlikely hero of revolt” who “is capturing the imagination of the Syrian opposition with a blog that has shot to prominence as the protest movement struggles in the face of a brutal government crackdown.” However, by June of 2011, the “brutally honest Gay Girl” was exposed as a hoax, a complete fabrication concocted by one Tom MacMaster. Naturally, the same outlets that had been touting the “Gay Girl” as a legitimate source of information on Syria immediately backtracked and disavowed the blog. However, the one-sided narrative of brutal and criminal repression of peace-loving activists in Syria stuck. While the source was discredited, the narrative remained entrenched.
And this last point is perhaps the key: online manipulation is designed to control narratives. While the war may be fought on the battlefield, it is equally fought for the hearts and minds of activists, news consumers, and ordinary citizens in the West. The UK and US both have extensive information war capabilities, and they’re not afraid to use them. And so, we should not be afraid to expose them.
May 6, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | CIA, DHS, DIA, NATO, NSA, Syria, UK, United States |
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The so-called “anti-Semitism row” embroiling the United Kingdom’s Labour Party under its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a fraud – a cynical fraud at that. Despite the best efforts of the notoriously tireless Israel lobby, not to mention an abundance of circling media sharks eager to seize upon the lobby’s every lurid accusation, not one actual anti-Semitic statement from a Labour politician has emerged to date.
Indeed, if the campaign has any effect at all, it will not be to eject anti-Semitism from British politics. On the contrary, it is likely to foment anti-Semitism where, up to now, little or none has existed.
It’s hard to exaggerate how ridiculous the witch hunt around Jeremy Corbyn has become. But you don’t have to take my word for that. If Anshel Pfeffer’s tortuous attempt this week to rationalize the charges of “anti-Semitism” is any indication of the merits of the smear campaign, not even its purveyors actually believe their own accusations.
Pfeffer – who published his piece in Israel’s liberal daily, Ha’aretz on May 1 – is a veteran reporter with a number of genuine stories to his credit. It stands to reason that if there were anything real behind the so-called anti-Semitism scandal, Pfeffer would find it. But not even Pfeffer can locate a single anti-Semitic slur to latch onto.
Instead, he’s reduced to redefining anti-Semitism – redefining it so broadly that it includes all criticism of Israel’s government. Pfeffer’s argument is that condemning crimes committed by Israel’s leadership is, in effect, an accusation against all Israelis, and that, since most Israelis are Jews, this means an implicit attack on Jews everywhere. Pfeffer doesn’t spell out this approach too carefully, and no wonder – if it were true, it would mean that any statement critical of, say, Bashar al-Assad would make the speaker an Islamophobe. But without this bowdlerized definition of anti-Semitism (according to Pfeffer, a critic of Israel’s illegal occupation is simply “someone who only hates Jews living in Israel”), Pfeffer’s whole attack on the Labour left would collapse.
Not even neutering the meaning of anti-Semitism is enough for Pfeffer’s purposes. To demonize critics of Israel he has to coin the peculiar notion of “anti-Jewish theories” as well. That is, to mention the Zionist movement’s early efforts to cooperate with Hitler’s government – as former mayor of London Ken Livingstone did in an off-the-cuff way while defending his colleague Naz Shah – is more or less historically accurate; certainly it isn’t an expression of bigotry. But if Jews don’t like to hear about such facts, that makes the comment an “anti-Jewish theory,” and of course anyone who would espouse an anti-Jewish theory must be an anti-Semite. Pfeffer complains that Corbyn and his supporters “are incapable of comprehending” this logic. I wonder why.
Pfeffer has more to say, but not a word of it is factual – it’s a low-rent right-wing conspiracy theory about how all socialists secretly hate Jews because they’re, well, white. Pfeffer can’t for the life of him imagine any other reason why some politicians might object to mass murder, apartheid or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – he calls this a “Marxist class-warfare perspective” and the product of “revised history” – but he does get good and sore over the fact that Labour MP John Mann, who had the “decency” (Pfeffer’s word) to smear Livingstone on television as a “Hitler apologist,” actually got a mild reprimand for the slander. Frankly, people with moral priorities like those give me the creeps.
But again, nobody has to take my word for any of this. The facts – which people like Pfeffer studiously ignore – speak for themselves. There is no anti-Semitism scandal in the U.K. A poll conducted by the highly respected Pew Research Center just last year found that only 7% of respondents in that country held an “unfavorable view” of Jews, as compared with 19% – nearly three times as many – who expressed such views about Muslims. And as for Labour, the hysterical rush to suspend Shah and Livingstone on the flimsiest of charges (not to mention Shah’s groveling apologies for some innocuous statements made long before she even ran for office) hardly bespeaks an anti-Jewish bias.
What’s more, for all Pfeffer’s posturing, neither Zionism’s past nor Israel’s present is above critical scrutiny. The Zionist movement, though certainly not allied with Nazism, did agree with Hitler on one important point: namely, that Jews are a nation – not a religious group – and consequently do not really belong in any European country. That’s why much of established British Jewry spoke out sharply against the Balfour Declaration in 1917: they recognized it as a blow to the hopes of British Jews who wanted equal rights in their own country. For Zionists, as for Nazis, such hopes were dangerous.
That’s a matter of history, but Israel’s crimes – including the wanton killing of civilians in Gaza less than two years ago – are urgent contemporary realities. The witch hunt for Labour Party “anti-Semites” is really a crude attempt to silence the critics of those crimes. And let’s not delude ourselves: the targets of that campaign understand this perfectly well.
That’s the ultimate irony about the “anti-Semitism” canard. The witch hunt isn’t uncovering any anti-Semitism. But it may go a long way toward creating it. As the redoubtable scholar Norman Finkelstein recently said, the attacks on left-Labour politicians, supported at every step by Israeli hasbara, are “fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah… [S]he’s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an ‘anti-Semite’ and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews.”
May 6, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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The Gulf monarchies are the main facilitators of Britain’s support for sectarian death squads in the Middle East. This should be no surprise because Britain brought them to power precisely because of their sectarianism.
“What we want is not a united Arabia: but a weak and disunited Arabia split up into little principalities so far as possible under our suzerainty, but incapable of coordinated action against us” – so claimed a memorandum written by the Foreign Department of the British Government of India in 1915.
A more succinct summary of British policy towards the Arab world – both then and now – would be hard to find.
As we outlined in the first piece in this series, Britain’s weapon of choice in its attempt to destroy the independent regional powers of West Asia and North Africa in recent years has been its sponsorship of violent sectarianism. Its support for racist death squads in Libya not only achieved the destruction of the Libyan state, but also brought terrorism to every country in the region from Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria to Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon; whilst its training and equipping of death squads in Syria has been directly responsible for the rise of ISIS.
These forces, by setting Sunni against Shia, Muslim against Christian, and Arab against Black, are helping to bring about precisely that “weak and disunited Arabia” that the British officials in India dreamed of one hundred years ago.
Alongside the direct support and recruitment provided by British intelligence and the British government, one of the main conduits for arms and fighters has been the gulf monarchies: Qatar and Saudi Arabia in particular. That the Gulf States should play this role should, of course, be no surprise – as they were very largely the creations of the same British Government of India that wrote that memo in the first place.
In 1857, British colonial rule of India was challenged as never before, as what started as a mutiny rapidly spread across the country to become a mass insurgency, the first war of Indian independence. One of the reasons it was so potent is that Hindus and Muslims had joined forces – leading to what became the biggest anti-colonial uprising of the nineteenth century. Britain learned the lessons – and began to cultivate sectarian divisions more assiduously than ever before.
As Mark Curtis notes in Secret Affairs: “After 1857 the British promoted communalism, creating separate electorates and job and educational reservations for Muslims. ‘Divide et imperia [divide and rule]’ was the old Roman motto, declared William Elphinstone, the early nineteenth-century governor of Bombay, ‘and it should be ours’. This view pervaded and became a cornerstone of British rule in India”.
Curtis quotes one document after another to demonstrate just how pervasive this view became: one Secretary of State advising the governor general that “we have maintained our power in India by playing off one part against the other and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling”; another informing the Viceroy that “this division of religious feeling is greatly to our advantage”; a senior civil servant writing that “the truth plainly is that the existence side by side of these hostile creeds is one of the strong points in our political position in India. The better clashes of Mohammedans are already a source to us of strength and not of weakness”, and so on, ad nauseam. Yet, Curtis notes, it was not in India but in the Middle East that this divide and rule strategy “reached its apogee”.
The British Government of India began cultivating alliances with family clans in the Arabian peninsula from around the late eighteenth century, formalizing these relationships through official treaties over the course of the next hundred and fifty years. Even before the discovery of oil, the region was deemed strategically important as part of the land route from India, as well for its surrounding sea routes, and the Indian government took steps to ensure that it be placed firmly under British control.
By the nineteenth century, Britain was already the pre-eminent naval power in the region, and had become powerful enough to make or break the fortunes of those to whom it lent (or withdrew) its ‘protection’. So it is interesting to note that those families which Britain did choose to turn into ruling classes of the new states that were being carved out – the Al Saud, the Al Thani, the Al Khalifa and others – all seemed to have two things in common: a history of regular warring with their neighbours; and an, at best, shaky control of the territories they claimed to rule. These factors were not coincidental – for what they produced was a dependence on British protection that effectively turned them into little more than vassals of Empire.
The al-Khalifa clan, for example, today’s rulers of Bahrain, originally hailed from Umm Qasr in Iraq, from where they were expelled by the Ottomans due to their regular attacks on trade caravans. They first seized control of Bahrain in 1783 after Persian rule began to crumble, but lost control two decades later falling out with the Wahhabis with whom they were briefly allied. It was only after signing a treaty with the British in 1820 that their rule was consolidated. This treaty, and the others that followed, effectively placed foreign policy in the hands of the British in exchange for Britain propping up the al Khalifa’s rule of the country – an arrangement that has continued, to all intents and purposes, right up to the present day.
Being effectively an alien force in the country, the al Khalifa were permanently at risk from the population they sought to rule, especially given their persecution of the Shia majority. This made British protection that much more important, and increased British leverage accordingly; whenever any particular Khalifa emir began to act too independently, the British would simply replace them.
Lieutenant Colonel Trevor, the Deputy Political Agent in Bahrain after the First World War, put it bluntly when, after receiving a series of demands from the new crown prince he noted that “The Shaikh forgets that he and his father were made Shaikhs by the British government.” Shortly afterwards, the British sent warships to the gulf to force the Shaikh to sign an agreement ceding all powers to his other son – a British protégé.
Formal independence was granted in 1971, but given that power was being handed over to the same family that had ruled Bahrain on Britain’s behalf for the past century and a half, this changed little. The most notable difference was perhaps the flags on the foreign warships at the country’s naval base, which changed from British to US.
Fast forward to the present day, and it is clear that the essence of the 1820 treaty – al Khalifa rule propped up by Western armaments, with foreign policy in the hands of the West – is still very much in place. Whilst David Cameron was proclaiming democracy (a euphemism for state collapse) for Libya and Syria, he was in Bahrain selling weapons to the Khalifas to suppress their own ‘Arab Spring’; whilst three years later the US fifth fleet would be firing hellfire missiles into Syria from its Bahraini base.
But British support for the al Khalifas has never been absolute; rather they built up the al-Thani clan as a ‘counterweight’ to the Khalifa in order to guarantee their continued dependence on the British. Up until 1867, Qatar had been essentially a semi-autonomous province of Bahrain, its government effectively ‘sub-contracted’ to the Al Thanis. In that year, however, a war between the Al Thanis and the Al Khalifas broke out; Britain intervened on the side of the Al Thanis, carving out Qatar out as a separate political entity and recognising the Al Thanis as its rulers. The border between the two countries was left devilishly ambiguous, and remained a running sore in Qatari-Bahraini relations right up until 2001; a “weak and disunited Arabia” indeed.
Further agreements were signed with the Al Thanis in 1935, offering them protection against internal and external threats in exchange for oil concessions. Qatar too gained formal independence in 1971, but the deep links forged during the period of the protectorate remain; indeed both the Emirs that have ruled since then were educated at Sandhurst Military Academy, with the current Sheikh educated at elite English private school Sherborne before that.
The relationship between Britain and the ruling families of Bahrain and Qatar continues to follow that same basic principle forged centuries ago, and now also extended to the US: whilst the ruling families act as regional agents of Western imperial policy, their rule is maintained by Western weaponry. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the events of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. The protests breaking out across the Arab world in early 2011 soon spread to Bahrain, where angry crowds demanded an end to the monarchy’s policies of discrimination and exclusion against the Shia majority. Cameron’s immediate response was to head to the region to sell the embattled regime the weapons it needed to crush the movement. The following year, the country’s interior minister, Rashid bin Abdulla al-Khalifa, visited the Foreign Office to gather “lessons learnt from our experience in Northern Ireland”, according to a British government statement. This experience was particularly relevant; the problem faced by the British in the North of Ireland was, after all, broadly analogous to that faced by the Bahraini monarchy: how to maintain an oppressive sectarian rule and crush movements calling for equality. The sight of British APCs in the street shooting down demonstrators, now common in the Bahraini capital, will be familiar to Belfast’s nationalist communities; and so too will the latest human rights reports coming out of Bahrain describing “detainees being beaten, deprived of sleep, burned with cigarettes, sexually assaulted, subjected to electric shocks and burnt with an iron”, all common practices in British army barracks in 1970s Ireland. Britain’s Bahraini students are quick learners. The US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain and used to fire missiles into Syria and Libya, is in safe hands.
Qatar, meanwhile, was a lynchpin in not only the militarization of the ‘Arab Spring’ and its capture by violent sectarian forces, but also its ideological whitewashing. The Al Jazeera TV channel was established by the Qatari government in 1996, effecting to what amounted to a ‘brown-facing’ of the BBC Arabic channel, which was closed down the same year before transferring a large chunk of its staff to the ‘new’ station. Al Jazeera built its credibility across the region – and, indeed, the world – with its critical coverage of Western and Israeli attacks on Iraq and Gaza. But in 2011 it would use this credibility to serve as NATO’s propagandist-in-chief, amplifying and disseminating every lie it could get its hands on – from African mercenaries, to mass rape, to ‘bombing his own people’, to ‘impending massacre’ – in order to demonize Gaddafi and sell the case for war. It would be a war in which Qatar would play a major role.
In the early days of the West’s attack on Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebel forces (led by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Al Qaeda’s Libyan franchise), even with NATO air support, proved spectacularly ineffective at capturing and holding territory from the Libyan government. For the first few months, most of the towns they ‘captured’ thanks to NATO incineration of government soldiers would simply be retaken by the Libyan army days later. But NATO countries were wary of risking a domestic political backlash by openly committing too many of their own troops or resources to tip the balance. The solution found was to let Qatar and the Gulf states carry out its dirty work. They played a leading role in training and equipping rebel fighters, allowing NATO to be pretending to observe the arms embargo to which UN resolutions committed them. As the Royal United Services Institute noted, “the UAE established a Special Forces presences in the Zawiyah district and started to supply rebel forces in that area with equipment and provisions by air. Qatar also assumed a very large role; it established training facilities in both Benghazi, and, particularly the Nafusa Mountains on May 9 and acted as a supply route and conduit for French weapons and ammunition supplies to the rebels (notably in June), including by establishing an airstrip at Zintan.” They added that, “Western special forces could have confidence in the training roles undertaken by Qatar and the UAE, because the special forces in those countries have in turn been trained by the UK and France over many years”.
In addition to this major training and arming role, Qatari jets also joined NATO in pounding Libya, and the country issued $100million of loans to the rebel groups. But most important was the Qatari ground invasion of Tripoli.
As Horace Campbell has documented in his book ‘Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya’, by the summer of 2011, NATO were nearing a crisis-point: the 60-day period in which the US president could engage in hostilities without Congressional support was over, and the UN mandate for military intervention was to expire in September. Calls were growing within the AU and the UN for a negotiated settlement, and rivalry between militias continued to dog the rebels’ progress. NATO needed to take Tripoli quickly if their regime change operation was not to be stalled in its tracks.
So in mid-August, NATO massively stepped up its bombing of Tripoli. Checkpoints, manned by citizens pledged to defend the capital were repeatedly targeted, and Obama sent the last two training drones left in the US to the Libyan front-line. That paved the way for what Campbell called “NATO’s triple assault – by air, land and sea”; not a ‘people’s uprising’ but rather a ground invasion to crush the people who had risen to defend their city. Troops were shipped in and disguised as ‘rebel fighters’, with, according to Le Figaro, five thousand Qatari troops chief amongst them. It was they who, finally, captured Tripoli for NATO, installing Abdul Hakim Bel Haj, now suspected leader of ISIS in Libya, as the new military chief of the conquered city.
Bahrain and Qatar are just two examples of the enduring alliances that the British government has cultivated over centuries as it groomed handpicked ruling families for their anointed role as agents of imperial policy. In exchange for a British guarantee of their absolute power domestically, they have provided military bases and have acted as willing agents for those tasks their patron was either unwilling or unable to carry out itself. Today, that means acting as an ‘arms-length’ distributor of both BBC propaganda and British violence, in far more ways than have been possible to articulate here (Qatar’s role in managing the various Muslim Brotherhood offshoots that have been destabilizing Syria, Egypt and elsewhere, for example, would need a full article in its own right). But even more significant than the British alliance with the al Khalifas and al Thanis is that which was established with the al-Saud family, the subject of our next piece. For it is this relationship, forged during the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire, that ultimately created a new multinational fighting force of fighters in the 1980s – the ‘database’ – that has been doing Britain’s bidding in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria ever since.
This is Part Two of Sukant Chandan and Dan Glazebrook’s series on British collusion with sectarian violence.
Read Part One here.
Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and ‘austerity’. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.
May 6, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Bahrain, ISIS, Libya, Qatar, Sandhurst Military Academy, Saudi Arabia, Sherborne, Syria, UK |
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The Labour Party may not have an issue with anti Semitism but they certainly have a serious issue with Black people and their history
Leading Black activist Jacqueline Walker of Thanet Momentum, is now suspended from the Labour party for comments about the primacy of Black suffering.
Ms Walker responded on Facebook to a question about the Holocaust by contrasting the Jewish holocaust to the “African holocaust.”
The mere mention of any other holocaust is a flagrant violation of the law against questioning the primacy of Jewish suffering. The Labour of Judea cannot tolerate such behaviour.
Walker wrote: “As I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews.”
Walker wrote, “the chief victims of those failures however are not people of Jewish descent, but are the many other representatives of other minorities under-represented in the structures of the LP and discriminated against inside and outside the LP economically, culturally and politically in contemporary Britain.”
The Labour Party has a serious problem with the truth. Anyone who dares to describe the world as it is is immediately ousted by the Jewish Labour thought police (LFI, John Mann MP and others).
First Labour showed itself dismissive of the working class, now we know it is also not interested in racial equality. The Party is bewitched by shekels and this kind of interest does not come cheap.
To read more: In the last decade the French left together with the Jewish lobby has been harassing the genius French black comedian Dieudonné. Here is my take on The Meaning Of Dieudonné: http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/the-meaning-of-dieudonne.html
May 5, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Jacqueline Walker, UK |
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In a bizarre effort to paper over the historical truth regarding Hitler and the Haavara Agreement, Professor Rainer Schulze of Essex University wrote an article totally lacking intellectual integrity. Schulze’s piece in the Independent, ‘Hitler and Zionism: Why the Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were Zionists’, demonstrates that fear of Zionists and their extensive power extends beyond the Labour party. It is deeply entrenched within the British psyche and institutionally embedded in academia.
Schulze article leads him to the conclusion that: “any claim that Nazis and Zionists ever shared a common goal is not only cynical and disingenuous, but a distortion of clearly established historical fact.” The German/British professor’s failure to apply elementary academic analytical skills to the issue results in faulty scholarship.
Schulze accepts that the Havaara Agreement provided that “Jewish emigrants from Germany had to hand over their possessions before they departed, and the proceeds from the sale of such possessions were used by a company specifically set up for this purpose in Tel Aviv to purchase German goods for sale in Palestine.”
But Schulze continues, “The Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were ever Zionists. Instead, it is testament to the fact that Nazi policy towards the Jews was not clear-cut from the beginning, but evolved greatly over the years.” Schulze clearly doesn’t understand what Zionism was and who the Zionists were at the time of the Agreement.
Schulze defines Zionism as; “a movement based on the right of self-determination.” This definition of Zionism is profoundly anachronistic and it is wrong.
Zionism was primarily and fundamentally the belief that Jews should return to Zion. Zionism was a Jewish ‘homecoming project.’*
Zionists Jews were divided amongst themselves what the ‘homecoming’ might mean. Some believed that Zionism should aim to create a spiritual centre, others believed in Bi Nationalism. Many engaged in a pragmatic political struggle to erect a racially oriented Jews Only State.
Crucially, Hitler like Churchill** and many others, saw in Zionism an opportunity for Europe to rid itself of some problematic Jewish elements. Whether Schulze likes it or not, Zionism was a successful project because from its onset, it formed a symbiotic relationship between Zionist Jews and the Jew haters who wanted the Jews out of Europe. Zionism promised a national home for the Jews and at the same time offered to ‘take the Jews away.’
In 1933 Hitler was a Zionist. Like Zionists (both Jews and their detractors) he wanted the Jews out of Europe. Palestine was his preferred solution. At a later stage, probably around 1936, Hitler changed his mind about Zionism. He realised that the Zionist project was celebrated at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian people. Professor Schulze can discuss this transition with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
One would expect an academic scholar specialising in Modern Jewish History to grasp that Zionism as well as the State of Israel are sustained by Jew hatred. If ‘anti Semitism’ disappears, Israel and Zionism become obsolete concepts. Understanding this, Israel and Zionism have consistently contributed to the rise of anti Semitism. When there is no anti Semitism to point at, Jewish institutions simply invent it, as they are presently doing in the Labour party.
Enough Schulze bashing for one day. To his credit, Professor Schulze is not entirely dishonest. Like other contemporary German historians, Schulze is very careful with his wording regarding the German oppressive mechanisms and practicality.
Towards the end of his Independent article, Schulze writes about the 1939 German Polish Campaign: “they (the Nazis) were looking for dumping grounds for Jews and other “undesirables.” These people were at best treated as ‘assets’ to exploit or, later, a stock of slave labour, and at worst simply expected to die of disease and starvation.”
Did Schulze miss something? He did. He forgot to mention the gas chambers. Was this unintentional? I don’t think so. I have noticed that more German mainstream historians are unwilling to commit to the gas chamber homicidal narrative. Let’s see how long it will be before Schulze is kicked out of Essex University for heresy of the one and only universal Western religion.
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*Home coming” from a Jewish perspective only. The author of this article doesn’t agree in any way that Palestine is home for the Jews.
**”Zionism offers the third sphere to the political conceptions of the Jewish race. In violent contrast to international communism, it presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character. It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and centre of national life.” (A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People, Winston S. Churchill 1920)
May 4, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Haavara Agreement, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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A Jewish rights organization has taken three local councils to court, alleging discrimination over the public authorities’ decision to boycott Israeli goods produced in illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Jewish Human Rights Watch (JHRW) has taken Swansea, Gwyneedd and Leicester councils to the High Court in London, alleging their boycott of Israeli goods is anti-Semitic and violates the 2010 Equality Act.
A solicitor for JHRQ, Robert Festenstein, said: “We would like to see the motions quashed. I don’t understand why they would pass it in the first place.
“I mean, they wouldn’t pass a motion saying something derogatory about women, so why would they do that about Jews?”
Andrew Sharland, a lawyer representing Leicester’s council, which approved the boycott back in 2014, said the JHRW is trying to “stifle criticisms of Israel.”
“What this challenge really concerns is criticism of the State of Israel, and the claimant’s desire to suppress it,” he said.
A number of councils across the country began boycotting Israeli goods around 2009 in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Earlier this year, the government issued guidance to public authorities saying such boycotts are “inappropriate” unless formal legal sanctions or embargoes have been put in place by central government.
The Cabinet Office warned that boycotts could “undermine good community relations, poison and polarize debate, weaken integration and fuel anti-Semitism.”
The campaign group War on Want has decried the JHRW legal challenge as “shameful.”
War on Want senior campaigner Ryvka Barnard said: “It’s shameful that local councils are being attacked for ensuring their policies are in line with international and UK law.
“The illegal settlements are a part of the systematic abuses of international law and human rights committed by Israel against the Palestinians.”
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has also criticized the government’s guidance on boycotts as an “attack on local democracy.”
Read more:
Ban on Israel boycotts contradicts UK Foreign Office rules – Labour MP
Security firm G4S divests from Israel, denies caving to BDS movement pressure
May 4, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Human rights, UK, Zionism |
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We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another “new anti-semitism” crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections.
Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice, while Britain’s elites hope that – in a period of unpopular austerity – they can turn the Labour leadership’s support for the Palestinians into its Achilles’ heel. This is nothing more than a class war to pave the way for a return of the Blairites to lead Labour.
Israel and its supporters in the UK are only too willing to help fuel the hysteria, given their own fears that a Corbyn-led government would be bad news for an Israel committed to destroying any hope of justice for the Palestinians.
I have analysed earlier efforts to foment panic about a “new anti-semitism”, including during the early years of the second intifada, when Israel’s popularity plummeted. As now, Israel tried to deflect attention from its increasingly clear abuses of Palestinians – and its lack of interest in peace-making – by suggesting that the problem lay with critics rather than its policies. You can see my articles about this here, here and here.
Then, the chief targets of the “new anti-semitism” smear were supposedly leftist elements in the media who were concealing their true goal – vilification of Jews – behind criticism of Israel. The campaign, despite being patent nonsense, was successful enough that it cowed the few critical voices in the media – and terrorised senior editors at the BBC into supine compliance with Israel’s narrative.
That’s why we should take this current campaign seriously and worry that Corbyn, who is already on the back foot, is in real danger of conferring credibility on this whole confected narrative of an “anti-semitism problem” in Labour simply by giving it house room. The only suitable response is derision.
We should be particularly wary of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. The Guardian’s Jerusalem bureau chief Peter Beaumont, for example, was set the task of bolstering absurd claims against Ken Livingstone for being an anti-semite after he stated – admittedly clumsily – a historical truth that for a period of time Hitler and the Zionist movement shared enough common ground that they held negotiations about transferring Jews to Palestine.
Livingstone said the following on radio:
When Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.
There’s a lot of information about this out there – Lenni Brenner even wrote a book on the subject. Livingstone’s mistake was both to express himself slackly in the heat of the moment and to refer to a history that was supposed to have been disappeared down the memory hole. But what he is saying is, in essence, true.
He could have gone further, in fact. A century ago, many European anti-Semites, including most members of the British government that formulated the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to create a “national home” for Jews in Palestine, upheld the same logic as the Zionist movement. They saw the Jews as a race apart. They thought in terms of a “Jewish question”, one that needed solving. And for many, the solution was to export that “problem” far away, out of Europe.
This was not surprising because Zionism emerged both in reaction to Europe’s ugly ethnic nationalisms – where it was normal to speak of “races” – and mirrored these nationalisms’ failings. The Zionists wanted to claim for themselves the same traits as other European “races”: nationhood and territory. And the European anti-Semites were only too happy to oblige – especially if the primary victims were going to be brown people in the colonies, whether in Uganda or Palestine.
Fortunately, there is an antidote to Beaumont’s kind of stenographic journalism, apparently written up after an afternoon at Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, in the form of this interview with Norman Finkelstein. It is full of profound insights.
Finkelstein puts into perspective both Livingstone’s comments and the orginal “offending” Facebook post by Labour MP Naz Shah that triggered the latest hysteria. Finkelstein notes that the post (one dredged up from two years ago), which shows a map of the United States with Israel superimposed, and suggests resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating Israel to the US, was clearly intended to be humorous rather than anti-Semitic.
I would make a further point. It is also obvious that the true target of the post is the US, not Jews or even Israel – making the anti-Semitic claim even more ridiculous.
The post’s implicit argument is that, if the US government and ordinary Americans are really so committed to the creation of a safe haven for Israeli Jews, then would it not be far wiser to locate them inside the US rather than supporting at great expense a garrison state in the Middle East that will always be at war with its neighbours? This is classic satire, and the fact that almost no one in the British media and political establishment can see this – or, in the case of Corbyn and his allies, afford to admit it – is the real cause for concern.
In addition, Finkelstein concludes with a very powerful argument that the “new anti-Semitism” canard is likely – and possibly intended – to fuel the very anti-Semitism that it claims to be exposing and challenging.
Here is what Finkelstein says:
Our Corbyn is Bernie Sanders. In all the primaries in the US, Bernie has been sweeping the Arab and Muslim vote. It’s been a wondrous moment: the first Jewish presidential candidate in American history has forged a principled alliance with Arabs and Muslims. Meanwhile, what are the Blairite-Israel lobby creeps up to in the UK? They’re fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah, a Muslim woman who has attained public office. They’re making her pass through these rituals of public self-degradation, as she is forced to apologise once, twice, three times over for a tongue-in-cheek cartoon reposted from my website. And it’s not yet over! Because now they say she’s on a ‘journey’. Of course, what they mean is, ‘she’s on a journey of self-revelation, and epiphany, to understanding the inner antisemite at the core of her being’. But do you know on what journey she’s really on? She’s on a journey to becoming an antisemite. Because of these people; because they fill any sane, normal person with revulsion.
Here is this Muslim woman MP who is trying to integrate Muslims into British political life, and to set by her own person an example both to British society at large and to the Muslim community writ small. She is, by all accounts from her constituents, a respected and honourable person. You can only imagine how proud her parents, her siblings, must be. How proud the Muslim community must be. We’re always told how Muslim women are oppressed, repressed and depressed, and now you have this Muslim woman who has attained office. But now she’s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an ‘antisemite’ and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews. These power hungry creeps are creating new hate by their petty machinations.
May 4, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, Palestine, Peter Beaumont, The Guardian, UK, Zionism |
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