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Category: Middle East

  • Washington’s Unstoppable Superweapon

    In recent months, even across the collective West’s media, growing admissions are being made about both Russia and China’s superior military industrial capacity. With Russia’s first use of the intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, it is admitted that Russia (and likely China) possess formidable military capabilities the collective West currently lacks.

    Despite the collective efforts of NATO in arming, training, and backing Ukraine, Ukrainian forces continue to give ground at an accelerated rate across the entire line of contact amid the ongoing Russian Special Military Operation (SMO).

    The post Washington’s Unstoppable Superweapon appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The BDS Movement Is Making Strides Across the Middle East

    In the bustling streets of Cairo, a bold banner hangs outside the Writers’ Syndicate, confronting passersby with a piercing statement: “Every pound you spend on their products returns as a bullet in your brother’s back.” This message critiques the economic and political ties between the listed multinational products and Israel. The visual captures the spirit of a region-wide movement…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Across The Middle East, The BDS Movement Is Thriving

    In the bustling streets of Cairo, a bold banner hangs outside the Writers’ Syndicate, confronting passersby with a piercing statement: “Every pound you spend on their products returns as a bullet in your brother’s back.” This message critiques the economic and political ties between the listed multinational products and Israel. The visual captures the spirit of a region-wide movement, where ordinary people are transforming everyday choices into acts of defiance against forces that fuel war and perpetuate conflict.

    The post Across The Middle East, The BDS Movement Is Thriving appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Israel Approves Plan to Expand Illegal Settlements in Occupied Golan Heights

    Israel is continuing to bomb Syria a week after longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad was ousted from power. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Israeli forces have launched over 800 strikes on Syria over the past week. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has approved a plan to expand illegal settlements in the occupied Golan Heights. “Israel is setting new precedents in the Middle East,”…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • War Propaganda And The Fall Of Syria

    The rapid fall of the Syrian Arab Republic government was both a shock and a catastrophe for that region and for the world. It was incomprehensible that the state which withstood a sustained attack since 2011 from the United States, Israel, Turkey and other NATO members, and gulf monarch states such as Saudi Arabia, would collapse so swiftly. The defeat was political, not military. There was surprisingly little actual fighting on the battlefield.

    Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, is engaged in Ukraine, while Turkey, Syria’s nemesis, played a two-sided game of working with its NATO allies while claiming to be negotiating in good faith with Russia.

    The post War Propaganda And The Fall Of Syria appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Inside Israel’s Opportunistic Invasion Of Syria

    Even as Bashar al-Assad was scrambling to get out of Syria, Israel was mobilizing its military to take advantage of the power vacuum that Assad’s ouster had created. After five decades of a low-level conflict between the two countries, Israel saw an opportunity to change the calculus, and it seized it.

    As of Wednesday, Israel had struck Syria nearly 500 times. Their goal with these attacks has been to essentially destroy Syria’s military capability, and they have already succeeded. Reports by Israeli media claim that well over 80% of Syria’s weaponry, ships, missiles, aircraft, and other military supplies have been damaged or destroyed.

    The post Inside Israel’s Opportunistic Invasion Of Syria appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How The West Rebranded Al-Qaeda’s Jolani As Syria’s ‘Woke’ New Leader

    Corporate media is heralding the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the emergence of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as the new leader of Syria, despite his deep ties to both al-Qaeda and ISIS.

    “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state,” runs the headline from an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that suggests that Jolani will construct a new Syria, respectful of minority rights. The same newspaper also labeled him a “moderate Jihadist.” The Washington Post described him as a pragmatic and charismatic leader, while CNN portrayed him as a “blazer-wearing revolutionary.”

    The post How The West Rebranded Al-Qaeda’s Jolani As Syria’s ‘Woke’ New Leader appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • From Damascus To Chaos: Assad’s Fall And Al-Qaeda’s Comeback

    There are some weeks when decades happen. In just a few days, the Syrian government has fallen, President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, and Al-Nusra founder Abu Mohammad al-Julani has taken power.

    How could all of this have happened so quickly? Only last year, it appeared that Assad was entrenching his position internationally, being invited back into the Arab League. Assad also moved away from Russia and Yemen and towards a closer relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

    Two guests, Kevork Almassian and Mohammad Marandi, will join the MintCast this week to discuss Syria’s collapse and what it means for the regional Axis of Resistance.

    The post From Damascus To Chaos: Assad’s Fall And Al-Qaeda’s Comeback appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Proxies In Syria Plead With Israel For Help

    Kurdish militants in northern Syria have been reaching out to Israel for “assistance” after their villages were stormed by extremist groups who were involved in the assault that resulted in the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government, according to a 12 December report by Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom.

    “Senior Kurdish militia figures are turning to Israel for urgent help, in light of the seizure of territories from them by Islamist militias backed by Turkiye,” the report said.

    The daily added that the Israeli security establishment is deliberating on whether or not it should respond to these Kurdish requests for aid, highlighting there has been ongoing communication between Tel Aviv and the Kurds, which has increased since Assad’s government fell on 8 December.

    The post US Proxies In Syria Plead With Israel For Help appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Rebuilding Democracy in Syria Will Require “Struggle From Below”

    The fall of the Assad regime in Syria continues to reshape the country and the greater Middle East. In Damascus, leaders of the armed group HTS have retained most services of the civilian government but vowed to dissolve Assad’s security forces and shut down Assad’s notorious prisons. “People have this sense of regained freedom,” says Syrian architect and writer Marwa al-Sabouni in Homs. Still…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Israeli extremism has a new best friend in the White House

    COMMENTARY: By Antony Loewenstein

    The incoming Trump administration will bring a dangerous brew of Christian nationalism and anti-Palestinian racism

    Things can always get worse. Much worse.

    The Biden/Harris administration has bank-rolled and funded Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, the sight of the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.

    Israeli soldiers wilfully post their crimes online for all the globe to see. Palestinian journalists are being deliberately targeted by Israel in an unprecedented way.

    Every day brings new horrors in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond. And that’s not ignoring the catastrophes in Syria, Sudan and Myanmar.

    But we can’t despair or disengage. It can be hard with an incoming Trump White House stuffed with radicals, evangelicals and bigots but now is not the time to do so.

    We must keep on reporting, investigating, sharing, talking and raising public awareness of the real threats that surround us every day (from the climate crisis to nuclear war) and finding ways to solve them.

    Always find hope.

    New global project
    Here’s some breaking news. I’ve said nothing about this publicly. Until now.

    I’ve spent much of the year working on a documentary film series inspired by my best-selling book, The Palestine Laboratory. I’ve travelled to seven countries over many months, filming under the radar due to the sensitivity of the material.

    I can’t say much more at this stage except that it’s nearly completed and will be released soon on a major global broadcaster.

    The photo at the top of the page is me in a clip from the series in an undisclosed location (after I’d completed a voice-over recording session.)

    Stay tuned for more. This work will be ground-breaking.

    My recent work has largely focused on the worsening disaster in the Middle East and I’ve spoken to media outlets including CNN, Al Jazeera English, Sky News and others.

    You can see these on my website and YouTube channel.

    I’m an independent journalist without any institutional backing. If you’re able to support me financially, by donating money to continue this work, I’d hugely appreciate it.

    You can find donating options in the menu bar at the top of my website and via Substack.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ungrateful Lying Upstarts

    Orientation
    Situating my article

    Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.

    In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers, I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

     Western claims about their place in world history

    • Charles Martel’s victory over the Saracens at the battle of Tours and Poitiers 732 CE
    • Europe pioneers the medieval agricultural revolution 600-1000 CE
    • Italian pioneers long-distance trade and early capitalism. Italy the leading global power 1000 CE
    • European crusaders assert control over the Islamic Middle East Post 1095 CE
    • Italian Renaissance and scientific revolution 1400-1650 CE
    • China withdraws from the world, leaving a vacuum filled by Europeans 1434 CE
    • Guttenberg invents the movable metal-type printing press 1455 CE
    • Bartolomeu Diaz is the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope 1487-88 CE
    • European Age of Discovery and the emergence of early Western globalization Post 1492 CE
    • The Spanish plunder the gold and silver bullion of Indigenous Turtle Islanders post 1492 CE
    • Da Gama makes its first contact with “primitives” and isolate Indigenous people 1498 CE
    • The Europeans defeat the Asians and monopolize world trade 1498-1800 CE
    • European military revolution 1550-1660 CE
    • First industrial miracle happens in Britain 1700-1850 CE
    • British industrialization is the triumph of domestic or self-generated change 1700-1850 CE
    • Commodore Perry opens up isolated Tokugawa Japan 1853 CE
    • Meiji Japan industrializes by copying the West 1853 CE
    • Britain reverses its trade deficit with China in the 1820s CE
    • Opium wars and unequal treaties force open and rescue China’s “backward” economy 1839-1858 CE

    Stopping Eurocentric thinking in its tracks
    You might not suspect that European goods were considered inferior both in terms of quality and price by Easterners. Public health and clean water were more advanced in China than in Europe. By 1800, as much as 22% of the Japanese population were living in towns, a figure that exceeds Europe. Even as late as 1850, the Japanese standard of living was higher than that of the British. In conclusion,  Europe invented very little for themselves. The only genuine innovations that they made before the 18th century were the Archimedean screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

    Countering the Eurocentric Myth of the Pristine West
    John M. Hobsons claims in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are:

    • The West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalization ever since 500 CE.
    • The East was more advanced than the West between 500-1800 CE. It wasn’t until 1800 that the West first caught up with and then surpassed China.
    • The East and South were not only not passive bystanders, but in the overwhelming number of cases, they were the initiator of technological, economic and even cultural change.
    • The West did initiate new inventions and ways of life but only beginning in the 19th century.
    • It was also in the 19th century that the West began its denial of Eastern and Southern influence.
    • This denial of pioneering role of  Western leadership in world history requires a revisionist history of virtually the whole world of the last 1500 years.

    Eurocentric Propaganda Maps
    Eurocentrism has multiple sides to its denial, neglect and outright lying about its place in world history. One piece of black propaganda can be seen is in the ways its maps are constructed. Hobson points out that on the realistic map, the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the Northern hemisphere. And yet in the Mercator map the landmass of the North occupiers 2/3 of the landmass. Secondly, while Scandinavia is about a third of the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on a map. Lastly, Greenland appears almost twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of Greenland.

    Placement of National and Regional Formations in World History Textbooks
    I remember my textbooks on world history. While they might start with Africa and Asia, the chapters were relatively short. But as soon as we got to Europe there are long chapters on technology, economics, politics and philosophy. It might not be until the end of the book than the rest of the world is reintroduced again. It’s as if there was no interaction going on between the West and the rest of the world between the time of the Greeks and the 20th century.

    Orientalist and Patriarchal Construction of the West vs the East
    The West is presented as a dynamic, ingenious, proactive, rational, scientific disciplined, ordered, self-controlled, sensible, mind-oriented, scientific, paternal, independent, functional, free, democratic, tolerant, honest, civilized morally and economically progressive (capitalist), parsimonious, and individualistic.

    On the other hand, the East (China, India and the Middle East) and the South (mostly Africa) is conceived of as unchanging, imitative, ignorant, passive, irrational superstitiously ritualistic, lazy, chaotic, erratic, spontaneous, emotional, body-oriented, exotic, alluring and childlike. Furthermore they are dependent, dysfunctional, enslaved, despotic, and intolerant. They are presented as corrupt, barbaric, savages, who are morally regressive economically stagnant, indolent, cruel and collectivist. Ten Western social scientists from the 19th century down to the present have accepted these dualistic stereotypes. It is out of these extremely unjust characterizations that the myth of the pristine Western development was born.

    Hobson writes that there is no dualist more extreme in categorizing the East and West than Max Weber. See Table 1 below.

    Table 1  Max Weber’s Orientalist View of the East and the West

    Occident Modernity Orient tradition
    Rational public law Ad hoc private law
    Double entry bookkeeping Lack of rational accounting
    Free and independent cities Political/Administrative camps
    Independent urban bourgeoise State controlled merchants
    Rational bureaucracy Patrimonial despotic state
    Rational science Mysticism
    Protestant ethics and the emergence of the rational individual Repressive religions and the predominance of the collective
    Basic institutional constitutions of the West are fragmented civilizations with balance of social power between all groups and institutions Basic institutional constitution of the East is a unified civilization with no social balance between groups and institutions
    Multi-state system of nation-states Single state system – empires
    Separation of the public and private Fusion of public and private


    The Western Falsification of the World Before 1500 CE

    Furthermore, standard picture of the world before 1500 is presented by Eurocentrism as:

    • the world mired in stagnant tradition;
    • a fragmented world divided between insulated and backward regional and; civilizations governed by a despotic states, mainly of the East.

    This concept was consciously reconstructed by Eurocentric intellectuals in the 19th century so that first Venice and later Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and Britain were represented as the leading global powers in the post 1000 period. Please see Table 2 for Hobson’s rebuttals

    Table 2 The Status of World Civilizations before 1500

    Eurocentric Myths Hobson’s Rebuttals
    Major regional civilizations were insulated from each other Persians, Arabs, Africans Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a global economy
    Political costs were too high to allow global trade Globalization in the East was a midwife if not the mother of the Medieval and Modern West
    There was an absence of capitalist institutions
    credit, money changes, banks, contract laws    		 There was plenty of commercial activity among Muslims and Chinese before 1500
    Transport technologies were too crude to be effective Use of camels 300-500 was more cost effective than horses
    Trade in the East was only in luxury goods Mass consumer products in China and the Middle East. Africans imported beads cowries, copper and copper goods, grain, fruits and raisons, wheat and later on, textiles which were mass-based goods, not luxuries
    Global flows were too slow to be of consequence Transcontinental trade pioneered by Islamic merchants reached from China to the Mediterranean
    Global processes were not robust enough to have a major reorganizational impact The rise of Tang China (618-907), the Islamic empire (661-1258) and North Africa 909-1171) were plenty robust
    There was no iron production in the world prior to the British Muslims dominate the Europeans in iron production and in steel production until the 18th century. China as well

    The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization
    Middle Ages and the Islamic state
    We are now in a position to compare the Western claims of civilization and what happened when the East and South are given their due. First, much greater than the victory of Charles Martel, between 751-1453 there was the Arab victory in the Battle of Talas which established Islamic domination in West Central Asia. In addition, the Ottoman Turks took over Constantinople in 1453. Nine hundred years before the Europeans developed an agricultural revolution, the Chinese pioneered many technologies that enabled the European agricultural revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.

    There was no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the 18th century and the advanced agriculture of China after the 4th century BCE (57)

    Technology of the agricultural revolution

    The basic technological ingredients of the medieval agricultural revolution were:

    • watermills;
    • windmills;
    • heavy moldboard plough which created drainage furrows;
    • new animal harnesses; and
    • iron horseshoes.

    Contrary to Eurocentric historians, none of these technological innovations were pioneered by Europeans. Either it was diffused to the West by the East, or Westerners innovated after the Eastern raw materials made them available. For example, Hobson tells us the plough entered Eastern Europe through the East from Siberia in the 9th century. The collar harness was clearly pioneered by the Chinese in the 3rd century CE. The invention of the stirrup really came from India in the late 2nd century and the Chinese bronze and cast-iron stirrup in the 3rd century. Other inventions adapted from China included the rotary winnowing machine and seed drills. Some of the revolutionary rotational crops used by the British in the 18th century were being used by the Chinese some 12 centuries earlier.

    Italian Trade
    Hobson’s central claim is that virtually all the major innovations that lay behind the development of Italian capitalism were derived from the more advanced East, especially the Middle East and China. The Italians might have been pioneers of long-distance trade that established merchant capitalism in Europe, but not on a world scale. The Italians were late arrivals to an Afro-Asian led global economy. The globalization enabled the diffusion of Eastern inventions to enable the development of a backward West. Neither did the European Crusades assert control over the Islamic Middle East. They remained dependent on the Islamic Middle East as well as Egypt. One last point about the Italians. Six-hundred years before the Italian Renaissance of 1400-1650 there was an Eastern and Islamic Renaissance which was the foundation for not only the Western Renaissance, but the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

    Eastern origins of the financial revolution
    Italians did not invent the bills of exchange, credit institutions, insurance and banking. Sumerians and Sassanids were using banks, bills of exchange and checks before the advent of Islam, although it was the Muslims who took these early beginnings the furthest. In the West, single entry bookkeeping was the most widespread use right down to the end of the 19th century. The Italian traders only began to use mathematics to replace the old abacus system once the Pisan merchant Fibonacci relayed eastern knowledge in 1202.

    The Eastern Renaissance
    Arab scholars drew heavily on Persian and Indian as well as Chinese sources on medicine, mathematics philosophy theology, literature, and poetry that lay the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. It’s true that Leonardo Fibonacci, wrote a book rejecting the old abacus system in favor of the new Hindu-Arabic system. However, by the beginning of the 10th century all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Ibn al-Shatir of the Maragha school develop a series of mathematical models which were almost the same as those developed 150 years later by Copernicus in his heliocentric theory of the heavens.

    The Eastern origins of the navigational revolution
    The foundation of the navigational revolution was the astrolabe and mariners’ compass. The compass could be used even in cloudy weather when the stars were covered. These breakthroughs allowed Europeans to take to the oceans. However, most of them were invented and all were refined in the East. It was the Muslims who undertook all the major innovations.

    Qualification about Italy
    This is not to say that Italy was unimportant to the fortunes of European commerce. However, Venice prevailed over its rival Genoa not because of its so-called ingenuity but because of its lucrative access to the East via Egypt and the Middle East. Italians played a vitally important role in spreading commercialization through Christendom (not the world). According to Hobson, the belief that Italy was important or the development of Europe in the medieval period seems reasonable. But the notion that Italians pioneered these inventions is a myth

    The myth of the European Age of Discovery
    When we examine the so-called European Age of Discovery we find that  that over 1,000 years before Bartolomeu Diaz circled the Cape of Good Hope the Arabs sailed around the Cape and into Europe. The Chinese did so in the 9th century and in the third century the “primitive” Polynesians and Indians sailed to the Cape and the East Coast of Africa.

    Chinese ships were striking in both their size and quantity. In the 8th century some 2,000 ships were working on the Yangtze.  It can be safely said that the Chinese were the greatest sailors in history. For nearly two millennium they had ships and sailing techniques far in advance of the rest of the world that comparisons are embarrassing. (58)

    As for the Portuguese, they borrowed Islamic innovations in mathematics in order to work out latitude, a longitude relying on the Islamic tables developed by an 11th century Muslim astronomer. The European age or the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Asia” turns out to be retrospective Eurocentric wishful thinking

    The myth of Spanish gold ruling the world
    As for the globalization of the economy in the 15th century, one thousand years ago, the Afro-Asian age expanded to a globalized market while not choosing to initiate imperialism. In the late 15th century, the Spanish plundered New World civilizations for their gold and silver. But 40 years before this, the Chinese initiated a silver currency and provided a strong demand for European silver.

    India was not isolated
    It is said that Vasco Da Gama made the first contact with Indian civilization which is presented as isolated. However, John Hobson tells us India was not isolated but had trading contact with the rest of Eurasia. In fact, Indians were economically superior to their Portuguese discoverers. Furthermore, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic and maybe Black African science and technology provided the basis for Portuguese ships and navigation.

    China and the Ming Dynasty

    When we turn to China, we hear the common claim that China withdrew in 1434, inexplicitly renouncing an opportunity to compete with Western imperialism. Supposedly they left a gap which the West filled.  But the truth is China maintained its power as a world trader all the way from 1434 to well into the 19th century (1840). Hobson tells us that:

     The original documents were distorted by the Chinese state in an attempt at being seen as maintaining a Confucius-like isolationist ideal. It was clear that one way or another Chinese merchants continued their extremely lucrative trading with or without official sanctioning. Many European scholars had been therefore easily seduced by the rhetoric of the Chinese state. (63,70)

    One typical myth of Chinese  state was that in true oriental despotic form, they crushed all capitalist activities. The reality is that the system was simply too large and the state too weak to be able to set up a command economy. The second myth is that the Ming state only dealt with luxury commodities. The truth, according to Hobson is that the majority of textiles produced in India were aimed at mass markets.

    Hobson says half the world was in China’s grip. China could have had the greatest colonial power 100 years before the great age of European exploration. They simply were not interested in imperialism (nor are they today). China was the most powerful economy between 1100 to 1800/1840.  Even as late as roughly 1800-1850, Chinese population growth rates increased at a phenomenal rate and would only be matched by Britain after its industrialization.

    China and the printing press
    As for the Gutenberg printing press and the movable mental type printing press, the Chinese had this by 1095. In addition, the Koreans invented the first metal type thirty years before the Guttenberg press. By the end of the 15th century, the Chinese published more books than all the other countries combined. Even as early as 978, one of the Chinese libraries contained 80,000 volumes. It was exceeded by the holdings of some of the major Islamic libraries. It was only in the 19th century that the European printing press became faster than its Asian counterparts.

    Myth of European pioneering of a military revolution
    Before the military revolution, swords, lances, mace and cross-bows were used in warfare. These were replaced by gunpowder, guns and cannons. Much has been made about the European military revolution between 1550 and 1660. But at most, 700 years before this between 850-1290, the Chinese developed all three that underly that military revolution. While the Europeans eventually took these military technologies further, (certainly by the 19th century) the fact remains that without the available advances from the East, there would have been nothing to have been taken further. It was the Jesuits who persuaded Europeans to face the fact that gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing all were invented in China.

    England drug-dealing opium
    Lastly we turn to the relationship between the British and the Chinese. Up until 1820, the Chinese matched the British industrially and it was the British who had a trade deficit. Eurocentric historians congratulate the British in reversing its trade imbalance, not bothering to mention the way they did that was by pushing opium. Even radicals like Marx and Engels looked the other way when the British “opened up” China, rescuing it, according to Marx and Engels, from Oriental despotism. There is a slight problem according to Hobson. Since as far back as 850 China has been open to world trade and achieved great economic progress long before the British had any industrialization of comparative commercial relations.

    Respect for China until the 19th century
    Many Enlightenment thinkers positively associated with China and its ideas including Montaigne, Leibniz, Voltaire, Wolf, Quesnay, Hume and Adam Smith. Voltaire’s book in 1756 has been described as the perfect compendium of all the positive feeling of the time in Europe about the Far East. Martin Bernal reminds us that no European of the 18th century (before 1780) could claim that Europe had created itself.

    Britain as a late developer of the industrial revolution
    For Eurocentric historians, the British genius was responsible for the industrial revolution unaided by anyone else, non-Europeans especially. But almost 2,000 years earlier, the Chinese had developed industry.

    The first cast-iron object dated from 513 BCE. Steel was being produced by the 2nd century BCE. China produced 13,500 tons of iron in 806, some 90,400 tons by 1064 and as many as 125,000 by 1078. Even as late as 1788 Britain was producing only 76,000. Chinese iron was not confined to weapons and decorative art but to tools and production. All this was made possible by the breakthroughs in smelting… and the use of blast furnaces. It was the assimilation of what the Chinese had built that made possible  the industrial revolution in Britain. Further, the industrialization process was made possible not by some independent British know-how but through the exploitation of multiple African resources. (51-53)

    The steam engine, pride of the British industrial revolution, was antedated by the Chinese as early as 1313 CE. The cotton industry, Hobson says, was the pacemaker of British industrialization. But here too, the cotton industry first found its home in both China and India centuries earlier.

    Japan industrialized before England
    When we turn to Japan, we find that Eurocentric historians agree that the Meiji empire underwent a powerful industrialization process, but they imagine that the process happened late, after 1853. Furthermore, it was only through Commodore Perry “opening up” the isolated Tokugawa Japan that industrialization began. But little did they know that Tokugawa Japan was tied to the global economy ever since 1603! Independent Tokugawa development provided a starting point for the subsequent Meiji industrialization. In other words, Japan was an early developer of industry, even before the industrial revolution in Britain.

    English Racist Identity in Justifying Imperialism

    In my article The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers I went into great detail about the Eurocentrism, paternalism and racism that is involved in Western international relations theory. This described how Westerners convinced themselves of their superiority over the East and South. I will just briefly add George Fredrickson’s two kinds of racism, implicit and explicit in the eightieth and 19th centuries. Implicit racism occurs in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Its foundation was cultural, institutional and environmental. People were not conscious of practicing it and their way of expressing imperialism was to imagine they were on a civilizing mission. They had a “Peter Pan” theory of East as childlike, alluring and exotic.

    In Britain after 1840 there was a new kind of racism which Fredrickson called explicit. Here the criteria for this “scientific” racism was genetic or physical characteristics of the Easterners and Southern civilizations. This racism was overt and conscious, and the superiority of the West was understood as permanent. Their ways of justifying imperialism were a mixture of optimism and pessimism. It was optimistic in its Social Darwinist mentality of subjugation at the hands of the superior British. However, it was also pessimistic because the English feared contact with other races might contaminate the Westerners.

    Evolution of Western Identity 500 CE to 1900 CE
    Westerners also divided societies into civilized (British, Germany) barbaric (China, India, Japan) and  savage (Africa). Each type had a skin color, temperament, religion, climatic character, type of government, self, manner of thinking, ontogenesis, social and political legitimizing and social pathology.

    Table 3  The Construction and Consequences of Western Identity

    Time period Western Identity Eastern and Southern Projections Western Appropriation Strategies
    500-1453 Constructed as Christendom Hostile and evil threat
    Islamic Middle East and Persia    		 Attacking Islam through the first round of the Crusades
    1453- 1780 Increasingly as the
    advanced West    		 Ottoman Turk as hostile and barbaric threat Attacking Islam through the second Crusades initiated by da Gama, Columbus
    Africans and indigenous Americans considered as pagans or savages ripe for exploitation and repression Appropriating bullion and circulating through global silver recycling process
    Slave trading and commodification of labor
    1780- 1900 Superior and carrier of advanced civilization Either inferior or evil savages or barbarians Slave trading in Britain and US
    Appropriation of Asian and African land, labor and markets through formal and informal imperialism

    How Than Did Contingency Enable The Rise of the Oriental West?
    The prominent anti-Eurocentric scholars Kenneth Pomeranz and James Blaut emphasize contingency (the fortuitous accident) as the critical factor in the rise of the West. The West was lucky that:

    • The more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonize Europe.
    • The Mongols turned to China – not Europe.
    • Mongols delivered both goods and Eastern resources.
    • The Muslims were not interested in conquering Western Europe.
    • The Spanish stumbled on the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance.
    • The Native Americans had inadequate immune systems.
    • African slaves had adequate immune systems.
    • The East Indian company happened to be in India at a time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord

    Conclusion
    I began this article by situating it within two previous articles I wrote showing how narrow International Relations Theory is cross-culturally in the exclusion of the Eastern and Southern civilizations from its theoretical understanding of world events. Embedded in this theory was Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. In this article, thanks to John M. Hobson’s book Eastern Origins of Western Civilization I show how in 19 areas of its history Western claims to superiority and leadership in relationship to science, technology, world trade, military weaponry, industry the West was dependent on the East from the 5th to the 19th centuries. It only clearly took the lead around 1840.

    So how did the West first deny its dependency and then insist on its superiority over the civilizations it once depended on? I begin by pointing out how on a microlevel its propaganda can be experienced in the areas of map-making and textbook construction. I name Max Weber as the historian with the most extreme hostility to the East and South in his study of Eastern and Western civilizations. I identify eight European myths about the status of world civilizations at the dawn of the modern West, 1500 CE. I then comb through the West’s dependency on Islamic, Chinese, Indian and African civilizations from 500 to 1900 BCE. I close my article by showing the extent to which the West did become more powerful was based on luck more than skill.

    So what does this have to do with the world today? It has been clear to me through my study of political economists and world historians that the West has been in decline since the mid 1970s and as China, Russia and Iran are rising along with BRICS. My article attempts to show that the rise of the West has not been a glorious 500 year trek, beginning with the Renaissance or two thousand year triumph beginning with Greeks. It has been a short 130-year history which is ending. The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history with the wind at its back and is returning to its long historical prominence today.

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  • As Biden Leaves Office, the US Empire is Desperate to Maintain Its Hegemony

    This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.

    While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.

    In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.

    The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

    One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.

    Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

    Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”

    According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”

    While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.

    In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”

    Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.

    In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.

    Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.

    Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.

    As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:

    Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.

    In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.

    The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.

    How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.

    Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.

    The post As Biden Leaves Office, the US Empire is Desperate to Maintain Its Hegemony first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • THEON secures $50 million of new orders and increased Soft Backlog as the new IRIS Thermal Clip-On System gains momentum

    New order intake/ increased soft backlog of c.$50 million in the first week of November. Strong continuous flow of sales across US, Europe, and Middle East. Uplift in sales supported by launch of new product IRIS, setting a new benchmark for a thermal imaging clip-on system. Initial IRIS orders currently span three NATO countries and […]

    The post THEON secures $50 million of new orders and increased Soft Backlog as the new IRIS Thermal Clip-On System gains momentum appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • To Turn a Secular Democracy into a Jewish Autocracy

    I am always leery of hubris. It may be true that all people of good now want ‘the fall’ of Israel, after a century of lies, deceit, killing and more killing, first by the British and European Jews, then by the US and European Jews, now by Britain-US-EU-Israel and European and Arab Jews. But compassion does not pay the bills. The stakes keep mounting, along with high tech death toys, and it’s very hard to image Israel on the verge of collapse. It, and world Jewry, have never been so rich, so powerful in all history.

    The major world powers – the ‘collective West’, China, India, Russia – provide it with most of the death toys and the fuel to run them. None of these hard-nosed political schemers want to see Israel collapse, nor do any of them lose much sleep over the plight of the Palestinians. I, like many others today, am devoting my life to help free Palestine and really, really don’t want to be disappointed, so I’ll temper my enthusiasm, hold off on celebrating the end of the monstrosity. I am not counting any chickens yet. It’s a long way till the final act when the fat lady belts out her last hava nagila.

    Dan Steinbock has written a book titled The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military (2025). Steinbock is a leading international economic expert who has put his chips on the side of BRICS and multipolarism. That’s where the future is and the ‘collective West’ better wake up soon as it is being left behind. And that includes Israel, as the West’s swan song to 19th century imperial glory. He is CEO and founder of Difference Group (Paul Krugman is a member of the board), its purpose: In the past, the West drove the global economic prospects. Today, that role belongs to the Global South. We help governments, institutions, businesses, and NGOs navigate in the new and complex, multipolar environment.

    The thesis of The Fall is simple: Aiming to turn a secular democracy into a Jewish autocracy/ theocracy, the most far-right government in the history of Israel has continued to push this judicial coup amid the fog of war. These cleavages in the Israeli society figure large in its political disintegration.

    Most analysis of the dilemmas Israel faces looks to the occupation of the Palestinian territories in the 1967 War and the subsequent expansion of Jewish settlements as the chief problem. They are its proximate effect; following directly on the ethnic expulsions of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. Steinbock makes it clear the Israelis never had any interest in anything but one Jews-only state, which was sort of achieved in the 1950s. Everything thereafter is footnotes.1 A pro-forma future two-state solution with present de facto one-state realities.2

    The US is both the problem, having encouraged Israel in its expansion from 1948 on, feeding it with lethal weapons, financing settlements condoning ethnic cleansing and murder on a daily basis, and the solution, as the current genocidal monster Israel would indeed ‘fall’ at the ‘twinkling of an eye’ if the US closed the spigot.

    The last US president to try that was Bush I, whose feeble attempt to stop the settlement expansion led to his humiliating defeat from a vengeful Israel lobby a few months later in 1992. The penultimate protest, JFK’s stand against Israel acquiring nukes, led to his assassination and replacement by Israel sycophant LBJ. With both Republican and Democratic parties in lockstep today, supporting Israel’s textbook genocide, the only hope is public opinion, anti-apartheid activism, which is increasingly criminalized in the ‘collective West’.

    Steinbock points to the mid-50s as the moment of truth, though we can go back to Jabotinsky in the 1920s, or Ben Gurion in the fateful 1948, when the slaughter began in earnest and was clear, certainly to the Palestinians, if not to a still naive collective West. The ‘bilateral’ ties with Washington and massive US military aid kicked in then and have reached staggering proportions now, a virtual blank cheque to reak havoc, no end in sight.

    These ties led to such new-old doctrines as the Dahiya (suburb) doctrine of carpet bombing civilians, the Hannibal directive to murder Israelis stupid enough to be taken hostage, and mass assassination factories, backed by pioneering artificial intelligence. The socialism of labor Zionism was replaced by the hard-right coalitions driven by revisionist Zionism, thanks to US neoliberal economic policies, assertive neoconservatism and Jewish-American donors. It also explains the rise of the Messianic far-right, centrist parties, and the failure of the Left.

    The Fall of Israel covers the country’s political and ethnic divides, economic polarization, social and military changes, the shifts in the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty, the apartheid regime in the occupied territories, the genocidal atrocities, the regional and global reverberations, and the ensuing human and economic costs, both prior and subsequent to Israel’s fatal war on Gaza. Not to mention the domestic hell – the economic polarization, the collapse of innovative, high tech start-ups, the talent brain drain, the undermined welfare state, rising poverty and the subsidized religious sector.

    Steinbock documents the three waves of settlers from 1948, the last following the 1993 Oslo Accords, which should have ended the settlements, but was so flawed that it allowed their acceleration, now under policing by the Palestinian Authority, even as Hamas was elected in Gaza, and the PA totally discredited, but still the de facto ‘authority’, now just a fig leaf for creeping genocide. Israeli attacks on Palestinians increased, killing Palestinians on a daily basis, with occasional massive bombings of Gaza (2008, 2009, 2014, 2023) killing thousands each time.

    Steinbock documents the atrocities, the complicity of the US. His many charts show the massive increase in West Bank land seizures in 2023, clearly part of a push to fully steal all the West Bank, even as there is no ‘exit strategy’ for the millions of Palestinians still alive. We know what Netanyahu would like to do to each and every one of those vermin, and at this point US politicians are more or less united on letting him ‘finish the job’. Steinbock (and all of us) pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.

    Tactics? Strategy? Duh …

    Their only strategy to achieve Apartheid 2.0 is denial of the facts on the ground, starting from 1948, denying the ethnic ‘cleansing’, the mass slaughter, the erasure of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Israelis pay no attention to the current slaughter, most hoping that the IDF and settlers kill all Palestinians still breathing. Israelis tactics are violence, murder, theft. In short, terrorism. But this is also its strategy since 1948, along with ‘divide and conquer’ of its Arab neighbors.

    Steinbock doesn’t take seriously the option of total erasure of the Palestinians, though that is the stated goal of Israeli leaders. The victory of the dead. But even if they could dump the Palestinians in Sinai, that is not a strategy which can bring peace, which would require negotiating with your own dispossessed citizens, and neighbors. In good faith. Which is impossible for Israel, as it is terrorizing its own Arab and its neighbors. In short, Israel can only survive through 24/7 terror, which is very expensive and means 24/7 US military aid. This can continue only as long as the US can keep printing dollars to cover its own massive debt. 18% of government spending is just to pay interest on this debt. As this continues to increase, eventually the US will be bankrupt, unable to function under the mountain of debt. This inevitable bankruptcy of the US will finally hit Israel, bringing to an end the blank cheque on its daily horrors, but I keep reminding myself, it took Rome four centuries to finally collapse collapse.

    What is particularly creepy is how Israel has used Palestinians as guinea pigs for testing its weapons of crowd control, now touting itself as the leader in the technology of totalitarian mind-body control. The only growth industry now for Israel is producing weapons, spyware, i.e., anything disgusting and lethal. This also began in the 1950s as Israel settled in to its schizoid de facto one-state- Jews-only state. The Israel Military Industry (IMI) began collaboration with the IDF, aiming to develop the most technologically advanced small arms systems for troops fighting in urban areas and harsh environments. The state-owned IMI (i.e., socialized death toys) was privatized in 2018, when it was taken over by Elbit Systems. (Poor Elbit is now the victim of western activists, who forced it to close up shop in Britain. Elbit has become our calling card for smashing windows and splashing red paint.)

    Israel has had to work very hard to overcome its notoriety as terrorist and mass killer. And it worked! By the early 1980s, more than 50 countries on five continents had become customers for Israeli killing technology. Israel added some sugar to its military toys, famously bragging about its agricultural successes in ‘making the desert bloom,’ and uses that as PR abroad about how nice Israel really is. That and weapons, ‘butter and guns’, though its ‘butter’ is all milked from stolen land, and its guns are used not to defend, but to suppress popular uprisings in oppressive Israel-like regimes around the world.

    Yes, Dahiya and Hannibal, but these ‘doctrines’ are merely (disgusting, inhuman) tactics rather than winning long run strategies. Israel’s tactics/ strategy have been violence, denial, theft with the goal of a Jews-only state, ignoring the natives who lived there, and then more violence. Which apparently works for world elites, including not just the US, but Chinese, Indian and Russian. No one besides plucky South Africa, Colombia and Bolivia have broken relations with the monster, despite rivers of crocodile tears.

    The Palestinian strategy is primarily nonviolent resistance with a militant wing occasionally fighting back, which is fully legal for a nation under occupation but condemned as terrorism. Funny how the real terrorists call the shots. The militants address the egregious crimes of the occupiers; they do not target civilians, even medevac helicopters.3 This strategy of compassion for the wounded is based on Islam, where rules of engagement with the enemy are nonnegotiable. Another religious principle rejects assassination of enemy leaders.

    Such ethical behavior is alien to Israel, which has assassinated hundreds of Palestinian, Lebanese, etc leaders, ‘rationally’ reasoning that the enemy will collapse without them. When Israel assassinates Palestinian leaders, they are mourned, they become martyrs, inspiring the next generation. Whatever personal flaws Nasrallah may have had, he is now a saint, an inspiration to all freedom-loving people. His body parts were gathered and temporarily hidden to prevent Israel from bombing them, and eventually will be buried probably in Karbala. Sinwar’s body was captured by Israel and most likely will not be returned (maybe dumped from a plane over the ocean like Bin Laden) as it will be a potent sword hanging over Israel’s head.

    Israel’s mass murderers, such as Meir Kahane are gruesomely worshipped, but only by nutcase settlers. Israel has few such martyr-heroes, but then neither the Palestinians nor their Muslim allies target Israelis for assassination, not believing that it is a useful tactic or strategy, rather giving a romantic aura of martyrdom to any victim as indeed is the case when Israelis target Palestinians. The Palestinians’ goal is jannah, the path/ strategy is moral and ethical living, prayer, jihad, martyrdom. Tactics are waging war to the death against the enemy, picking up unexploded Israeli bombs and reusing them. All the time, appealing to humanity, to the basic decency of the outside world, calling on world opinion, boycotting, bringing criminal charges to bring peace.

    Steinbock introduces necrotization, which seeks to transform a world of life into a world of death, because that is what displacement, dispossession and devastation ultimately require. It is the collective psychological obliteration of those who have nothing to lose, and therefore fight for their homes, refuse to move away, risk nothingness for being.4 Is this a strategy, or again just a tactic meant to kill or so disillusion Palestinians, so that whoever remains alive will be glad to leave. Whatever. It ignores the ‘last stand’ psychology of the dispossessed, who prefer to die fighting for their homes than to flee to a desolate refugee camp, so it really just amounts to genocide. It just occurred to me that a crude policy of terror, dispossession and genocide doesn’t need any subtleties like tactics vs strategy. The victory of the dead.

    Jew vs Jew, Arab turmoil

    The real showdown should be between the more universalist Jewish diaspora and the nationalist, racist Israeli Jews. Even as Trump is showered with Adelson’s millions to complete the Israeli dream of total control of the Middle East, some Jews are protesting, but have made zero difference politicly as the Democrats and Republicans are still in lockstep. So much for that strategy. What’s left? The brain drain and increased emigration of Jews from Israel as the crisis deepens. But that leaves the Kahane-ites in control. So much for that strategy.

    He considers the rise of Islamic movements in particular the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under al-Banna, which spread to all the Arab world, rivaled by Arab nationalism under Nasser and Hafez Assad. In all cases, the MBs were crushed by neocolonial regimes, and then attempts to promote Arab nationalism failed, descending into personal dictatorships. Muslims make poor nationalists. Islam rejects ideologies that interfere with being good Muslims. In Iraq the Baath party reformers finally ending in the humiliating defeat of atheistic Saddam Hussein (who called on Allah in a panic at the end). Though battered, the MBs remain the only survivors of a century of anti-imperialist struggle, still determined to face off against the Zionist occupiers.

    With Israel commanding everyone’s undivided attention, the Arab world remains shamefully ‘divided and conquered’, resentful, even hostile to Shia Iran’s lifeline to Gaza and Lebanon. Jordan and Saudi assistance to US-Israel to shoot down Iran’s missiles will never be erased. Jordan and Saudi leaders have a lot to account for before their people. Only when Israel is eventually brought to justice, can the Middle East develop more naturally. Islam remains the bedrock, and Islamic reforms will be the way forward, based now on the experience of the past century, including Egypti’s MB, Islamic Iran and Afghanistan. The Saudis and Gulf emirates are remnants of 19th century British imperialism and do not represent the future of the Egyptian, Iraqi, Palestinian, Jordanian, etc masses. But until the enemy is defeated, we must stand shoulder to shoulder (though the Saudis et al should keep a look out over theirs).

    Russia, China

    Steinbock doesn’t make predictions on their account. He puts his hopes on BRICS, especially China’s hint at engagement, its brokering Saudi-Iranian reconciliation, and Palestinian factions uniting. The latter was called the Beijing Declaration, calling for a larger-scale Israeli-Palestinian peace conference and a timetable to implement a two-state solution.

    I think it is a mistake to be too hopeful. Russia and Chinese have highly developed economic relations with Israel; Russia provides it with the oil to use to bomb Palestinians; China is Israel’s largest trade partner – 18% of trade vs 10% for US and 2.5% for Russia. Chinese investment is more than US$15b, spawning seed capital in Israeli startup companies, as well as the acquisition of Israeli companies by major Chinese corporations that incorporate Israel’s know how to help invigorate the development of the modern Chinese economy more efficiently. China ranked second in 2015 after the US on collaboration with Israeli high-tech firms that are backed by Israel’s Office of the Chief Scientist. Neither Russia nor China want to see Israel collapse. BRICS is not a coherent economic force. We are stuck with US-Israel, the Axis of Resistance, the Palestinian now scattered around the world, working with the handful of anti-Zionist diaspora Jews, until the US itself collapses. That seems to be our strategy.

    All countries listen to China, Israel included. It would be lost if China made an serious move to threaten its economic ties. China’s recent two-state proposals prompted Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to move forward with plans to present a joint political vision for rehabilitating the Gaza Strip and establishing a Palestinian state after the Israel-Hamas war. To preempt such schemes, Netanyahu’s office presented its own vision of ‘Gaza 2035’ in May. The Israeli proposal labels Gaza as an ‘Iranian outpost’, taunting the quisling Arab leaders as ineffectual, traitors, allies of the hated Israel. So Gaza can be taken, as it isn’t really part of the Arab world, but an Iranian outpost which must be destroyed. More tactic than strategy and very silly. Israel would mobilize the emirates and Saudis to divvy out aid to Gazans and hunt down and eliminate Hamas, much like the Oslo Accords got the PA to police Palestinians as settlements proceeded. After 15 years, if things go well, some limited autonomy would be allowed, all the while under Israeli hegemony.

    Steinbock puts his eggs in China’s basket in his vision of any future Middle East peace. At each step, China is filling in where the US fears (or is too lazy) to tread. Re Egypt, in the absence of Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories, the bilateral trust with Israel has been eroding for decades. Today it is sustained mainly by US aid, which is vital to bottomless-pit Cairo. Meanwhile China’s multibillion-dollar economic cooperation initiatives are fostering rather than undermining Egyptian development. Ditto Jordan, where China is building a national railway network, an oil pipeline to link Iraq and Jordan, and a new Jordan-China university. Egypt and Jordan, weak and corrupt, are throwing themselves at China’s feet, much like Iran did over the past decade. China is waging a positive-sum war against/ with the world, promising prosperity and Chinese hegemony as a package deal. (At least this is not the subtle Bretton Woods ‘prosperity and US imperialism’.)

    China’s Belt Road Initiative has reached around the world, despite US attempts to sabotage China with its own rail-ship road from India through the Middle East to Europe, but that assumes Saudi compliance, which is dead-on-arrival now. One can only laugh in disbelief as US hegemony is being K-Oed by the Chinese economic fist – everywhere. Unlike US-Israel, China has a clear strategy of nonzero sum cooperation with all, promising advantages where past ‘aid’ meant corruption, misuse of funds, more debt.

    The US-China economic rivalry is providing lots of brainstorming by potential participants in both hopeful outcomes, but China remains cautious, more or less abiding by US sanctions on Russia. BRICS at least has raised the profile of the South, given them collective clout though still much less than the collective West.

    With the Ukraine war unending, Russia is now unofficially joining all anti-US efforts, probably providing Iran and the Houthis with satellite information to keep the Suez Canal out of commission and for accurate bombing, possibly even providing a few missiles and drones. Why not? The world really is going to Hell in a handbasket, and the ride is rocky but exciting and even hopeful, considering the bad guys seem to be doing everything wrong, pushing Putin into the hands of enemy.

    Nuke time?

    The ongoing war on multiple fronts from the Axis of Resistance, with 100,000s of Hezbollah bombs ready, could push Israel to use its nukes.5 The Begin ‘doctrine’ was ‘formulated’ to justify bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities and is still in play against Iran. Several nuclear sites were bombed in October, though not the main sites, and were accompanied by a promise to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities after the election.

    Trump has already voiced his approval. But Iran’s success in bombing Israel twice in 2024 shows it has jumped ahead of Israel (and the US) in hypersonic missiles, which can be mobilized to really destroy little sitting-duck Israel. Israel is still loudly threatening Iran but my gut reaction is to imagine hundreds of hypersonic missiles reining down on Israel. Israelis are uniformly racist monsters now, so the civilian-military distinction is moot. When the whole world feels that way about you, all the king’s horse and all the king’s lackeys won’t be able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.

    In the West, Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), and the Abraham Accords (2020–2021) with some Gulf states are often portrayed as steps toward a two-state solution. In Israel, they are seen more as bilateral “normalization” deals with individual Arab countries that will over time marginalize or exclude Palestinians from a final peace solution. The Gaza War has jeopardized the future of such normalization agreements, while severely shuttering the existing deals. The trouble is neither the US nor Israel ever took the negotiations seriously. No one believed then or now that the two-state solution is possible. Meanwhile even US presidents don’t control things, as congress is completely in thrall to Israel and will not allow any pressure to be put on Israel to negotiate. The Knesset voted unanimously against a Palestinian state for the nth time (68, 9 Arab Israelis voting for a Palestinian state).

    Given the likely Trump second term, funded by Adelson, probably none of this matters at all. Trump’s Project 2025 includes Project Esther, which plans to crush all anti-Israel dissent in the US and Europe and to create a Potemkin villlage of acceptable Palestinians, to be kept in line by Arab sheikhs with Israeli puppet masters. Netanyahu couldn’t have said it better.

    Steinbock is hopeful re Russia, with its offer to Iran of S-400 anti-missile defense (a decade after Iran paid for them), showing the US that it is not the only kid on the block with nukes. But Steinbock’s only real hope is that world opinion, backed by a Jewish diaspora, will somehow click in and bring the US to its senses. I would add the Palestinian diaspora, which is already larger (in 2003 9.6m) than the Jewish one (8.5m), working together, will be the driving force of change. And Islam. It is the fastest growing religion (always has been) and the Middle East is now multiple-birthing Ziophobia and Islamophilia. It’s never been a better time to be a Muslim. We have a huge diaspora in the House of War. And we have Boycott Divest Sanction as the secular version of jihad. When Jews, Christians6 and Muslims can join forces, we can do anything.

    The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa. But it took another 2 decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.

    It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as the Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments. Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’

    ENDNOTES:

    The post To Turn a Secular Democracy into a Jewish Autocracy first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Dan Steinbock, The Fall if Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025</a>, p362.
    2    Israel has been in complete control of all lands since 1948. Palestinians who stayed were to be ethnically cleansed, killed or deported over time.
    3    There may be an implicit pact here: you let us retrieve our wounded soldiers and we will not starve you TO DEATH.
    4    Ibid., p126.
    5    Ibid., p350.
    6    I have given Christianity short shrift here, but ‘that’s life.’ The Palestinian Christians have been decimated already, hanging on only due to their Muslim friends.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • MILIPOL QATAR, an Essential Event for Security Issues in the Middle East

    To close out October, Arquus will participate to Milipol Qatar, a key security exhibition taking place in Doha from October 29 to 31. Arquus, a long-standing partner of the Qatari armed forces and security services, will be present under the French pavilion, alongside John Cockerill Defense, to showcase the latest innovations in its security range. […]

    The post MILIPOL QATAR, an Essential Event for Security Issues in the Middle East appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The Only US Diplomat to Publicly Resign From Biden Admin Over Gaza Speaks Out

    As human rights groups continue to call out war crimes committed by the Israeli military, we speak to the only U.S. diplomat to publicly resign from the Biden administration over its policy on Israel. We first spoke to Hala Rharrit when she resigned from the State Department in April, citing the illegal and deceptive nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We continue to willfully violate laws…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Failures of U.S. Middle East Policies

    United States foreign policies are marked by intermittent failures, often accomplishing the opposite of what is intended — Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are examples. A difference between U.S. policies in the Middle East and State Department walkthroughs in other regions is that the Middle East policies have been consistent failures, worse than adversaries relish.

    Immediately after World War II, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union drove U.S. policies, mildly favored Israel, and tended toward achieving a balance of power between the Zionist state and Arab world. Israel’s victory in the 1967 six-day war changed the status quo. Warsaw Pact nations had supplied arms to Egypt, ostensibly for defensive purposes, and Israel’s rapid offensive angered them. The Soviet bloc severing of relations with Israel led Washington to believe the Arab world had allied with the Soviet Union and motivated Uncle Sam to elevate relations with the victorious nation. Each year, the commitment to advance Israel’s supremacy and slaughter of the Palestinian people grew. Each year, the democratic appearance and humanistic values of the American system deteriorated. Each year, the American system, established in 1789, tended toward destruction of its political and social fabrics.

    President Jimmy Carter added a Middle East foreign policy directive by claiming the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to the free movement of Middle Eastern oil through the Persian Gulf. Safeguarding the oil flow was of vital interest to the United States of America. Framed in other words, the U.S. had another mission ─ prevent Iran from threatening Arab kingdoms and disturbing the flow of oil.

    One approach to examining policies is to compare results with intentions. Dr. Michael S. Bell, professor at the National Defense University Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, has given a sensible definition of the policies: 1) protection of the American homeland from terrorist attacks; 2) peace between countries in the region; 3) nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; and 4) the free flow of energy and commerce to the global economy.

    Protection of the American homeland from terrorist attacks

    Protection from terrorist attacks did not occur, not in the homeland, at American military bases, and in American embassies. The American people remain unformed why Sept 11, 2001 and other terrorist attacks occurred.

    The errors started with President Ronald Reagan allowing the CIA to shuffle funds to Pakistan intelligence, who used the funds to finance Saudi construction engineer, Osama bin Laden, to construct roads and bases in Afghanistan that eventually became training grounds for al-Qaeda militants. The road led through several nations. Along its path, al-Qaeda recruited others to form new terrorist organizations and attack American facilities in several countries. In Afghanistan, the CIA paved the road to the 9/11 terrorist attack on American soil.

    Hidden from public knowledge is that America’s support for Israel contributed to Obama bin Laden‘s arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the opening sentences of a “Letter to America.” Bin Laden’s words are unpleasant and offensive but taking notice and reading them was a prerequisite for devising a strategy that defeated terrorism and protected Americans. The letter’s opening statements.

     Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

    (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

    a) You attacked us in Palestine:

    (i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

    (b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.

    The letter appeared in 1998, but before that date bin Laden had signaled his displeasure with America. Ignoring the reasons for his threats was a grave policy mistake and proved fatal. Policy errors manufactured additional policy errors.

    By stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, President George H. W. Bush aroused Radical Islamists in the Desert Kingdom to join forces with Osama bin Laden. On December 29, 1992, a bomb exploded  at the Gold Mohur hotel in Aden, Yemen, where U.S. troops had been staying while on route to Somalia.

    Intelligence and strategy failures by President Bill Clinton elevated al-Qaeda to an international enterprise. President Clinton’s aggressive policy in Somalia created a mistrust of American power among East Africans and an anarchy that eventually led to emergence of The Islamic Courts Union ( ICU), who preached Shariah as law and ruled parts of Somalia at various times. After being defeated, the ICU evolved into Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda look alike in East Africa.

    • On Friday, February 26, 1993, Kuwaiti Ramzi Yousef and Jordanian Eyad Ismoil parked a yellow Ryder van in the public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Later in the day, the van exploded, killing six people and injuring 1,042.
    • In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex for Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans and wounding 372.
    • Truck bomb explosions occurred on 7 August 1998 at U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and killed hundreds of people. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, under direction from Osama bin Laden.
    • Al-Qaeda associates bombed the U.S. Navy warship, USS Cole, in October 2000 and killed 17 sailors. Al-Qaeda in Yemen, soon to become al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was born.

    No intelligence failures can possibly compare to those that enabled foreign terrorists to enter the United States, request one-way flying lessons, take planes up with no concern about being able to land them, book flight tickets, walk through airport inspections, seize commercial planes in mid-flight, and fly them into public buildings. No terrorist action has been as serious as those that occurred on September 11, 2001.

    Guided by a tendency to assist Radical Islam in its endeavors, the George Bush administration provided a route for al-Qaeda to mature into ISIS. 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 members forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a safe haven in Iraq. Fighters trained in 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 Ali Muhammad 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 to found Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ) and countered the U.S. military in Iraq.

    After previous disastrous policies prepared the framework for ISIS to establish its caliphate, and spawn “look-alikes” in Yemen and throughout North Africa, President Barack Obama approached the dangerous situation with confusion. Not wanting to betray his French ally, Obama brought his country into the Libyan civil war and enabled Radical Islamists a safe haven in the new Libya

    Since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained al-Qaeda, militants from Libya have flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles have flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Militants trained in post-Gadhafi Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; Boko Haram spreads havoc throughout northern Nigeria and parts of Chad.

    The al-Qaeda that the U.S. helped create committed the greatest single act of foreign destruction to American soil. The Afghanistan the U.S. helped establish became the Afghanistan the U.S. was  forced to combat and could not destroy. The Israel that the U.S. nourished and fortified contributed to the development of international terrorism and to the U.S. failure in containing  it, a common thread through all U.S. Middle East policy failures. The American people sat silently as its State Department and Israel brought terrorism to American shores.

    Peace between countries in the region

    Instead of bringing a pledged peace and stability to the Middle East, the U.S. has brought constant violence and mayhem. Except for Iraq’s wars against Iran and Kuwait, and some skirmishes in Yemen, the Middle East Arab nations have not attacked one another. The United States has been twice at war with Iraq and has engaged Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Patron Israel has fought wars with Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt and has had continuous strife with the Palestinians, which have exploded into intense battles in Gaza. The U.S. invasion of Iraq came from the bidding of the Neocons  ─ American officials allied with Israel. Deceptively portrayed as a war to defeat Saddam Hussein’s’ developments of farcical “weapons of mass destruction,” the invasion of Iraq used American forces to subdue Israel’s principal nemesis.

    Reasons for U.S. antipathy toward Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen Houthis, and Iran are not clear. None of these nationalities have attacked the U.S. or its personnel. Their common expressions are opposition to (1) Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people; (2) seizing Arab lands, and (3) disturbing Muslim sites in Jerusalem. Without Israel, dominating their lives, the Middle East might have rivalries but warfare is not probable. U.S. policy of bringing peace between countries in the region could not succeed. Support of an aggressive Israel meant peace in the region was impossible.

    Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons

    Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons is best accomplished by making certain that no nation fears a nuclear threat. By ignoring Israel’s development of the atomic bomb, the U.S. made sure that Middle East nations felt constantly threatened by an aggressive Israeli military machine. Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Syria briefly sought nuclear developments and were stopped. Although denying it, Iran is presently believed to be in an advanced stage toward developing an atomic bomb. Do away with Israel’s atomic bombs and assuredly, Iran will halt its developments. Another failure of U.S. policy due to its strange relations with Israel.

    Free flow of energy and commerce to the global economy.

    OPEC determines the price of oil and the U.S. does not control OPEC. President Carter’s anxiety that closing the Strait of Hormuz will greatly disturb oil shipments to Western nations is exaggerated. The burning of oil by the U.S. fifth fleet in the Indian Ocean contributes as much to the price of oil as would the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Well, not exactly, but it’s a point.

    In 2022, oil flow through the Straits “averaged 21 million barrels per day (b/d), or the equivalent of about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Estimates are that” 82% of the crude oil and condensate that moved through the Strait of Hormuz went to Asian markets in 2022. China, India, Japan, and South Korea were the top destinations for the crude oil ….In 2022, the United States imported about 0.7 million b/d of crude oil and condensate from Persian Gulf countries through the Strait of Hormuz, accounting for about 11% of U.S. crude oil and condensate imports and 3% of U.S. petroleum liquids consumption.” China received 1/3 of the Asian market for the crude oil.

    Whose free flow of energy is the fifth fleet protecting? Very little to the Western markets; more to the Asian markets and mostly to China. The fifth fleet, which has been hanging around in the Indian ocean for thirty years waiting for Godot is principally occupied to defend Chinese (our nemesis) right to assure oil shipments.

    If the United States wants to assure Iran will not interfere with oil shipments, why not become friends with Iran? Good reason to be friends with the mullahs. Friends help friends, except when the “friend” is Israel.

    Want to receive shocks in free flow of oil, Israel is the “go to guy.” The deepest scarcity of oil and high prices occurred when oil producing Arab nations embargoed oil to the United States in retaliation for U.S. rescue mission of military shipments to Israel during the !973 Yom Kippur War, another U.S. Middle East policy of sacrificing the interests of the U.S. people to enhance Israel’s interests.

    Conclusion

    U.S. Middle East policies have been consistent failures, bringing great harm to Arab populations and to the American people. In all the policies, beginning with the ratification of the 1947 Partition Plan and arriving at military assistance to Israel in its 2023 war on Gaza, the Israel state appears and diverts the policies to catastrophes. Americans of good conscience stand aghast at Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians and America’s participation in the genocide. They do not realize that the Palestinian genocide is a byproduct of 70 years of slaughter of the American psyche and its institutions. Too few take notice of the onslaught on American academic and press freedoms, corruption of American values, coopting of its political system, and reduction of its intellectual qualities. Assailants sink America further into an abyss and more Palestinians are murdered from the same assailants. Americans and Palestinians are “captured in a web that imprisons every faculty and sense.” Only a captured faculty can allow a genocide. No  genocide makes sense and this genocide makes all of us senseless.

    The post Failures of U.S. Middle East Policies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden Admin Launches Stealth Bomber Attack on Yemen Without Congress’s Approval

    The Biden administration on Wednesday deployed B-2 stealth bombers to launch multiple airstrikes on Yemen, attacks that underscored the United States’ deep involvement in a deadly regional war that is threatening to engulf the entire Middle East. The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement that the strikes targeted “numerous Iran-backed Houthi weapons storage facilities within…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Silent as Over 100 Nations Back UN Chief

    The U.S. was not among the more than 100 United Nations member states that signed a new letter of support for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres after Israel’s foreign minister declared him “persona non grata” and barred him from entering the country. The letter, spearheaded by Chile, said Israel’s attack on Guterres would “undermine the United Nations’ ability to carry out its mandate…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Albanese v Dutton and the political struggle over Israel and Palestine

    In this episode of New Politics, we look at the tumultuous week in Australian politics as Parliament resumes in Canberra. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought to balance the sensitive issue of the October 7 attacks in Israel and Palestine, delivering a motion intended to commemorate the victims on both sides. However, opposition leader Peter Dutton showed once again his divisive political style, choosing to condemn Albanese’s efforts and push a narrative that highlights his lack of bipartisanship and disregard for social cohesion.

    We explore how Australia’s political landscape is deeply intertwined with the Middle East conflict, despite claims to the contrary. Both major political parties, Labor and the Liberal Party, have taken starkly different stances, with the Liberal Party displaying extreme support for Israel. Meanwhile, the Labor government finds itself in a difficult position, trying to navigate this ongoing crisis while maintaining balance domestically and internationally.

    The episode also takes a closer look at the role of the Australian Greens, who have been critical of Israel’s actions and consistent in their stance on Palestine. Max Chandler-Mather, a key figure in the Greens, recently spoke out in Parliament, reflecting a growing faction of Australians who refuse to be silenced on the issue.

    Closer to home, we turn our attention to New South Wales, where Premier Chris Minns has taken a controversial stance by suggesting that weekly pro-Palestinian protests in Sydney should be shut down due to the financial costs they impose on the state. Over the past year, these protests have reportedly cost the NSW government $5 million, prompting Minns to call for an end to the demonstrations. However, critics argue that this move is an attempt to silence dissenting voices, particularly those from the pro-Palestinian and Islamic communities. We explore the double standards at play – why the Minns government tolerates other types of protests, but not these, and what it says about freedom of speech in Australia.

    We also examine Peter Dutton’s political opportunism, his lack of nuance, and his growing appeal to far-right Zionist groups, as well as the implications for Australian politics moving forward. Will Dutton’s right-wing strategy pay off in the next federal election? Or will Albanese’s cautious approach, despite criticism, resonate with a majority of Australians?

    Beyond the two major parties, we also discuss the rise of new political movements, such as Australia’s Voice, a party founded by former Labor Senator Fatima Payman. This new party, which has already drawn significant negative media attention, represents a continuing shift away from Australia’s traditional two-party system. In this episode, we assess the viability of this new party and the broader trend of Australians looking to third parties, independents, and movements like the teals and Greens for alternatives to the status quo. #AUSPOL

    Support New Politics: https://www.patreon.com/newpolitics

    Song listing:

    1. ‘The Message’, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.
    2. ‘Confessions Of A Window Cleaner’, Ed Kuepper.
    3. ‘All Along The Watchtower’, Afterhere (cover version).
    4. ‘Wild’, Spoon.
    5. ‘Release The Pressure’, Leftism.

    Music interludes:

    Support independent journalism

    We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.

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    The post Albanese v Dutton and the political struggle over Israel and Palestine appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • The surplus, Queensland election and Middle East tensions exploited in Australia

    In this episode of the New Politics podcast, we get into the complexities of the Australian federal government’s second consecutive surplus, this time amounting to $15.8 billion. What does this surplus mean for the economy, and how does it reflect on Treasurer Jim Chalmers?

    Despite their inability to deliver a surplus in nine years of governance, the Liberal Party, led by shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, is claiming credit. We dissect the media bias that often paints the Liberal Party as excellent economic managers while depicting Labor’s success as pot luck.

    Next, we look at the commencement of the Queensland election campaign, where Premier Steven Miles leads the Labor government, which has been in power for most of the last 35 years. The Liberal–National Party is ahead in the polls, and is trying to distance itself from its unpopular past under Campbell Newman between 2012 to 2015. Will this strategy work, or is history doomed to repeat itself if David Crisafulli’s LNP wins?

    We also examine the low-profile appointment of Aftab Malik as Australia’s special envoy to combat Islamophobia. We explore why this appointment has gone largely unnoticed and how it contrasts with the appointment of a similar envoy to combat anti-Semitism. Are both roles being treated with equal importance by the government and the media, or is there a glaring imbalance in attention?

    Finally, we report on the escalating tensions in the Middle East, focusing on Lebanon and Israel’s continued and unchecked military actions. We explore how mainstream media and political leaders like Peter Dutton and Bridget McKenzie are spinning this conflict for political gain, and the wider implications for Australia’s Arab and Islamic communities.

    Tune in for this insightful discussion on Australia’s economy, politics, and international relations, filled with detailed analysis and fearless commentary.

    Support New Politics: https://www.patreon.com/newpolitics

    Song listing:

    1. ‘The Message’, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.
    2. ‘Confessions Of A Window Cleaner’, Ed Kuepper.
    3. ‘Arion’, Blue States.
    4. ‘Dayvan Cowboy’, The Boards Of Canada.
    5. ‘Praise You’, Fat Boy Slim.

    Music interludes:

    Support independent journalism

    We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.

    SUPPORT NEW POLITICS!

    The post The surplus, Queensland election and Middle East tensions exploited in Australia appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • The surplus, Queensland election and Middle East tensions exploited in Australia

    In this episode of the New Politics podcast, we get into the complexities of the Australian federal government’s second consecutive surplus, this time amounting to $15.8 billion. What does this surplus mean for the economy, and how does it reflect on Treasurer Jim Chalmers?

    Despite their inability to deliver a surplus in nine years of governance, the Liberal Party, led by shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, is claiming credit. We dissect the media bias that often paints the Liberal Party as excellent economic managers while depicting Labor’s success as pot luck.

    Next, we look at the commencement of the Queensland election campaign, where Premier Steven Miles leads the Labor government, which has been in power for most of the last 35 years. The Liberal–National Party is ahead in the polls, and is trying to distance itself from its unpopular past under Campbell Newman between 2012 to 2015. Will this strategy work, or is history doomed to repeat itself if David Crisafulli’s LNP wins?

    We also examine the low-profile appointment of Aftab Malik as Australia’s special envoy to combat Islamophobia. We explore why this appointment has gone largely unnoticed and how it contrasts with the appointment of a similar envoy to combat anti-Semitism. Are both roles being treated with equal importance by the government and the media, or is there a glaring imbalance in attention?

    Finally, we report on the escalating tensions in the Middle East, focusing on Lebanon and Israel’s continued and unchecked military actions. We explore how mainstream media and political leaders like Peter Dutton and Bridget McKenzie are spinning this conflict for political gain, and the wider implications for Australia’s Arab and Islamic communities.

    Tune in for this insightful discussion on Australia’s economy, politics, and international relations, filled with detailed analysis and fearless commentary.

    Support New Politics: https://www.patreon.com/newpolitics

    Song listing:

    1. ‘The Message’, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five.
    2. ‘Confessions Of A Window Cleaner’, Ed Kuepper.
    3. ‘Arion’, Blue States.
    4. ‘Dayvan Cowboy’, The Boards Of Canada.
    5. ‘Praise You’, Fat Boy Slim.

    Music interludes:

    Support independent journalism

    We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.

    SUPPORT NEW POLITICS!

    The post The surplus, Queensland election and Middle East tensions exploited in Australia appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • CAIR Calls for Ousting of “Notoriously Orientalist” Biden Middle East Adviser

    Advocates are calling for the ousting of a top Biden administration official who has acted as the “shadow president” on Middle East policy, directing much of the administration’s decisions in the region as the U.S. has enabled Israel to plunge it into chaos and destruction. On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that Middle East adviser Brett McGurk “must go” after…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Backs Israel’s Retaliation Threat Against Iran, Raising Fears of Regional War

    Israel has announced it is sending more troops into southern Lebanon as the Middle East moves closer to a full-scale regional war. On Tuesday, Iran fired at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israel that Iran says targeted Israeli military and security sites, a response that comes after a series of escalating Israeli attacks in recent months against Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian leaders.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Milkor 380 UAS Makes ADAS Debut

    The South Africa based defence manufacturer, Milkor  showcased a scale model of its armed Milkor 380 Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for the first time at the ADAS, defence exhibition in Manila. In addition to the Milkor 380, the company also exhibited its land and naval systems at the show. Milkor is eyeing inroads into the Philippine market, to add […]

    The post Milkor 380 UAS Makes ADAS Debut appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).

    Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.

    A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.

    Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”

    This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.

    What Does the Future Hold?

    Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar

    Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.

    “If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”

    (This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?

    Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)

    Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.

    Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.

    Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)

    And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.

    Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power.  The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.

    These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.

    The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.

    For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.

    The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.

    Question:  Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?

    Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?

    How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.

    Threat of nuclear war question: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?

    Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.

    Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.

    Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.

    The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.

    Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.

    Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.

    Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.

    The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.

    Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?

    Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.

    The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.

    Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.

    Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.

    We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.

    Question: How do we muster that will?

    Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property  Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.

    What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit.  The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.

    Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.

    Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.

    AmThis article covers the first 34 minutes of a 52-minute video: Noam Chomsky: About the Future of Our World.

    “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)

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  • Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad

    With a click, with a shock
    Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
    Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .

    — “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.

    Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked.  The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner.  When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.

    It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.

    Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.

    Let us hope but not be naïve.  The signs all point in one direction.  The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one.  Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies.  Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance.  But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.

    “It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.”  Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.

    I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss.  The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes.  It’s not terribly complex.  Netanyahu and Biden are two of them.  Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat.  But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them.  They gladly kill other people’s children.  They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise.  This is hard for regular people to accept.

    The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths.  He wrote:

    And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

    And lie and suppress we still do today.

    Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments.  Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology.  The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked.  The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.

    It’s not hard to do.  That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.

    Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?

    Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?

    How do you think it would respond?

    The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day.  The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically.  After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”  Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?

    Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond?  How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation?  And what kind of retaliation?

    Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon.  Something is coming and it won’t be pretty.  Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region?  Will nuclear weapons be used?  Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?

    While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set.  We enter the final act.

    Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive.  So he thinks.  Psychotic killers always do.

    The signs all point in one direction.  No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.

    “Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”

    If you have time.

    The post Something’s Coming, We Don’t Know What It Is But It Is Going To Be Bad first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Advocate slams NZ snub of Nagasaki peace tribute as ‘outrageous’

    By Mick Hall

    A leading peace campaigner is calling Aotearoa New Zealand’s decision to stay away from a peace event in Nagasaki paying tribute to victims of the Japanese city’s 1945 nuclear bombing “outrageous”.

    Former trade union leader Robert Reid said New Zealand could have acted as a strong independent Pacific voice by attending today’s peace gathering, held annually on August 9 to commemorate the estimated 70,000 people killed in a US nuclear attack on the Japanese city at the end of World War II.

    “New Zealand has missed an opportunity to demarcate itself from the cheerleaders of the Gaza genocide, from the US and the UK and other Western countries, and in a way has turned its back on Japan, which was an ally with us in the anti-nuclear position that New Zealand has held for many years,” the former Unite president said.

    His comments come after a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Mfat) spokesperson confirmed to In Context neither New Zealand’s ambassador to Japan Hamish Hooper nor any other consulate official would be attending the peace ceremony, stressing the move was due to “resourcing” and unrelated to a boycott by Western nations following the city’s decision not to invite Israel.

    The US and its Western allies are staying away from the peace ceremony because Nagasaki’s Mayor Shiro Suzuki declined to send an invitation to Israel to attend, over events in the Middle East and to avoid protests against the war in Gaza at the event.

    In a statement a Mfat spokesperson said: “The New Zealand government will not be represented at the commemorations at Nagasaki on 9 August 2024. This decision reflects limited resourcing of the Embassy in Tokyo, and is not associated with attendance of other countries.”

    However, it is understood New Zealand was represented at a commemoration event at head of mission level in Hiroshima last Tuesday. Nagasaki is located south of Hiroshima and a journey three-and-a-half hours by train.

    Cancelled last year
    The Nagasaki commemoration was cancelled last year due to a typhoon warning. New Zealand had been represented at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events in recent years, at head of mission level in 2022 and 2021.

    It only attended the Hiroshima commemoration in 2020, a period when covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions were widespread.

    New Zealand’s absence comes after envoys of the US, Canada, Germany, France, the UK and other Western nations sent a letter to Nagasaki organisers expressing concern over the city not inviting Israel.

    The letter, dated July 19, warned that if Israel was excluded, “it would become difficult for us to have high-level participation” in the event as it would “result in placing Israel on the same level as countries such as Russia and Belarus,” both having been excluded from the ceremony since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

    In a statement on July 31 outlining the reasons for excluding Israel, Suzuki said officials feared protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza would take away the ceremony’s solemnity.

    He added that he made the decision based on “various developments in the international community in response to the ongoing situation in the Middle East”.

    ICJ ruled Israel as apartheid state
    An International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on July 19 ruled Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal and that Israel was administering a system of apartheid through discriminatory laws and policies. Apartheid is a crime against humanity.

    In a 14-1 ruling, the ICJ directed Israel to immediately cease all settlement activity, evacuate settlers from occupied Palestinian territories, and pay reparations to Palestinians. It also voted 12-3 that UN states not render aid or assistance to Israel to continue the illegal occupation.

    On July 30, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said in light of the ruling: “States must immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.”

    There were protests on Wednesday following a decision by the Hiroshima municipality to allow Israeli representation at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park event the day before, while not inviting a Palestinian envoy on the basis that the occupied country was not a United Nations member and that Japan did not recognise it as a state.

    “I understand New Zealand is not calling its absence a boycott, but just that it’s too busy, but it has attended in the past,” Read said.

    “I think we’re just playing with words here. This was a chance for New Zealand to stand with the people of Palestine, to stand with the Japanese people, who have had bombs dropped on them and they have perhaps taken a weak way out by not attending.”

    The Disarmament and Security Centre Aotearoa is holding a Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemoration event on Sunday, August 11, at Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens.

    Virtual centre
    The non-profit organisation is a virtual centre connecting disarmament experts, lawyers, political scientists, academics, teachers, students and disarmament proponents.

    Its spokesperson, Dr Marcus Coll, said he was shocked New Zealand would not be attending the Nagasaki event this year.

    “These sorts of things should never be about resources because it’s the symbolism of it that is so important and actually showing solidarity with the victims of Nagasaki,” he said.

    “In the Pacific region especially, we’ve really felt the effects of nuclear testing throughout the decades and then in Japan, there still are a lot of the survivors and their families are affected because of the intergenerational effects.”

    Dr Coll spent seven years studying and working in Japan. His doctoral research involved interviewing and researching survivors of the atomic bombings, as well as indigenous rights activists, religious and military leaders, peace campaigners, and others who were instrumental in shaping New Zealand’s nuclear free identity.

    He said Japan’s survivors had expressed awe at a small country in the Pacific taking a strong stand against nuclear weapons.

    “New Zealand has really been a kind of a beacon of hope for a lot of those people,” he said.

    Nuclear-free legacy
    New Zealand became a nuclear-free country in 1987, with a Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act that effectively banned US nuclear vessels from its waters.

    It led to New Zealand being frozen out of the ANZUS security treaty and allowed the country to develop a more independent policy engagement with the Pacific and the rest of the world.

    “That came from the government level as well,” Dr Coll said.

    “It was a groundswell from the public, which changed our policy, but governments of all stripes up until recently have really not contested that legacy and actually been kind of proud of it.

    “It really is something that sets us apart, especially internationally and we’re respected for it . . . So, it seems like a real let down that our own government can’t even show up.”

    Dr Coll said New Zealand had nurtured a significant link with Nagasaki, being the last place to suffer a nuclear attack in warfare.

    “Our former director used to go to Nagasaki. She had very strong connections with the mayor there. There’s actually a sculpture in the Nagasaki Peace Park, given to the city on behalf of New Zealand cities and the New Zealand government back in 2000s, forging that strong connection.

    “It’s called the Korowai of Peace. Phil Goff as foreign minister, the New Zealand ambassador and other civil society people were there . . .  This decision I suspect is a kind of PR and not to attend is a blow to our heritage of promoting disarmament and being anti-nuclear.”

    The US envoy to Japan Rahm Emanuel is expected to attend a peace ceremony at the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo on Friday instead.

    Nagasaki was bombed by the United States on August 9, 1945, after Hiroshima had been hit by atomic bomb on August 6. The two attacks at the end of World War II killed up to 250,000 people. Japan surrendered on August 15.

    Republished from Mick Hall In Context with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Was Hamas Leader Killed in Iran to Inflame Sectarian Conflict?

    On July 31, Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau Ismail Haniyeh attended the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Hours later, he was reported killed in an “Israeli strike” along with his bodyguard in Tehran.

    Simultaneously, Israel claimed it had killed senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, and that its intelligence had confirmed that another top Hamas leader Mohammed Deif was also killed in a July 13 Israeli strike in Khan Younis, Gaza.

    The reason the manipulative Zionist regime cunningly plotted to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh during his visit to Iran is two-fold. Firstly, the Islamic Republic over the years has established the reputation of being the torchbearer of the Palestine cause, particularly in the Islamic World.

    While the craven Arab autocracies, under the thumb of duplicitous American masters enabling the Zionist regime’s atrocious genocide of unarmed Palestinians, were pondering over when would be the opportune moment to recognize Israel and establish diplomatic and trade ties, the Iran-led resistance axis, comprising Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, has claimed stellar victories in battlefields against Israel.

    It’s worth pointing out, however, that Hamas’ main patrons are private donors in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Egypt, not Iran, as frequently alleged by the mainstream disinformation campaign. In fact, Hamas as a political movement is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. And by mainstream media’s own accounts, the Shiite leadership of Iran and Hezbollah weren’t even aware of the Sunni Palestinian liberation movement Hamas’ October 7 assault.

    Secondly, the treacherous murder of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was clearly designed to inflame the sectarian conflict. Lately, it has become a customary propensity of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have ignited the flames of internecine conflict in the Islamic world.

    Some self-anointed “Arabists” of the mainstream media posit that the sectarian division goes all the way back to the founding of Islam, 1400 years ago, and contend that the conflict emerged during the reign of the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib, in the seventh century A.D. Even though both sects of Islam peacefully coexisted during the medieval era in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Mughal India, where several provinces, particularly the glorious State of Awadh, were governed by benevolent Shiite nawabs.

    One wonders what the Western-led war on terror’s explanation would be of such “erudite historians of Islam” – that the cause of purported “clash of civilizations” between Christians and Muslims is to be found in the Crusades when Richard the Lionheart and Saladin were skirmishing in the Levant and exchanging courtesies at the same time.

    Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and Iran for regional dominance which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity.

    Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for supremacy as the leader of the Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-led Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003.

    The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni Arab bulwark against Iran’s meddling in the Arab world. But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003 and subsequently when elections were held in Iraq which were swept by Shi’a-dominated politico-religious parties, Iraq has now been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

    Moreover, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration took advantage of the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq and used the Kurds and Shi’as against the Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. And during the occupation years from 2003 to 2011, the once dominant Sunni minority was politically marginalized which further exacerbated ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq.

    The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iran’s encroachment on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against the Shia-led Syrian government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf States along, with their regional Sunni allies, Turkey and Jordan, and the Western patrons gradually militarized the protests to dismantle the Iran-led resistance axis, comprising Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen.

    Similarly, during the Libyan so-called “humanitarian intervention” in 2011, the Obama administration provided money and arms to myriads of tribal militias and Islamic jihadists to topple the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi government. But after the policy backfired and pushed Libya into lawlessness, anarchy and civil war, the mainstream media pointed the finger at Egypt, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia for backing the renegade general, Khalifa Haftar, in eastern Libya, even though he had lived for more than two decades in the US right next to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia.

    Regarding the Western powers’ modus operandi of waging proxy wars in the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms markets in the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the targeted country by using security agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Libya or Syria, the same playbook was executed to the letter.

    More to the point, raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; the benefit of buying weapons from unregulated arms markets of Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Recall that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists were the blowback of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the proxy war in Syria.

    Apart from Syria and Iraq, two other flashpoints of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region are Bahrain and Yemen. When peaceful protests broke out against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain by the Shi’a majority population in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia sent thousands of troops across the border to quell the uprising.

    Similarly, as the Arab Spring protests toppled longtime dictators of the Arab World, including Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Yemenis also gathered in the capital’s squares demanding removal of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

    Instead of conceding to protesters’ fervent demand of holding free and fair elections to ascertain democratic aspirations of demonstrators, however, the Obama administration adopted the convenient course of replacing Yemen’s longtime autocrat with a Saudi stooge Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

    Having the reputation of a “wily Arabian fox” and being a Houthi himself, Ali Abdullah Saleh wasn’t the one to sit idly by and retire from politics in ignominy. He colluded with the Houthi rebels and incited them to take advantage of the chaos and political vacuum created after the revolution to come out of their northern Saada stronghold and occupy the capital Sanaa in September 2014. How ironic that Ali Abdullah Saleh was eventually killed by Houthis in December 2017 because of his treacherous nature.

    Meanwhile, a change of guard took place in Riyadh as Saudi Arabia’s longtime ruler King Abdullah died and was replaced by King Salman in January 2015, while de facto control of the kingdom fell into hands of inexperienced and belligerent Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

    Already furious at the Obama administration for not enforcing its so-called “red line” by imposing a no-fly zone over Syria after the false-flag Ghouta chemical weapons attacks in Damascus in August 2013 and apprehensive of security threat posed to the kingdom from its southern border along Yemen by Houthi rebels under the influence of Iran, the crown prince immediately began a military and air warfare campaign against Houthi rebels with military assistance from the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of UAE, Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan, in March 2015.

    Mindful of the botched policy it had pursued in Libya and Syria and aware of the catastrophe it had wrought in the Middle East region, the Obama administration had to yield to the dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf States during the conflict.

    Now, when the fire of inter-sectarian strife is burning on several different fronts in the Middle East and the Sunni and Shi’a communities are witnessing a merciless slaughter of their brethren in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain, then it would be preposterous to look for the causes of the conflict in theology and medieval history. If the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how come they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?

    Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the phenomena of Islamic radicalism, jihadism and consequent Sunni-Shi’a conflict are only as old as the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s when the Western powers with the help of their regional allies trained and armed Afghan jihadists to battle the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

    More significantly, however, the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 between the Sunni and Baathist-led Iraq and the Shi’a-led Iran after the 1979 Khomeini revolution engendered hostility between the Sunni and Shi’a communities of the region for the first time in modern history.

    And finally, the conflict has been further exacerbated in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 when the Western powers and their regional client states once again took advantage of the opportunity and nurtured militants against the Arab nationalist Gaddafi government in Libya and the Baathist-led Assad administration in Syria.

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