Talking Peace – Waging War

Obama’s war on Syria rages. It’s taken a horrific toll nationwide. Tens of thousands died. Dozens more do daily.

Millions were displaced. Numbers internally and abroad range up to one-third of Syria’s population. Humanitarian crisis conditions exist. Human suffering is extreme.

Peace talks reflect more illusion than reality. On January 22, they’re scheduled to begin.

On Sunday and Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with so-called Friends of Syria countries in Paris.

They include America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and UAE.

They’re imperial collaborators. They no friends of the great majority of Syrians. On Sunday, they issued a joint statement, saying:

“Assad and his close associates with blood on their hands will have no role in Syria.”

Throughout nearly three years of conflict, they’ve wrongfully blamed him for Western-backed insurgent crimes.

They’re imperial collaborators. They’re responsible for horrific bloodshed. They want regime change. They want mass slaughter and destruction to achieve it.

They want sole right to choose who’ll rule. They want Syrians having no say. They want pro-Western stooges in charge. They’re ravaging and destroying a once peaceful country.

They’re responsible for high crimes against peace. No end of conflict looms. It’s unclear if talks will take place as scheduled. It’s unclear if it matters.

It’s unclear who’s attending. Divided opposition groups may not come. They’re preoccupied with slaughtering each other instead.

On January 12, AFP headlined “700 killed in Syria rebel-jihadist battle: monitor.”

Hundreds more are missing. Fighting rages. It’s been ongoing for days. Civilians are caught in the middle. Perhaps well over 1,000 died. Expect many more to perish.

Northern provinces are affected. Aleppo, Idlib and Raqa are hard hit. So are Hama and Homs. At least 16 suicide attacks occurred. Dozens were killed. More die daily. Syria remains a cauldron of violence.

On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius lied, saying:

“It’s the regime of Bashar al-Assad that is feeding terrorism. We must bring that regime to an end.”

“There is no solution to the Syrian tragedy apart from a political solution. And there is no possibility to achieve (it) if Geneva two does not take place.”

Geneva I ended in failure. Washington and other opponents demanded he must go. They demand he go now. They do so illegitimately.

On Sunday, John Kerry discussed prospects for Middle East peace. He addressed Syria. He blamed Assad for Obama’s war.

“There is an urgent need for the Syrian regime to implement its obligations under the UN Security Council Presidential Statement,” he said.

“We believe it is possible for the regime to (cease fighting) before Geneva – local ceasefires if necessary – a ceasefire with respect to Aleppo, and send the signal that they are prepared to set a different mood, a different climate, a different stage for the possibility of success in Geneva.”

“They have the power to do that. And the opposition has pledged that if they will do that. The opposition will live by it.”

False! Kerry knows it. Extremist elements continue fighting. They reject peace talks. Washington bears full responsibility for ongoing conflict. Assad defends Syria responsibly.

He’s battling US-backed foreign invaders. Don’t expect Kerry to explain. Continued aggression is planned.

Washington is directly involved in supplying lethal aid. It’s been doing it all along. It’s coming cross border from Turkey and Jordan. Israel is supplying weapons. CIA and US special forces are directly involved.

Kerry lied saying Assad “disregard(s) the most basic human rights.” Extremist opposition forces are barbaric. They’ve committed numerous atrocities. Assad is wrongfully blamed.

Washington wants war on Syria continued. Geneva II won’t end it. Demanding Assad must go is illegal.

Syrians alone have sole right to decide who’ll lead them. Foreign interference violates international law.

Kerry is an unindicted war criminal. He has no legitimacy whatever. He’s less than optimistic about Syria.

“None of us have an expectation,” he said. “(F)ull agreement” is unlikely.

“What we do expect is to begin to get the parties at the table convened and negotiating and beginning a process of waging an even stronger effort to provide for this political solution.”

“It’ll take a little bit of time, but I’m confident that it needs that forum. It needs all the players at the table.”

“It needs the umbrella of the United Nations.” It needs Assad gone, according to Kerry.

On Sunday, Friends of Syria countries issued a statement saying Geneva Two’s objective is replacing Assad with transitional governance.

They want one fully empowered. They want pro-Western stooges in charge. They want what Syrians won’t tolerate.

Ahmad Jarba heads the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. He replaced Moaz al-Khatib. He’s no friend of Syrians. He’s one-sidedly pro-Western.

He issued a statement saying:

“The most important aspect of today’s meeting is that we all agree to say that the Assad family has no future in Syria.”

“Removing Assad from Syria for the future has now been clearly established in a unanimous decision adopted by (Friends of Syria countries) without the possibility for ambiguity.”

Lavrov responded saying:

“Our partners are blinded by an ideological mission for regime change.”

“I am convinced that the West is doing this to demonstrate that they call the shots in the Middle East. This is a totally politicized approach.”

Russia is fundamentally opposed. It respects Syrian sovereignty. International laws matter. Putin calls force against sovereign nations unacceptable. He said waging it is aggression.

Removing Assad assures endless conflict. Doing so frees jihadists to run wild. Syria will resemble Iraq and Libya.

Daily conflict kills dozens in both countries. Violence shows no signs of ending. Pro-Western puppet governance can’t stop it.

Institute of World Economy and International Relations senior fellow Stanislav Ivanov believes peace in Syria remains elusive.

He doubts Geneva II will work. Given what remains ongoing, it’s destined to fail, he said.

He believes a UN-sponsored conference should precede Geneva. All relevant international parties should be involved.

Iran should be invited unconditionally. It won’t attend Geneva any other way.

Center for Contemporary Iranian Studies Rajab Safarov calls Geneva talks this month futile.

“The conference will not take place because of the US,” he said. “Washington cannot get rid of the heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They are not interested in finding a solution to the Syrian issue,” he added.

“There are almost no chances this conference and even holding it can succeed,” he said.

“Assad needs 4-6 months (more fighting) maximum. After that there will be no opposition in Syria. And no need” for peace talks, he believes.

At the same time, he thinks Geneva II can achieve something positive. Geneva I failed by demanding Assad must go.

Friends of Syria countries demand it now. Doing so runs counter to what most Syrians wish. Peace remains a convenient illusion.

Expect conflict without end to continue. It’s virtually certain without Iran’s involvement to end it.

Regional violence shows no signs of ending. Greater war looms possible. Post-9/11, millions died. Washington bears full responsibility.

It’s waging war on humanity. Expect other countries to be ravaged and destroyed before it ends.

The entire region may become embroiled in conflict. Global war is possible. Imagine the potential consequences. Imagine what no responsible leaders should risk.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Long History of Zionism In Canada

Canada’s Conservative government is trying to convince Canadian Jews to support its right-wing imperialistic worldview.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently spoke to the annual Toronto gala of the Jewish National Fund, which has a long history of dispossessing Palestinians and discriminating against non-Jews.

Echoing the words of Theodor Herzl, a founder of political Zionism, Harper told the 4,000 attendees that Israel is a “light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness.”

Shortly before this event the Minister for Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney spoke at the launch of the Canadian chapter of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Established by a former colonel in the Israeli military, MEMRI selectively (mis)translates stories from Arab and Iranian media in a bid to advance expansionist Israeli interests.

Kenney told the audience assembled at Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue that MEMRI is “a peaceful weapon of truth-telling in a civilizational conflict in which we are all engaged.”

The comments from Harper and Kenney certainly play well with those in the Jewish community committed to Israeli and Western imperialism, but they also spur that sentiment. Most people respect power and when leading politicians say a country is involved in a “civilizational conflict” against “a region of darkness” it tends to shape opinion.

Few Canadian Jews — or others among the target audience for that matter — realize that Harper and Kenney don’t take this “clash of civilizations” talk literally (if they did they wouldn’t be deepening political ties with a number of Middle Eastern monarchies and selling billions of dollars in weaponry to the region’s “darkest” regime, Saudi Arabia.)

While the Harper government’s pro-Israel comments are particularly extreme, they are far from unique in Canadian history. For more than a century non-Jewish Canadians have promoted a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Similar to Europe, Zionism’s roots in Canada are Christian, not Jewish. Early Canadian support for Zionism was based on the more literal readings of the Bible that flowed out of the Protestant Reformation.

They were also tied to this country’s status as a dominion of the British Empire, which in the latter half of the nineteenth century began to see Zionism as a potential vehicle to strengthen its geostrategic position in the region.

At the time of confederation, Canada’s preeminent Christian Zionist was Henry Wentworth Monk. To buy Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in 1875, Monk began the Palestine Restoration Fund.

Unsuccessful, seven years later he took out an ad in the Jewish World proposing a “Bank of Israel” to finance Jewish resettlement. Irving Abella’s book A Coat of Many Colours: Two Centuries of Jewish Life in Canada describes Monk as “an eccentric but respected businessman” who took up a campaign in Canada and England to raise funds for buying land in Palestine during the 1870s and 1880s.

“In 1881 Monk even proposed setting up a Jewish National Fund,” Abella writes. “He issued manifestoes, wrote long articles, spoke to assorted meetings and lobbied extensively in England and Canada to realize his dream.”

Monk called for the British Empire to establish a “dominion of Israel” similar to the dominion of Canada. In the 1978 book Canada and Palestine, Zachariah Kay notes: “Monk believed that Palestine was the logical center of the British Empire, and could help form a confederation of the English-speaking world.”

Monk was not alone in Canada. Citing a mix of Christian and pro-British rationale, leading Canadian politicians repeatedly expressed support for Zionism. In 1907, two cabinet ministers attended the Federation of Zionist Societies of Canada convention, telling delegates that Zionism had the support of the government, according to Kay’s book.

Kay’s book also states that Arthur Meighen, then solicitor-general and later prime minister, proclaimed in November 1915: “I think I can speak for those of the Christian faith when I express the wish that God speed the day when the land of your forefathers shall be yours again. This task I hope will be performed by that champion of liberty the world over — the British Empire.”

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, which declared British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, boosted support for Zionism in this country. In the years thereafter, Canadian politicians of various stripes repeatedly urged Jews (and others) to support Zionism.

During a July 1922 speech to the Zionist Federation of Canada, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister Mackenzie King “was effusive with praise for Zionism,” explains David Bercuson in Canada and the Birth of Israel. King told participants their aspirations were “in consonance” with the greatest ideals of the “Englishman.”

A dozen years later, Prime Minister R.B. Bennett told a coast to-coast radio broadcast for the launch of the United Palestine Appeal fund drive that the Balfour Declaration and the British conquest of Palestine represented the beginning of the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.

According to a 1962 book by Canadian Zionist Bernard Figler, Bennett said, “When the promises of God, speaking through his prophets, are that the home will be restored in the homeland of their forefathers…Scriptural prophecy is being fulfilled. The restoration of Zion has begun.”

Jewish Zionism must be understood from within the political climate in which it operated. And Canada’s political culture clearly fostered Zionist ideals.

British imperialism, Christian Zionism and nationalist ideology were all part of this country’s political fabric. Additionally, in the early 1900s most Canadians did not find it odd that Europeans would take a “backward” people’s land, which is what settlers did to the indigenous population here.

A number of books about Canada’s Jewish community discuss how elite Canadian Jews, especially after the 1917 Balfour Declaration, were more active Zionists than their US counterparts. In Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey, Gerald Tulchinsky explains: “The First World War accentuated differences between Canadian and American Jewry. For example, loyalty to Britain’s cause provided Zionists with opportunities to identify their purposes with Britain’s imperial mission.”

When British General Edmund Allenby led a campaign in late 1917 to take Palestine from the Ottomans as many as 400 Canadians (about half recruited specifically for the task) fought in Allenby’s Jewish Legion. Sometimes beleaguered Jewish communities were praised by the media for taking up England’s cause to conquer Palestine.

Since Israel’s creation in 1948 different Canadian governments have expressed varying degrees of support. But overall, the laudatory public declarations have continued.

After a long career of support for Zionism as external minister and prime minister, Lester Pearson referred to that country as “an outpost, if you will, of the West in the Middle East.”

External Affairs Minister Don Jamieson echoed this sentiment in an October 1977 speech. “Israel is an increasingly valuable ally of the West and Jews and non-Jews alike should see to it that Israel remains … an ally of the Western world,” Jamieson said. “We in Canada must see to it that when Israel is making such tremendous sacrifices, we should stand ready to help Israel with oil and material assistance.”

Yes, the current government is more aggressive in its public declarations than any before it and this has helped drive the establishment Jewish community to an even more hardline position.

To the Conservatives’ delight, two years ago the ninety-year old Canadian Jewish Congress was disbanded by its wealthy donors in favor of an even more Israel-focused Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. Similarly, the Conservatives’ strong ties to Christian Zionism has prodded the Zionist lobby group B’nai Brith to deepen its ties with Canada Christian College and the prominent right-wing evangelist Charles McVety.

At the same time, the anti-racist sectors of Canada’s Jewish community have made major strides in recent years. Groups such as Independent Jewish Voices, Not In Our Name, Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Women in Solidarity with Palestine and Jews for a Just Peace, have undercut the notion that all Canadian Jews support Israeli policy or Zionism. But these groups are unlikely to become dominant voices within the Jewish community until there is a shift in Canada’s political culture.

Canadian Zionism has long been part of the religious and political establishment. In every community there are those who take the side of the rich and powerful.

Source: Global Research

It Is Not Over

Everywhere I go, I meet people who seem to believe that it’s all over, that there is no hope, that freedom is forever doomed. The doom and gloomers are omnipresent. But there is a great line in the newest version of the movie “Red Dawn” that should help put it all in perspective. One of the freedom fighters says, “I’m still breathing so, it’s not over.” I love that line. I feel exactly the same way.

There is no question that the forces of globalism and socialism have pretty much had their way over the past few decades. And with very few exceptions, we don’t have a lot of allies in Washington, D.C., and in most State capitals. For that matter, we don’t have a lot of allies on Wall Street or in most classrooms. But that doesn’t mean that it’s over: not by a long shot.

Freedom didn’t have a majority in 1775 and 1776, either. I doubt that one could find any time in history when the proponents of liberty were ever in a majority. Sam Adams may have said it best when he said, “It does not take a majority to prevail…but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

However, there is one thing that Colonial America had that modern America doesn’t have: a patriot pulpit. The pulpits of Colonial America were ablaze with the fire of liberty. Colonial clergymen of every Christian denomination explained, extolled, enlightened, expounded, and elucidated the Natural Biblical principles of liberty from their pulpits continuously. Remember that it was mostly the men of Pastor Jonas Clark’s congregation at the Church of Lexington that stood armed on Lexington Green against British troops in the wee morning hours of April 19, 1775, and fired the shot heard ’round the world.

Publisher and historian Gerald Nordskog writes these words about Jonas Clark: “As the pastor of the church at Lexington, he typically gave four sermons a week, written out and orally presented–nearly 2200 sermons in his lifetime. His preaching was vigorous in style, animated in manner, instructive in matter, and delivered with uncommon energy and zeal, with an agreeable and powerful voice. His sermons were rarely less than an hour, often more.”

Nordskog continues, “It can be regarded only as a singularly happy circumstance that, as Lexington was to be the place where resistance to the power of England was first to occur, and the great act of a declaration of war first to be made by the act of the people in the blood to be there shed, making the place forever famous in history, the minister of Lexington should have been a man of the principles, character, courage, and energy of Mr. Clark.

“It can be regarded he was eminently a man produced by the times–more than equal to them; rather a guide and leader. All his previous life, his preaching, his intercourse and conversation among his people had been but a continued and most effectual preparation for the noble stand taken by his people on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775. The militia on the Common that morning were the same who filled the pews of the meetinghouse on the Sunday morning before, and the same who hung upon the rear of the retreating enemy in the forenoon and throughout the day. They were only carrying the preaching of many previous years into practice.

“It would not be beyond the truth to assert that there was no person at that time and in that vicinity–not only no clergyman but no other person of whatever calling or profession, who took a firmer stand for the liberties of the country or was more ready to perform the duties and endure the sacrifices of a patriot, than the minister of Lexington.

“When the struggle actually commenced, the people were ready for it, thoroughly acquainted with the reasons on which the duty of resistance was founded, and prepared to discharge the duty at every hazard. No population within the compass of the Colonies were better prepared for the events of the 19th of April, than the people of Lexington; no people to whom the events of that day could more safely have been entrusted; none more worthy of the duties that fell to their lot; or who better deserved the honours which have followed the faithful performance of them. No single individual probably did so much to educate the people up to that point of intelligence, firmness, and courage, as their honoured and beloved pastor.” (Nordskog, Gerald Christian; The Battle of Lexington; Nordskog Publishing; 2007; Print.)

Can one imagine how history would have been changed had the Church of Lexington, Massachusetts, and all of the churches of Colonial America for that matter, been occupied with the kinds of ministers we have today? I can tell you this: there would have been no Lexington Green and Concord Bridge; no Bunker Hill; no Valley Forge; no Declaration of Independence; no U.S. Constitution; and no United States of America. And that is an absolute fact. The erroneous interpretation of Romans 13, so prevalent today among pastors and churches, would have instructed the colonists that it would be a sin against God to rebel against King George. Pastors would have taught their congregations to be good little slaves to the Crown. Without a doubt, had Colonial America had the kinds of ministers we have today, we would still be a subjected colony of Great Britain to this very hour.

And if you think Jonas Clark was the exception to the rule in Colonial America, you haven’t studied history. Men such as John Witherspoon, James Caldwell, John Peter Muhlenberg, Joab Houghton, Ebenezer Baldwin, Elisha Williams, Charles Chauncy, Jonathan Mayhew, Isaac Backus, Samuel Sherwood, John Fletcher, John Leland, etc., etc, inspired and instructed Christians of all denominations regarding their duties and responsibilities as free men and women under God–including the duty to free themselves from the yoke of bondage.

So prominent was the role that Presbyterian pastors played in the American Revolution that as news of the rebellion spread throughout England, Horace Walpole told his fellow members of the British Parliament, “There is no use crying about it. Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” And Presbyterian ministers were not the only ones to rally the church for the cause of independence.

So many Baptist preachers participated in America’s War for Independence that at the conclusion of the war, President George Washington wrote a personal letter to the Baptist people saying, “I recollect with satisfaction that the religious societies of which you are a member have been, throughout America, uniformly and almost unanimously, the firm friends to civil liberty, and the preserving promoters of our glorious Revolution.” It also explains how Thomas Jefferson could write to a Baptist congregation and say, “We have acted together from the origin to the end of a memorable Revolution.” (McDaniel, George White. The People Called Baptists. The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1918. Print.)

But it was ministers from all of the Christian denominations who sounded the clarion call for freedom from their pulpits. Writing in the mid-1800s, noted attorney and historian John Wingate Thornton said, “To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence.”

The patriot pulpit is what Colonial America had that modern America doesn’t have. We lack the “moral force” of that patriot pulpit. For the most part, America’s pastors today are shy, sheepish servants of the state. For the American people to once again muster the courage and conviction to reclaim their liberties requires a revival of the patriot pulpit. As long as Christian people stay seated in the padded pews of these passive pulpits, our nation will continue to plummet into the pit. But this is where the good news begins.

All over the country, tens of thousands of Christians are leaving these timid and cowardly ministers–even pastors are leaving their timid congregations behind and joining up with freedom-minded believers in brand new independent fellowships.

For example, we have over 800 patriot pastors listed on our Black Regiment web page. These are ministers who are not afraid to identify themselves as a patriot pastor and have asked to be included in the list. I invite you to search the list and see if there is a Black Regiment pastor near you. See it here:

Furthermore, there are thousands of Christians who are leaving these say-nothing churches and starting home churches or are meeting with small groups of believers who also share their love of liberty. In addition, we have hundreds of believers who, because they cannot find a patriot pastor in their community, are tuning into the service at Liberty Fellowship each Sunday afternoon at 2:30 Mountain Time and listening to our messages.

Talkin’ ‘Bout A Global Revolution

As the global financial crisis now enters its seventh year, it is time to start asking difficult questions about the right priorities for popular protest if we want to realise a truly united voice of the world’s people. There can be no revolution in a truly moral or global sense until the critical needs of the extreme poor are prioritised and upheld, which will require mass mobilisations in the streets like we have never seen before.

At the onset of 2014, many people are now anticipating the prospect of a ‘global revolution’. The intense revolutionary fervour of 2011 may have dissipated in North America and much of Western Europe in the past couple of years, but a new geography of protest continues to shift and transmute in different countries and world regions – the million people on the streets of Brazil in June last year; the earlier defence of the commons in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park; the indigenous uprising and student protests across Canada; the Ukraine demonstrations that are still under way.

There is no way of predicting where a mass protest movement will kick off next or what form it will take, but analysts expect that an even larger-scale version of an Occupy Wall Street-type movement will emerge in 2014. The conditions for a truly global political awakening are firmly in place, and few can believe in the politician’s rhetoric about the world economy sorting out its problems during the year ahead. Wealth and income inequalities continue to spiral out of control, increasingly to the benefit of the 1% (or indeed the 0.001%). Austerity policies pushed by governments on both sides of the Atlantic continue to threaten the social gains made since the Second World War, which is deepening social divisions and creating a new situation of desperately poor and hungry people in Britain, America and many so-called wealthy countries.

And there is no shortage of analysis about the structural crisis of our political and economic systems, from chronic unemployment and falling real incomes to corporate-captured representative democracies and Orwellian state controls. At the same time, governments remain committed to the paradigm of endless growth for its own sake, and are nearly all beholden to the interests of giant energy corporations that are determined to burn more fossil fuels  without becoming unliveable. Not to mention the escalation of climate and ecological disasters, dwindling oil reserves, the risk of food shortages and further food price volatility, or even the prospect of global terrorism. Hence the growing understanding among everyday people that we are in the midst of a crisis of civilization, and we cannot rely on our existing government administrations to affect a necessary transformation of the international political and economic order.

The revised meaning of ‘revolution’

As we continue along this chaotic and uncertain road, the very idea of social or political ‘revolution’ is taking on new and different meanings. A common understanding of the term is no longer limited to the revolutionary wave of actions of the 20th century, which were typically led by charismatic leaders and a strong ideology, and often involved the violent overthrow of state power (notwithstanding such heroic examples of non-violent political struggle as Gandhi, Luther King and Vaclav Havel). But now we have the examples of Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Taksim Square demonstrations and other mass protest movements that defy conventional explanation in their spontaneous and largely peaceful mobilisations, their leaderless structures and practice of horizontal democracy, as well as their disavowal of traditional left/right politics and ideologies or ‘isms’, such as socialism and communism.

Since 2011 there is also much serious talk of a revolution of love and a collective awakening to our spiritual potential as human beings, as captured in the now-famous words of Russell Brand who advocates a “total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic systems”. Others speak of a revolution in our sense of self as ‘global citizens’, in which we equate our own interests with those of people anywhere in the world, and we no longer conform to a financialised vision of society in which we are forced to compete with everyone else as ‘others’. In short, a renewed sense of idealism and hope is everywhere being felt for a new society to be built from within the existing one, and for a revolution in every sense of the word – in our values, our imaginations, our lifestyles and our social relations, as well as in our political and economic structures.

What still isn’t clear is how the growing call for revolutionary change and new economic models can be realised on a truly international basis, and for the common good of all people in all countries – not only for the citizens of individual nations (in particular within the most advanced economies). The new protest movements may draw on a concept of human rights that is necessarily international, and they may be driven by social networks and communications technology that is shared beyond national borders, but their various concerns and demands are still generally of a domestic and country-specific nature.

Following the artful state repression of Occupy Wall Street, the vision of a collectively organised alternative to neoliberal politics is too often lost in a fight for or against individual reforms, while the Occupy movement as a whole has become increasingly atomised and fragmented. The Arab Spring is fast fading in memory, as exemplified by the political chaos and recent crackdown on popular dissent in Egypt. And there is little evidence of a shared agenda for change that can unify citizens of the richest and poorest nations on a common platform, one that recognises the need for global as well as national forms of redistribution as a pathway towards sharing the world rather than keeping it divided.

Blueprints for a new world

This is not to say that realistic proposals for planetary change do not exist, as individuals and groups everywhere are discussing the necessary reforms and objectives for how the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from the local to global. An abundance of enlightened thinking outlines the need for a ‘revolution’ in every aspect of our economic and political systems – a commons revolution, a food sovereignty revolution, a renewable energy revolution, the next American revolution – which altogether articulate an effective blueprint for a new and better world. But great uncertainty remains around how this crucial transformation of our lives can be affected when such immensely powerful forces of economic and political self-interest control the current world direction, combined with political apathy and disengagement among a vast swathe of the population.

With the global financial and economic crisis now entering its seventh year, it is time to start asking some difficult questions about the right priorities for popular protest if we want to realise a truly united voice of the world’s people. It is inevitable that the gap between rich and poor will continue to increase in most countries, and the reality of poverty and hunger will worsen across the world – regardless of the distorted arguments by the World Bank and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) coterie at the UN. And as living standards decline for many middle-class families in developed countries, there is a risk that people will remain preoccupied with their own situations and solely national concerns, which is already where all the militant strength is being directed in European and U.S. protest movements.

But there is no escaping the enormous disparities in wealth and income between rich OECD countries and the less developed nations, where millions of people face such extreme deprivation and food insecurity that at least 40,000 people needlessly die each day from poverty-related causes. There can be no genuine revolution in a moral or global sense until the critical needs of these voiceless poor are prioritised and upheld, which will require mass mobilisations in the streets like we have never seen before – not only predicated on redistributing resources from the 1% to the 99% within our own countries, but also centred on a shared demand for a fairer distribution of wealth, power and resources across the entire world. Perhaps that is where the true meaning of ‘global revolution’ begins, and it could be our greatest hope for a sustainable and just future in the coming year and beyond.

Volgograd And The Conquest of Eurasia: Has The House of Saud Seen Its Stalingrad?

The events in Volgograd are part of a much larger body of events and a multi-faceted struggle that has been going on for decades as part of a cold war after the Cold War—the post-Cold War cold war, if you please—that was a result of two predominately Eurocentric world wars. When George Orwell wrote his book 1984 and talked about a perpetual war between the fictional entities of Oceania and Eurasia, he may have had a general idea about the current events that are going on in mind or he may have just been thinking of the struggle between the Soviet Union and, surrounded by two great oceans, the United States of America.

So what does Volgograd have to do with the dizzying notion presented? Firstly, it is not schizophrenic to tie the events in Volgograd to either the conflict in the North Caucasus and to the fighting in Syria or to tie Syria to the decades of fighting in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. The fighting in Syria and the North Caucuses are part of a broader struggle for the mastery over Eurasia. The conflicts in the Middle East are part of this very grand narrative, which to many seems to be so far from the reality of day to day life.

 “Bandar Bush” goes to Mother Russia

For the purposes of supporting such an assertion we will have to start with the not-so-secret visit of a shadowy Saudi regime official to Moscow. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the infamous Saudi terrorist kingpin and former House of Saud envoy to Washington turned intelligence guru, last visited the Russian Federation in early-December 2013. Bandar bin Sultan was sent by King Abdullah to solicit the Russian government into abandoning the Syrians. The goal of Prince Bandar was to make a deal with the Kremlin to let Damascus be overtaken by the Saudi-supported brigades that were besieging the Syrian government forces from Syria’s countryside and border regions since 2011. Bandar met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the two held closed-door discussions about both Syria and Iran at Putin’s official residence in Novo-Ogaryovo.

The last meeting that Bandar had with Putin was a few months earlier in July 2013. That meeting was also held in Russia. The July talks between Prince Bandar and President Putin also included Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. One would also imagine that discussion about the Iranians increased with each visit too, as Bandar certainly tried to get the Russians on bad terms with their Iranian allies.

After Bandar’s first meeting with President Putin, it was widely reported that the House of Saud wanted to buy Russia off. Agence France-Presse and Reuters both cited the unnamed diplomats of the Arab petro-monarchies, their March 14 lackeys in Lebanon, and their Syrian opposition puppets as saying that Saudi Arabia offered to sign a lucrative arms contract with Moscow and give the Kremlin a guarantee that the Arab petro-sheikdoms would not threaten the Russian gas market in Europe or use Syria for a gas pipeline to Europe.

Russia knew better than to do business with the House of Saud. It had been offered a lucrative arms deal by the Saudi regime much earlier, in 2008, to make some backdoor compromises at the expense of Iran. After the compromises were made by Moscow the House of Saud put the deal on ice. If the media leaks in AFP and Reuters were not tactics or lies in the first place aimed at creating tensions between the Syrian and Russian governments, the purportedly extravagant bribes to betray Syria were wasted on the ears of Russian officials.

The House of Saud and the undemocratic club of Arab petro-monarchies that form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have always talked large about money. The actions of these self portrayed lords of the Arabia Peninsula have almost never matched their words and promises. To anyone who deals with them, the House of Saud and company are known for habitually making grand promises that they will never keep, especially when it comes to money. Even when money is delivered, the full amount committed is never given and much of it is stolen by their corrupt partners and cronies. Whether it is the unfulfilled 2008 arms contract with Russia that was facilitated with the involvement of Iraqi former CIA asset Iyad Allawi or the overabundant commitments of financial and logistical aid to the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples that never materialized, the Arab petro-sheikhdoms have never done more than talk grandly and then get their propagandist to write articles about their generosity and splendor. Underneath all the grandeur and sparkles there has always been bankruptcy, insecurity, and emptiness.

A week after the first meeting with Bandar, the Kremlin responded to the media buzz about the attempted bribe by Saudi Arabia. Yury Ushakov, one of Putin’s top aides and the former Russian ambassador to the US, categorically rejected the notion that any deal was accepted or even entertained by the Kremlin. Ushakov avowed that not even bilateral cooperation was discussed between the Saudis and Russia. According to the Kremlin official, the talks between Bandar and Putin were simply about the policies of Moscow and Riyadh on Syria and the second international peace conference being planned about Syria in Geneva, Switzerland.

More Leaks: Fighting Fire with Fire?

If his objective was to get the Russians to abandon Syria, Prince Bandar left both meetings in Russia empty-handed. Nevertheless, his visit left a trail of unverifiable reports and speculation. Discretion is always needed when analyzing these accounts which are part of the information war about Syria being waged on all sides by the media. The planted story from the Saudi side about trying to buy the Russians was not the only account of what took place in the Russian-Saudi talks. There was also a purported diplomatic leak which most likely surfaced as a counter-move to the planted story about Bandar’s proposal. This leak elaborated even further on the meeting between Bandar and Putin. Threats were made according to the second leak that was published in Arabic by the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir on August 21, 2013.

According to the Lebanese newspaper, not only did Prince Bandar tell the Russians during their first July meeting that the regimes of the GCC would not threaten the Russian gas monopoly in Europe, but he made promises to the Russians that they could keep their naval facility on the Mediterranean coast of Syria and that he would give the House of Saud’s guarantee to protect the 2014 Winter Olympics being held in the North Caucasian resort city of Sochi, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, from the Chechen separatist militias under Saudi control. If Moscow cooperated with Riyadh and Washington against Damascus, the leak discloses that Bandar also stated that the same Chechen militants fighting inside Syria to topple the Syrian government would not be given a role in Syria’s political future.

When the Russians refused to betray their Syrian allies, Prince Bandar then threatened Russia with the cancellation of the second planned peace conference in Geneva and with the unleashing of the military option against the Syrians the leak imparts.

This leak, which presents a veiled Saudi threat about the intended attacks on the Winter Olympics in Sochi, led to a frenzy of speculations internationally until the end of August 2013, amid the high tensions arising from the US threats to attack Syria and the threats coming from Iran to intervene on the side of their Syrians allies against the United States. Originating from the same politically affiliated media circle in Lebanon, reports about Russian military preparations to attack Saudi Arabia in response to a war against Syria began to circulate from the newspaper Al-Ahed also, further fueling the chain of speculations.

A House of Saud Spin on the Neo-Con “Redirection”

Seymour Hersh wrote in 2007 that after the 2006 defeat of Israel in Lebanon that the US government had a new strategy called the “redirection.” According to Hersh, the “redirection” had “brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.” With the cooperation of Saudi Arabia and all the same players that helped launch Osama bin Ladin’s career in Afghanistan, the US government took “part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria.” The most important thing to note is what Hersh says next: “A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

A new House of Saud spin on the “redirection” has begun. If there is anything the House of Saud knows well, it is rounding up fanatics as tools at the service of Saudi Arabia’s patrons in Washington. They did it in Afghanistan, they did it Bosnia, they have done it in Russia’s North Caucasus, they did it in Libya, and they are doing it in both Lebanon and Syria. It does not take the British newspaperThe Independent to publish an article titled “Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis” for the well-informed to realize this.

The terrorist bombings in Lebanon mark a new phase of the conflict in Syria, which is aimed at forcing Hezbollah to retreat from Syria by fighting in a civil war on its home turf. The attacks are part of the “redirection.” The House of Saud has accented this new phase through its ties to the terrorist attacks on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut on November 19, 2013. The attacks were carried out by individuals linked to the notorious Ahmed Al-Assir who waged a reckless battle against the Lebanese military from the Lebanese city of Sidon as part of an effort to ignite a sectarian civil war in Lebanon.

Al-Assir’s rise, however, was politically and logistically aided by the House of Saud and its shameless Hariri clients in Lebanon. He is also part of the same “redirection” policy and current that brought Fatah Al-Islam to Lebanon. This is why it is no surprise to see Hariri’s Future Party flag flying alongside Al-Qaeda flags in Lebanon. After Al-Assir’s failed attempt to start a sectarian Lebanese civil war, he went into hiding and it was even alleged that he was taken in by one of the GCC embassies.

In regard to the House of Saud’s roles in the bombings in Lebanon, Hezbollah would confirm that the attack on the Iranian Embassy in Beirut was linked to the House of Saud. Hezbollah’s leadership would report that the Abdullah Izzam Brigade, which is affiliated to Al-Qaeda and tied to the bombings, is directly linked to the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, the Saudi agent, Majed Al-Majed, responsible for the attack would be apprehended by Lebanese security forces in late-December 2013. He had entered Lebanon after working with Al-Nusra in Syria. Fars News Agency, an Iranian media outlet, would report on January 2, 2014 that unnamed Lebanese sources had also confirmed that they had discovered that the attack was linked to Prince Bandar.

Wrath of the House of Saud Unleashed?

A lot changed between the first and second meetings that Prince Bandar and Vladimir Putin had, respectively in July 2013 and December 2013. The House of Saud expected its US patron to get the Pentagon involved in a conventional bombing campaign against Syria in the month of September. It is more than likely that Riyadh was in the dark about the nature of secret negotiations that the US and Iran were holding through the backchannel of Oman in the backdrop of what appeared to be an escalation towards open war.

Bandar’s threat to reassess the House of Saud’s ties with Washington is probably a direct result of the US government keeping the House of Saud in the dark about using Syria as a means of negotiating with the Iranian government. US officials may have instigated the House of Saud to intensify its offensive against Syria to catalyze the Iranians into making a deal to avoid an attack on Syria and a regional war. Moreover, not only did the situation between the US and Iran change, Russia would eventually sign an important energy contract for Syrian natural gas in the Mediterranean Sea. The House of Saud has been undermined heavily in multiple ways and it is beginning to assess its own expendability.

If one scratches deep enough, they will find that the same ilk that attacked the Iranian Embassy in Beirut also attacked the Russian Embassy in Damascus. Both terrorist attacks were gifts to Iran and Russia, which served as reprisals for the Iranian and Russian roles in protecting Syria from regime change and a destructive war. It should, however, be discerned if the House of Saud is genuinely lashing out at Iran and Russia or if it being manipulated to further the goals of Washington in the US negotiations with Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus.

In the same manner, the House of Saud wants to generously reward Hezbollah too for its role in protecting Syria by crippling Hezbollah domestically in Lebanon. Riyadh may possibly not want a full scale war in Lebanon like the Israelis do, but it does want to neutralize and eliminate Hezbollah from the Lebanese landscape. In this regard, Saudi Arabia has earnestly been scheming to recruit Lebanon’s President Michel Suleiman and the Lebanese military against Hezbollah and its supporters.

The Saud grant of three billion dollars to the Lebanese Armed Forces is not only blood money being given to Lebanon as a means of exonerating Saudi Arabia for its role in the terrorist bombings that have gripped the Lebanese Republic since 2013, the Saudi money is also aimed at wishfully restructuring the Lebanese military as a means of using it to neutralize Hezbollah. In line with the House of Saud’s efforts, pledges from the United Arab Emirates and reports that NATO countries are also planning on donating money and arms to the Lebanese military started.

In addition to the terrorists bombings in Lebanon and the attack on the Russian Embassy in Damascus, Russia has also been attacked. Since the Syrian conflict intensified there has been a flaring of tensions in Russia’s North Caucasus and a breakout of terrorist attacks. Russian Muslim clerics, known for their views on co-existence between Russia’s Christian and Muslim communities and anti-separatist views, have been murdered. The bombings in Volgograd are just the most recent cases and an expansion into the Volga of what is happening in the North Caucasus, but they come disturbingly close to the start of the Winter Olympics that Prince Bandar was saying would be “protected” if Moscow betrayed Syria.

Can the House of Saud Stand on its Own Feet?

It is a widely believed that you will find the US and Israelis pulling a lot of the strings if you look behind the dealings of the House of Saud. That view is being somewhat challenged now. Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UK, threatened that Saudi Arabia will go it alone against Syria and Iran in a December 2013 article. The letter, like the Saudi rejection of their UN Security Council seat, was airing the House of Saud’s rage against the realists running US foreign policy.

In this same context, it should also be noted for those that think that Saudi Arabia has zero freedom of action that Israeli leaders have stressed for many years that Tel Aviv needs to cooperate secretly with Saudi Arabia to manipulate the US against Iran. This is epitomized by the words of Israeli Brigadier-General Oded Tira: “We must clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabia so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran.”

Along similar lines, some may point out that together the House of Saud and Israel got France to delay an interim nuclear agreement between the Iranians and the P5+1 in Geneva. The House of Saud rewarded Paris through lucrative deals, which includes making sure that the grant it gives to the Lebanese military is spent on French military hardware. Saad Hariri, the main Saudi client in Lebanon, even met Francois Hollande and French officials in Saudi Arabia in context of the deal. Appeasing the House of Saud and Israel, French President Hollande has replicated France’s stonewalling of the P5+1 interim nuclear deal with Iran by trying to spoil the second Syria peace conference in Geneva by saying that there can be no political solution inside Syria if President Bashar Al-Assad stays in power.

Again, however, it has to be asked, is enraging Saudi Arabia part of a US strategy to make the Saudis exert maximum pressure on Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus so that the United States can optimize its gains in negotiations? After all, it did turn out that the US was in league with France in Geneva and that the US used the French stonewalling of an agreement with Iran to make additional demands from the Iranians during the negotiations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov revealed that the US negotiation team had actually circulated a draft agreement that had been amended in response to France’s demands before Iran and the other world powers even had a chance to study them. The draft by the US team was passed around, in Foreign Minister Lavrov’s own words, “literally at the last moment, when we were about to leave Geneva.”

Instead of debating on the level of independence that the House of Saud possesses, it is important to ask if Saudi Arabia can act on its own and to what degree can the House of Saud act as an independent actor. This looks like a far easier question to answer. It is highly unlikely that Saudi Arabia can act on its own in most instances or even remain an intact state. This is why Israeli strategists very clearly state that Saudi Arabia is destined to fall apart. “The entire Arabian Peninsula is a natural candidate for dissolution due to internal and external pressures, and the matter is inevitable especially in Saudi Arabia,” the Israeli Yinon Plan deems. Strategists in Washington are also aware of this and this is also why they have replicated models of a fragmented Saudi Arabia. This gives rise to another important question: if they US assess that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not a sustainable entity, will it use it until the burns out like a flame? Is this what is happening and is Saudi Arabia being sacrificed or setup to take the blame as the “fall guy” by the United States?

Who is Hiding Behind the House of Saud?

Looking back at Lebanon, the messages from international media outlets via their headlines is that the bombings in Lebanon highlight or reflect a power struggle between the House of Saud and Tehran in Lebanon and the rest of the region. Saying nothing about the major roles of the US, Israel, and their European allies, these misleading reports by the likes of journalists like Anne Barnard casually blame everything in Syria and Lebanon on a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, erasing the entire history behind what has happened and casually sweeping all the interests behind the conflict(s) under the rug. This is dishonest and painting a twisted Orientalist narrative.

The outlets trying to make it sound like all the Middle East’s problems are gravitating around some sort of Iranian and Saudi rivalry might as well write that “the Saudis and Iranians are the sources behind the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the sources behind the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq that crippled the most advanced Arab country, the ones that are blockading medication from reaching Gaza due to their rivalry, the ones who enforced a no-fly zone over Libya, the ones that are launching killer drone attacks on Yemen, and the ones that are responsible for the billions of dollars that disappeared from the Iraqi Treasury in 2003 after Washington and London invaded that country and controlled its finances.” These outlets and reports are tacitly washing the hands of  actors like Washington, Tel Aviv, Paris, and London clean of blood by trying to construct a series of false narratives that either blame everything on a regional rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh or the premise that the Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims are fighting an eternal war that they are biologically programmed to wage against one another.

Arabs and Iranians and Shias and Sunnis are tacitly painted as un-human creatures that cannot be understood and savages to audiences. The New York Times even dishonestly implies that the Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims in Lebanon are killing one another in tit-for-tat attacks. It sneakily implies that Hezbollah and its Lebanese rivals are assassinating one another. Bernard, its reporter in Lebanon who was mentioned earlier, along with another colleague write:

In what have been seen as tit-for-tat attacks, car bombs have targeted Hezbollah-dominated neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of Beirut and Sunni mosques in the northern city of Tripoli.

On Friday, a powerful car bomb killed Mohamad B. Chatah, a former Lebanese finance minister who was a major figure in the Future bloc, a political group that is Hezbollah’s main Sunni rival.

The New York Times is cunningly trying to make its readers think that Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing as part of a Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict by concluding with an explanation that the slain former Lebanese finance minister belonged to “Hezbollah’s main Sunni rival” after saying that the bombings in Lebanon “have been seen as tit-for-tat attacks” between the areas that support Hezbollah and “Sunni mosques” in Tripoli

The US and Israel wish that a Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict was occurring in Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East. They have been working for this. It has been them that have been manipulating Saudi Arabia to instigate sectarianism. The US and Israel have been prodding the House of Saud—which does not represent the Sunni Muslims, let alone the people of Saudi Arabia which are under its occupation—against Iran, all the while trying to conceal and justify the conflict being instigated as some sort of “natural” rivalry between Shiites and Sunnis that is being played out across the Middle East. 

It has been assessed with high confidence by outsiders concerned by the House of Saud’s inner dealings that Prince Bandar is one of the three Al-Saud princes managing Saudi Arabia’s security and foreign policy; the other two being Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the Saudi deputy foreign minister and one of King Abdullah’s point men on Syria due to his ties to Syria from his maternal side, and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the interior minister. All three of them are tied to the United States more than any of their predecessors. Prince Bandar himself has a long history of working closely with the United States, which explains the endearing moniker of “Bandar Bush” that he is widely called by. “Chemical Bandar” can be added to the list too, because of the reports about his ties to the Syrian chemical weapon attacks in Ghouta.

As a US client, Saudi Arabia is a source of instability because it has been conditioned hence by Washington. Fighting the terrorist and extremist threat is now being used by the US as a point of convergence with Iran, which coincidently has authored the World Against Violence and Extremism (WAVE) motion at the United Nations. In reality, the author of the regional problems and instability has been Washington itself. In a masterstroke, the realists now at the helm of foreign policy are pushing American-Iranian rapprochement on the basis of what Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor of the US, said would be based on Tehran and Washington working together to secure Iran’s “volatile regional environment.” “Any eventual reconciliation [between the US and Iranian governments] should be based on the recognition of a mutual strategic interest in stabilizing what currently is a very volatile regional environment for Iran,” he explains. The point should not be lost either that Brzezinski is the man who worked with the Saudis to arm the Afghan Mujahedeen against the Soviets after he organized an intelligence operation to fool the Soviets into militarily entering Afghanistan in the first place.

The House of Saud did not work alone in Afghanistan during the Cold War either. It was rigorously backed by Washington. The United States was even more involved in the fighting. It is the same in Syria. If the diplomatic leak is to be believed about the meeting between Bandar and Putin, it is of merit to note that “Bandar Bush” told Putin that any “Saudi-Russian understanding” would also be part of an “American-Russian understanding.”

Has the “Redirection” Seen its Stalingrad?

Volgograd was called Stalingrad for a part of Soviet history, in honour of the Republic of Georgia’s most famous son and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It was Volgograd, back then called Stalingrad, where the Germans were stopped and the tide of war in Europe was turned against Hitler and his Axis allies in Europe. The Battle of Stalingrad was where the Nazis were defeated and it was in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where the bulk of the fighting against the Germans was conducted. Nor is it any exaggeration to credit the Soviets—Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Tartar, Georgian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Chechen, and all—for doing most of the fighting to defeat the Germans in the Second World War.

Judging by the  of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the terrorist attacks in Volgograd will be the start of another Battle of Stalingrad of some sorts and the launch of another Russian “war on terror.” Many of the terrorists that Russia will go after are in Syria and supported by the House of Saud.

The opponents of the Resistance Bloc that Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian resistance groups form have called the battlefields in Syria the Stalingrad of Iran and its regional allies. Syria has been a Stalingrad of some sorts too, but not for the Resistance Bloc. The alliance formed by the US, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel has begun to unravel in its efforts to enforce regime change in Syria. The last few years have marked the beginning of a humiliating defeat for those funding extremism, separatism, and terrorism against countries like Russia, China, Iran, and Syria as a means of preventing Eurasian cohesion. Another front of this same battle is being politically waged by the US and the EU in the Ukraine in a move to prevent the Ukrainians from integrating with Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

Volgograd and the Conquest of Eurasia

While speculation has been entertained with warning in this text, most of what has been explained has not been speculative. The House of Saud has had a role in destabilizing the Russian Federation and organizing terrorist attacks inside Russia. Support or oppose the separatist movements in the North Caucasus, the point is that they have been opportunistically aided and used by the House of Saud and Washington. Despite the authenticity of the narrative about Bandar’s threats against Russia, Volgograd is about Syria and Syria is about Volgograd. Both are events taking place as part of the same struggle. The US has been trying to encroach into Syria as a means of targeting Russia and encroaching deeper in the heart of Eurasia.

When George Orwell wrote 1984 he saw the world divided into several entities at constant or “eternal” war with one another. His fictitious superstates police language, use total surveillance, and utterly manipulate mass communication to indoctrinate and deceive their peoples. Roughly speaking, Orwell’s Oceania is formed by the US and its formal and informal territories in the Western Hemisphere, which the Monroe Doctrine has essentially declared are US colonies, confederated with Britain and the settler colonies-cum-dominions of the former British Empire (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa). The Orwellian concept of Eurasia is an amalgamation of the Soviet Union with continental Europe. The entity of Eastasia on the other hand is formed around China. Southeast Asia, India, and the parts of Africa that do not fall under the influence of Oceanic South Africa are disputed territory that is constantly fought for. Although not specifically mentioned, it can be extrapolated that Southwest Asia, where Syria is located, or parts of it are probably part of this fictional disputed territory, which includes North Africa.

If we try to fit Orwellian terms onto the present set of global relations, we can say that Oceania has made its moves against Eurasia/Eastasia for control of disputed territory (in the Middle East and North Africa).

1984 is not just a novel, it is a warning from the farseeing Orwell. Nonetheless, never did he imagine that his Eurasia would make cause with or include Eastasia through a core triple alliance and coalition comprised of Russia, China, and Iran. Eurasia will finish, in one way or another, whatOceania has started. All the while, as the House of Saud and the other rulers of the Arab petro-sheikhdoms continue to compete with one another in building fancy towers, the Sword of Damocles is getting heavier over their heads.

Source: Global Research

When Britain Savages Itself

England’s prestigious Oxford Union recently invited famed raconteur and talk-radio host Michael Savage to a debate on whether or not NSA leaker Edward Snowden is a hero. And that is certainly a matter for debate. Whatever Snowden is, though, he is definitely one thing: more noble than the British government.

You see, Savage won’t be attending the debate for a somewhat well-known but nonetheless shocking reason: He’s still banned from entering Britain.

Savage was placed on a list of persona non grata in 2009 along with Muslim extremists and race-group leaders for, as Gordon Brown’s U.K. government put it, “seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.” Of course, with the “hate speech” laws in today’s Britain — where Christians are arrested for professing their faith — such an accusation could be leveled for even just criticizing Islam or homosexual behavior. So what was it in Savage’s case? His message of “borders, language and culture”? We can ask but the U.K. government won’t tell.

And it doesn’t even matter.

Because Savage was placed on the list not for polemics but political expediency: Cowardly to the core, the burka-brown-nosing Brown government didn’t want to ban Muslim jihadists and the other miscreants without serving up enough white males for “balance.” And this speaks volumes about today’s Britain.

Before getting to that, however, I have a suggestion for the Oxford Union. Why not offer to have Savage appear via satellite on a large video screen? I don’t know if Oxford has used this technique before — and my guess is that they like to adhere to a traditional formula in their debates — but think about the delicious irony: Michael Savage, banned alleged bad boy, appearing on a huge Big Brother-like video screen to bedevil a government that is actually becoming Big Brother. The appearance could be dubbed “The Savage Leak from the U.S.”

The only problem is that Savage’s image might then appear larger than the U.K. itself. Don’t get me wrong, like many Americans, I have the instincts of an Anglophile. Why do you think our old films — even if set during the Roman Empire — might feature actors with British accents? (There’s another irony: Britain was an outpost of the Roman Empire…and then we made movies with Julius Caesar sounding like Margaret Thatcher!) Americans have long wanted to love Britain.

Now Britain doesn’t even love herself.

Those old films were made in the days when you could still say the sun never sets on the British Empire, which at one time ruled a quarter of the world’s people. Now Britain’s life clock reads a quarter to midnight.

It didn’t surprise me in the least when David Cameron’s “conservative” government did nothing to remove Savage from the banned list; after all, with a political spectrum situated where we’re heading, U.K. conservatives are a lot like our quasi-moderate liberals.

Britain is now the Incredible Shrinking Land. Once a bold nation certain that “English” was synonymous with civilization, it is now contracting culturally into ever-tightening coils of callow and craven political correctness. If a boy says he’s a girl and wants to go to school dressed like Maid Marian, the headmaster (probably a mistress today) will order a round of sensitivity training for the rest of the 8-year-olds. And dare they question his “gender” perception, well, it’s like the headmistress who recently threatened to attach a “Racial Discrimination note” to the record of any child who didn’t attend an Islamic workshop. They’ll be branded bigots. Heck, this is a nation whose “National Children’s Bureau” advised in 2008 that toddlers who say “yuck” in response to foreign food may be “racist.”

So, listen, I still love traditional Britain, though it has now been relegated to movies and memories. As far as its current culture goes, however, I say yuck. And this brings me to a word for Michael Savage.

I know he was taking it quite hard when he first was placed on the U.K. banned list. But I think here of what Jesus said: “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” And if speaking the Truth is now a revolutionary act in Britain, I would take their banning me as a badge of honor. Hey, Savage could probably get off the banned list next week — he’d just have to have a sex-change or convert to Islam. The British government, rife with capons bearing hyphenated last names, will never reject one of its own.

So all I can say, UK-LBGT, is, why don’t you ban me, too? Whatever Savage’s ideological trespass, I’m surely guilty of it as well. In fact, you really need to ban millions of Americans — and of your own citizens — who still have the temerity to believe tradition isn’t a dirty word.

Hey, why not?

You’ve already banned your true self.

Making The World Safe For War Profiteers

Adam Smith said governments are “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.” Wars are waged to make them richer.

Howard Zinn called war “terrorism magnified a hundred times.” Make it many thousands of times.

Michael Parenti said “the best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize (is) to wage war or support those who wage (it) instead of peace.”

In his book titled “,” he discusses a richly financed military/industrial complex. Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff call it the “military-industrial media complex.”

Waging wars requires selling them. Public support is needed. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call it “.”

Propaganda works as intended. Minds are manipulated to support war. Truth is suppressed. Fear is stoked. Patriotism, national security, and democratic values are highlighted.

Longstanding US policy facilitates earning obscene amounts from militarism, wars, homeland security, and related operations.

Doing so has nothing to do with external or internal threats. It’s unrelated to spreading democracy. It isn’t about humanitarian intervention.

It about advancing America’s imperium. Parenti calls the process “the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries. (It) “carves up whole continents.”

“(T)he dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.”

Capitalist imperialism differs from earlier forms. It dominates other economies and political systems. It accumulates enormous amounts of wealth.

It uses money to make more of it. It gains market control. It exploits resources and labor.

According to Marx and Engels:

Bourgeois capital “chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere…It creates a world after its own image.”

Societies are destroyed and remade to do it. Nations are pillaged for profit. Populations become disenfranchised. Workers become serfs. Local cultures become mass-market consumer ones.

Agribusiness replaces local farming. Competitive industries are eliminated.  Foreign investment crowds out local capital.

Dominance legitimizes capital’s divine right. Plunder assures obscene profits. Capital accumulation demands more. Profiteering becomes a be-all-and-end-all.

Businesses price according to what the market will bear. Profiteers take advantage of emergency or other out-of-ordinary conditions to cash in excessively.

WikiLeaks calls profiteering “a pejorative term for the act of making profit by methods considered unethical.”

Price fixing is illegal. Price gouging reflects grabbing all you can. It’s charging more than what’s considered reasonable and fair.

War profiteers are in a class by themselves. They thrive on war. They depend on it. Their businesses require conflicts and instability to prosper. The more ongoing, the greater the potential profits.

Lot of players profit from wars. Companies develop technologies with military applications. Black marketeers cash in.

Politicians taking campaign contributions, special favors or bribes benefit handsomely. Nations do by acquiring control over territory, resources and exploitable people.

Private military contractors include companies offering a wide range of services. They provide everything from tactical combat to security to consulting to logistics to technical support.

In his book titled “,” Pratap Chatterjee describes a company tainted by sweetheart deal no-bid contacts, bribes, kickbacks, inefficiency, shoddy work, corruption, fraud, gross overcharging, worker exploitation, and other serious offenses.

Other companies operate the same way. Military spending is hugely wasteful. Fraud and abuse are rampant. War is extremely profitable. Why else would so many be waged.

Mercenaries are guns for hire. They’re for sale to the highest bidder. They’re in it for the money. They’re unchecked, unaccountable and unprincipled.

Arms and munitions companies benefit most. Amounts spent are mind-bogging.

Bloomberg says defense budgets “contain hundreds of billions of dollars for new generations of aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, tanks that even the Army says it doesn’t need and combat vehicles too heavy to maneuver in desert sands or cross most bridges in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.”

According to BusinessWeek, redundancy wastes lots of money. “One need only spend 10 minutes walking around the Pentagon or any major military headquarters to see” it.

Why doesn’t Congress trim fat? Because politicians want lots of pork for constituents. It’s a great vote-getter.

BusinessWeek explained more, saying:

“Why is sensible military budgeting so difficult? Because lawmakers, including small-government Republicans, protect defense business in their home states with the ferocity of Spartans.”

“Even if the Pentagon offered up (sensible) cuts…Congress would almost certainly reject them.”

“The senators and representatives don’t have the political courage to face voters and tell them that the republic simply does not need the weapon under construction in their hometown.”

Trillions of dollars are spent.  Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta once said DOD “is the only major federal agency that cannot pass an audit today.”

Even during October’s 16 day shutdown, huge amounts of wasteful spending continued.

Ralph Nader calls now the time to address bloated military spending. Let’s “start shutting down the waste and fraud in our military budget,” he stresses.

Billions get tossed around mindlessly. Profiteers never had it better. Government watchdogs identify hundreds of billions of potential savings from unneeded weapons, defective ones, no-bid excess, overpayments, and outright fraud.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) conducts research on security, war and peace.

“A world in which sources of insecurity are identified and understood, conflicts are prevented or resolved, and peace is sustained,” it says.

It reports on “recent trends in military expenditure(s).”

Amounts spent are huge. In 2012, nominal global military spending exceeded $1.7 trillion. It’s around historic highs.

In real terms, it exceeds peak amounts spent during the Cold War. Post-9/11, spending increased sharply. America led the way.

In 2012, 15 nations accounted for over 80% military spending. SIPRI lists them as follows:

• America: $682 billion – 39%
• China: $166 billion – 9.5%
• Russia: $90.7 billion – 5.2%
• Britain: $60.8 billion – 3.5%
• Japan: 59.3 billion – 3.4%
• France: $58.9 billion – 3.4%
• Saudi Arabia: $56.7 billion – 3.2%
• India: $46.1 billion – 2.6%
• Germany: $45.8 billion – 2.6%
• Italy: $34 billion – 1.9%
• Brazil: $33.1 billion – 1.9%
• South Korea: $31.7 billion – 1.8%
• Australia: $26.2 billion – 1.5%
• Canada: $22.5 billion – 1.3%
• Turkey: $18.2 billion – 1%
• Others 18%

SIPRI calculates nominal military spending. Amounts America spends far exceeds annual defense authorizations.

Other allocations are for the Energy Department, State Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Treasury, NASA, military construction, various categories related to security, and interest attributable to past defense outlays.

Black intelligence, Pentagon and other budgets add many tens of billions more. So do supplemental military allocations. Foreign aid is mostly military related.

The Library of Congress listed the top 10 2012 recipients and amounts as follows:

Israel: $3.075 billion

Note: Israel gets special benefits provided no other nations.

They include annual $3 billion + direct appropriations, undisclosed additional amounts, state-of-the-art weapons and technology, billions in loan guarantees, military loans as grants, privileged contracts for Israeli companies, trade exemptions, and more.

Special allocations are buried in various agency budgets. Low or no-interest loans are provided. Some are never repaid. Most often, whatever Israel wants it gets.

• Afghanistan: $2.327 billion
• Pakistan: $2.102 billion
• Iraq: $1.683 billion
• Egypt: $1.557 billion
• Jordan: $676 million
• Kenya: $652 million
• Nigeria: $625 million
• Ethiopia: $580 million
• Tanzania: $531 million

US defense related spending exceeds $1.5 trillion annually. It’s half or more what other nations spend in total.

Militarism defines America. So do permanent wars. They’re a national addiction. They’re part of the national culture.

Violence is the American way. Wars are glorified. Pacifism is considered sissy. Peace is deplored. Conflicts persist with no end.

War profiteers gorge themselves at the public trough. Their operations thrive on war. They depend on it.

They’re waged for profit and dominance. They continue without end. Peace is verboten. It’s a convenient illusion.

Howard Zinn once asked “(h)ow can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

Why most Americans put up with it they’ll have to explain. Doing so lets Washington get away with mass murder and then some. It lets war profiteers benefit at our expense.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at .

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Former Pink Floyd Frontman Sparks Fury By Comparing Israelis To Nazis

Inflammatory remarks by the musician Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, comparing the modern Israeli state to Nazi Germany have put him at the centre of a furious dispute.

Performers and religious figures reacted angrily to the veteran rock star’s argument that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians can be compared to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. “The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious,” he said in an American online interview last week.

Waters, 70, a well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, has frequently defended himself against accusations that he is antisemitic, claiming he has a right to urge fellow artists to boycott Israel.

This summer he was criticised for using a pig-shaped balloon adorned with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David, as one part of the stage effects at his concerts. Waters countered that it was just one of several religious and political symbols in the show and not an attempt to single out Judaism as an evil force.

Now leading American thinker Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has raised the stakes .

Writing in the , the rabbi said: “Mr Waters, the Nazis were a genocidal regime that murdered six million Jews. That you would have the audacity to compare Jews to monsters who murdered them shows you have no decency, you have no heart, you have no soul.” The rabbi was responding to Waters’s latest comments on the Middle East.Speaking to the leftwing CounterPunch magazine, the musician criticised the US government for being unduly influenced by the Israeli “propaganda machine”.

The former Pink Floyd frontman, who has recently toured the world with a show based on the influential 1979 album The Wall, went on to describe the Israeli rabbinate as “bizarre” and accused them of believing that Palestinians and other Arabs in the Middle East were “sub-human”. Waters suggested the “Jewish lobby” was “extraordinarily powerful”. On the subject of the Holocaust, he said: “There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946. So this is not a new scenario. Except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”

Speaking from New York on Saturday night, Waters strongly rejected Rabbi Boteach’s characterisation of his views. He said: “I do not know Rabbi Boteach, and am not prepared to get into a slanging match with him. I will say this: I have nothing against Jews or Israelis, and I am not antisemitic. I deplore the policies of the Israeli government in the occupied territories and Gaza. They are immoral, inhuman and illegal. I will continue my non-violent protests as long as the government of Israel continues with these policies.

“If Rabbi Boteach can make a case for the Israel government’s policies, I look forward to hearing it. It is difficult to make arguments to defend the Israeli government’s policies, so would-be defenders often use a diversionary tactic, they routinely drag the critic into a public arena and accuse them of being an antisemite.”

Waters continued: “The Holocaust was brutal and disgusting beyond our imagination. We must never forget it. We must always remain vigilant. We must never stand by silent and indifferent to the sufferings of others, whatever their race, colour, ethnic background or religion. All human beings deserve the right to live equally under the law.”

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “Everyone is entitled to an opinion and to advocate passionately for a cause, but drawing inappropriate parallels with the Holocaust insults the memory of the six million Jews – men, women and children – murdered by the Nazis. These kinds of attacks are commonly used as veiled antisemitism and should be exposed as such.”

Jo-Ann Mort, vice-chair of US Jewish group Americans for Peace Now, is calling for musicians and other entertainers to go to Israel to understand that there is also Israeli opposition to discrimination against Arabs. Speaking to the Observer from California, she said it was important for international performers to “speak their mind to audiences about the nation’s successes and failures. Just as Israeli musicians – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – do.”

“The media in Israel flock to foreign entertainers. Performers would have the opportunity to make their viewpoints known – and it will also help to break the logjam that fundamentalists have had on both sides,” she argued.

Mort supports the anti-boycott approach of Israeli singer and activist David Broza, whose forthcoming album features covers of songs that urge understanding, including Waters’s own song Mother, from the album The Wall.

“Music captivates your head and your mind,” Broza recently argued. “If it comes with good vibes, then everyone wants to be part of it. The hard work comes from having a belief in what you are doing and in not stopping at the barricades that are posted at every corner.”

Last week Waters’s words drew a strong response from the Community Security Trust, the body that monitors anti-Jewish activity in Britain. A spokesman told the Jewish Chronicle that Waters’s comments “echo the language of antisemitism” and added that the musician was “living proof of how easily people who pursue extreme anti-Israel politics can drift into antisemitic statements and ideas”.

Bicom, the UK-based Israel advocacy organisation, also condemned Waters’s views. Chief executive Dermot Kehoe said: “The statements by Roger Waters calling for a cultural boycott of Israel and comparing the country to Nazi Germany are repugnant and fly in the face of both the reality in Israel today and the ongoing peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.”

In August Waters used his Facebook page to  that he was an “open hater of Jews”, made by Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in an interview with an American weekly Jewish newspaper, the Algemeiner.

“Often I can ignore these attacks, but Rabbi Cooper’s accusations are so wild and bigoted they demand a response,” Waters wrote, adding that he had “many very close Jewish friends”.

Source: The Guardian

The Myth of Turkish Secularism

Turkey is a secular state.   So claim its government and nearly all mainstream Western media.  They are mistaken.

In civilized, democratic countries, secularism means not only a respectful separation between church and state but also freedom of religion.  As we shall demonstrate, Turkish policies have long been the antithesis of secularism.

The Turkish government massively supports and funds Islam – specifically Sunni Islam – inside the country.  Turkey simultaneously represses religions such as Alevism, and bullies and persecutes indigenous Christians, most of whom it liquidated in 20^th century genocides.  Moreover, it uses Islam to project Turkish political power into Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.  Turkey’s system is more properly termed State Islam.

This article is not a criticism of Islam or its faithful.  We respect both.  Turkey’s secularism myth, nevertheless, cries out to be laid bare.

State Islam

The Directorate of Religious Affairs – known as the Diyanet – is the government body that represents and directs all of Sunni Islam in Turkey.  Created in 1924, a year after the Republic of Turkey was formed, the Diyanet is enshrined in Article 136 of the Turkish Constitution.  The Diyanet is huge and powerful.  Operating under the Prime Minister, it employs about 100,000.  All Sunni clergy are salaried civil servants of the Diyanet.

The Diyanet’s $2 billion annual outlay exceeds the combined budgets of Turkey’s Foreign, Energy, and Environmental Ministries.  By law a political party can be dissolved if it dares to advocate the Diyanet’s abolition.

Until recently, the Diyanet wrote all the sermons for its clergy, but reportedly now sometimes allows them to write their own, though their contents are controlled.

Would the U.S. – or any democratic Western country – be termed “secular” if it funded a huge Christian government agency that employed all Christian clergy and controlled their sermons?  Obviously not.

Who ownsTurkey’s 80,000 mosques?  It’s not always clear.  Even many Turks wonder.  For sure, however, the Diyanet controls all mosques. (Shiite Muslims represent only about 3% of Turkey’s 80 million people and are largely independent of the Diyanet.)

Two large mosques to be built on Istanbul’s Camlica Hill and Taksim Square are personal projects of Prime Minister Erdogan.  The government is apparently paying most of the costs, not something a secular state would do.

The Diyanet operates not only in Turkey but worldwide. Turkish foreign policy and the Diyanet are intertwined.  The latter promotes the country’s political influence abroad.

Worldwide Reach

The Diyanet has a Foreign Affairs department that sends religious consultants not only into Muslim countries, such as those in Central Asia and Africa, but also into the United States, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, and other European countries.

Indeed, some Turkish embassies and consulates have a religious affairs department and attachés that work with local Diyanet representatives.   Turkey is very active, for instance, in the Netherlands where it reportedly pays the salaries of the Diyanet-affiliated Dutch Islamic Foundation’s staff.

In partnership with Turkey’s Religious Foundation, the Diyanet has in the last two decades constructed or renovated mosques in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia, northern Cyprus, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

A $100 million, 15-acre Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center (TACCC), which includes a large mosque, is being built in Lanham, Maryland, 14 miles from Washington, D.C.  It is “a project of the government of Turkey” and the Turkish American Community Center.  The latter’s older mosque is “related to the Republic of Turkey and the Department of Religious Affairs [Diyanet].”  Several months ago, PM Erdogan placed a ceremonial stone at the TACCC construction site.

No truly secular state would do these things.   Nor would it persecute persons of other religions.

Religious Repression

Last year the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), established by Congress, placed Turkey in its worst category, a “Country of Particular Concern,” alongside Burma, China, Pakistan, and a dozen others.

Turkey, noted the USCIRF, “significantly restricts religious freedom, especially for non-Muslim religious minority communities – including the Greek, Armenian, and SyriacOrthodoxChurches, the Roman Catholic and ProtestantChurches, and the Jewish community.”

Restrictions that “deny non-Muslim communities the rights to train clergy, offer religious education, and own and maintain places of worship, have led to their decline, and in some cases their virtual disappearance.”

Such mistreatment of Christians, numbering only about 100,000, is particularly reprehensible given that Turkey carried out genocide from 1915 to 1923 against millions of indigenous Christian Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs, including many Catholics and Protestants.

The persecution of non-Muslims continued even after the Turkish Republic came about in 1923.  The infamous Capital Tax (Varlik Vergisi) program during World War II, as but one example, deliberately taxed Christians and Jews at extortionate rates that often exceeded their income.  Men were sent to labor camps in the interior when unable to pay.  Families were bankrupted.  Only an international outcry stopped the program.

Thousands of Christian churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, and other community properties have been continually seized by Turkey in the past several decades.

Though Turkey has recently returned some of these properties under international pressure, the vast majority has not been, and probably will not be, returned.

Countless ancient Armenian churches and monasteries, such as Saint Mark’s (Nshan) in Sivas, have been deliberately destroyed, sometimes with explosives. Others serve as stables.   Earlier this year in the cities of Iznik and Trabzon, old Greek churches were converted to mosques.

Alevism is a religion that has some 10 to 20 million adherents in Turkey. Complex and somewhat mysterious, it contains elements of Shia Islam, Sufism, paganism, and other spiritual and religious traditions.  Alevis worship in houses called cemevis, not mosques.  Alevis and cemevis are not recognized by the Turkish government.  Alevis complain bitterly, to little avail.

Alevis have long been the victims of discrimination and even violent attacks, such as in Sivas in 1993 when 35 leading Alevis were murdered by mobs, and most recently this year in Ankara, when police fired tear-gas at protesting Alevis.

“Turkey may look like a secular state on paper,” says Izzettin Dogan, a leading Alevi, “but in terms of international law it is actually a Sunni Islamic state.”  He is correct, but most of the outside world is oblivious to voices such as his.

True Secularism

Some Turks feel that their country is secular because the Diyanet’s hegemony moderates Islam against extremist tendencies.  There may be some truth to that.

But as secularism must include a respectful distance between religion and state, Turkey would still not qualify.   Along with Turkey’s domestic religious repression, and employing the Diyanet in foreign policy, the claim of secularism is simply fallacious.

The Turkish government is in full-blown denial about secularism and religious freedom, as evidenced by PM Erdogan’s preposterous claim two years ago that

If Turkey is ever to be secular, it must allow the free exercise of all religions – including Islam – and guarantee the rights of the faithful to be free from harassment and compulsion.   The Turkish government’s acknowledgement of its past and present wrongs, especially to the non-Turkish and non-Muslim communities, and making genuine amends, must be part of this process.

Until then – particularly in the West – mainstream media, governments, religious leaders, academicians, and political analysts should cease swallowing Turkey’s fraudulent claim of secularism.

New York Times, Vanunu And 12 Days Before Christmas

The response from the NY Times to the following two exclusive submissions was the Auto-Reply that they were received.

For the next 12 Days before Christmas I will be to the NY TIMES, such as this:

 and 12 Days Before 

I also will be TWEETING it to every Media outlet I can find at ; but first a little background:

I learned about Vanunu while researching my first historical novel and wrote him into the Chapter THANKSGIVING EVE 1987 

A few months later, I met Vanunu during my first of 8 journeys to both sides of The Wall in Israel Palestine and wrote that experience in the Chapter 16 Days in Israel Palestine

The last time I saw Vanunu was a week before Thanksgiving 2013:

One correction I have repeatedly addressed on the WWW is the legend of Cindy/Cheryl and the “honey trap”:

When I asked Vanunu what he was thinking when he took off with Cindy, he maintained eye contact and readily replied,

“It wasn’t like THAT-when Maxwell’s paper published my photo without ever talking to me and some of the stolen Dimona photos with a very bad story against me, I knew the Mossad was after me. Cindy said she had a sister in Rome and I thought I would be safe there until I could return to London.

“We went to movies and art galleries. I trusted her.

“But, as soon as I got into the apartment, I was hit on the head and drugged. When I woke up and they took me for interrogation, they threw the Times article on the table and said, ‘Look, what you did.’ I was so relieved they had published it and that I had done what I did.”

What ‘Cindy’ did was masquerade as an American beautician on holiday in London. In reality, ‘Cindy’ was the American Mossad agent, Cheryl Hanin Bentov who was using her sister-in-laws passport!

It is illegal under American-Israeli diplomatic protocols for the Mossad to operate in America.

MY Submissions to The New York Times:

Nov. 6, 2013
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Dear New York Times,

As the current leader of the International Cause dedicated to help free Mordechai Vanunu, I am informing you of Mordechai Vanunu’s mid December Appeal.

On 6 December, Vanunu wrote: “Court hearing against the restrictions not to leave Israel, schedule hearing in the Supreme court will be Dec’ 16, 2013. The same Appeal was in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. The court can send me free and end all this case from 1986-2013.”

In 1986, Israel kidnapped Vanunu from Rome and after a closed door trial, convicted him of espionage and treason. 

Although released on 21 April 2004, Israel has denied Vanunu the right to  “get on the first plane out of here.”

In 1985, Vanunu suffered a crisis of conscience, when he realized he was “a bolt” in the manufacturing of WMD.

After a supervisor carelessly left the keys in the shower room, Vanunu seized his opportunity to document top secret locations within Israel’s 7-story underground nuclear facility and he spent a few intense hours doing just that!

View Vanunu’s photos of the Dimona at his YouTube Channel:

A few months later, Vanunu leaves Israel and travels throughout Europe with the two rolls of undeveloped film. 

After meeting Peter Hounam, a reporter for the London Sunday Times, Vanunu shares all he knew in his position as a mid-level technician and the two develop the film.

A total of 1,200 pages of transcript of Vanunu’s closed door trial have been released.
Defense witness Peter Hounam stated, “We did not pay him money, but only covered his expenses…Money did not motivate him.”

During my conversations with Vanunu beginning in 2005, he told me:

“All the secrets I had were published in 1989 in an important book, by [Nuclear Physicist] Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East.”

Barnaby testified, “I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel’s secrecy laws he explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically.

“Israel’s political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about Israel’s nuclear-weapons programme and he found this unacceptable in a democracy. 

“The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel’s nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985.”

Vanunu also told me:

“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’

“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.

“The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out.

“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.

“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”

Contact Vanunu through his website HERE

Most sincerely.
Eileen Fleming ###

November 9, 2013

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Dear New York Times,

Photo of Mordechai Vanunu, by me 24 November 2013, east Jerusalem.

As the current leader of the international cause dedicated to free Mordechai Vanunu I write to alert you that on 9 December, Vanunu wrote:

“Changes in date, Court hearing against the restrictions not to leave Israel, schedule hearing in the Supreme court will be Dec’ 25, 2013, moved from the Dec’ 16, the same Appeal was 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. The court can send me free and end all this case from 1986-2013.”

The restrictions that have subjected Vanunu to 24/7 surveillance [his movements, phone calls and emails] since he emerged from 18 years behind bars on 21 April 2004, come from the Emergency Defense Regulations, which were implemented by Britain against Palestinians and Jews after World War II.

Attorney Yaccov Shapiro, who later became Israel’s Minister Of Justice, described the Emergency Defense Regulations as “unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany.”

View Vanunu moments after emerging from 18 years behind bars:

On 2 October 2009, The Washington Times reported that President Obama agreed to keep Israel’s nukes ‘secret’ and reaffirmed a 4-decade-old understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.

Three officials spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, but all said Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May 2009.

On 24, November 2006, Vanunu wrote:

“My lawyer succeeded to reveal a few very important facts: This General of the Army also was not allowed to see all the secrets that he is required to protect by these restrictions that they claim I know them. So, he gave orders of restrictions without knowing what he is protecting or that he is also following orders blindly, and Mossad Sheen Bet using its authority for just punishing me.

“He testified that it is not a crime for me to talk with foreigners in general anywhere. He testified that I can speak freely to any Israeli citizens about anything; it is not his concern what I am saying to them. These Israelis can give this information to any foreigners. It was difficult for the Judge to understand why this dichotomy exits between foreigners and Israelis. It means that it is not about secrecy but about something else.”

In 2004, Yossi Melman wrote for Haaretz:

“This is the secret that hasn’t yet been told in the affair: the story of the security fiasco that made it possible for Vanunu to do what he did, and the story of the subsequent attempts at cover-up, whitewashing and protection of senior figures in the defense establishment, who were bent on divesting themselves of responsibility for the failure.”

Will the New York Times shine a light on Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower’s nearly 10 year struggle for freedom from Israel before his Christmas Day appeal?

Most sincerely,
Eileen Fleming

Concealment & Truth In Palestine And Beyond

The following is the text of a talk I gave at the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London last Saturday, 23 November, 2013.

History, we are told, is an attempt to narrate the past. But in reality, more than often history has little to do with revealing the past. It is instead an orchestrated and institutional attempt to shove the shame deep under the carpet.

Much Jewish history texts, for instance, are there to divert the attention from the peculiar and tragic fact that along their history, Jews have managed to bring on themselves an endless chain of disasters. But Palestinian history at large,  is no different. After more than a century of liberation struggle, the situation in Palestine is worse than ever, yet Palestinian scholarship, as we will soon see, is drifting away from any possible understanding of the circumstances that led to their ongoing disaster.

Although the Brits have many war crimes attached to their names, the British Imperial War Museum decided to allocate a whole floor to the Jewish Holocaust instead of featuring one of the British-made genocides. The Brits, like everyone else, prefer to conceal their shame.

Historical accounts are commonly there to suppress the truth and conceal our shame. Yet, it is far from clear who is in charge, who decides what must be covered up and which path must be taken in order to suppress the truth.

Apparently, restricting the terminology and limiting freedom of expression by means of (political) correctness are probably amongst the most popular methods. Sadly enough, Palestine solidarity discourse is a spectacular test case in that regard. 

A brief examination of each of the terminological pillars and the principles that shape our vision of the conflict, of its history and of its possible solution are there to conceal the obvious causes, ideologies and belief system that drive the crimes in the Middle East in general and in Palestine in particular.

Zoom In

We’ll now scrutinize the terminology and notions that are involved in the debate over Palestine and expose once again the deceitful nature that is unfortunately intrinsic to the contemporary progressive discourse.

Zionism – Palestinian solidarity members are required to avoid the ‘J’ word and to use the word ‘Zionism’ instead. I recently revealed that Ali Abunimah, one of my current arch detractors, advised me a few years ago to refer to Zion when I really think Jewish so he and I “might find grounds for a lot of agreement….” In fact  Abunimah was not alone. Jewish Voice For Peace approached me with a pretty much similar offer about the same time.

The truth of the matter is that Israeli politics has little to do with Zionism. Israelis  are hardly familiar with Zionist ideology, nor they are concerned or motivated by Zionist praxis.  Zionism is largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse that vows to establish a Jewish National home in Palestine  and to civilize the Jew by means of nationalism. Israel is obviously the product of the Zionist project; however, the Israelis see themselves as post-revolutionary subjects – they transformed the Zionist dream into a practical reality.

Thus, criticism of Zionism per se hardly touches Israelis or Israeli politics. If anything, it actually diverts the attention from the crimes that are committed by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people.

But then, why do we use the term Zionism instead of referring to Jewish power, Jewish politics or the Jewish State?  Simple: we do not want to offend the ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews and Jews in general. We consciously choose to let Israel off the hook. Apparently we much prefer to target a phantasmic imaginary object that means very little rather than simply calling spade a spade.

Colonialism – Palestinian solidarity activists are expected to pepper their sentences with different permutations of the word ‘colonial’ with the hope that the more they use it the more it is likely to stick eventually. Consequently, activists and scholars commonly refer to Israel and Zionism as a ‘colonial project’. But they are obviously wrong.

Colonialism is traditionally defined as a clear material exchange between a ‘mother State’ and a ‘settler State’. Israel is no doubt a settler state, yet, no one can suggest who exactly was or is her mother.*

So why do we refer to Israel and Zionism as a colonial project? Simple: it saves us from admitting that the Jewish national project is indeed a unique project with no precedent in history. It would save us from admitting that we do not understand this project nor do we know where it aims. The Left and the so-called ‘anti-Zionist’ Jews cling to the colonial paradigm because it locates Israel and Zionism within a model they and their audience are slightly familiar with. The colonial paradigm suggests that the Jewish national project is as vicious as the British or French colonialism. But the grave truth is that we are dealing here with a unique form of abusive nationalist, racist project.

Settler Colonialism – in recent years a new terminological spin popped up within the Palestine solidarity ranks, namely ‘settler colonialism.’ I guess that my criticism of the colonial paradigm has shaken a few of the so-called progressive and ‘anti’ Zionists intellectuals, and they were pushed to revise their theoretical narrative. Their effort brought to the world a new deformed dysfunctional theoretical baby. But sadly enough, ‘settler colonialism’ also hardly explains a thing. It is rather a desperate attempt to further conceal the truth of the Jewish National project.

Settler Colonialism refers to the situation in which Super Power ‘A’ facilitates the settlement of Ethnic Group ‘B’ on Land ‘C’. Such an event may lead eventually to some grave consequences as far as indigenous population ‘D’ is concerned.

But here is the problem. This historical scenario A-B-C-D has nothing in common with Zionism, Israel or the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In reality, it was Zionists (B) who actually persuaded Britain, at the time a super power (A), that a Jewish Homeland in Palestine (C) is the right way forward. It was also Zionists (B) who promised to help pushing America into World War One that led Lord Balfour to commit the British empire (A) to the Zionist cause. In short, instead of the A-B-C-D chain of events, when it comes to Zionism, what we easily detect is a B-A-C-D chronology. It is the ethnic group ‘B’ that pushes Super Power ‘A’ to act in its favour.

But then we may want to ask ourselves why is it that Palestinian solidarity activists such as Ben White are consciously lying when they speaks about “settler-colonial past and present.”  Unfortunately White is not alone, the list of academics and scholars who participate in the dissemination of this false narrative is pretty impressive.

Why do they deceive, is it because they are an ignorant bunch? Not at all, they are actually dedicated scholars, it is just intellectual integrity that they lack, and severely.

Spreading the ‘settler colonialism’  narrative is, once again, intended to divert the attention from the embarrassing fact that already in 1917 the Jewish Lobby was amongst the strongest lobbies in the land. Such an admission could easily offend many Jews within the Palestine solidarity movement. Seemingly, we really do not want to offend anyone but intelligence.

Apartheid – Solidarity activists are inclined to refer to Israel as an apartheid state. They obviously let the Jewish State off the hook. Apartheid is commonly defined as a racially driven system of exploitation. But Israel is not Apartheid, it is not interested in exploitation. Israel is far worse, it wants the Palestinians gone. Israel is a racially driven, nationalist ethnic cleanser. In that regard, Israel is very similar to Nazi Germany. But this is exactly the equation we are supposed to avoid because it may hurt the Jews and even confuse the Left.

Two State / One State Debate – The philosophy behind the ‘one state solution’ is obviously ethical and universal.  But there is one slight problem. It finds no political partners or supporters within the Israeli society. Why? Because Israel is the Jewish State and the notion of Peace is totally foreign to Israeli and Jewish culture. The word ‘Shalom’ that is commonly translated as peace, reconciliation and harmony, is understood in Hebrew as ‘security for the Jews’.

Accordingly, it was very embarrassing to read Palestinian prominent intellectual Joseph Massad make some gross mistakes misinterpreting the word ‘peace’ in the context of the Zionist ideology and Israeli politics.

In a recent article named Peace Is War: Israeli settler-colonialism and the Palestinians Massad wrote:  “Waging war as peace is so central to Zionist and Israeli propaganda that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which killed 20,000 civilians, was termed ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’”.

If Massad had committed to proper scholarship he would probably find out that, as far as Israelis are concerned, operation ‘Shlom Ha-Galil’ really meant ‘security’ for the Galilee rather than ‘Peace for Galilee’. Massad could have saved himself this intellectual blunder if he had read The Wandering Who rather than attempting to burn the book, whose author actually delves into the topic occasionally.

Israelis would support the One State Solution as long as it is One Jewish State. As Paul Larudee suggested recently, the Israelis would also support the Two State Solution as long as it is Two Jewish States.   Yet the only question that bugs me is, why would a Palestinian blogger such as Ali Abunimah  go out of his way to stop us from looking into the tribal and racist culture that drives the Jewish State?

Is it possible that some of the prominent Palestine voices also do not want to offend the Jews? I will let you judge.

Palestinian Cause

Is it really the Right of Return?  or 1948? For many years I was convinced that the Nakba was at the core of the Palestinian plight. But then monitoring BDS Movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction of Israeli goods, culture and academia) politics taught me that I could have been deluded.

When BDS was formed in 2005 this was its first goal:

1. Ending its (Israeli) occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; (2005)

But then, without any attempt to discuss the matter publicly, BDS headquarters in Ramallah changed its first goal. It now reads:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;

Some efforts have been made to make sure that Palestinian organisations are aware of this crucial change. Adding the 1967 made it clear that BDS de facto accepted the existence of a Jewish State over Palestine.

Interestingly enough, not many Palestinians were really outraged by BDS dropping the 1948 and accepting Israel as a fact. I guess that the meaning of it is simple. As far as Palestinians in exile in the West  are concerned, 1948 and  the Right of Return are not the real topic. I guess that such an agenda is not driven by the concern for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon or Syria. I assume that refugees in Gaza and Jenin may also be outraged but, as things stand,  we can hardly hear their voices anyway. I guess that BDS is there to appease the ‘Jews in the movement’ and even liberal Zionists. This is hardly surprising considering the embarrassing fact that liberal Zionist George Soros who funds the Light Zionist J-Street also funds BDS as well as many other Palestinian NGOs.

Zoom Out

As we can see; Zionism, Colonialism, Settler-Colonialism, Apartheid, BDS and even The One State Solution are all misleading concepts and they are shaped to not offend the anti Zionist Jews and even Jews in general. This surreal and macabre political act explains why the solidarity movement has failed to deliver on every and each front, except one of course. With the support of liberal Zionists such as Soros, Palestine solidarity is now a little industrial affair that is pretty successful in maintaining itself. The absurd outcome is that the newly emerging Palestine solidarity industry actually benefits from the constant escalation of the crisis in Palestine – the worse is the situation on the ground, the more funding is pumped through the industry.

I guess that if we want to grasp what is behind this constant regression, concealment and repression are obviously the key words.

Concealment and repression lead towards stagnation. This is exactly what we see in Palestine and for more than a while – 100 years of struggle that led to a complete failure. Palestinian Solidarity is now farther than ever from understanding Zionism, Israel and the conflict. The so-called ‘movement’ is entrenched within a muddy terminological swamp that results in intellectual and spiritual paralysis.

This is exactly the point where truth and truth seeking come into play. The role of the intellectual and the artist is to unveil the concealed. To look into the pain and to dig into the essence. This search for essentiality is similar to the role of the psychoanalyst who delves into the realm of the unconscious.

When it comes to Palestine we have to grasp, once and for all, what the Jewish State stands for. We have to understand what Judaism and Jewishness are. We have to grasp who are the Jews, what unifies them and vice versa. We must learn the relationships between these distinct categories and Zionism and only then may we be ready to form some pragmatic and practical thoughts on Zionism, the Jewish State and its lobbies. By the time we are ready to do so, we may as well grasp the role of Jews-Only groups within the solidarity ‘movement’. We may comprehend how they have been shaping the discourse and suppressing the truth by dominating our language and restricting our intellectual liberties. By the time we are familiar with Jewish tribal culture ideology and politics, we may as well grasp the role of the ‘Sabbath Goy’, the caretaker who performs the services Jews prefer to leave to theGoyim.

But our role doesn’t end there. We also must grasp what Palestine means. How is it possible that Palestine scholarship is withdrawing rather than progressing. How is it possible that in the 70’s Palestinians were the world’s leading guerrilla fighters but not anymore. What happened and why?   What is it that the Palestinians want?  Can we even talk about Palestinians or are they a fragmented society that is split geographically, culturally, spiritually, politically and ideologically? And if they are divided, who is it that keeps them divided? Is there anything that can unite them?

I believe that the Jewish progressive politics together with the non-dialectic Left are to be blamed for this political disaster and terminological impotence. We are dealing with a concealment apparatus that forsakes the future just to sustain a remote echo of a decaying 19th ideology. It is there to nourish the forgetting of Being. It is there to make us aloof to the grave reality we are living in by means of intellectual and spiritual suppression.

When 1984’s Orwell wrote about Newspeak, he had Britain in mind. He foresaw the devastating impact of the so-called progressive minds around him. He could predict where The Guardians of correctness might be leading us all. And, for a reason, he made Immanuel Goldstein, the imaginary false dissent icon.

My message to you today is simple – true liberation is the ability to learn how to think, to learn how to be intrigued and irritated. Liberation is to unveil the concealed, to think and re-think, to view, re-view and revise.  To think is to aim at the essence, at the bottom of things, at the categorical. To think is to be able to distinguish between the symptoms and the disease.  Liberation is to burn bridges compulsively and enthusiastically and to bear the consequences. Liberation is to pursue truth relentlessly. This is exactly the moment when pain becomes pleasure.

Wikipedia Under Threat

Wikipedia is a wonderful invention. But precisely because it’s so trusted and convenient, people with their own agendas keep trying to take it over. Editing wars are common. According to researchers at Oxford University, the most controversial subjects worldwide include Israel and God.

This is not surprising. Everyone knows that there are opposing views on politics and religion, and many people recognise a biased account when they see it. But in the realm of science, things are different. Most people have no scientific expertise and believe that science is objective. Their trust is now being abused systematically by a highly motivated group of activists called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.

Scepticism is a normal, healthy attitude of doubt. Unfortunately it can also be used as a weapon to attack opponents. In scientific and medical contexts, organized skepticism is a crusade to propagate scientific materialism. (In Britain, skeptical organizations use the American spelling, with a k.)

Most materialists believe that the mind is nothing more than the physical activity of the brain, psychic phenomena are illusory, and complementary and alternative medical systems are fraudulent, or at best produce placebo effects.

Most materialists are also atheists: if science can, in principle, explain everything, there is no need for God. Belief in God is a hangover from a pre-scientific age. God is nothing but an idea in human minds and hence in human brains.

Several advocacy organizations promote this materialist ideology in the media and in educational institutions. The largest and best funded is the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The Guerrilla Skeptics have carried the crusading zeal of organized skepticism into the realm of Wikipedia, and use it as a soapbox to propagate their beliefs.

There is a conflict at the heart of science between the spirit of free enquiry and the materialist worldview. I gave a talk this subject at a TEDx event in London earlier this year, in which I discussed the ten dogmas of modern science. I showed that by turning the dogmas into questions they can be examined critically in the light of the findings of science itself. For example, the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same becomes “Is the total amount of matter and energy always the same?” Most physicists now think that the universe contains vast amount of dark matter and dark energy, whose nature is literally obscure, constituting 96 percent of the universe. Regular matter and energy are only about 4 percent of reality. Is the total amount of dark matter always the same? No one knows. Some physicists think that the total amount of dark energy increases as the universe expands. Proponents of a hypothetical form of dark energy called quintessence specifically suggest that it produces different amounts of energy over time.

My talk was removed from the TEDx web site after furious protests from militant skeptics, who accused me of propagating pseudoscience. This sparked off a controversy that went viral on the internet, documented here. Most participants in online discussions were very disappointed that TED had been frightened into submission, and TED themselves against me.

This summer, soon after the TED controversy, a commando squad of skeptics captured the Wikipedia page about me. They have occupied and controlled it ever since, rewriting my biography with as much negative bias as possible, to the point of defamation. At the beginning of the “Talk” page, on which editorial changes are discussed, they have posted a warning to editors who do not share their biases:

“A common objection made by new arrivals is that the article presents Sheldrake’s work in an unsympathetic light and that criticism of it is too extensive or violates Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View policy.”

Several new arrivals have indeed attempted to restore a more balanced picture, but have had a bewildering variety of rules thrown at them, and warned that they will be banned if they persist in opposing the skeptics. Craig Weiler gives some telling examples in his newly posted blog called “The Wikipedia battle for Rupert Sheldrake’s biography”. Fortunately, a few editors arguing for a more neutral point of view have not yet been bullied into silence. An editing war is raging as you read this.

The Guerrilla Skeptics are well trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams, contrary to Wikipedia rules. The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbik. She explains how her teams work in a . She now has over 90 guerrillas operating in 17 different languages. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to “control information”, and Ms Gerbik glories in the power that she and her warriors wield. They have already seized control of many Wikipedia pages, deleted entries on subjects they disapprove of, and boosted the biographies of atheists.

As the Guerrilla Skeptics have demonstrated, Wikipedia can easily be subverted by determined groups of activists, despite its well-intentioned policies and mediation procedures. Perhaps one solution would be for experienced editors to visit the talk pages of sites where editing wars are taking place, rather like UN Peacekeeping Forces, and try to re-establish a neutral point of view. But this would not help in cases where there are no editors to oppose the Guerrilla Skeptics, or where they have been silenced.

If nothing is done, Wikipedia will lose its credibility, and its financial backers will withdraw their support. I hope the noble aims of Wikipedia will prevail.

Source: 

“Find Them And Destroy Them!” – Canadian Writer Subject To Multiple Arrests

When Kevin Galalae uncovered a secret spying program aimed at University students in the UK, he did not expect his life to blow up.

He did not expect to be bankrupted, locked out of his home or for his children to be ripped from his side. Nor did Galalae, a Romanian born professional writer who had been living in Canada since 1985, expect to become the target of multiple arrests by the Canadian authorities.

Six arrests in two years, to be exact. And now, two months after the most recent charges against him were stayed by a Canadian court, Galalae is facing yet another potential arrest.

Galalae’s saga began in 2009, when he enrolled in an online political philosophy course at Oxford University, in preparation for a Master’s course into which he had been accepted by the University of Leicester. When he found himself censored and subsequently removed from the course, he began to investigate why.

That is when Kevin Galalae uncovered that he had been targeted by a covert program of censorship and surveillance, SAC, which had been operating in Britain since 2007. SAC, he soon learned, is part of a wider counter terrorism program called CONTEST.

Dismayed that he had been caught in a net intended to ferret out terrorists, Galalae subsequently sued the UK at the European Court of Human Rights. His lawsuit was lodged in March of 2011 and in April he flew to Strasbourg, France, to commence a month-long hunger strike at the Council of Europe in order to compel European politicians to condemn SAC and to compensate all students who had been so targeted.

Called back to Canada by pleas from his wife, Cindy, Galalae found that his wife, alarmed by his activism, had taken the children and fled to her parents’ home. She had also locked him out of their mutual bank account.

When Galalae showed up at Cindy Marshall’s parents’ home, looking for his family, he was met by a plainclothes police officer who informed him that he was “trespassing.” Galalae was subsequently taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. After three days, the doctor refused to hold him any longer and the police then showed up and arrested him on charges of “harassment” for his efforts to see his two children.

It is now two years and multiple arrests later. The Oslo Times ran a comprehensive article in May of 2012, detailing many of the intervening arrests and charges against Galalae. On advice of his lawyer, David Sinnett, Galalae pled guilty to the initial harassment charge and also to a charge of taking his wife’s emails, which he had taken to use as evidence of his innocence. Galalae fought all subsequent charges, none of which have resulted in sentencing or a guilty charge. Galalae’s longest period of detention was nine months, when he was held in Quinte Detention Center from December 2012 to September of this year. All charges against him were stayed due to the Crown failing to provide disclosure.

On September 4, 2013, the very day that the criminal court judge stayed Counts 1-8 against Galalae (the remainder of the counts were stayed on September 11), Crown Attorney Elisabeth Foxton filed further papers with the court alleging a recognizance violation which had taken place in November of 2011. The alleged recognizance violation refers to failure to reside at a reported residence during prosecution for charges, all of which were subsequently stayed. Of grave concern is that while the Criminal Court insists that there are no further matters concerning Kevin Galalae on the record, the Superior Court, where his recognizance violation will be heard, insists that only the first batch of Counts were stayed and that the other counts are still pending.

But this dissonance in court records is only a portion of the bizarre paper trail in this case. Evidence reviewed by this reporter includes apparently falsified police reports, finessed psychiatric records which attempt to create a file for non-existent treatment of illusory depression and records indicating repeated police fumbling as Detective Diane McCarthy and Constable Rob Lalonde attempt to tweak records in such a clumsy manner that the only reality that emerges is the over eagerness of the Kingston police to find an excuse, any excuse, to jail Kevin Galalae.

In addition, this reporter has reviewed correspondence between Galalae and the attorneys who were pledged to represent him revealing that said attorneys were at some juncture bound by the Crown from giving disclosure to their own client. One must ask how an attorney can represent a client when constrained from discussing the evidence with him.

On November 27, Galalae will appear in Kingston Superior court concerning this two year old recognizance violation on charges which have already been adjudicated. He has appealed to the OIPRD, which is the equivalent of Internal Affairs, to review the Kingston police’s actions in his matter.

States Galalae: “The rule of law no longer exists in Canada.” He reports thinking of his children, whom he has not seen in over two years, every single day. Writes Galalae:

“To force me into submission the Canadian authorities have taken my children away and are holding them hostage until such time as I acquiesce to global autocracy. They have accomplished this with the full assistance of my wife and her family, who have sacrificed me and my children to keep their social positions. But I will never submit. I will fight until my last breath to free my children and the world from the double yoke of political oppression and economic exploitation, which is all that remains of the so-called free world, a far more pitiful state of affairs than the communist world I was born in and left behind. ”

Galalae’s book on chemical and biological depopulation initiatives, entitled “Killing Us Softly: Causes and Consequences of the Global Depopulation Policy” is scheduled for publication by Progressive Press next year.

Our Friends Are Killing Us

There is a prophetic verse of Scripture that records the conquering Messiah as being asked about the wounds that are in his hands. He responds, “Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” (Zechariah 13:6 KJV) Indeed. It wasn’t the Romans that were fixated with killing Christ; it was the Lord’s own brethren. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” (John 1:11 KJV) In like manner, our nation is quickly losing its liberties and Natural rights, not because of our enemies, but because of our so-called friends and brothers.

Edmund Burke summarized it beautifully: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” And, for the most part, that is what good men are doing today: nothing!

As regular readers of this column know, I am passionate in my defense of the Natural right of self-defense. I firmly believe that the only thing standing between us and tyranny is the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The freedom of speech, the right to assemble and redress government, the right to be secure in our own homes, the right to a trial by jury, the freedom of worship, etc., all depend on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. When the people of America surrender this right, all of the other rights will quickly disappear.

Furthermore, Daniel Webster was absolutely right when he said, “Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster, and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” Amen!

Not only does the Second Amendment protect the liberties of the people of the United States, the Second Amendment protects the free peoples of the world. Without the armed citizenry of the people of America, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, France, and the rest of the free world would plummet into abject tyranny and oppression. Look at how socialistic and enslaved people in these countries already are. Can one imagine how quickly they would plunge into the Dark Ages without the power and influence of the last bulwark of liberty: a free and armed United States of America?

Daniel Webster uttered another profound truth: “There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter: from the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.”

Ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what many of our so-called friends and brothers have become: “instruments of their own undoing.” It is not the liberals, socialists, amoralists, elitists, globalists, etc., who are killing us; it is the pastors, Christians, conservatives, Republicans, etc., who sit back and do nothing that are killing us.

Let me say it plainly: neocon Republicans do far more damage to the cause of liberty than do liberal Democrats. Do-nothing pastors and Christians do far more damage to the cause of liberty than do atheists and agnostics. Compromising conservatives do far more damage to the cause of liberty than do liberals.

Come on, folks! Think about it: who endangered the cause of independence more: King George III or Benedict Arnold? A known enemy is far less dangerous than an enemy who pretends to be your friend.

All over America, our “friends” are selling out the cause of liberty. Every pastor who refuses to publicly repudiate the forces that are attacking our freedom is selling out the cause of liberty. Every Republican who refuses to stand firm against the forces that are attacking our freedom is selling out the cause of liberty. Every conservative who refuses to resist the forces that are attacking our freedom is selling out the cause of liberty.

There is nothing new about big-government zealots. They have been with us ever since the Tower of Babel. They were with us in 1775 and 1776. Freedom does not depend upon the absence of would-be tyrants; it depends upon the presence of those who are willing to resist would-be tyrants. And that is what seems to be vanishing.

Folks, this is an absolute truism: not all Christians are friends of liberty; not all pastors are friends of liberty; not all conservatives are friends of liberty; not all Republicans are friends of liberty; not all military personnel are friends of liberty; not all policemen are friends of liberty; not all attorneys are friends of liberty; not all physicians are friends of liberty; not all teachers and professors are friends of liberty; and not all gun owners are friends of liberty. Anyone who refuses to resist the forces of evil that attack our Constitution, Declaration, and Bill of Rights is no friend of liberty.

For example, I have been a long-time subscriber to a couple of gun magazines: Guns and Ammo and Handguns. Both of these magazines are published by the same parent company. When President Obama and Senator Feinstein attempted to ban semi-automatic rifles and full-size rifle and pistol magazines earlier this year, I kept waiting for the editors and writers of these two magazines to sound the clarion call of resistance. I waited and waited and waited. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Throughout the entire debate, there was not one peep of protest to these egregious gun control laws proposed by Obama and Feinstein in these magazines. This in spite of the fact that practically every page of both magazines is filled with the very arms that would have been banned to the general public had Obama and Feinstein gotten their way. Had the gun-grabbing tyrants been victorious, I suppose Guns and Ammo magazine would simply have re-invented itself in order to fit into the new Amerika in much the same way that so many companies did in Nazi Germany. I guess they would simply have changed the name of the magazine to Military and Police Guns and Ammo.

I wrote the publisher of the two magazines mentioned above and explained why, after so many years as a faithful subscriber, I was not renewing my subscription. Of course, I received no reply. And now I know why.

Writing for Breitbart.com, AWR Hawkins filed this report: “In the December issue of Guns & Ammo magazine, editor Dick Metcalf uses his ‘Backstop’ column to argue that all constitutional rights need regulation, including the 2nd Amendment.

“TheTruthAboutGuns.com has scanned and posted a copy of the column online. In it, Metcalf explains why he chose to address the regulation of constitutional rights: ‘I bring this up because way too many gun owners still believe that any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement. The fact is that all Constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.’

“Metcalf says he receives ‘bags of mail every year’ from people complaining of the myriad regulations related to concealed carry permits. He says these readers ‘typically argue’ that the 2nd Amendment ‘is all the authority they need’ to keep and bear arms, to carry a gun with them where they go.

“In response, Metcalf writes: ‘I [wonder] whether those same people believe that just anybody should be able to buy a vehicle and take it out on public roadways without any kind of driver’s training, test, or license.’

“Metcalf misses the point. The 2nd Amendment protects a natural right; that’s why it is not to be infringed. Owning and operating a vehicle is not a natural right, so comparing it to gun ownership is like comparing the ability to own and operate an airplane with the rights to freedom of speech and religion.

“This is an important point because our Founders’ central reason for creating the Bill of Rights was to hedge in a body of natural rights as off-limits to government regulation and interference.

“The 2nd Amendment says, ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ Metcalf has seized on the words ‘well regulated,’ taking them out of context to the detriment of ‘shall not be infringed.’”

See the report at:

Hooray for Mr. Hawkins! He has a grasp of Natural Law. That is something that Dick Metcalf obviously doesn’t possess. The sad thing is Mr. Metcalf occupies a very trusted and influential position that should be utilized to protect the Second Amendment. Instead, he is using his position to help destroy the Second Amendment. Like I said, not all gun owners are the friends of liberty.

But as long as Guns and Ammo magazine is rolling in the dough, don’t expect any change. I, for one, am not going to help pay a gun magazine editor’s salary that is using the money I send him to use the pages of the magazine to facilitate the destruction of the liberties that keep my children and grandchildren free. That means I have kissed my subscription to Guns and Ammo and Handguns magazines goodbye.

By the same token, how long are Christians today who say they believe in the Second Amendment (and the rest of the Bill of Rights) going to keep sending their tithes and offerings to these churches where the pastors refuse to publicly resist these draconian gun control bills such as were recently introduced by Obama and Feinstein? How long are they going to keep filling the pews of these do-nothing churches? As long as these say-nothing pastors see their pews and offering plates full, don’t expect anything to change.

I will say it plainly: if you attend a church and didn’t hear your pastor oppose the Obama/Feinstein gun control bills from the pulpit earlier this year, YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF THAT CHURCH. The only thing holding this republic together is the people’s right to keep and bear arms–especially semi-automatic rifles with large-capacity magazines. By refusing to resist evil, your pastor has become an enemy of liberty. Wittingly or not, he is helping to put the chains of slavery around the necks of your children and grandchildren. Why would you stay and support such a pastor and church?

As Christ was betrayed and rejected by His “friends,” so, too, the liberties and freedoms of our country are being betrayed and rejected by its “friends.”

Armistice Day, 95 Years Later

After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War ended 95 years ago on November, 11th 1918. The most tragic event in the history of mankind, that war destroyed a vibrant, magnificently creative civilization. A fundamentally decent and well-ordered world was shattered forever. The floodgates of hell in which we live now were opened.

It was truly the first global war—la Grande Guerre, der grosse Krieg. Tens of millions of men were mobilized. In France and Germany four fifths of all men between 18 and 50 donned the uniform. The entire human, physical and moral resources of Europe’s major powers and a host of smaller nations were strained like never before in history. The weapons were deployed on a massive scale, killing machines that only a generation earlier did not exist: airplanes, tanks, poison gasses, submarines. The lethal mix of the machine gun and barbed wire made “going over the top” tantamount to a death sentence.

The war claimed close to 20 million lives, soldiers and civilians in roughly equal proportion. Millions of young men were maimed and damaged forever. Epidemics during and immediately after the war claimed millions more. Even more horrendous are that war’s moral and spiritual consequences. Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the sequel known as the Second World War, and the wounded civilization we now live in, are its poisoned fruits.

How it actually happened, or, as Ranke would put it, wie es eigentlich gewesen?

As we near the centennial of its outbreak, it is not uncommon for educated non-historians who think about such matters to assume that the war in 1914 was the result of a series of blunders and miscalculations in various Great Power courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries. The key interwar American text on the subject, Sidney B. Fay’s Origins of the World War, suggested that nobody wanted the war but—like in a Greek drama—forces beyond the actors’ control and understanding drove everyone into the maelstrom. Implicit in this narrative was the view that the European system was so inherently unstable that a single terrorist act by a troubled Serb adolescent in a troubled Balkan city could fatally disrupt it.

That view was wrong. As one of the most prominent German historians of the 20th century, Fritz Fischer, demonstrated in his masterly Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s Bid for Global Dominance), the Kaiserreich military and political elite welcomed the prospect of war resulting from the attentat in Sarajevo as an opportunity to make Germany the hegemon of the Old Continent. Fischer established beyond reasonable doubt that Berlin manipulated the July crisis in 1914 to revise her 1871 borders and establish dominance in Europe, whereby France and Russia would be degraded to powerlessness and territorial insignificance.

To that end, after Sarajevo Germany encouraged Austria to pursue what Vienna believed would be a local war against Serbia in order to engineer a wider European conflagration which would eliminate France and Russia from the scene for decades. The record is clear: as (by then former) German chief of general staff Moltke confided to his friend Colmar von der Goltz as early as 1915, it was the war of Germany’s making, “this war that I prepared and initiated.” Had the murdered Archduke Francis Ferdinand—who did not want war—been alive, Austria’s Chief of Staff Konrad von Hetzendorf mused when the war started going badly for the Dual Monarchy, “he would have had me shot.”

Moltke and other Junkers were not acting alone. Having betrayed Bismarck’s legacy by tying Germany to the decaying Habsburg Monarchy and by conducting a reckless foreign policy in the early years of the 20th century, having alienated Britain by building an unnecessary and ultimately useless high seas fleet, the Wilhelmine establishment found itself in the encirclement of its own making. That establishment blundered to the point of prompting Britain and Russia to become de facto (albeit not as yet formal) allies in 1907—unthinkable in the days of the Iron Chancellor. At times Germany acted on the global stage like a bunch of McCains with manners: when Berlin got needlessly involved in Morocco in 1911, even Vienna withdrew support.

A “preventive” war against Russia and France, based on the Schlieffen Plan, was seen as a way out of Germany’s chronic diplomatic isolation and as a means of preempting Russia’s economic, demographic and military rise, which obsessed Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who complained that it was useless to plant oaks on his Brandenburg estate since some Cossacks would rest in their shade. To that end Germany encouraged Austria-Hungary to issue an impossible ultimatum to Serbia blaming her for Sarajevo—the famous blank check of July 5, 1914—with both Central Powers knowing full well that this would lead to an all-out war unless Russia climbed down at the last minute and thus abdicated her role as a great power. As David Fromkin concluded in his excellent Europe’s Last Summer, it takes two or more to keep the peace but only one to start the war: “The international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately.” One was Austria’s war against Serbia, the other Germany’s war against France and Russia. Britain inevitably and predictably entered the fray when Germany violated Belgium’s neutrality—as postulated by the Schlieffen Plan—thus making the war global. It was frivolously assumed in Berlin that in any event the British could not field an army capable of affecting the outcome until it was too late.

It was not possible for German politicians and soldiers simply to declare the European system created by Bismarck null and void. They could not admit that they wanted to revise it by force in favor of an extended Mitteleuropa, dominated by Germany, with an emaciated France to the west and a humbled Russia—minus the Ukraine and the Baltic provinces—to the east. The Prussian elite needed a seemingly righteous cause, the latter-day Ems Telegram, to unite the nation and, in particular, to persuade its millions of Social Democrats and Roman Catholics that the coming war was just, and the Vaterland’s cause worth dying for. The scenario was simple, mendacious, and effective: encourage Austria to present Serbia with an outrageous ultimatum that had to be rejected; let Russia threaten Austria in Serbia’s defense; present Germany’s subsequent move against Russia as a gallant and selfless rescue of Germany’s aggrieved Danubian ally; and attack France first, on whatever grounds, in order to kick her out of the war before turning the might of the entire army against the slow-mobilizing Russians.

This was a reckless scenario full of incalculable risks. The British duly declared war when Liege was attacked and the Schlieffen Plan collapsed with the Miracle on the Marne. But in July 1914 both military planning and the political rationale behind it reflected Berlin’s establishment’s obsession with the notion of “encirclement.” Just as the political paradigm was unduly pessimistic, its military “solution” was based on an optimistic scenario that had many elements that could, and did, go wrong. Determined to break out of this self-imposed, intellectually wanting and largely imagined “encirclement,” the Second Reich discarded Bismarck’s flexibility of external liaisons in favor of an implacable hostility to France, a self-generated sense of existential danger from Russia, and—perhaps worst of all—an alliance with Austria-Hungary that was debilitating in its implications and disastrous in its consequences.

The Iron Chancellor would never have allowed the worn-out Viennese tail to wag the dynamic German dog, and in the 1880s and 90s he repeatedly warned that the Balkans must never be allowed to release its potential as Europe’s proverbial powder keg. His successors of 1914 disregarded that advice on both counts. In this they encountered no effective opposition, and even the seemingly middle-of-the-road Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, joined the fray with an air of fatalistic determination, only once or twice interrupted by pangs of fearful lucidity.

By 1914 Germany’s ruling stratum’s understanding of the State reason was fatally corrupted by a host of ideological mantras which were Wilhelmine Germany’s equivalent of America’s global interventionists today: the naval lobby, the colonial lobby, the annexationist lobby, the Voelkisch lobby. Like the proponents of the war against Iran, they branded all moderation weakness and all doubt treason. Germany’s criminal blunder of 1914 was a sinister precursor of her crime of 1939. As per Fischer, these are the “ideologies, values, and ambitions that led our country to destruction in the space of two generations.”

In addition to being gripped by a self-fulfilling and gloomy Weltanschauung that demanded aggressively proactive policies, the Central Powers’ political elites were unable and unwilling to question the dictates of military planning. As Fischer’s old foe, conservative German historian Gerhard Ritter, readily admitted, a desperate gamble, va-banque Spiel, replaced policy making: in Vienna Conrad presented the Cabinet with a rosy and unrealistic assessment of Austria’s military capabilities that were soon demolished in a series of humiliating defeats in Serbia. In Berlin the German plan of campaign—which relied on a great Austrian offensive in the East which never happened—suffered from an over-estimation of German capability. Mobilization schedules and railway timetables took over. The lights went out all over Europe, never to be lit again.

Four awful years later President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war—espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine thrown at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day. Wilson’s notions of an “enlarging democracy” and “collective security” signaled the birth of a view of America’s role in world affairs which has created—and is still creating—endless problems for both America and the world. It was Wilson, speaking through President George W. Bush a decade ago, who declared that America not only “created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish” but “also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples.”

Two decades after the Armistice, burdened by Clemenceau’s harsh revenge at Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated sequel in September 1939. After 1918 it was very badly wounded; after 1945, mortally so. The result is a civilization that is aborting and birth-controlling itself to death, a civilization that is morally bankrupt, culturally spent, and spiritually comatose. Ninety five years later we are living—if life it is—with the consequences, and on the ruins, of the Great War.

The Revolutionaries In Our Midst

New York – Jeremy Hammond sat in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center last week in a small room reserved for visits from attorneys. He was wearing an oversized prison jumpsuit. The brown hair of the lanky 6-footer fell over his ears, and he had a wispy beard. He spoke with the intensity and clarity one would expect from one of the nation’s most important political prisoners.

On Friday the 28-year-old activist will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow Chemical and Raytheon.

Four others involved in the hacking have been convicted in Britain, and they were sentenced to less time combined—the longest sentence was 32 months—than the potential 120-month sentence that lies before Hammond.

Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and  and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once

made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none.The email exchanges Hammond made public were entered as evidence in my lawsuitagainst President Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Section 1021 permits the military to seize citizens who are deemed by the state to be terrorists, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities. Alexa O’Brien, a content strategist and journalist who co-founded US Day of Rage, an organization created to reform the election process, was one of my co-plaintiffs. Stratfor officials attempted, we know because of the Hammond leaks, to falsely link her and her organization to Islamic radicals and websites as well as to jihadist ideology, putting her at risk of detention under the new law. Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled, in part because of the leak, that we plaintiffs had a credible fear, and she nullified the law, a decision that an appellate court overturned when the Obama administration appealed it.

Freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by the corporate state. The resulting self-exile of investigative journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, along with the indictment of Barret Brown, illustrate this. All acts of resistance—including nonviolent protest—have been conflated by the corporate state with terrorism. The mainstream, commercial press has been emasculated through the Obama administration’s repeated use of the Espionage Act to charge and sentence traditional whistle-blowers. Governmental officials with a conscience are too frightened to reach out to mainstream reporters, knowing that the authorities’ wholesale capturing and storing of electronic forms of communication make them easily identifiable.

Elected officials and the courts no longer impose restraint or practice oversight. The last line of defense lies with those such as Hammond, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who are capable of burrowing into the records of the security and surveillance state and have the courage to pass them on to the public. But the price of resistance is high.

“In these times of secrecy and abuse of power there is only one solution—transparency,” wrote Sarah Harrison, the British journalist who accompanied Snowden to Russia and who also has gone into exile, in Berlin. “If our governments are so compromised that they will not tell us the truth, then we must step forward to grasp it. Provided with the unequivocal proof of primary source documents people can fight back. If our governments will not give this information to us, then we must take it for ourselves.”

“When whistleblowers come forward we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged,” she went on. “When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it. Courage is contagious.”

Hammond knows this contagion. He was living at home in Chicago in 2010 under a 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. curfew for a variety of acts of civil disobedience when Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was arrested for giving WikiLeaks secret information about military war crimes and government lies. Hammond at the time was running social aid programs to feed the hungry and send books to prisoners. He had, like Manning, displayed a remarkable aptitude for science, math and computer languages at a young age. He hacked into the computers at a local Apple store at 16. He hacked into the computer science department’s website at the University of Illinois-Chicago as a freshman, a prank that saw the university refuse to allow him to return for his sophomore year. He was an early backer of “cyber-liberation” and in 2004 started an “electronic-disobedience journal” he named Hack This Zine. He called on hackers in a speech at the 2004 DefCon convention in Las Vegas to use their skills to disrupt that year’s Republican National Convention. He was, by the time of his 2012 arrest, one of the shadowy stars of the hacktivist underground, dominated by groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks in which anonymity, stringent security and frequent changes of aliases alone ensured success and survival. Manning’s courage prompted Hammond to his own act of cyber civil disobedience, although he knew his chances of being caught were high.

“I saw what Chelsea Manning did,” Hammond said when we spoke last Wednesday, seated at a metal table. “Through her hacking she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, if she could make that risk shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.”

Hammond—who has black-inked tattoos on each forearm, one the open-source movement’s symbol known as the “glider” and the other the shi hexagram from the I Ching—is steeped in radical thought. As a teenager, he swiftly migrated politically from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the militancy of the Black Bloc anarchists. He was an avid reader in high school of material put out by CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that publishes anarchist literature and manifestos. He has molded himself after old radicals such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman and black revolutionaries such as George Jackson, Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur, as well as members of the Weather Underground. He said that while he was in Chicago he made numerous trips to Waldheim Cemetery to visit the Haymarket Martyrs Monument, which honors four anarchists who were hanged in 1887 and others who took part in the labor wars. On the 16-foot-high granite monument are the final words of one of the condemned men, August Spies. It reads: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voice you are throttling today.” Emma Goldman is buried nearby.

Hammond became well known to the government for a variety of acts of civil disobedience over the last decade. These ranged from painting anti-war graffiti on Chicago walls to protesting at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York to hacking into the right-wing website Protest Warrior, for which he was sentenced to two years in the Federal Correctional Institute at Greenville, Ill.

He said he is fighting as “an anarchist communist” against “centralized state authority” and “exploitative corporations.” His goal is to build “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in “mass organizing of protests, strikes and boycotts.” Hacking and leaking, he said, are part of this resistance—“effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system.”

Hammond spent months within the Occupy movement in Chicago. He embraced its “leaderless, non-hierarchical structures such as general assemblies and consensus, and occupying public spaces.” But he was highly critical of what he said were the “vague politics” in Occupy that allowed it to include followers of the libertarian Ron Paul, some in the tea party, as well as “reformist liberals and Democrats.” Hammond said he was not interested in any movement that “only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He remains rooted in the ethos of the Black Bloc.

“Being incarcerated has really opened my eyes to the reality of the criminal justice system,” he said, “that it is not a criminal justice system about public safety or rehabilitation, but reaping profits through mass incarceration. There are two kinds of justice—one for the rich and the powerful who get away with the big crimes, then for everyone else, especially people of color and the impoverished. There is no such thing as a fair trial. In over 80 percent of the cases people are pressured to plea out instead of exercising their right to trial, under the threat of lengthier sentences. I believe no satisfactory reforms are possible. We need to close all prisons and release everybody unconditionally.”

He said he hoped his act of resistance would encourage others, just as Manning’s courage had inspired him. He said activists should “know and accept the worst possible repercussion” before carrying out an action and should be “aware of mass counterintelligence/surveillance operations targeting our movements.” An informant posing as a comrade, Hector Xavier Monsegur, known online as “Sabu,” turned Hammond and his co-defendants in to the FBI. Monsegur stored data retrieved by Hammond on an external server in New York. This tenuous New York connection allowed the government to try Hammond in New York for hacking from his home in Chicago into a private security firm based in Texas. New York is the center of the government’s probes into cyber-warfare; it is where federal authorities apparently wanted Hammond to be investigated and charged.

Hammond said he will continue to resist from within prison. A series of minor infractions, as well as testing positive with other prisoners on his tier for marijuana that had been smuggled into the facility, has resulted in his losing social visits for the next two years and spending “time in the box [solitary confinement].” He is allowed to see journalists, but my request to interview him took two months to be approved. He said prison involves “a lot of boredom.” He plays chess, teaches guitar and helps other prisoners study for their GED. When I saw him, he was working on the statement, a personal manifesto, that he will read in court this week.

He insisted he did not see himself as different from prisoners, especially poor prisoners of color, who are in for common crimes, especially drug-related crimes. He said most inmates are political prisoners, caged unjustly by a system of totalitarian capitalism that has snuffed out basic opportunities for democratic dissent and economic survival.

“The majority of people in prison did what they had to do to survive,” he said. “Most were poor. They got caught up in the war on drugs, which is how you make money if you are poor. The real reason they get locked in prison for so long is so corporations can continue to make big profits. It is not about justice. I do not draw distinctions between us.”

“Jail is essentially enduring harassment and dehumanizing conditions with frequent lockdowns and shakedowns,” he said. “You have to constantly fight for respect from the guards, sometimes getting yourself thrown in the box. However, I will not change the way I live because I am locked up. I will continue to be defiant, agitating and organizing whenever possible.”

He said resistance must be a way of life. He intends to return to community organizing when he is released, although he said he will work to stay out of prison. “The truth,” he said, “will always come out.” He cautioned activists to be hyper-vigilant and aware that “one mistake can be permanent.” But he added, “Don’t let paranoia or fear deter you from activism. Do the down thing!”

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, has previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Source: Truthdig

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