This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
-
We continue to look at the record of Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, with a focus on his foreign policy actions, with Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy, former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Vance is “very aligned with Trump,” says Duss, such as in his support of the Abraham Accords, the Arab-Israeli normalization deal signed under the Trump administration that sought to increase Israel’s power in the region at the expense of Palestinian rights.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
The reported plea bargain between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the United States government brings to a close one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom, says the union for Australian journalists.
While the details of the deal are still to be confirmed, MEAA welcomed the release of Assange, a Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance member, after five years of relentless campaigning by journalists, unions, and press freedom advocates around the world.
MEAA remains concerned what the deal will mean for media freedom around the world.
The work of WikiLeaks at the centre of this case — which exposed war crimes and other wrongdoing by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — was strong, public interest journalism.
MEAA fears the deal will embolden the US and other governments around the world to continue to pursue and prosecute journalists who disclose to the public information they would rather keep suppressed.
MEAA media federal president Karen Percy welcomed the news that Julian Assange has already been released from Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held as his case has wound its way through UK courts.
“We wish Julian all the best as he is reunited with his wife, young sons and other relatives who have fought tirelessly for his freedom,” she said.
‘Relentless battle against this injustice’
“We commend Julian for his courage over this long period, and his legal team and supporters for their relentless battle against this injustice.“We’ve been extremely concerned about the impact on his physical and mental wellbeing during Julian’s long period of imprisonment and respect the decision to bring an end to the ordeal for all involved.
Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024
“The deal reported today does not in any way mean that the struggle for media freedom has been futile; quite the opposite, it places governments on notice that a global movement will be mobilised whenever they blatantly threaten journalism in a similar way.
Percy said the espionage charges laid against Assange were a “grotesque overreach by the US government” and an attack on journalism and media freedom.
“The pursuit of Julian Assange has set a dangerous precedent that will have a potential chilling effect on investigative journalism,” she said.
“The stories published by WikiLeaks and other outlets more than a decade ago were clearly in the public interest. The charges by the US sought to curtail free speech, criminalise journalism and send a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished.”
Percy said was clearly in the public interest and it had “always been an outrage” that the US government sought to prosecute him for espionage for reporting that was published in collaboration with some of the world’s leading media organisations.
Julian Assange has been an MEAA member since 2007 and in 2011 WikiLeaks won the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Walkley award, one of Australia’s most coveted journalism awards.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange boarding his flight at Stansted airport on the first stage of his journey to Guam. Image: WikiLeaks This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
-
The post Call for Alarm first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The unique post-World War II economic and military power of the United States prevented military and foreign policy errors from becoming overpowering disasters. Military adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq upended America’s political system and wounded its psyche. Other than the 2001 attacks on American soil, physical destruction was foreign, appearing as images on television screens. Oil price rises, inflation, increasing debt to finance military costs, and social upheavals temporarily perturbed the US socioeconomic system. A powerful America overcame the impediments and continually extended its power until the Asian Tigers, a rejuvenated China, and progressive Latin leaders appeared on the global stage. America’s hegemony declined and the decline became confirmed by the Russian/Ukraine conflagration, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and a subsequent attack on protesting students at the UCLA campus. No nation with unique power and in control of that power would have permitted these horrific happenings.The US is sliding into a mediocre existence. Heard that before? Hear it again. Four words describe those who have brought the United States to a sorrowful state ─ treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitor ─ harsh words that will be met with smiles, sneers, and derisions. They are correct words and backed by a long list of treacherous, treasonous, tyrannical, and traitorous actors in the American public. The description of the “tyranny in America” is not a repetitious overkill; it is a necessary refrain that punctuates the alarm ─ America is led by pseudo patriots who have betrayed its ideals and Americans must regain its inspiring freedom, liberty-loving, and peaceful aspirations.
Domestic treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors
Running for president of the USA are two traitors ─ Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is accused of provoking and aiding the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and pursuing an insurrection against the US government. Treason.
Donald Trump is accused of keeping US government top secrets in his home in locations where they could be revealed to others. He is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.
Donald Trump solicits Evangelical vote and financial assistance by supporting Israel, a foreign nation, in its genocide of the Palestinian people. Treachery.
Joe Biden said, “Because even where we have some differences, my commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad. I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.” Besides the nonsensical statement that condemns Biden for not knowing that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have continually suffered from fatal attacks, claim insecurity that seeks security, and exhibit excessive prejudice toward one another — Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, both against Yemeni and Falasha, and secular against ultra-orthodox — Biden admits he has failed to protect the most well-off Americans ─ Jewish citizens (from what??). Treachery.
By having said, “My commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad,” Joe Biden betrayed US interests, which should have a flexible foreign policy. He has allied the US people with genocide. Traitor.
Hunter Biden had financial dealings with adversaries of the US government. Joe Biden should have known his son’s arrangements and prevented accusations of influence peddling. Joe Biden is guilty of violating his oath of office. Treachery.
Biden, similar to Trump, brought classified documents to his home and left them scattered in places open to revelation. Despite the Justice Department not pressing charges, Biden is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.The US Justice Department (DOJ) indicted several Russians and Chinese who infiltrated America, gathered information, and lobbied for a foreign nation. The US Justice Department has not indicted one of tens of thousands of Israelis (could be one of hundreds of thousands), who have performed similar duties for Israel. Lobbying is only a small part of the damage to Americans done by these miscreant infiltrators, sent by Israel to foreign shores to do their mischief. From the almost one million Israelis living in the United States, hundreds of thousands may have become citizens, voted, and changed a highly contested election. In a coming election in Westchester, New York, Westchester Unites urged Jewish voters in the district (not non-Jewish voters??) to request ballots so they could vote before the June 25 Democratic primary battle between New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who criticizes Israel, and challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, an avid supporter of apartheid Israel’s genocide. Campaign organizers say they will spend up to $1 million to boost voter turnout.
I’m not privy to the manipulations of the American public performed by the mass of Israeli infiltrators. One example is the declarations by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His contrived Amplify Israel Initiative “aims to breathe new life into the principles we’ve been committed to for decades, with an array of programs aimed at bolstering support for Israel and aligning Zionism with liberal ideology.” In clearer words, “influence every man, woman, and child that nationalist, militarist, oppressive, and apartheid Israel is a benevolent country.”
Who is Rabbi Hirsch? Ammiel Hirsch went to high school in Israel, served as a tank commander in the IDF, and was formerly the director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Israeli arm of the North American Reform movement. In a response to a letter, in which 93 rabbinical and cantorial students harshly criticized Israeli actions in the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Rabbi Hirsch wrote:
For the record, the Reform movement is a Zionist movement. Every single branch of our movement — the synagogue arm (Union for Reform Judaism), the rabbinic union (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and our seminary (HUC-JIR) — every organization separately, and all together, are Zionist and committed ideologically and theologically to Israel.
Why did Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, after receiving training in Israel, come to the United States to guide the Reform movement, which, in previous decades, had been against Zionism, and define it in Israel’s image? By not investigating the actions of multitudes of Israelis residing, the US Justice Department betrays the US people.
In an espionage scandal involving Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, who passed classified documents to AIPAC officials, which disclosed secret United States policy towards Iran, Franklin pleaded guilty and, in January 2006, was sentenced to nearly 13 years of prison. He served ten months of house arrest. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against the AIPAC officials — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Reason (which was treason) — the Department claimed court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose classified information (which can apply to almost every trial for treason). Despite the previous espionage charges and knowledge that un-American AIPAC is a lobby for apartheid Israel, the DOJ has not indicted AIPAC for being an unregistered lobby and has permitted its cadre of Israel firsters to wander the halls of Congress and shake palms with dollar bills. Traitors.
US representatives know that AIPAC lobbies for an apartheid Israel that is committing genocide and drags US citizens into accusations of aiding the genocide. Politicians accept contributions from individuals allied with AIPAC and vote in accordance with AIPAC’s preferences. The power of the contributions and fear that disregarding AIPAC poses a danger to remaining in office was highlighted in 1984. For voting to permit Boeing to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and for suggesting there were Palestinians and they had “rights,” AIPAC marked as undesirable the popular Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Charles Percy, who had always favored Israel. Paul Simon wrote in his autobiography that Bob Asher, an AIPAC board member, called him to run for Senator from Illinois. Simon unseated the admired and respected Charles Percy who was only 98% pure in his support for Israel. Treachery.
The US government and local governments favor laws, such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which can suppress free speech and free actions that contend Israel’s genocidal policies, and H.R. 3016, Anti-Boycott Act, which “bars U.S. citizens from participating in boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries.” Federal and local governments tyrannize the US people. Tyranny.
The Los Angeles (LA) Police Department stood by for hours before halting attacks on peaceful UCLA students and then arrested dozens of student protesters and not any of the vigilantes who represented a foreign power and attacked the students. The LA Police Department supported a group representing a foreign government and failed to protect American citizens. Treason.
The House of Representatives has had numerous one-sided hearings on campus anti-Semitism that feature callous remarks against Jews from relatively few of the protestors. In none of the hearings has a Committee invited the student protestors to testify; maybe, because they might say, “These students do not represent the protestors. They are angry and frustrated individuals who see Israel identify itself as a Jewish state and note that a great number of American Jews approve of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. They realistically equate Jews with the genocide.” The truth of these hearings is they are more concerned with fictional Jewish feelings than factual Palestinian lives. Let’s face it, these hearings are organized by Israel’s advocates who seek to prevent the US public from gaining awareness of the genocide and shift the protest arguments to a spurious charge of anti-Semitism in America. Elected officials adhere to a foreign nation’s request to stifle American citizens from exercising their right to protest and move dialogue from the horrific victimization of Gazans to an artificially created Jewish victimhood. College presidents committed a huge error by not responding to the committees’ fabricated charges of campus anti-Semitism with a simple statement, “There is no campus anti-Semitism and you are attempting to divert the impact of these demonstrations that criticize Israel policies into a false charge that indirectly enhances Israel’s image.” By representing a foreign power and censoring American students from their right to protest, these elected officials are guilty. Treason.
Foreign policies exhibit the same treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors.
North Vietnam
President Lyndon Johnson’s reciting a dubious attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the USS Maddox in international waters cajoled Americans into accepting an increased US military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Global strategists also mentioned the Domino Theory, where if one country falls to communism, then adjacent nations also become communist. A non-functioning Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) tied these fabrications into a call for action. Result was 58,148 uniformed Americans killed, 200,000 wounded, and 75,000 severely wounded. Ho Chi Minh’s followers won the war and none of the neighboring SEATO nations became communist. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading prophet of the Domino Theory, confessed, “I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don’t believe that its loss would have led – it didn’t lead – to Communist control of Asia.” Treachery.Six-day war
During the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, Israeli torpedo boats and airplanes attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34, and wounded 171 American service personnel. President Johnson refused to respond to this assault, an insult to all Americans. Treason.Yom Kippur war
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon’s administration supplied arms to Israel and reversed the course of the war. Arab nations responded with an oil embargo that caused huge inflation in the United States, punished the American consumer, and harmed the American economy. Treachery.Afghanistan-1980s
President Ronald Reagan’s CIA covertly assisted Pakistan intelligence in providing financial and military assistance to Osama bin Laden during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In effect, the US played an essential role in creating the al-Qaeda network. Treason.International Terrorism and 911
After Ronald Reagan helped create and popularize Osama bin Laden, later presidents did not heed Osama bin Laden’s warnings. The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorism germs. It should be titled, “How the United States made me a terrorist.” It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern.
Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
William J. Clinton was president during the period that Bin Laden raged his fury at the United States. If Bill Clinton had considered some of bin Laden’s grievances his considerations might have prevented the later 9/11 attack on American soil. Treason.
George W. Bush and American security officials permitted 19 co-conspirators to enter the country and take preparatory flying lessons in full view of authorities. His DOJ did not pursue information that connected the Saudi royal family with the bombers. Treason.
Afghanistan-2001
Without exhausting all means to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan and knowing that the Taliban was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in a military adventure that had no defined purpose and accomplished nothing. In a war that lasted 20 years, the United States had 2,459 military deaths and 20,769 American service members wounded in action. Twenty years of a useless war that only brought the Taliban back to power. Treachery.Iraq
George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is the best example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests. The cited reason ─ destroying Hussein’s weapons of destruction ─ whose evidence of developments the U.S. based on spurious intelligence and was a farce that no sensible person could believe. This “made for consumption” and fabricated story detracted from the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — to prevent Iraq from becoming the central power in the Middle East and able to threaten Israel. Neocons succeeded in pressuring President George W. Bush to sacrifice American lives and, by military action, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Discarding the nonsensical assertion that Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear material, no technology to develop a nuclear weapon, and no ICBMs to deliver a bomb, threatened the United States, and needed to be immediately stopped from turning bubble gum into a mighty weapon solicits a more acceptable reason for the U.S. attack on Iraq. The U.S. Department of Defense casualty website has the US military suffering 4,418 deaths and 31,994 wounded in action during the Iraq War. No coincidence that Iraq was a long-time adversary of Israel and it was in Israel’s interests to have Iraq become militarily impotent. Treason.Libya
NATO declared it intervened in the 2011 Libyan Civil War “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” President Barack Obama remarked, “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”Reuters report demonstrated significant differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s rendition: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy,’ March 17, 2011.
Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.
Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge.
The U.S. vacillated, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, convinced President Obama to join NATO in removing Gaddafi. NATO eliminated Gaddafi, Islamic extremists gained partial power, discarded armaments were shipped to al-Qaeda “look-alikes” throughout North Africa and soon the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition, Boko Haram, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) were creating havoc throughout North Africa. The US gained nothing in removing Gaddafi and created more Islamic extremist organizations with which to contend. Treachery.
UN Vetoes
As of December 18, 2023, the U.S. vetoed resolutions critical of Israel 45 times. Each time, the Secretary of State offered the excuse that the resolution would not advance the cause of peace, and each time vetoing the resolution did not advance the cause for peace. Why do Americans give deference to Israelis when Israel insults American leaders, uses Americans to die in wars that advance Israel’s interests, causes havoc that brings injury to U.S. relations with other nations, and sucks money ($3.1 billion annually) from U.S. taxpayers to support its apartheid and oppressive policies?
Some mentioned reasons, which have changed during the decades, are:
- Israel was aligned with the US during the Cold War.
- The US needs a Western-style pistol-packing mama in the Middle East.
- Israel has an excellent intelligence-gathering network that shares information.
- The two countries collaborate on the joint-development of sophisticated technologies.
Pundits confuse support for Israel with support for this Israel. The United States, for military and geopolitical reasons, can support Israel, as it does Columbia, but there is no reason to support and assist this Israel in the destruction of the Palestinians. The Washington establishment and foreign policymakers have incorrectly calculated the tradeoffs between supporting this Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights and in satisfying the Palestinian cause.
- Israel is no longer dependent on the United States and seeks its own alliances.
- Israel will not scratch a finger to help the US in any conflict; just the opposite, it convinces the US to fight for Israel.
- Israel intelligence provides the CIA with intelligence concerning nations that are adversarial to the US due to its close ties with Israel. No close ties, none of these adversaries, and no need for intelligence.
- Israel has used US and Russian engineers for its technical achievements. No Israel, and the Russian and American engineers will go to work in Silicon Valley.
Just for money and votes, U.S. politicians sell out their commitment to the American people, follow the dictates of a foreign nation, and make Americans party to the destruction of innocent people. TREASON!!
Conclusion
Americans have, at times echoed grievances against their government’s policies and demonstrated their despair, well, some Americans, a small minority of the US population. The rest of the population has been naïve, complacent, and manipulated. Due to America’s intrinsic wealth — natural resources, abundant farmland, temperate climate, rivers, valleys, streams, hard-working population, ocean barriers to foreign incursions — the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors temporarily slowed but did not stop the roaring engine. The roaring engine is beginning to sputter.
America’s posture as the leading defender of democracy and human rights is hypocritical; its economic system is challenged; its united states are disunited; its pluralistic political system is an epic fantasy; its legislative bodies are divided; and its courts are agenda-seeking rather than law-abiding. Democracy recedes and polarization of citizens widens. Americans are increasingly divided in their aspirations and express increasing fears of one another. An almost self-sufficient economic system proceeds with debt financing imports, trade imbalances, and growth, an unruly situation that can continue until debt hits a financial wall and repaying the debt becomes intolerable.
Hopefully, more Americans will take cognizance of the failed leadership, meet the challenges they pose, gather the resources, form the organizations, shout much louder, push much stronger, and succeed in disposing of the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors that have made the Statue of Liberty weep.
The words of Patrick Henry, “These are the times that try people’s souls,” are heard again in the cities and villages of a disunited United States of America.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
In the first of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet the Green Party’s Carne Ross – standing against Labour’s Emily Thornberry
Carne Ross was once a British diplomat. After the invasion of Iraq, he gave “secret evidence to the Butler Inquiry” and resigned. He knew the government had lied, failed to pursue alternatives to military action, and broken UN resolutions. And this experience profoundly changed his political views.
Today, he’s standing against Labour Party “machine politician” Emily Thornberry in Islington South and Finsbury at the general election. And his big message for voters is that Britain’s political system is in desperate need of change. As he told the Canary:
… it’s obviously not working. People are fed up with it, that society is not fair, it is not inclusive, people are treated badly, we are destroying the planet. It’s a long list of failure, and we’ve got to consider radical ideas to improve matters.
Palestine: “the occupation has to end”
We asked Carne Ross, as the Green Party’s Global Solidarity spokesperson, about how to end the genocide in Gaza and bring peace to occupied Palestine. He insisted:
There is an occupation of one party by another, and until that ends there will not be peace. And that used to be a clear plank of British policy towards Israel/Palestine…
You won’t hear government ministers talk about it now. You won’t hear Labour politicians talk about it. But it is the fundamental requirement of peace. The occupation has to end.
Regarding the position of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on Gaza, Ross stressed:
I think the Labour Party has been a disgrace on Gaza. It has abandoned fundamental rules of international law and the laws of war in particular. Keir Starmer and indeed Emily Thornberry have at moments approved of Israel’s action in cutting off food and medical supplies – food and fuel and water – to the Gaza Strip, which is condoning collective punishment, which is a war crime.
So how bad does it have to get? You condone a war crime? That’s what Labour has done.
The Green Party, on the other hand, believes:
… there is no military solution to this problem. There is only a political solution. And pursuing a military solution will just make things worse and will cost a lot of lives, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen.
Western double standards on Gaza are undermining international law
Speaking about the immense difference between the West’s approach to Ukraine and Gaza, Carne Ross said:
[Labour’s] David Lammy talks about a rules-based international order, just like the Tories by the way. [It’s] very difficult to distinguish between them. What they have done in Gaza is not supporting a rules-based international order. It is the opposite. It is undermining that rules-based order because it is exempting Israel from these rules.
The rules of war, international humanitarian law, Security Council resolutions. They’ve given Israel a free pass. And that is double standards. We… rightly condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and we demand that the world condemns Russia, as they should. But that call is undermined by the application of double standards in Gaza.
The world isn’t stupid. Other countries – I talked to them at the UN, to diplomats of other countries. They see this – you know, the way that Britain and the US have defended Israel at the UN Security Council, have voted to stop resolutions calling for a ceasefire. I mean, they are shocked and appalled. And if I was a British diplomat today, which I’m glad to say I’m not, I would be ashamed.
“Lack of accountability is a systematic failure of our political system”
The Canary also asked Carne Ross about the impact that his resignation over the invasion of Iraq had on his political views. He explained:
This was a democratic government that… launched a blatantly illegal and unnecessary war that cost 500,000 lives. And the people responsible have not been held accountable. That is pretty shocking, and it remains something I feel very, very strongly about and talk about when I can because that lack of accountability is a systematic failure of our political system.
It’s not just Iraq. It’s also Grenfell, it’s the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal. We see it over and over again. The institutions look down on everybody else. They’re not accountable. They’re not transparent. And that has changed my view of politics fundamentally.
That will always be the case as long as a few people have power over the many. And we need to invert that pyramid.
For more on Ross’s comments on the election and other issues, see the full interview on our YouTube channel:
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.
-
COMMENTARY: By John Minto
Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.
I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.
If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.
- READ MORE: Palestine protesters challenge TVNZ over Israeli ambassador’s ‘propaganda’
- Columbia Law Review website shut down over ‘censored’ article critical of Israel
- Other War on Gaza reports
The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times.
This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.
Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.
In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate.
Riddled with examples
The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.
However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.
Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.
The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.
The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.
Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.
No baby beheaded
Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.
Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.
Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.
Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.
Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.
Independent probe
eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.
A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.
They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.
These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.
People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.
These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.
The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.
The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.
And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
-
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. It’s been a constant of our history. Another constant has been American military personnel killing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
-
Ruthless prosecutor behind thousands of executions who rose through the theocratic ranks to become the president of Iran
The career of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who has been killed in a helicopter crash aged 63, was defined by violent events. His initiation into politics was triggered by the 1979 Iranian revolution, one of the most cataclysmic and epoch-shaping events of the late 20th century, which unfolded with headline-grabbing drama as Raisi was just turning 18.
Given the heady fervour of that revolutionary period, with daily mass street demonstrations eventually leading to the toppling of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s once seemingly invincible western-allied monarch, followed by the return from exile of the messianic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to ecstatic acclaim, it is perhaps no surprise that a militant, impressionable young activist was sucked into the political system that took shape in the aftermath, was moulded by it – and later participated in some of its more unsavoury actions.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
-
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Adam Hamawy, one of around 20 American medical workers trapped in Gaza after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. A plastic surgeon and Army veteran, Hamawy is on a volunteer mission with the Palestinian American Medical Association at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Like many Gazans, the U.S. medical workers are now facing dehydration and other deadly health conditions. “We’re continuing to do our job. … It’s tiring, but this is exactly what we need to be doing,” says Hamawy, who calls on President Biden to stop supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza. “If my best friend is a serial killer, I’m going to stop being his friend.” Hamaway describes treating “massive” injuries to civilians in Khan Younis, where much of the city has been destroyed and vandalized in Hebrew. “It’s going to haunt all of us. … I’m here. I see it with my own eyes. At some point in time, everyone is going to see it.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Israel’s aspirations to become the region’s transportation hub have taken a hit. The maritime and land blockade against Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza is working, as one of Israel’s main plans for a prospective “land bridge” connecting the Gulf countries with Israel and Europe has suffered an irrevocable setback. The Israel-centered India Middle East Europe Economic Corridors project (IMEC)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
-
On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor. Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”. Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.
The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception. In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found. The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers and the zealous, are rarely called out. The memorial statements crow with amnesiac sweetness, and all the time, those same planners will be happy to add to the numbers of the fallen.
The events of April 25, known in Australia as Anzac Day, are saccharine and tinged about sacrifice, a way of explicating the unmentionable and the barely forgivable. But make no mistake about it: this was the occasion when Australians, with their counterparts from New Zealand as part of the Australian New Zealand Corps, foolishly bled on Turkish soil in a doomed campaign. Modern Australia, a country rarely threatened historically, has found itself in wars aplenty since the 19th century.
The Dardanelles campaign was conceived by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and, like many of his military ventures, ended in calamitous failure. The Australian officers and politicians extolling the virtues of the Anzac soldiers tend to ignore that fact – alongside the inconvenient truth that Australians were responsible for a pre-emptive attack on the Ottoman Empire to supposedly shorten a war that lasted in murderous goriness till November 1918. To this day, the Turks have been cunning enough to treat the defeated invaders with reverence, tending to the graves of the fallen Anzacs and raking in tourist cash every April.
For the Australian public, it was far better to focus on such words as those of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett written on the occasion of the Gallipoli landings: “There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights.” Ashmead-Bartlett went on to note the views of General William Birdwood, British commander of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli: “he couldn’t sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials”. They “where happy because they had tried for the first time and not found wanting.”
In March 2003, these same “colonials” would again participate in the invasion of a sovereign state, claiming, spuriously, that they were ridding the world of a terrorist threat in the form of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction were never found, and whose subsequent overthrow led to the fracturing of the Middle East. Far from being an act of bravery, the measure, in alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, was a thuggish measure of gang violence against a country weakened by years of sanctions.
When options to pursue peace or diplomacy were there, Australian governments have been slavish and supine before the dictates and wishes of other powers keen on war. War, in this context, is affirmation, assertion, cleansing. War is also an admission to a certain chronic lack of imagination, and an admission to inferiority.
The occasion of Anzac Day in 2024 is one acrid with future conflict. Australia has become, and is becoming increasingly, an armed camp for US interests for a war that will be waged by dunderheads over such island entities as Taiwan, or over patches of land that will signify which big power remains primary and ascendant in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific. It is a view promoted with sickly enthusiasm by press outlets and thinktank enclaves across the country, funded by the Pentagon and military contractors who keep lining their pockets and bulking their accounts.
Central to this is the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States, which features a focus on nuclear powered submarines and technology exchange that further subordinates Australia, and its tax paying citizens, to the steering wishes of Washington. Kurt Campbell, US Deputy Secretary of State, cast light on the role of the pact and what it is intended for in early April. Such “additional capacity” was intended to play a deterrent role, always code for the capacity to wage war. Having such “submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances [would have] enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances”. That’s Taiwan sorted.
Ultimately, the Australian role in aiding and abetting empires has been impressive, long and dismal. If it was not throwing in one’s lot with the British empire in its efforts to subjugate the Boer republics in South Africa, where many fought farmers not unlike their own, then it was in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam, doing much the same for the United States in its global quest to beat off atheistic communism. Australians fought in countries they barely knew, in battles they barely understood, in countries they could barely name.
This occasion is often seen as one to commemorate the loss of life and the integrity of often needless sacrifice, when it should be one to understand that a country with choices in war and peace decided to neglect them. The pattern risks repeating itself.
The post Anzac and the Pageantry of Deception first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
US state department says law could drive away foreign investment while David Cameron described it as ‘dangerous and worrying’
Human rights groups and diplomats have criticised a law passed by the Iraqi parliament over the weekend that would impose heavy prison sentences on gay and transgender people.
The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that the law on passed Saturday “threatens those most at risk in Iraqi society” and “can be used to hamper free-speech and expression”. He warned that the legislation could drive away foreign investment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
-
By not responding to decades of Israel’s provocations with an attack on Israeli soil, Iran displayed patience. The Islamic Republic rulers realized the provocations were becoming harsher, more damaging, and without stopping; it was time to respond. Their response was notable; a mild rebuke that showed power and unwillingness to harm civilians, unlike the offensive attacks by Israel’s military and intelligence that have killed Iranian civilians and military personnel.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda mechanism omits the tens of previous illegal and damaging attacks inflicted upon Iran and charges Iran with cruel and threatening behavior that requires a strong reply. Already, members of England’s parliament (MP) obeyed the Zionist call for action with outrageous pleas to assist Israel against “Iran’s genocidal actions,” and “attempt to interrupt the peace.”
One person is injured and that is genocide. Tens of thousands of Gazans killed and no reference to genocide. Mayhem in the Middle East since the first Zionist set foot in Palestine and one relatively harmless attack disturbed the peace. Are these MPs real people or artificial intelligence? How can they run for office and be elected?
A common thread exists in US actions of aggressive behavior toward nations that have not threatened the security of the United States, such as 21st-century Iraq and Iran. The common thread weaves nations that were or are antagonists of apartheid Israel. All, except Iran, have been subdued by the U.S. What Israel wants, Israel gets, and Israel convinced the United States to eliminate the foes of the Zionist Republic. Americans died and Americans paid for efforts that had scarce benefits to U.S. citizens. Iran is now the last nation standing and Israel is coercing the U.S. to perform its usual duty — get rid of Iran. Look at the record.
Sudan
Deposed Sudan leader, Omar al-Bashir, made it clear. “Israel is our enemy, our number one enemy, and we will continue calling Israel our enemy.” Israel also made its relationship with Bahir clear by destroying a Sudanese arms factory suspected of producing chemical weapons for Hamas. Times of Israel reports that “Over the years, there have been reports of the Israelis continuing to aid South Sudanese rebels during Sudan’s second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005.” Israel’s assistance to the rebels enabled South Sudan to secede and weaken Bashir. The Times of Israel also reports that “Miniature Israeli flags hang from car windshields and flutter at roadside stalls, and at the Juba souk in the city’s downtown, you can buy lapel pins with the Israeli flag alongside its black, red and green South Sudanese counterpart.”
Link of a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, who resided in Sudan, prompted the US State Department to add Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed economic, trade, and financial sanctions on Sudan. These sanctions occurred despite none of the extremists engaging in terrorist activities while in Sudan. Bashir offered extradition or interviews of arrested al-Qaeda operatives and allowed access to the extensive files of Sudanese intelligence. According to a CIA source, reported in the Guardian, Sept 30, 2001, “This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.”
The U.S. Congress heightened the insurrection in Sudan’s Darfur province by passing amendment H.Con.Res.467 — 108th Congress (2003-2004), amended 07/22/2004, which “States that Congress declares that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide, and urges the Administration to refer to such atrocities as genocide.” The amendment gathered world opinion against the Sudanese government. Although the public accepted the figure of 400,000 killings of people in Darfur, this genocide had no verification of the number of killings, no displayed mass graves, and no images of a great number of bodies.
Before he left the U.S. State Department, former US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stated on ABC News online, November 9, 2005, “It’s a tribal war. And frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of Sudanese.”
A peace agreement ended the second Sudanese civil war in 2005. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became independent and reduced Sudan to a pipeline for South Sudan oil. After Sudan became a diminished state, barely able to survive, the United States lifted economic and trade sanctions. Independent South Sudan fared worse — involved in its civil war, human rights violations, and social and economic turmoil. Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed [South Sudan] “Government security forces and armed groups perpetrated serious human rights abuses, including killings, acts of sexual violence, abductions, detention, torture and other ill-treatment, the recruitment and use of children, and destruction of civilian property.” The U.S. government did not criticize the human rights violations of the friend of Israel.
On October 23, 2020, Israel and Sudan agreed to normalize relations
On April 6, 2021, the Sudanese cabinet approved a bill abolishing the 1958 law on boycotting Israel.The once wealthy Sudan, flowing with minerals and gushing with oil had the possibility of becoming a strong and vibrant African nation. US policies of countering terrorism, assisting South Sudan rebels, and interfering in the Darfur civil war contributed to preventing that outcome and provided Israel with a friendly Sudan that no longer assisted the Palestinians.
Libya
Libya’s leader, Mohammar Qadhafi, has been quoted as saying on April 1, 2002, “Thousands of Libyans are ready to defend the Palestinian people.” In that speech he called for a Pan-Arab war against the state of Israel’s existence and demanded “other Arab leaders open their borders to allow Libyans to march into Palestine, to join the Palestinian uprising.” In the speech, Gaddafi claimed he would not recognize Israel as a state.
The United States used Gadhafi’s support for radical revolutions as a reason to have strained relations with Libya. Sanctions soon followed. In March 1982, the U.S. Government prohibited imports of Libyan crude oil into the United States and expanded the controls on U.S. originated goods intended for export to Libya. Licenses were required for all transactions, except food and medicine. In April 1985, all Export-Import Bank financing was prohibited.
On April 14, 1986, the United States launched air strikes against Libya in retaliation for “Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.” Five military targets and “terrorism centers” were hit, including Gadhafi’s headquarters.
After Libya halted its nuclear program, renounced terrorism, accepted responsibility for inappropriate actions by its officials, and paid appropriate compensation to the victims’ families for the bombing of a US commercial airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, the United Nations (UN) lifted sanctions, the U.S. terminated the applicability of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act to Libya, and President Bush signed an Executive Order terminating the national emergency, which ended economic sanctions. All was going well until 2011.
Despite the lack of clarity of the 2011 rebellion against Gadhafi and specious reasons for NATO and US roles to defend the rebels, the U.S. government cut ties with the Gadhafi regime, sanctioned senior regime members, and, together with several European and Arab nations, managed to convince the UN Security Council to authorize intervention in the conflict. The intervention demolished the Gadhafi regime and enabled the rebels to obtain victory, another fallen nation that was an outspoken antagonist of Israel, and, still, in 2024, an embattled nation.
Egypt
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel to reclaim territories they had lost in the Six-Day War. With Israeli troops seriously outnumbered and facing near-certain defeat at the hands of the Soviet-backed nations, President Nixon ordered an emergency airlift of supplies and materiel. “Send everything that will fly,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger. The American airlift enabled Israel to launch a decisive counterattack that pushed the Egyptians back across the Suez Canal.
In a briefing, Scuttle Diplomacy: Henry Kissinger and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, by Salim Yaqub, Woodrow Wilson Center, Dr. Yaqub argued that “Kissinger’s pivotal role as the intermediary allowed him to feign neutrality while secretly supporting the Israelis, and to turn the peace negotiations into a long series of small confidence building steps which would give the appearance of progress that Egypt required to come to an agreement with Israel, but which would allow Israel to keep most of the Syrian and Palestinian land gained after the 1967 Six-Day War.”
Prime Minister of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the U.S. normalized relations with previously combative Egypt. The most populous and leading nation of the Arab world, the principal defender of Arab rights, which had waged several wars with Israel, no longer posed a threat to Israel and became a weakened observer to the hostilities affecting the Middle East.
Syria
Israel and Syria battled from day one of the UN 181 Proclamation that recommended partition of the British Mandate.
The U.S. never favored the Assad regime and cut relations. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil, the Syrian Government tried limited cooperation with the U.S. War on Terror. Syrian intelligence alerted the U.S. of an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a hang glider loaded with explosives into the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Syria was also a destination for U.S. captives outside of its borders in its rendition program. According to U.S. officials, as reported by Nicholas Blanford, in a Special to The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2002, ”Syrian information was instrumental in catching militant Islamists around the world.”
Syria’s descent into near oblivion started with its civil wars, in which foreign fighters (ISIS and al-Nusra) entered Syria from NATO’s Turkey (no retribution to Turkey for allowing ISIS to enter Syria), and a multitude of insurgents fought with and against one another until Assad, with assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, overcame the insurgencies. WikiLeaks, in 2011, released diplomatic cables between the U.S. embassy in Damascus and the State Department, which revealed the U.S. had given financial support to political opposition groups and their related projects through September 2010.
ISIS is defeated and a limping Assad government barely survives as a splintered nation. Bombed almost daily by Israeli missiles and planes, the hopelessly weak Syria cannot retaliate. With assistance from the U.S., Syria’s threat to Israel has been neutralized.
Iraq
Justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a spurious reason that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be silenced was so absurd that another reason was sought. Security school scholars argued a joint threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argued preservation and extension of U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. When in doubt bring in liberal democratic ideals.
The interventionists conveniently forgot that Saddam Hussein was a restraint to Iran and a deterrent to Radical Islamists. With Hussein removed, Iran lost its restraint. Bordering on Iraq and spiritually attached to Iraq’s Shi’a population, Iran became involved in the commercial, economic, and political future of Iraq, an event that U.S. strategists should have known.
The invasion of Iraq and disposal of a Saddam Hussein regime, which had prevented al-Qaeda elements from establishing themselves, exposed Iraq’s porous borders to Radical Islamic fighters. Founded in October 2004, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) emerged from a transnational terrorist group created and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His cohorts entered through Jordan, while al-Qaeda forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a haven in Iraq. Meanwhile, fighters trained in and wandering through the deserts of Saudi Arabia hopped planes to Istanbul and Damascus and worked their way across Syria into Iraq. Disturbed by the U.S. invasion and military tactics, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Al Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic Caliphate, transformed himself from a fun-loving soccer player into a hardened militant and helped found the militant group Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ), which countered the U.S. military in Iraq.
Spurious reasons and obvious counterproductive results leave doubts that the original explanation and rationales for the invasion were correct. A more valid reason involves the neocons in the Bush administration who were closely identified with Israel in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the office of the vice president, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who aggressively advanced the case for the invasion. Some backups to that theory,
Haaretz, Apr 03, 2003, “White Man’s Burden,” Ari Shavit, “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish (ED: Avid Israel supporters), who were pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
In The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad echoes the case.
The road to Iraq was paved with neoconservative intentions. Other factions of the US foreign policy establishment were eventually brought around to supporting the war, but the neocons were its architects and chief proponents.
Ahmad quotes a remark attributed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” He also quotes former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan who contended, “The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.”
A 1996 report, Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, prepared by neoconservatives at the Jerusalem-based think tank, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, many of whom held vital positions in the George W. Bush administration, lends substance to the charge that the invasion of Iraq served Israel’s interests.
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship….Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
Participants in the Study Group included Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader, James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates, Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser later served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration at the time of the Iraq invasion. The others were allied with organizations that promoted Israel’s interests.
Two observations:
(1) Why were Americans prominent in an Israeli Think Tank and why were they advising a foreign nation?
(2) Note that the thrust of the report is to advise Israel to have a “clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity, and mutuality.” This has been the modus operandi of the Netanyahu administrations.Another ember that warmed the neocon’s heartfelt devotion to Israel; The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years. “Bombing Iraq Isn’t enough. Saddam Hussein must go,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC neocon directors wrote in the 1998 New York Times.
No “smoking gun” firmly ties the neocons devoted to Israel together with using the United States military to eliminate another Israel antagonist. The argument is based upon it being the best, most factual, and only reason the war could have been wanted.
Iran – Last Nation Standing
The Islamic Republic may not be an exemplary nation, but there is no evidence or reason for the U.S. accusations that Iran is a destabilizing, expansionist nation, or leading sponsor of international terrorism. Why would it be – there are no external resources or land masses that would be helpful to Iran’s economy, Iran has not invaded any nation, and its few sea and drone attacks on others are reactions from a perception that others have colluded in harming the Islamic Republic and its allies. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of expanding his social ideology never got anywhere and died with him. Subsequent leaders have been forced to reach out to defend their interests and those of their friends, but none of these leaders has pursued an expansionist philosophy or wants the burden that accompanies the task — enough problems at home.
No matter what Iran does, the US perceives Iran as an enemy and a threat to not only the Middle East but to world order. All this hostility, despite the facts that (1) the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, almost equal to the amount that the United States pledged at the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, (2) according to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, played a “decisive role in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands of wanting 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government,” (3) Iran arrested Al-Qaeda agents on its territory and, because Al-Qaeda linked the Shiite Muslims, represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders, Zionists, and Jews as its most bitter enemies, had ample reason to combat terrorist organizations, and (4) Iran has no reason for or capability of attacking the U.S .or its western allies.
Being vilified for inadequate reasons is followed by Iran not being praised for significant reasons. President Trump, in his January 8, 2020 speech, argued the U.S. had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remains defeated. Trade the U.S. with Iran and Trump’s speech would be correct.
The U.S. spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and leadership from its Major General Qasem Soleimani, recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and played a leading role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Iran and Soleimani were key elements in the defeat of ISIS.
What reward did Solemani receive for his efforts? When his convoy left Baghdad airport, a drone strike, perpetrated by U.S. military, assassinated Major General Solemani and nine other innocent people on January 3, 2002. UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, reported the U.S. had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to life to justify the attack.
As usual, Israel used the U.S. to satisfy its desires. “Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months,” President Trump said about the coordination to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. “We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack. I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. We were disappointed by that. Very disappointed…But we did the job ourselves, with absolute precision … and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Why do these protectors of the realm want Iran destroyed — they fear Iran may act as a deterrent to their future aggression. Iran cannot win a war with a nuclear weapon or any weapons; it can only posture and threaten use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Its principal antagonists, Israel, United States, and Saudi Arabia have elements that shield themselves from a nuclear attack by Iran. Israel’s small size makes it likely that fallout from a nuclear weapon will endanger the entire region, especially Iran’s allies. Any nuclear strike on Israel will be countered with a torrent of nuclear missiles that will completely wipe large Iran off the map and without fallout causing harm to neighboring nations. With little to gain and everything to lose, why would Iran engage in nuclear aggression?
Netanyahu’s scenario follows a pattern of using American lives and clout to further Israel’s interests and decimate its adversaries. Survey the record — destruction of Iraq, destruction of Sudan, destruction of Libya, destruction of Egypt, destruction of Syria. and now Iran. Only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries will be left standing, remaining in that position as long as they show no threat to Israel.
The destructions visited upon the described nations have done little to advance US security and economy. Therefore, the reason for the actions and US support of Israel must be political —politicians coopted by catering to the religious right community and other Israel defenders. US administrations are willing to sacrifice American lives and give exorbitant financial assistance to Israel in trade for electoral support from Israel’s backers.
The present confrontations between Iran and Israel have escalated. Those who believe Israel’s few drones over Isfahan concluded retaliation for Iran’s excessive number of missiles and harmless result in the attack on Israel might be mistaken. The drones may have only tested Iranian defensive capability. More, much more provocations may happen.
Due to US aggressive tactics, the antagonists to Israel have fallen and Iran is the last nation standing.
The post Last Nation Standing ─ Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
Time (4/14/24)
This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed.
Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged.
But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful.
We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’
Prometheus Books (2024)
Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books.
The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on <i>Spy for No Country</i> appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
-
Jury trial against military contractor CACI over ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton abuses’ comes 20 years after scandal broke
The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day that the photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed to the public, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolize the treatment of detainees in the US “war on terror”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
-
Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot. Christmas crackers are less important than the new year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like the newborn into the information world. The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often aged and seasoned numbers, whiskered by storage and grey with cataloguing.
On January 1, the NAA diligently followed a long standing convention of releasing a stash of cabinet documents running into 240 from the Howard government, a period in Australian history when finance ruled with raffish vulgarity, and critical adventurers of conscience were anesthetised and told to get a mortgage. John Howard, Australia’s dull, waxwork prime minister, reminded his voters that Australia’s links to Asian countries were less important than the sigh-heavy attention from Washington.
What was particularly interesting in this disgorging of material was the focus on Australia’s foolish, negligent and even criminal contribution to the war on Iraq in 2003. Even more interesting was how little the files said about the reasons for Australia’s commitment to the invasion. Much of this was occasioned by the omission of 78 records that would otherwise have been in the original 2020 transfer to the archives.
Canberra is the city of smudged politicians, unnervingly clean air and endless meetings, but the omission of documents troubled Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, given that they concerned the invasion. He even went so far as to order an inquiry. In true capital fashion, it was done with reserve and caution, the broom being of the “one of us” school. Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), not to mention being on the government’s retainer as a consultant, became the broom in question.
In subsequent recommendations as to why the omission of the documents had taken place, Richardson advanced the less than controversial thesis that the NAA include documents from the National Security Committee (NSC), a fixture of the Howard government.
On March 14, the Archives, as if prodded, released certain NSC documents relevant to the Iraq invasion. In the incomplete release, Australia as empire’s obedient, perfumed appendage becomes almost ridiculously evident. On January 10, 2003, the Defence Minister Robert Hill, along with the defence force chief, identified the need for deploying some personnel from the Australian Defence Force within a month “on the likely time-frame for possible military action against Iraq” as indicated by US Central Command. The meeting also reveals that ADF forward units were already designated from a list agreed upon by the NSC on August 26 and December 4, 2002. The thrill for imminent war was palpable.
Howard, at the same meeting, promised that committing ADF forces required the consideration of all cabinet members, also noting that he had “foreshadowed to the governor-general the general direction of steps under consideration by the government in relation to Iraq”. But the governor-general of the time, the eventually doomed Peter Hollingworth, was subsequently told by the prime minister that involving him in the decision to invade Iraq was needless; the ADF could be deployed under the provisions of the Defence Act.
A minute dated March 18, 2003 makes mention of the full cabinet’s authorisation of the invasion, though hardly anything else. There is, however, a submission from the defence minister “circulated in the cabinet room on 17 and 18 March” intended to convince cabinet on possible military operations in Iraq. In anticipation of a formal request to commit troops, the ADF had already been authorised to pursue “prudent contingency planning” on the matter. The two stated war aims of Washington are outlined (vassal, take note): “regime change” and crippling Iraq’s “delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)”. On this point, the Howard government dawdles, if ever so slightly, notably on the issue of regime change, admitting, ultimately, that “this may be a desirable, even inevitable, outcome of military action”.
The now infamous memorandum of advice authored by the first assistant secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney-General’s department is also to be found. The memorandum offers the shakiest of justifications for invading Iraq, also drawing from unsubstantiated reasons from their UK counterparts. It was subsequently and rightly excoriated by an irate Gavan Griffith, the then unconsulted Solicitor-General. Not only were both bits of legal advice “entirely untenable”, they were also “arrant nonsense”, furnishing “no threads for military clothes.” Nothing from President George W. Bush’s remarks had revealed any desire “to clothe American action with the authority of the Security Council.” Thuggish unilateral action seemed the order of the day.
For Griffith, certain omissions were almost unpardonable. What, for instance, of such authorities as Canberra’s veteran authority, Henry Burmester, the former head of the Office of International Law, subsequently appointed Chief Counsel of the AG’s department. Or for, that matter, of the now late James Crawford of Cambridge University, commonly retained for the giving of advice on international law. Cautious experience had been elbowed out in favour of the gun.
The latest documents from the NSC are more sleet than snow. They do confirm that the parliamentary system, more than ever, should be involved in reining in the wild impulses of war makers. In the meantime, drawing up an indictment for Howard to stand trial in the International Criminal Court is overdue. The same goes for a number of his cabinet. We would not want them to go stale before justice.
The post Predictable Outcomes: Australia, the National Security Committee, and Invading Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and “de-radicalizing” the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains “freedom of action” to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
-
It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.
After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:
reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)
Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:
‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’
(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)
In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.
Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.
We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:
Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.
We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’
The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.
None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.
None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:
Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.
(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)
Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:
does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.
For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:
Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.
Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:
In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.
Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:
A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.
Scarr continued:
Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.
What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.
You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.
Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:
In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)
For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:
These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.
Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.
Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”
Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:
What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?
Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.
On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:
This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.
Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.
The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.
To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:
jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.
Oborne expanded:
As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.
The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.
He continued:
It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)
Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.
By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.
Establishment Alarm At Public Protest
In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:
The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:
Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.
Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.
It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.
In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.
On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:
As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.
He added:
The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.
Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:
Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.
‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.
A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.
Sinclair observed that:
This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.
Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth
One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).
The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.
Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’
She added:
Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.
Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:
Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.
They added:
By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.
Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.
Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.
The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:
one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.
In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’
The song observes movingly:
Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is trueIt concludes on an uplifting note:
Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —One fine day
That one fine day is still within our reach.
The post Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
It is a historical fact that powerful elites do not wish to be diverted from pursuing their selfish interests by the public. Minimal, unthreatening expressions of dissent may be tolerated in ostensible ‘democracies’. But public opinion needs to be managed, manipulated or, if necessary, simply ignored.
After all, as Noam Chomsky has said, real ‘democracy is a threat to any power system’. He noted that Edward Bernays, one of the founders and leading figures of the huge public relations industry:
reminded his colleagues that with “universal suffrage and universal schooling… even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.” That unfortunate tendency could be contained and reversed, he urged, by new methods of “propaganda” that could be used by “intelligent minorities” to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
(Preface to The Myth of the Liberal Media, Edward S. Herman, Peter Lang Publishing, 1999, pp. x-xi.)
Elite shaping of public opinion is not 100 per cent foolproof, of course, but it is often highly effective. As Peter Beattie, an assistant professor in political economy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, observed:
‘While the media is far from a brainwashing “influencing machine” or a hypodermic needle capable of injecting ideas into our minds, it is nonetheless the greatest influence on public opinion, as it is the conduit through which the building blocks of public opinion are transported.’
(Beattie, Social Evolution, Political Psychology, and the Media in Democracy: The Invisible Hand in the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 8)
In fact, one could argue that the media is ‘a brainwashing “influencing machine”’, as demonstrated, for example, by the power and success of the propaganda blitz against Jeremy Corbyn, and the deliberate conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism in establishment attempts to smear critics of Israel. However, if public opinion remains stubbornly immune from establishment pressure, it can simply be rejected or overridden.
Consider a YouGov poll last October showing that 66 per cent of the British public support reinstating public ownership of energy companies. Likewise, a 2022 survey by campaign group We Own It revealed that a majority want to see public ownership of utilities such as energy and water.
We Own It director Cat Hobbs said:
Privatisation has failed for nearly 40 years. Politicians can’t ignore the truth any longer: these monopolies are a cash cow for shareholders and we need to take them back.
We need energy companies that don’t rip us off, public transport that works for passengers and water companies that don’t pour sewage into our rivers.’
The poll also showed very strong support for public ownership of buses, the railways, the National Health Service and Royal Mail. These findings were echoed in an Ipsos poll last August.
None of these popular policies are consistent with the extremist, corporate agenda of the Tory government or the ‘opposition’ Labour party. Nor do they feature much in ‘mainstream’ media reporting and commentary. This sums up the reality of British ‘democracy’: a state that suppresses the wishes of the majority and is run for the benefit of a very rich minority.
None of this is unique to the UK; it is an endemic feature of capitalist societies. Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture, wrote that:
Majorities [in the US and other western countries] consistently support increased government spending in traditionally “liberal” areas such as healthcare, education, environmental protection, and even – when the word “welfare” is not used – programs for assisting the poor. This has been well documented in a number of comprehensive studies. And yet the media’s interpretative frameworks tend to suppress the leftist leanings of opinion poll responses, creating a picture of a moderate to conservative citizenry that matches a moderate to conservative political elite.
(Lewis, Constructing Public Opinion: How Political Elites Do What They Like And Why We Seem To Go Along With It, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 44.)
Of course, the notion that power is held to account by a ‘free press’ in a modern ‘democracy’ is a discredited myth. Patrick Lawrence, formerly a foreign correspondent for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, noted that the US:
does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.
For instance, US political journalist Glenn Greenwald observed of Ukraine war coverage:
Every word broadcast on CNN or printed in The New York Times about the conflict perfectly aligns with the CIA and Pentagon’s messaging.
Journalists with successful careers in the major Western news media would never dare make such a cogent remark in public. Instead, attention has to be directed towards the propaganda operations of whoever the current ‘Official Enemy’ happens to be. To give just one example: on 27 February 2022, Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, stood outside the Kremlin and declaimed live on BBC News that evening:
In Russia, television remains the key tool for shaping public opinion. So, if you control TV, as the Kremlin does, you control the messaging. But not 100 per cent, because today many Russians do get their news and information online. And there they see a very different picture.
Likewise, a BBC ‘Live’ webpage about the Ukraine war on 24 February last year included a supposed analysis by Francis Scarr of BBC Monitoring titled, ‘The evolution of Russian propaganda at home’. It began:
A year since the invasion of Ukraine, coverage of the war on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels has shifted as the Kremlin attempts to shape public opinion at home.
Scarr continued:
Two-thirds of Russians receive most of their information from TV, where the messaging is under tight Kremlin control.
What about the ‘tight control’ of government ‘messaging’ via BBC News? It does not necessarily require direct instructions from Whitehall or Downing Street. But senior BBC managers and editors have certainly risen to their positions by thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things.
You will therefore struggle to find a BBC journalist pointing to the disparity between state-mandated BBC News ‘messaging’ and informed sources challenging establishment ideology via non-corporate media. A vanishingly rare exception is Rami Ruhayem, a BBC Arabic and BBC World Service journalist and producer since 2005, who was scathing about the BBC’s coverage of the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (see our recent alert). Ruhayem has essentially been ‘disappeared’ with no public response from the BBC and virtually zero coverage in state-corporate media.
Nor will BBC News inform its audiences that government policy is largely determined by the wishes of business elites, as independent studies have shown. Chomsky referred to one of these studies in his 2010 book, ‘Hopes and Prospects’:
In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. (p. 47.)
For example, opinion polling in Germany and France revealed that most people there blame the United States and/or NATO for the war in Ukraine. US political analyst Ben Norton commented:
These results suggest that many average Europeans can see clearly that the conflict in Ukraine is not merely a battle between Kiev and Moscow, but rather a proxy war that the NATO military alliance, led by the United States, is waging against Russia.
Such unacceptable public opinions are dismissed routinely by political leaders. Germany’s hawkish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock insisted NATO must ‘stand with Ukraine as long as they need us’, pledging military support ‘no matter what my German voters think’.
Israel’s Claims Against Unrwa: “No Evidence”
Meanwhile, the massive public opposition to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is generating concern at senior levels in western capitals. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte reportedly even asked the country’s legal affairs ministry:
What can we say to make it look like Israel is not committing war crimes?
Here in the UK, a recent YouGov opinion poll starkly highlighted just how out of step both the Tory government and Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party are with British public opinion on Israel and Palestine. 66 per cent of Britons believe Israel should stop attacking Gaza and agree to an immediate ceasefire. Only 13 per cent of Britons think Israel should continue with its ‘military action’.
On 20 February, with the death toll in Gaza at almost 30,000, and more than four months after the Israeli carnage began, Labour finally called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire’, under parliamentary pressure from a Scottish National Party (SNP) motion. However, in the end, a formal vote on a ceasefire did not take place with the Commons debate descending into chaos. There were accusations that the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, and Starmer had colluded to block Parliament voting on the SNP motion, thus avoiding a mutiny among Labour MPs who have been demanding a less barbaric stance from the Labour leader. SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said:
This should have been the chance for the UK Parliament to do the right thing and vote for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and Israel – instead it turned into a Westminster circus.
Much of the public, as well as legal experts and informed commentators, regard Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal; not least the majority of judges who heard the recent South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands.
The cynical and premeditated response of Israel to the ICJ ruling was to make unsubstantiated claims that Unrwa employees, the UN agency which provides relief for six million Palestinian refugees, were involved in the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year. News media, notably including BBC News, gave the claims wall-to-wall coverage. The staff – 12 people out of 13,000 employees – named by Israel were summarily dismissed, without an investigation, by Unrwa. This did not prevent many countries, including the US and the UK, suspending vital humanitarian contributions to the relief agency.
To its credit, Channel 4 News investigated Israel’s allegations and broadcast a report showing that Israel had provided ‘no evidence’ of its claims against the Unrwa staff, other than details identifying the employees alleged to have been involved. As Peter Oborne observed, it appears that, in immediately suspending aid, Britain’s foreign secretary David Cameron had:
jumped to attention solely based on claims made by a government which has long had a strong interest in discrediting Unrwa.
Oborne expanded:
As Israeli television has reported, based on a “high-level classified foreign ministry report”, Israel plans to push Unrwa out of the Gaza Strip.
The plan involves three stages: the publication of a report alleging Unrwa cooperation with Hamas; followed by the promotion of alternative organisations to provide welfare services; and finally, the removal of Unrwa from Gaza altogether.
He continued:
It’s not as if Israel deserves to be automatically believed. The Israeli military has repeatedly been caught out making false and fabricated statements about events in Gaza and elsewhere. This means that every claim emanating from Israel should be treated sceptically. (The same applies, of course, to Hamas.)
Compare this with the UK government’s response to the evidence-based ICJ judgment that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Cameron trashed the court even before it had reached its judgment, and have continued to do so since.
By contrast, Britain responded at once to allegations regarding Unrwa produced by Israel and suspended funds to the one agency capable of delivering aid in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The huge public protests in the UK, and around the world, highlight the great divide between the public and governments on Israel and Palestine, and wider foreign policy. This has been the case historically.
Establishment Alarm At Public Protest
In February 2003, when a massive global movement attempting to stop the impending Iraq war took to the streets, the New York Times wrote:
The huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
A similar phenomenon is occurring now, with international grassroots pressure demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. But coverage in the state-corporate media does not reflect the power or importance of public protest. As Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, observed:
Mainstream [sic] media like the BBC will not represent this movement nor hold to account those governments who are complicit in the destruction of Gaza because they are overwhelmingly tied to an imperial world view.
Instead, the BBC and other news media endlessly platform Israeli propaganda, notably the apartheid state’s repeated claims to be ‘defending itself’ in ‘responding’ to the Hamas attacks of 7 October last year.
It is important to emphasise, however, that elite power is not invulnerable to public opinion. In the years following the Iraq war, much of the public came to realise it had been deceived. The US-led invasion-occupation was not about disarming Saddam of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or about bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq. It was about oil and western hegemony in the Middle East.
In 2014, a huge 71 per cent of Americans said that the war in Iraq ‘wasn’t worth it’. Likewise, three opinion polls conducted from 1990-2000 found that about 7 in 10 Americans believed that the US war against Vietnam was a ‘mistake’. Many no doubt would have said that the Vietnam war, like the Iraq war, was an international war crime, not merely a ‘mistake’.
On the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq last February, journalist Ian Sinclair published an important analysis in the Morning Star. He pointed out that, although the enormous Stop the War marches did not prevent the war going ahead, or the UK’s participation in it, the anti-war movement did have significant impacts. It helped to inform public opinion and mobilise public action that challenged British foreign policy. Sinclair wrote:
As a politician, Blair was fatally wounded over Iraq, with a 2010 ComRes poll finding 37 per cent of respondents thought he should be put on trial for the invasion.
He added:
The anti-war public mood was also likely a constraining influence on British forces in Iraq. In a 2016 RUSI Journal article, Major General Christopher Elliott noted there was “a cap on numbers, driven by political constraints rather than military necessity.
Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, argued that the UK anti-war movement came close to derailing Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war:
Wobbly Tuesday is one of the great secrets of the Iraq war, kept secret not by state censorship and repression, but by media and academic self-censorship.
‘Wobbly Tuesday’ was Tuesday, 11 March 2003, the date when the British government began to panic that it might lose a parliamentary vote on the war, given the massive public protests. The Sunday Telegraph reported that on that day, Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defence, was ‘frantically preparing contingency plans to “disconnect” British troops entirely from the military invasion of Iraq, demoting their role to subsequent phases of the campaign and peacekeeping.’ In the end, the government won the Commons vote and the UK shamefully took part in the invasion-occupation of Iraq which led to the deaths of around one million Iraqis.
A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 52 per cent of respondents now oppose British military interventions overseas. This new reality was already evident in August 2013 when MPs voted against a government motion to support planned US air strikes on Syria. Public opinion had been strongly opposed to military action, with a YouGov poll just before the vote showing opposition at 51 per cent, and support at just 22 per cent. This was the first time a British prime minister had lost a vote on war since 1782.
Sinclair observed that:
This defeat generated significant alarm within the Establishment. Speaking two years later, Sir Nick Houghton, Britain’s chief of defence staff, worried “we are experiencing ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force” due to a lack of “societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.
Julian Assange: Persecuted For Reporting The Truth
One of the biggest establishment campaigns in recent times to manipulate public opinion has been the attempted smearing of WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, as we have repeatedly highlighted in media alerts (for example, see here and here).
The latest stage of this campaign has been the final High Court hearing in London this week to decide whether Assange will be sent to trial in the US under the 1917 Espionage Act, a first for the prosecution for any journalist or publisher. And all for the supposed ‘offence’ of publishing the truth about US war crimes.
Nina Cross, an investigative reporter for The Indicter website, noted that ‘the defamation of Assange’s character by the British government is institutional’ and that ‘only through the complicity of the corporate media has this abuse been possible.’
She added:
Without its sustained collusion and servility, the powerful would not have impunity; they would not dare attempt what appears to be the slow assassination of a journalist in full public view for exposing their crimes.
Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker pointed out how the media bowed down to the US government’s dictate that they focus on Assange’s personality, and not on the principles of the case:
Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of “the ways in which the first world exploits the third”, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.
They added:
By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks’ revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assange’s 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.
Whatever the outcome of this week’s High Court hearings, the valiant example of Assange and WikiLeaks in exposing power serves as inspiration for what can be achieved through the power of truth, humanity and compassion.
Elite power may, at times, seem overwhelming, bordering on invincible. It is an oft-quoted line, but a vital truth that: ‘We are many and they are few’. At root, elite interests fear public power. Therein lies hope.
The writer Maria Popova highlighted David Byrne, former frontman of Talking Heads, as:
one of the last standing idealists in our world — a countercultural force of lucid and luminous optimism, kindred to Walt Whitman, who wrote so passionately about optimism as a mighty force of resistance and a pillar of democracy.
In ‘One Fine Day’, co-written with Brian Eno, Byrne sings a ‘buoyant hymn of optimism [that] ripples against the current of our time as a mighty countercultural anthem of resistance and resilience.’
The song observes movingly:
Shouts and battle cries, from every part
I can see those tears, every one is trueIt concludes on an uplifting note:
Then a peace of mind fell over me —
In these troubled times, I still can see
We can use the stars, to guide the way
It is not that far, the one fine —One fine day
That one fine day is still within our reach.
The post Elite Fear Of The Public: Ukraine, Gaza and Assange first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
The post Wars on Terrorism first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Domestic and international terrorism have caused havoc in several nations. Each nation exhibits a unique approach to combatting terrorism; each nation exhibits a unique outcome from its approach. Examining types, causes, approaches, and outcomes of wars on terrorism in four nations — United States, Israel, China, and Russia — discloses successful strategies, self-destructive strategies, and strategies that deceive the public and terrorize others with impunity. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are not always allied; terrorist actions are not always due to terrorists.
Depending on perspective, the word “terrorism” ─ the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government ─ can be falsely labeled and falsely applied. Those who exhaust peaceful protests against oppression and provocation lash out at their oppressor and inflict damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. Not understanding the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed have unfavorably skewed the responses and led to more terrorism.
United States
United States administrations exhibited a strange method for repelling terrorists — let them enter an area, establish themselves, become strong, and commit atrocities, and then attack them — the spider approach. Muhammad Atta and his eighteen partners freely entered the United States, studied how to go up and not come down, and did their dirty deeds.
After facing several terrorist situations during the 1990s, the September 11, 2001 bombings compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. The U.S. government used one strategy to respond to terrorism ─ brute force.
Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attack the U.S. breathes easier, no terrorism on its mainland, and the major terrorist organizations — al Qaeda and ISIS — decimated. From appearances, the U.S. applied an effective counter-terrorism strategy and contained terrorism. Not quite. U.S. strategy expanded terrorism and moved terrorism into parts of Africa. The reduction in terrorism came mainly from the efforts of other nations.
By blending its battles against terrorism with preservation of American global interests, the U.S. initially expanded terrorism. The battles to overcome terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former beginning and ending with undefined meaning and the latter having no relation to terrorism.
U.S. assistance to Pakistan intelligence during the Soviet/Afghan war indirectly supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden, financed his activities, and helped create the al-Qaeda network.
U.S. manufacture of terrorists continued during Clinton’s administration. Battles between U.S. and Somali forces weakened Somali leadership. From an imposed anarchy in Somalia, al-Shabaab eventually emerged. In 2023, the militant group continues its violent insurgency in Somalia.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in moving bin Laden from a grim and arduous perch in a rugged and isolated mountain to a comfortable villa in Pakistan, from where he was eventually captured and killed. Other than that accomplishment, the 20-year incursion into Taliban territory accomplished nothing positive — the Taliban returned to power and, thanks to the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, other terrorist groups operate within its boundaries. In August 2022, the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri residing in Kabul and killed him in a drone strike.
By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. After the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq from Pakistan and formed ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (AQI ).
AQI was responsible for its downfall. Sunni tribes revolted at al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and the “Iraqi surge,” with assistance from U.S. troops, inflicted heavy losses on the al-Qaeda organization. Stability returned to Iraq until the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the remnants of AQI, and took advantage of growing resistance to U.S. troops in Iraq and discontent with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Baghdadi formed a force that captured about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
Contributed by Sémhur, Flappiefh – Own work from Near East topographic map-blank.svg by Sémhur ; data from the New York Times.
President Barack Obama and his administration share blame for the creation of ISIS, allowing its recruitment throughout the world, not preventing recruits from entering Syria, its rapid capture of territory, and expansion into a caliphate. Former President Donald Trump exaggerated the claim that his administration was the primary force in defeating ISIS. U.S. airpower, which killed too many civilians and was not always welcome, helped; other groups liberated the ISIS dominated areas.
· Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mainly composed of Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, backed by U.S. airpower, liberated Raqqa.
· Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian airpower, recaptured Aleppo.
· Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen, and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes, drove ISIS from Mosul.
Amnesty international lists 1,600+ civilians dead from the war in Raqqa and between 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed in the battle for Mosul, mostly from U.S. air attacks. Foreign Policy estimates that “8,000 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in Mosul’s Old City. Include other parts of the city where the battle raged and the estimates of buildings damaged or destroyed are as high as 138,000.”
The irony of Trump’s Trumpism is his assassination of a person responsible for ISIS’ defeat, Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani. The U.S. contributed to ISIS’ initial successes by training an inept Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left the city to a small contingent of ISIS forces that equipped itself with captured weapons. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. The disasters energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force (PMF). With cooperation from Iran and leadership from Major General Qassim Soleimani, the PMF recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually played a role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Instead of receiving praise for his efforts, Major General Qassim Soleimani, who was never responsible for any terrorist activity, was eliminated as an arch-terrorist. Who committed the terrorism in his death? Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped out of the joint assassination plan at the last minute and left President Chump holding the bag.
NATO, with the U.S. providing air force and ballistic missile support, played the decisive role in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained Radical Islam and its terrorist activities. Militants from Libya flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq, and added to ISIS ranks. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM led the 2013 attack on a gas facility in southern Algeria; individuals trained in Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; and Boko Haram spread havoc throughout northern Nigeria.
Another defect in U.S. strategy ─ Osama bin Laden left no doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks.
During the 1990s, two documents,”Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.
[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.
So now they come to annihilate . . . this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula
From Pakistan, through Egypt to North Africa and Nigeria, and South to Somalia and Kenya, al-Qaeda, Daish, and a multitude of terrorist organizations perform daily bombings, killings, and insurrections, a result of policies of all U.S. administrations since the “gipper” assumed the presidential office.
Israel
Israelis have been victims of many terrorist attacks; few of these attacks have been performed by terrorists. The great magnitude has been done by Palestinians who had exhausted the means to overcome their oppression. To express their oppression and popularize their cause, they have lashed out at their oppressor and inflicted damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. The terrorist actions are mostly revenge attacks due to provocations, succeeding Israeli military and civilian terror attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians.
Depicting Israel as a nation that has suffered excessive terrorism is a mischaracterization. More correct is that by magnitudes more than any nation, not even close, Israel is the major terrorist nation in the world. Look at the record. In almost every country of the world, apartheid Israel has committed terrorist actions.
Begin with the 1948-49 war against the Palestinians. From Wikipedia:
According to several historians, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 war. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Aryeh Yizthaki lists 10 major massacres with more than 50 victims each.
The newly established Israeli government continued its aggression against the Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian communities, ethnically cleansing 1.1 million Palestinians, and forcing them into displaced persons and refugee camps.
Israel followed the ethnic cleansing by instituting apartheid and continually terrorizing West Bank and Gazan Palestinians with provocative terror attacks.
Gaza before Oct. 7-Courtesy of ABC News
Gaza after Oct. 7-Courtesy of Aljazeera
Going beyond its borders, Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon and used terror attacks on the Lebanese population.
Going worldwide, Israel uses its intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate foreign scientists, military hardware suppliers, Palestinian activists, and those who harmed Israelis.
Israel displays a dual strategy in the war on terrorism. Building walls to separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, restricting travel between Israel and its occupied territories, scrutinizing entry at checkpoints, and cleverly surveilling all Palestinians have prevented terrorism within Israel. Provoking Palestinians into committing terrorist acts and stimulating settlers to make revenge “price tag” attacks against Palestinian communities and the military to wage war against the terrorists is the other side of the coin.
The violence committed against the Palestinians emits a backlash from worldwide supporters of the Palestinians and causes harm to Jews. The backlash is converted into spurious charges of anti-Semitism and used to justify Israel’s actions.
Add it up and Israel is an apartheid country, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people, a triple combination that no nation in all history has been able to equal. The Israeli government and its worldwide public relations machine convince the world it is an innocent victim of Hezbollah terrorists, Hamas terrorists, anti-Semites, surviving Nazis, liberal misfits, and disoriented people who cannot get out of the way of bullets and bombs. Western governments pay no heed to the triple play.
Russian Federation
A reported 1,312 terrorist attacks caused 1,179 Russian deaths between 2007 and 2021 and gripped the Russian Federation. After peaking in 2009, attacks and deaths in Russia consistently declined to only one attack and two deaths in 2021. Three of the major attacks happened when Chechen insurgents attacked apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, killing 200 people and injuring several hundred; on October 23, 2002, when Chechen insurgents attacked the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and an estimated 129 people were killed during the rescue operation, and during September 1–3, 2004, when Chechen and Ingush insurgents attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and held more than 1,100 hostages. A careless rescue operation caused more than 300 deaths, including 186 children.
Terrorism arose from a combination of extremist ethno-nationalist and Islamist militants from North Caucasus’s republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya. The dual nature of terrorism ─ people seeking more autonomy and extremists seeking more Islam complicated the Kremlin’s strategy to combat terrorism.
In retaliation for Chechnya terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, a name whose roll from the lips has an endearing quality. Massive and indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages that caused high civilian casualties, herding of people into camps, extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances occurred from both sides and made it difficult to ascertain, who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys.’ Which side was more guilty of terrorism?
Vladimir Putin registered his name, ruthlessness, pragmatism, and authority by resolving the Chechnya terror crisis. He followed Abraham Lincoln’s pattern of using force and making friends with the enemy. Putin convinced Akhmad Kadyrov, Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s, to switch sides. Kadyrov later became the President of the Chechen Republic. Grozny has been rebuilt and Chechnya exists on multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Moscow.
Grozny
Recognizing that Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus were loosely allied with al-Qaeda’s network and many traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the Russian president realized that joining Syria in its civil war against ISIS was a means of preventing the Islamic extremists from extending their reach. Decimating the central authorities of the terrorist campaigns would subdue the morale and incentives of the al-Qaeda “look-alikes” on Russian soil. Without having to use Russian ground troops, and air force pilots not facing challenges in the sky, support of the be-sieged al-Assad regime was a “win-win proposition for Moscow. Putin’s strategy to combat terrorism has been successful — ISIS and al-Qaeda are mostly gone from the Arab lands of the Middle East (still in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa) and the Russian Federation has had no terrorist attacks in the last two years.
China
A shadowy and shifting group of Uyghur separatists is responsible for terrorism committed against Chinese authorities and citizens. Incomplete statistics from The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China show that “from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.” From 1990 to 2001 the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which proposes the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state, “was responsible for over 200 acts of terrorism, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.”
Two of the reported and more serious terrorist attacks.
On May 22, 2014, five terrorists drove two SUVs through the fence of the morning fair of North Park Road of Saybagh District, Urumqi, into the crowd and detonated a bomb that claimed the lives of 39 and left 94 injured.
On 1 March 2014, a group of 8 knife-wielding terrorists attacked passengers in the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, Yunnan, China, killing 31 people, and wounding 143 others. The attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers at random.
A more complete description of the terrorist attacks is available in an article by The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.
As the terrorist attacks rose, Beijing had one strategy ─ ruthlessly seek out the perpetrators. “In the period 2013–2017 police arrested 330,918 in the province, 7.3 percent of total arrests in China. This compares to 81,443 arrests in the previous five years. In March 2019, Chinese officials said that they had arrested more than 13,000 militants in Xinjiang since 2014.”
Realizing their strategy had developed into a “tit-for-tat” operation, where each blow against the terrorist apparatus was countered by a blow against Chinese, the Chinese government changed its strategy. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism in Xinjiang and combined the use of force with initiatives that integrated the Uyghur populations into Chinese society and improved their standard of living. The new strategy has been successful — no reported terror attacks in recent years, the GDP of a stagnant Xinjiang province increased from 963 billion yuan in 2016 to 1,774 billion yuan in 2022, and the unemployment rate decreased from 2.48 percent to 2.04 percent during the same interval.
While Western media accuses China of destroying mosques, the Xinjiang Islamic Association states, “There are some 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang. Many in the region were built in the 1980s and 1990s or earlier, but some of these mud-and-brick structures (ED: the demolished Kargilik’s Grand Mosque was a mud-and-brick structure) or small buildings were not well maintained or repaired. They became unsafe for religious activities and posed a serious threat in the event of an earthquake. The mosques were also inadequately designed, making worship difficult.”
Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque
Before Renovation
After Renovation
Conclusion
Terrorism’s principal strategy is to inflict pain, pain, and more pain on a civilian population until the civilian population’s government agrees to their demands. Governments may care but always place national interests above that of the local population. The struggle to overcome terrorism has had two principal strategies
(1) Give ‘em nothing and fight them until the death, and
(2) Use force to keep terrorism contained and offer benefits that will satisfy some grievances and lower the temperature until the heat becomes normal.
The United States pursued the ‘fight until death’ strategy. After excessive deaths from the ongoing terrorism and civilians caught in the battles, the U.S. appears to have won the war; terrorism in the Middle East has declined to an acceptable level.
Israel has pursued a strategy of “we can outdo all terrorist attacks by being more terrorist than the terrorists.” Pushing the oppressed Palestinians into terrorist attacks enables Israel to respond tenfold to the attack on its populace. Terrorizing opposition in other nations is neatly performed by false charges of anti-Semitism, cyber attacks, and, when necessary, Mossad hitmen.
Russia went from ‘fight until death’ to offering the leaders of domestic terrorism a good bribe and letting them take care of it. Total force was used against international terrorism. Both strategies have been successful.
China departed from brute force to a more conciliatory strategy that recognized the wants of the Uyghurs and devised plans to satisfy the population. Most successful of all of the strategies.
Each nation that confronts terrorism may have unique characteristics that shape the terrorism and the response to it. This investigation shows that Chinese President Xi-Jinping eventually realized the exact nature of the terrorism his country was experiencing and accepted a plan that quickly solved the problem. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was pragmatic and changed his stance as events unfolded. Soon afterward, Russia had no more terrorism.
For Israel, terrorism is part of the daily diet. Israel commits terrorism, Israel invites terrorism, Israel commits terrorism, Invites terrorism, on and on until there will be none.
The United States invited terrorism by helping Pakistan’s intelligence fortify Osama bin Laden, not listening to the al-Qaeda leader’s grievances, and invading Iraq. In 1998, bin Laden demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula and voiced objections to a U.S. foreign policy that armed Israel. Did U.S. troops need a base in Saudi Arabia? Why has the U.S. had close ties with the apartheid country, which is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Assuredly, the date 9/11 would just be another day on the calendar if U.S. administrations understood the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Rafah, the last refuge in southern Gaza. Photo credit: MENAFNOn February 7, 2024, a U.S. drone strike assassinated an Iraqi militia leader, Abu Baqir al-Saadi, in the heart of Baghdad. This was a further U.S. escalation in a major new front in the U.S.-Israeli war on the Middle East, centered on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but already also including ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and the U.S. and U.K.’s bombing of Yemen.
This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.
What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.
When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.”
The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.
The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.< A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases.
Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.”
Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.
From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.”
Three days later, Orla would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared.
But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.
Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.
Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.
Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”
After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.
The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.
While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The post US Chooses Genocide Over Diplomacy in the Middle East first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
-
A deadly U.S. drone strike in Baghdad late Wednesday drew swift criticism from Iraqi officials and foreign policy analysts, who warned that the Biden administration’s repeated attacks are further inflaming regional tensions and putting civilians at risk. Yehia Rasool, a spokesperson for the Iraqi military, said in a statement early Thursday that the U.S. “conducted a blatant assassination through…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
-
U.S. officials have said they believe air strikes on dozens of Iranian-linked sites in Syria and Iraq late on February 2 in retaliation for the killing of three U.S. troops in northwest Jordan were successful and warned more strikes will follow, as Baghdad expressed anger and concerns persisted of widening conflict in the region.
U.S. President Biden had warned of imminent action after a drone attack at a U.S. base in Jordan killed three U.S. service members on January 28.
Washington blamed Iran and its supply of weapons to militia groups in the region.
Reports said the U.S. strikes had hit seven locations, four in Syria and three in Iraq.
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement released shortly after the attacks that “our response began today,” adding, “It will continue at times and places of our choosing.”
“The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond,” he added.
General Yehia Rasool, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani accused the United States of a “violation” of Iraqi sovereignty with potentially “disastrous consequences for the security and stability of Iraq and the region.”
After a previous U.S. air strike in Baghdad, Sudani asked for the 2,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn — a sensitive bilateral topic.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the United States “did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes” but did not provide details. He said the attacks lasted about 30 minutes and included B-1 bombers that had flown from the United States.
Kirby said defense officials would be able to further assess the strikes’ impact on February 3.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, which has extensive contacts inside Syria, said at least 18 pro-Iran fighters had been killed in a strike near Al-Mayadeen in Syria.
U.S. Central Command earlier confirmed the strikes, saying its forces “conducted air strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States,” it said, adding that it had struck “command and control operations, centers, intelligence centers, rockets, and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicle storages, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces.”
Syrian state media said there had been a number of casualties in several sites in Syria’s desert areas along the border with Iraq.
U.S. officials have said that the deadly January 28 attack in Jordan carried the “footprints” of Tehran-sponsored Kataib Hizballah militia in Iraq and vowed to hold those responsible to account at a time and place of Washington’s choosing, most likely in Syria or Iraq.
On January 31, Kataib Hizballah extremists in Iraq announced a “suspension” of operations against U.S. forces. The group said the pause was meant to prevent “embarrassing” the Iraqi government and hinted that the drone attack had been linked to the U.S. support of Israel in the war in Gaza.
Biden has been under pressure from opposition Republicans to take a harder line against Iran following the Jordan attack, but said earlier this week that “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said Tehran “will not start any war, but if anyone wants to bully us, they will receive a strong response.”
Biden on February 2 witnessed the return to the United States of the remains of the three American soldiers killed in Jordan at a service at the Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
The clashes between U.S. forces and Iran-backed militia have come against the background of an intense four-month military campaign in Gaza Strip against the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist group Hamas after a Hamas attack killed at least 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.
Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen have also waged attacks on international shipping in the region in what they call an effort to target Israeli vessels and demonstrate support for Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to his fifth round of crisis talks in the region from February 3-8, with visits reportedly planned to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and the West Bank in an effort to promote a release of hostages taken by Hamas in its brutal October 7 raids.
With reporting by AFP, CNN, BBC, and AP
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
U.S. officials have said they believe air strikes on dozens of Iranian-linked sites in Syria and Iraq late on February 2 in retaliation for the killing of three U.S. troops in northwest Jordan were successful and warned more strikes will follow, as Baghdad expressed anger and concerns persisted of widening conflict in the region.
U.S. President Biden had warned of imminent action after a drone attack at a U.S. base in Jordan killed three U.S. service members on January 28.
Washington blamed Iran and its supply of weapons to militia groups in the region.
Reports said the U.S. strikes had hit seven locations, four in Syria and three in Iraq.
“Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement released shortly after the attacks that “our response began today,” adding, “It will continue at times and places of our choosing.”
“The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond,” he added.
General Yehia Rasool, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani accused the United States of a “violation” of Iraqi sovereignty with potentially “disastrous consequences for the security and stability of Iraq and the region.”
After a previous U.S. air strike in Baghdad, Sudani asked for the 2,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq to be withdrawn — a sensitive bilateral topic.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the United States “did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes” but did not provide details. He said the attacks lasted about 30 minutes and included B-1 bombers that had flown from the United States.
Kirby said defense officials would be able to further assess the strikes’ impact on February 3.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, which has extensive contacts inside Syria, said at least 18 pro-Iran fighters had been killed in a strike near Al-Mayadeen in Syria.
U.S. Central Command earlier confirmed the strikes, saying its forces “conducted air strikes in Iraq and Syria against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.”
“U.S. military forces struck more than 85 targets, with numerous aircraft to include long-range bombers flown from United States,” it said, adding that it had struck “command and control operations, centers, intelligence centers, rockets, and missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicle storages, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces.”
Syrian state media said there had been a number of casualties in several sites in Syria’s desert areas along the border with Iraq.
U.S. officials have said that the deadly January 28 attack in Jordan carried the “footprints” of Tehran-sponsored Kataib Hizballah militia in Iraq and vowed to hold those responsible to account at a time and place of Washington’s choosing, most likely in Syria or Iraq.
On January 31, Kataib Hizballah extremists in Iraq announced a “suspension” of operations against U.S. forces. The group said the pause was meant to prevent “embarrassing” the Iraqi government and hinted that the drone attack had been linked to the U.S. support of Israel in the war in Gaza.
Biden has been under pressure from opposition Republicans to take a harder line against Iran following the Jordan attack, but said earlier this week that “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said Tehran “will not start any war, but if anyone wants to bully us, they will receive a strong response.”
Biden on February 2 witnessed the return to the United States of the remains of the three American soldiers killed in Jordan at a service at the Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
The clashes between U.S. forces and Iran-backed militia have come against the background of an intense four-month military campaign in Gaza Strip against the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist group Hamas after a Hamas attack killed at least 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.
Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen have also waged attacks on international shipping in the region in what they call an effort to target Israeli vessels and demonstrate support for Palestinians.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to his fifth round of crisis talks in the region from February 3-8, with visits reportedly planned to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Israel, and the West Bank in an effort to promote a release of hostages taken by Hamas in its brutal October 7 raids.
With reporting by AFP, CNN, BBC, and AP
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Listen to the Talking China In Eurasia podcast
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | YouTube
Welcome back to the China In Eurasia Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China’s resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.
I’m RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here’s what I’m following right now.
As Huthi rebels continue their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the deepening crisis is posing a fresh test for China’s ambitions of becoming a power broker in the Middle East – and raising questions about whether Beijing can help bring the group to bay.
Finding Perspective: U.S. officials have been asking China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Huthis, but according to the Financial Times, American officials say that they have seen no signs of help.
Still, Washington keeps raising the issue. In weekend meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan again asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to play a “constructive role” in stopping the attacks.
Reuters, citing Iranian officials, reported on January 26 that Beijing urged Tehran at recent meetings to pressure the Huthis or risk jeopardizing business cooperation with China in the future.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that China would want to bring the attacks to an end. The Huthis have disrupted global shipping, stoking fears of global inflation and even more instability in the Middle East.
This also hurts China’s bottom line. The attacks are raising transport costs and jeopardizing the tens of billions of dollars that China has invested in nearby Egyptian ports.
Why It Matters: The current crisis raises some complex questions for China’s ambitions in the Middle East.
If China decides to pressure Iran, it’s unknown how much influence Tehran actually has over Yemen’s Huthis. Iran backs the group and supplies them with weapons, but it’s unclear if they can actually control and rein them in, as U.S. officials are calling for.
But the bigger question might be whether this calculation looks the same from Beijing.
China might be reluctant to get too involved and squander its political capital with Iran on trying to get the Huthis to stop their attacks, especially after the group has announced that it won’t attack Chinese ships transiting the Red Sea.
Beijing is also unlikely to want to bring an end to something that’s hurting America’s interests arguably more than its own at the moment.
U.S. officials say they’ll continue to talk with China about helping restore trade in the Red Sea, but Beijing might decide that it has more to gain by simply stepping back.
Three More Stories From Eurasia
1. ‘New Historical Heights’ For China And Uzbekistan
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev made a landmark three-day visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi, engaged with Chinese business leaders, and left with an officially upgraded relationship as the Central Asian leader increasingly looks to China for his economic future.
The Details: As I reported here, Mirziyoev left Uzbekistan looking to usher in a new era and returned with upgraded diplomatic ties as an “all-weather” partner with China.
The move to elevate to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from a “comprehensive strategic partnership” doesn’t come with any formal benefits, but it’s a clear sign from Mirziyoev and Xi on where they want to take the relationship between their two countries.
Before going to China for the January 23-25 trip, Mirziyoev signed a letter praising China’s progress in fighting poverty and saying he wanted to develop a “new long-term agenda” with Beijing that will last for “decades.”
Beyond the diplomatic upgrade, China said it was ready to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan across the new energy vehicle industry chain, as well as in major projects such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower.
Xi and Mirzoyoev also spoke about the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, with the Chinese leader saying that work should begin as soon as possible, athough no specifics were offered and there are reportedly still key disputes over how the megaproject will be financed.
2. The Taliban’s New Man In Beijing
In a move that could lay the groundwork for more diplomatic engagement with China, Xi received diplomatic credentials from the Taliban’s new ambassador in Beijing on January 25.
What You Need To Know: Mawlawi Asadullah Bilal Karimi was accepted as part of a ceremony that also received the credential letters of 42 new envoys. Karimi was named as the new ambassador to Beijing on November 24 but has now formally been received by Xi, which is another installment in the slow boil toward recognition that’s under way.
No country formally recognizes the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, but China – along with other countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – have appointed their own envoys to Kabul and have maintained steady diplomatic engagement with the group since it returned to power in August 2021.
Formal diplomatic recognition for the Taliban still looks to be far off, but this move highlights China’s strategy of de-facto recognition that could see other countries following its lead, paving the way for formal ties down the line.
3. China’s Tightrope With Iran and Pakistan
Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region, as I reported here.
Both Islamabad and Tehran have since moved to mend fences, with their foreign ministers holding talks on January 29. But the incident put the spotlight on what China would do if two of its closest partners entered into conflict against one another.
What It Means: The tit-for-tat strikes hit militant groups operating in each other’s territory. After a tough exchange, both countries quickly cooled their rhetoric – culminating in the recent talks held in Islamabad.
And while Beijing has lots to lose in the event of a wider conflict between two of its allies, it appeared to remain quiet, with only a formal offer to mediate if needed.
Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me this approach reflects how China “shies away from situations like this,” in part to protect its reputation in case it intervenes and then fails.
Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, added that, despite Beijing’s cautious approach, China has shown a willingness to mediate when opportunity strikes, pointing to the deal it helped broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.
“It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves,” he told me. “So [Beijing] might be relieved now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t step up if needed.”
Across The Supercontinent
China’s Odd Moment: What do the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s slowing economy have in common? The answer is more than you might think.
Listen to the latest episode of the Talking China In Eurasia podcast, where we explore how China’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union is shaping the country today.
Invite Sent. Now What? Ukraine has invited Xi to participate in a planned “peace summit” of world leaders in Switzerland, Reuters reported, in a gathering tied to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
Blocked, But Why? China has suspended issuing visas to Lithuanian citizens. Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis confirmed the news and told Lithuanian journalists that “we have been informed about this. No further information has been provided.”
More Hydro Plans: Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Energy and the China National Electric Engineering Company signed a memorandum of cooperation on January 24 to build a cascade of power plants and a new thermal power plant.
One Thing To Watch
There’s no official word, but it’s looking like veteran diplomat Liu Jianchao is the leading contender to become China’s next foreign minister.
Wang Yi was reassigned to his old post after Qin Gang was abruptly removed as foreign minister last summer, and Wang is currently holding roles as both foreign minister and the more senior position of director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office.
Liu has limited experience engaging with the West but served stints at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and currently heads a party agency traditionally tasked with building ties with other communist states.
It also looks like he’s being groomed for the role. He recently completed a U.S. tour, where he met with top officials and business leaders, and has also made visits to the Middle East.
That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.
Until next time,
Reid Standish
If you enjoyed this briefing and don’t want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.
- US hits Iranian-backed militant targets in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for drone strike that killed US servicemembers.
- Federal judge postpones former President Trump’s scheduled March election interference trial in DC.
- Second atmospheric river in a week set to hit California over the weekend.
- Senate negotiators reach agreement to revamp nations asylum system.
- Hamas considering US, Egyptian, Qatari hostage release ceasefire proposal.
- Fresno activists suing to stop CALTRANS project.
The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – February 2, 2024 US hits Iranian-backed militant targets in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for drone strike that killed US servicemembers. appeared first on KPFA.
This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
-
A militia group that the Biden administration blamed for the deadly attack on U.S. forces stationed at a shadowy base in Jordan said Tuesday that it would stop targeting American troops in Iraq, a move that could clear the way for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers more than two decades after the 2003 invasion. “We announce the suspension of military and security operations against the occupation…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
