We Better Move On…

“I’ve gotten some of my best light from bridges I’ve burned.”– Don Henley

What does it take, in an era dominated by progressive identity politics, to be accepted as a fully qualified member of the Left?

Jane is a London lawyer who identifies politically ‘as a woman,’ and marches enthusiastically for human rights. Can she join? I think the answer is yes, she can.

George is a medical doctor who happens also to be a black man and identifies as ‘Black middle class.’ Can he subscribe to a progressive email group and contribute to the discussion? I hope and suspect that he can.

And what about Julie? She runs an estate agency on the posh side of town but she also identifies as a ‘gay lesbian,’ can she join the parade? What a question! Of course she can.

Now Abe is an accountant and very attached to his Jewish heritage. Abe identifies as a ‘secular Jew,’ can he join the anti-war movement? More than likely he can, in fact he may even, within hours of his joining, find himself in a position of leadership.

But what about Hammed, a metal worker from Birmingham? Hammed identifies as a ‘Muslim’ — can he join a Left demonstration against the War in Syria? It’s a good question and the answer is not immediately obvious at all because it’s no secret that many of those who subscribe to ‘progressive’ ideology and indeed, activism, are rather troubled by religion in general and Islam in particular.

So, while Hammed is identifying with a universal and humanist precept, Jane, ‘the woman’, Julie ‘the Gay Lesbian’ and George ‘the Black’ openly subscribe to biologically-determined political identities. Furthermore, Abe, Identifying as a secular Jew, affiliates himself with a blood-based ethnocentric tribal identity. Clearly, the Left has no problem with such marginal and exclusivist political identities.

So, how is it possible that the contemporary Left discourse is sustained by people who, themselves subscribe to biologically-determined identity politics, yet so often reject similar, though often working class folk, who actually support equality and human rights issues? Could it be that the Left has in fact, drifted away from working class politics into some vague and inconsistent pseudo-empathic discourse primarily engaged in sectarian battles?

And there’s more.

Uri is an Israeli peace activist and writer who also identifies as an Israeli Leftist. Is Uri welcome within the progressive network? The answer is unreservedly, yes. But John Smith, an English bus driver from Liverpool is proud to be English and ‘as an Englishman’ he opposes the war because John actually believes that peace is patriotic. Can he join an anti-war protest and, while he’s at it, carry a Union Jack to demonstrations? I leave the answer to you.

Tony is a ‘Jewish Socialist’ – certainly not religious but an ethnic Jew who identifies ‘as a Jew’ racially and ethnically. And by the way, Tony also operates politically within Jews-only anti-Zionist groups. Now Tony is hugely welcome at most Left and progressive gathering. But can the same be said for Franz who identifies as an ‘Aryan socialist’? Again, I leave the answer to you.

The point is that yet again we detect a critical discrepancy in Left or progressive thinking. While Jewish ethnocentrism and even Jewish racial exclusivity is accepted, other forms of ethnocentrism are bluntly rejected. Is this a contradiction? You judge.

And, while we’re at it, what about Laura? She’s a Muslim convert who often hides her face behind the veil. Does she feel comfortable in ‘progressive’ gatherings? Not really. But Laura certainly supports human rights and equality almost as much as she loves Allah. But the Left’s  and progressives’ tolerance towards Allah worshippers is particularly limited while, on the other hand,  worshippers of the Talmud who are willing to oppose Israel are, not only tolerated, they are positively welcomed. Torah Jews, for instance, are often invited to progressive gatherings though, it must be said, they also encounter some resentment, especially from Jewish activists (This surely is because progressive Jews don’t like to be associated with people in caftans).

So it seems that membership of a progressive club is no straightforward matter because here we are here dealing with a discourse that is far from being open or inclusive. On the contrary, it is a pretty selective operation and far from being principled, coherent or universal. No longer is it committed to ‘members’ of the ‘working class’ –  unless they first demonstrate adherence  to a predetermined tablet of  ‘correct politics’.

So what are these ‘correct politics’? Where are they defined and by whom?

In order to address this question we have to first delve into the peculiar ‘progressive’  threshold that leaves the Muslim and the nationalist out yet happily embraces other biologically-determined political, and even racial categories. Strangely enough, the mix that forms the Left alliance is suspiciously similar to the mix that sustains Liberal Zionist political power.

Is this a coincidence? Is it really that surprising that the Left, traditionally defined as a universal humanist discourse, is now supported politically and financially by a mixture of political identities that also lend their support to Israel and its rabidly nationalist, capitalist and ethnocentric ideology? No, it’s not, so I guess that the growing similarity between the Left and Liberal Zionism alliance demands some explanation. I’ve managed to come with three possible answers.

1.     The Spin – The similarity between the Liberal Zionist alliance and the Left compound is a complete coincidence and reveals nothing about either Zionism or Left ideology.

2.     The Observant – The Left and Liberal Zionism are basically two faces of the same coin.

3.     The Forensic – By following the money trail, we see that most Left groups and liberal Zionism (a la J-Street and practically the entire progressive network) are funded by the same organizations, leading amongst them being George Soros’ Open Society Institute.  

If the last is true (and I think it is) it may as well mean that a large part of the ‘dissident’ network is sustained by….wait for it… a Wall Street hedge fund. In other words we are dealing here with an institutional and well-funded controlled opposition apparatus. This may explain, what so often seems on the part of the Left and Progressive discourse generally, like complete dysfunction and utter impotence – whether in labour matters, domestic politics, foreign affairs, global wars and, of course, Palestine.

If the Left sees any reason to rescue itself — and this is indeed a big ‘if’ —  it would first have to redeem itself from its greed and attachment to ‘big money.’ It may have to redefine for itself exactly what labour and ‘working class politics’ means for the workless.

Of course, it may just be that the Left has ended its political and ideological role, that basically, it belongs to the past. In other words, our capacity to think universally and ethically is now completely liberated from dialectical materialism or class division.

In the end, I doubt whether anyone within the progressive network possesses the intellectual capacity and ideological stamina  to endure such a serious discussion.

I guess we’d just better move on.

Britain: ‘Pedophile Network at the Heart of Government’

A former female MP was involved in a paedophile network at the heart of government, police have been told.

She is alleged to have forced a boy in care to perform a “vile” sex act at one of a series of drug-fuelled parties in Westminster in the Eighties where boys and girls as young as 13 were allegedly abused.

Last night her alleged victim told the Sunday Express: “I want justice.”

Andrew Ash, now 45, said he has given Scotland Yard the name of the former MP. We cannot name her for legal reasons.

Mr Ash claims he was frequently ferried down to London from the North of England, where he was in care, to take part in sex parties.

He says they were organised by a paedophile ring involving David Smith, Jimmy Savile’s former chauffeur who killed himself last year before he was due to stand trial for sex offences.

He said: “It wasn’t just politicians, there were also a number of celebrities, including Jimmy Savile, who seemed to have a lot of good links to MPs and powerful businessmen.

“There was usually drugs like cocaine and speed available as well as bottles of champagne.”

Of his encounter with the female MP, he said: “She was extremely drunk and was laughing as she did it.

“I didn’t really know what was going on but the others around her were goading her on.

“I must have been about 13 years old at the time and felt humiliated.” We can also reveal that security services have been working closely with Yard detectives because of the highly sensitive nature of the allegations.

The Sunday Express understands police seized video footage and photographs of an alleged sex party from a well-known paedophile last year.

Mr Ash claims officers have footage which shows a senior male MP in the same frame as him, although no abuse takes place on camera. He said he is speaking out now because he is frustrated by the lack of action after being interviewed for 70 hours by the Met Police’s Paedophile Unit.

He says he was abused by the male MP on another occasion too. He said: “I remember being filmed with this MP, who was abusing me in a garage of a very prominent building behind a Rolls-Royce.

“Another politician turned up with a video camera but the man abusing me just smirked and joked, ‘OK, OK, I’ll vote any way you want’ as if he was being blackmailed. What I want to know is why they haven’t arrested him yet if they have this evidence.

“All I want is justice and for the truth to come out because these people have been protected for far too long.”

Mr Ash said two Met officers called at his home in Yorkshire last May.

Interviews were conducted mainly at a safe house in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, but also in London. “The interviews were usually carried out in blocks of three, normally every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

“On at least two occasions there were two other officers present that I didn’t recognise. They didn’t ask me a thing, they just scribbled notes.

“I asked who they were but all I was told was that they were from ‘upstairs’. It was clear from the tone that they were intelligence officers.

“They had obviously been made aware of the high-profile names and the sensitive information I had given police.”

Dutch intelligence officers attended at least one interview because Andrew told of being trafficked to Amsterdam on a number of occasions to be abused by a group of paedophiles including convicted child killer Sidney Cooke.

He claims Cooke, now 84, made him film the paedophile abusing another young boy on video. It is feared Cooke may have abused and killed young boys in the Netherlands.

Mr Ash also told police he was abused by a big-name celebrity.

He said: “This particular person was able to get youngsters into glitzy nightclubs in the West End. After one evening he invited me and a young girl back to his house where he made us have sex before joining in.”

Mr Ash is being helped by anti-abuse campaigners Bill Maloney and Chris Fay.

Mr Fay said: “The police have spent a good deal of time with him, listening to his evidence, and now potentially have compelling information that Andrew was at one of these parties with at least one prominent former MP.

“He hopes by speaking out, other victims may come forward.”

Source: Alternews

10 Compelling Reasons You Can Never Trust The Mainstream Media

A poll last year showed that trust in the mainstream media is increasing, which should worry all of us who value truth, integrity and press freedom. Why? Here are 10 disturbing things everyone needs to know about the global media giants who control our supply of information, wielding immense power over the people- and even over the government.

1. Mainstream media exists solely to make profit

What´s the purpose of the mainstream media? Saying that the press exists to inform, educate or entertain is like saying Apple corporation´s primary function is to make technology which will enrich our lives. Actually, the mass media industry is the same as any other in a capitalist society: it exists to make profit. Medialens, a British campaigning site which critiques mainstream (or corporate) journalism, quotedbusiness journalist Marjorie Kelly as saying that all corporations, including those dealing with media, exist only to maximize returns to their shareholders. This is, she said,  ´the law of the land…universally accepted as a kind of divine, unchallengeable truth´. Without pleasing shareholders and a board of directors, mass media enterprises simply would not exist. And once you understand this, you´ll never watch the news in the same way again.

2. Advertisers dictate content

So how does the pursuit of profit affect the news we consume? Media corporations make the vast majority (typically around 75%) of their profit from advertising, meaning it´s advertisers themselves that dictate content- not journalists, and certainly not consumers. Imagine you are editor of a successful newspaper or TV channel with high circulation or viewing figures. You attract revenue from big brands and multinational corporations such as BP, Monsanto and UAE airlines. How could you then tackle important topics such as climate change, GM food or disastrous oil spills in a way that is both honest to your audience and favorable to your clients? The simple answer is you can´t. This might explain why Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times-   by Goldman Sachs-  is so keen todefend the crooked corporation. Andrew Marr, a political correspondent for the BBC, sums up the dilemma in his : ´The biggest question is whether advertising limits and reshapes the news agenda. It does, of course. It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques.´ Enough said…

3. Billionaire tycoons & media monopolies threaten real journalism

The monopolization of the press (fewer individuals or organizations controlling increasing shares of the mass media) is growingyear by year, and this is a grave danger to press ethics and diversity. Media mogul RupertMurdoch´s  neo-liberal personal politics are reflected in his 175 newspapers and endorsed by pundits (see Fox news) on the 123 TV channels he owns in the USA alone. Anyone who isn´t worried by this one man´s view of the world being consumed by millions of people across the globe- from the USA to the UK, New Zealand to Asia, Europe to Australia- isn´t thinking hard enough about the consequences. It´s a grotesquely all-encompassing monopoly, leaving no doubt that Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world. But as the News International phone hacking scandal  showed, he´s certainly not the most honorable or ethical. Neither is AlexanderLebedev, a former KGB spy and politician who bought British newspaper The Independent  in 2010.  With Lebedev´s fingers in so many pies (the billionaire oligarch is into everything from investment banking to airlines), can we really expect news coverage from this once well-respected publication to continue in the same vein? Obviously not: the paper had always carried a banner on its front page declaring itself  ´free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence´, but interestingly this was dropped in September 2011.

4. Corporate press is in bed with the government

Aside from the obvious, one of the most disturbing facts to emerge from Murdoch´s News International phone hacking scandal (background information here ) was the exposure of shady connections  between top government officials and press tycoons. During the scandal, and throughout the subsequent Leveson inquiry into British press ethics (or lack of them), we learned of secret meetings, threatsby Murdoch to politicians who didn´t do as he wanted, and that Prime Minister David Cameron has a very close friendship with The Sun´s then editor-in-chief (and CEO of News International) Rebekah Brooks. How can journalists do their job of holding politicians to account when they are vacationing together or rubbing shoulders at private dinner parties? Clearly, they don´t intend to. But the support works both ways- Cameron´s government tried to help Murdoch´s son win a bid for BSkyB, while bizarrely,  warmongering ex Prime Minister Tony Blair is godfather to Murdoch´s daughter Grace. As well as ensuring an overwhelming bias in news coverage and election campaigns, flooding newspapers with cheap and easy articles from unquestioned government sources, and gagging writers from criticizing those in power, these secret connections also account for much of the corporate media´s incessant peddling of the patriotism lie-  especially in the lead-up to attacks on other countries. Here´s an interestinganalysis of The New York Times´s coverage of the current Syria situation for example, demonstrating how corporate journalists are failing to reflect public feeling on the issue of a full-scale attack on Assad by the US and its allies. 

5. Important stories are overshadowed by trivia

You could be forgiven for assuming that the most interesting part of Edward Snowden´s status as a whistleblower was his plane ride from Hong Kong to Russia, or his lengthy stint waiting in Moscow airport for someone- anyone- to offer him asylum. Because with the exception of The Guardian who published the leaks (read them in fullhere), the media has generally preferred not to focus on Snowden´s damning revelations about freedom and tyranny, but rather on banaltrivia – his personality and background, whether his girlfriend misses him, whether he is actually a Chinese spy, and ahhh, didn´t he remind us all of Where´s Waldo as he flitted across the globe as a wanted fugitive? The same could be said of Bradley Manning´s gender re-assignment, which conveniently overshadowed the enormous injustice of his sentence. And what of Julian Assange? His profile on the globally-respected BBC is dedicated almost entirely to a subtle smearing of character, rather than detailing Wikileaks´s profound impact on our view of the world. In every case, the principal stories are forgotten as our attention, lost in a sea of trivia, is expertly diverted from the real issues at hand: those which invariably, the government wants us to forget.

6. Mainstream media doesn´t ask questions

´Check your sources, check your facts´ are golden rules in journalism 101, but you wouldn´t guess that from reading the mainstream press or watching corporate TV channels. At the time of writing, Obama is beating the war drums over Syria. Following accusations by the US and Britain that Assad was responsible for a nerve gas attack on his own civilians last month, most mainstream newspapers- like the afore-mentioned New York Times- have failed to demand evidence or call for restraint on a full-scale attack. But there are several good reasons why journalists should question the official story. Firstly, British right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail actually ran a news piece back in January this year, publishing leaked emails from a British arms company showing the US was planning a false flag chemical attack on Syria´s civilians. They would then blame it on Assad to gain public support for a subsequent full-scale invasion. The article was hastily deleted but a cached version still exists. Other recent evidence lends support to the unthinkable. It has emerged that the chemicals used to make the nerve gas were indeed shipped from Britain, and German intelligenceinsists Assad was not responsible for the chemical attack. Meanwhile, a hacktivist has come forward with alleged evidence of US intelligence agencies´ involvement in the massacre (download it for yourself here ), with a growing body of evidence suggesting this vile plot was hatched by Western powers. Never overlook the corporate media´s ties to big business and big government before accepting what you are told- because if journalism is dead, you have a right and a duty to ask your own questions.

7. Corporate journalists hate real journalists

Sirota rightly points out the irony of this: ´Here we have a reporter expressing excitement at the prospect of the government executing the publisher of information that became the basis for some of the most important journalism in the last decade.´ Sirota goes on to note various examples of what he calls the ´Journalists against Journalism club´, and gives severalexamples of how The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has been attacked by the corporate press for publishing Snowden´s leaks. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin called for Greenwald’s , while NBC’s David Gregory´s declared that Greenwald has ´aided and abetted Snowden´. As for the question of whether journalists can indeed be outspoken, Sirota accurately notes that it all depends on whether their opinions serve or challenge the status quo, and goes on to list the hypocrisy of Greenwald´s critics in depth: ´Grunwald has saber-rattling opinions that proudly support the government’s drone strikes and surveillance. Sorkin’s opinions promote Wall Street’s interests. (The Washington Post´s David) Broder had opinions that supported, among other things, the government’s corporate-serving “free” trade agenda. (The Washington Post´s Bob) Woodward has opinions backing an ever-bigger Pentagon budget that enriches defense contractors. (The Atlantic´s Jeffrey) Goldberg promotes the Military-Industrial Complex’s generally pro-war opinions. (The New York Times´s Thomas) Friedman is all of them combined, promoting both “free” trade and “suck on this” militarism. Because these voices loyally promote the unstated assumptions that serve the power structure and that dominate American politics, all of their particular opinions aren’t even typically portrayed as opinions; they are usually portrayed as noncontroversial objectivity.´

8. Bad news sells, good news is censored, and celebrity gossip trumps important issues

It´s sad but true: bad news really does sell more newspapers. But why? Are we really so pessimistic? Do we relish the suffering of others? Are we secretly glad that something terrible happened to someone else, not us? Reading the corporate press as an alien visiting Earth you might assume so. Generally, news coverage is sensationalist and depressing as hell, with so many pages dedicated to murder, rape and pedophilia and yet none to the billions of good deeds and amazingly inspirational movements taking place every minute of every day all over the planet. But the reasons we consume bad news are perfectly logical. In times of harmony and peace, people simply don´t feel the need to educate themselves as much as they do in times of crises. That´s good news for anyone beginning to despair that humans are apathetic, hateful and dumb, and it could even be argued that this sobering and simple fact is a great incentive for the mass media industry to do something worthwhile. They could start offering the positive and hopeful angle for a change. They could use dark periods of increased public interest to convey a message of peace and justice. They could reflect humanity´s desire for solutions and our urgent concerns for the environment. They could act as the voice of a global population who has had enough of violence and lies to campaign for transparency, equality, freedom, truth, and real democracy. Would that sell newspapers? I think so. They could even hold a few politicians to account on behalf of the people, wouldn´t that be something? But for the foreseeable future, it´s likely the corporate press will just distract our attention with another picture of Rhianna´s butt, another rumor about Justin Bieber´s coke habit, or another article about Kim Kardashian (who is she again?) wearing perspex heels with swollen ankles while pregnant. Who cares about the missing$21 trillion, what was she thinking?

9. Whoever controls language controls the population

Have you read George Orwell´s classic novel yet? It´s become a clichéd reference in today´s dystopia, that´s true, but with good reason. There are many- too many- parallels between Orwell´s dark imaginary future and our current reality, but one important part of his vision concerned language. Orwell coined the word ´Newspeak´  to describe a simplistic version of the English language with the aim of limiting free thought on issues that would challenge the status quo (creativity, peace, and individualism for example). The concept of Newspeak includes what Orwell called ´DoubleThink´-  how language is made ambiguous or even inverted to convey the opposite of what is true. In his book, the Ministry of War is known as the Ministry of Love, for example, while the Ministry of Truth deals with propaganda and entertainment. Sound familiar yet? Another book that delves into this topic deeper is , a must-read for anyone interested in language and power and specifically how words are distorted for political ends. Terms such as ´peace keeping missiles´, ´extremists´ and ´no-fly zones´, weapons being referred to as ´assets´, or misleading business euphemisms such as ´downsizing´ for redundancy and ´sunset´ for termination- these, and hundreds of other examples, demonstrate how powerful language can be. In a world of growing corporate media monopolization, those who wield this power can manipulate words and therefore public reaction, to encourage compliance, uphold the status quo, or provoke fear.

10. Freedom of the press no longer exists

The only press that is currently free (at least for now) is the independent publication with no corporate advertisers, board of directors, shareholders or CEOs. Details of how the state has redefined journalism are noted here and are mentioned in #7, but the best recent example would be the government´s treatment of The Guardian over its publication of the Snowden leaks. As a side note, it´s possible this paper plays us as well as any other- The Guardian Media Group isn´t small fry, after all. But on the other hand- bearing in mind points 1 to 9- why should we find it hard to believe that after the NSA files were published, editor Alan Rusbridge wastold by the powers that be ´you´ve had your fun, now return the files´, that government officials stormed his newsroom and smashed up hard drives, or that Greenwald´s partner David Miranda wasdetained for 9 hours in a London airport under the Terrorism Act as he delivered documents related to the columnist´s story? Journalism, Alan Rusbridge lamented, ´may be facing a kind of existential threat.´ As CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote: ‘We have few princes and earls today, but we surely have their modern-day equivalents in the very wealthy who seek to manage the news, make unsavory facts disappear and elect representatives who are in service to their own economic and social agenda… The “free press” is no longer a check on power. It has instead become part of the power apparatus itself.’

Sophie is a staff writer for True Activist and a freelance feature writer for various publications on society, activism and other topics. You can read more of her stuff here.

Source: True Activist

Putin Scores A New Victory In The Ukraine

What really happened in the Ukrainian crisis?

It is freezing cold in Kiev, legendary city of golden domes on the banks of Dnieper River – cradle of ancient Russian civilisation and the most charming of East European capitals. It is a comfortable and rather prosperous place, with hundreds of small and cosy restaurants, neat streets, sundry parks and that magnificent river. The girls are pretty and the men are sturdy. Kiev is more relaxed than Moscow, and easier on the wallet. Though statistics say the Ukraine is broke and its people should be as poor as Africans, in reality they aren’t doing too badly, thanks to their fiscal imprudence. The government borrowed and spent freely, heavily subsidised housing and heating, and they brazenly avoided devaluation of the national currency and the austerity program prescribed by the IMF. This living on credit can go only so far: the Ukraine was doomed to default on its debts next month or sooner, and this is one of the reasons for the present commotion.

A tug-of-war between the East and the West for the future of Ukraine lasted over a month, and has ended for all practical purposes in a resounding victory for Vladimir Putin, adding to his previous successes in Syria and Iran. The trouble began when the administration of President Yanukovich went looking for credits to reschedule its loans and avoid default. There were no offers. They turned to the EC for help; the EC, chiefly Poland and Germany, seeing that the Ukrainian administration was desperate, prepared an association agreement of unusual severity.

The EC is quite hard on its new East European members, Latvia, Romania, Bulgaria et al.: these countries had their industry and agriculture decimated, their young people working menial jobs in Western Europe, their population drop exceeded that of the WWII.

But the association agreement offered to the Ukraine was even worse. It would turn the Ukraine into an impoverished colony of the EC without giving it even the dubious advantages of membership (such as freedom of work and travel in the EC). In desperation, Yanukovich agreed to sign on the dotted line, in vain hopes of getting a large enough loan to avoid collapse. But the EC has no money to spare – it has to provide for Greece, Italy, Spain. Now Russia entered the picture. At the time, relations of the Ukraine and Russia were far from good. Russians had become snotty with their oil money, the Ukrainians blamed their troubles on Russians, but Russia was still the biggest market for Ukrainian products.

For Russia, the EC agreement meant trouble: currently the Ukraine sells its output in Russia with very little customs protection; the borders are porous; people move freely across the border, without even a passport. If the EC association agreement were signed, the EC products would flood Russia through the Ukrainian window of opportunity. So Putin spelled out the rules to Yanukovich: if you sign with the EC, Russian tariffs will rise. This would put some 400,000 Ukrainians out of work right away. Yanukovich balked and refused to sign the EC agreement at the last minute. (I predicted this in my report from Kiev full three weeks before it happened, when nobody believed it – a source of pride).

The EC, and the US standing behind it, were quite upset. Besides the loss of potential economic profit, they had another important reason: they wanted to keep Russia farther away from Europe, and they wanted to keep Russia weak. Russia is not the Soviet Union, but some of the Soviet disobedience to Western imperial designs still lingers in Moscow: be it in Syria, Egypt, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Venezuela or Zimbabwe, the Empire can’t have its way while the Russian bear is relatively strong. Russia without the Ukraine can’t be really powerful: it would be like the US with its Mid-western and Pacific states chopped away. The West does not want the Ukraine to prosper, or to become a stable and strong state either, so it cannot join Russia and make it stronger. A weak, poor and destabilised Ukraine in semi-colonial dependence to the West with some NATO bases is the best future for the country, as perceived by Washington or Brussels.

Angered by this last-moment-escape of Yanukovich, the West activated its supporters. For over a month, Kiev has been besieged by huge crowds bussed from all over the Ukraine, bearing a local strain of the Arab Spring in the far north. Less violent than Tahrir, their Maidan Square became a symbol of struggle for the European strategic future of the country. The Ukraine was turned into the latest battle ground between the US-led alliance and a rising Russia. Would it be a revanche for Obama’s Syria debacle, or another heavy strike at fading American hegemony?

The simple division into “pro-East” and “pro-West” has been complicated by the heterogeneity of the Ukraine. The loosely knit country of differing regions is quite similar in its makeup to the Yugoslavia of old. It is another post-Versailles hotchpotch of a country made up after the First World War of bits and pieces, and made independent after the Soviet collapse in 1991. Some parts of this “Ukraine” were incorporated by Russia 500 years ago, the Ukraine proper (a much smaller parcel of land, bearing this name) joined Russia 350 years ago, whilst the Western Ukraine (called the “Eastern Regions”) was acquired by Stalin in 1939, and the Crimea was incorporated in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Khrushchev in 1954.

The Ukraine is as Russian as the South-of-France is French and as Texas and California are American. Yes, some hundreds years ago, Provence was independent from Paris, – it had its own language and art; while Nice and Savoy became French rather recently. Yes, California and Texas joined the Union rather late too. Still, we understand that they are – by now – parts of those larger countries, ifs and buts notwithstanding. But if they were forced to secede, they would probably evolve a new historic narrative stressing the French ill treatment of the South in the Cathar Crusade, or dispossession of Spanish and Russian residents of California.

Accordingly, since the Ukraine’s independence, the authorities have been busy nation-building, enforcing a single official language and creating a new national myth for its 45 million inhabitants. The crowds milling about the Maidan were predominantly (though not exclusively) arrivals from Galicia, a mountainous county bordering with Poland and Hungary, 500 km (300 miles) away from Kiev, and natives of the capital refer to the Maidan gathering as a “Galician occupation”.

Like the fiery Bretons, the Galicians are fierce nationalists, bearers of a true Ukrainian spirit (whatever that means). Under Polish and Austrian rule for centuries, whilst the Jews were economically powerful, they are a strongly anti-Jewish and anti-Polish lot, and their modern identity centred around their support for Hitler during the WWII, accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of their Polish and Jewish neighbours. After the WWII, the remainder of pro-Hitler Galician SS fighters were adopted by US Intelligence, re-armed and turned into a guerrilla force against the Soviets. They added an anti-Russian line to their two ancient hatreds and kept fighting the “forest war” until 1956, and these ties between the Cold Warriors have survived the thaw.

After 1991, when the independent Ukraine was created, in the void of state-building traditions, the Galicians were lauded as ‘true Ukrainians’, as they were the only Ukrainians who ever wanted independence. Their language was used as the basis of a new national state language, their traditions became enshrined on the state level. Memorials of Galician Nazi collaborators and mass murderers Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych peppered the land, often provoking the indignation of other Ukrainians. The Galicians played an important part in the 2004 Orange Revolution as well, when the results of presidential elections were declared void and the pro-Western candidate Mr Yuschenko got the upper hand in the re-run.

However, in 2004, many Kievans also supported Yuschenko, hoping for the Western alliance and a bright new future. Now, in 2013, the city’s support for the Maidan was quite low, and the people of Kiev complained loudly about the mess created by the invading throngs: felled trees, burned benches, despoiled buildings and a lot of biological waste. Still, Kiev is home to many NGOs; city intellectuals receive generous help from the US and EC. The old comprador spirit is always strongest in the capitals.

For the East and Southeast of the Ukraine, the populous and heavily industrialised regions, the proposal of association with the EC is a no-go, with no ifs, ands or buts. They produce coal, steel, machinery, cars, missiles, tanks and aircraft. Western imports would erase Ukrainian industry right off the map, as the EC officials freely admit. Even the Poles, hardly a paragon of industrial development, had the audacity to say to the Ukraine: we’ll do the technical stuff, you’d better invest in agriculture. This is easier to say than to do: the EC has a lot of regulations that make Ukrainian products unfit for sale and consumption in Europe. Ukrainian experts estimated their expected losses for entering into association with the EC at anything from 20 to 150 billion euros.

For Galicians, the association would work fine. Their speaker at the Maidan called on the youth to ‘go where you can get money’ and do not give a damn for industry. They make their income in two ways: providing bed-and breakfast rooms for Western tourists and working in Poland and Germany as maids and menials. They hoped they would get visa-free access to Europe and make a decent income for themselves. Meanwhile, nobody offered them a visa-waiver arrangement. The Brits mull over leaving the EC, because of the Poles who flooded their country; the Ukrainians would be too much for London. Only the Americans, always generous at somebody’s else expense, demanded the EC drop its visa requirement for them.

While the Maidan was boiling, the West sent its emissaries, ministers and members of parliament to cheer the Maidan crowd, to call for President Yanukovich to resign and for a revolution to install pro-Western rule. Senator McCain went there and made a few firebrand speeches. The EC declared Yanukovich “illegitimate” because so many of his citizens demonstrated against him. But when millions of French citizens demonstrated against their president, when Occupy Wall Street was violently dispersed, nobody thought the government of France or the US president had lost legitimacy…

Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State, shared her biscuits with the demonstrators, and demanded from the oligarchs support for the “European cause” or their businesses would suffer. The Ukrainian oligarchs are very wealthy, and they prefer the Ukraine as it is, sitting on the fence between the East and the West. They are afraid that the Russian companies will strip their assets should the Ukraine join the Customs Union, and they know that they are not competitive enough to compete with the EC. Pushed now by Nuland, they were close to falling on the EC side.

Yanukovich was in big trouble. The default was rapidly approaching. He annoyed the pro-Western populace, and he irritated his own supporters, the people of the East and Southeast. The Ukraine had a real chance of collapsing into anarchy. A far-right nationalist party, Svoboda (Liberty), probably the nearest thing to the Nazi party to arise in Europe since 1945, made a bid for power. The EC politicians accused Russia of pressurising the Ukraine; Russian missiles suddenly emerged in the western-most tip of Russia, a few minutes flight from Berlin. The Russian armed forces discussed the US strategy of a “disarming first strike”. The tension was very high.

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s international editor and author of , is a hawk of the Churchill and Reagan variety. For him, Russia is an enemy, whether ruled by Tsar, by Stalin or by Putin. He wrote: “It is no exaggeration to say that the [Ukraine] determines the long-term future of the entire former Soviet Union. If Ukraine adopts a Euro-Atlantic orientation, then the Putin regime and its satrapies are finished… But if Ukraine falls into Russia’s grip, then the outlook is bleak and dangerous… Europe’s own security will also be endangered. NATO is already struggling to protect the Baltic states and Poland from the integrated and increasingly impressive military forces of Russia and Belarus. Add Ukraine to that alliance, and a headache turns into a nightmare.”

In this cliff-hanging situation, Putin made his pre-emptive strike. At a meeting in the Kremlin, he agreed to buy fifteen billion euros worth of Ukrainian Eurobonds and cut the natural gas price by a third. This meant there would be no default; no massive unemployment; no happy hunting ground for the neo-Nazi thugs of Svoboda; no cheap and plentiful Ukrainian prostitutes and menials for the Germans and Poles; and Ukrainian homes will be warm this Christmas. Better yet, the presidents agreed to reforge their industrial cooperation. When Russia and Ukraine formed a single country, they built spaceships; apart, they can hardly launch a naval ship. Though unification isn’t on the map yet, it would make sense for both partners. This artificially divided country can be united, and it would do a lot of good for both of their populaces, and for all people seeking freedom from US hegemony.

There are a lot of difficulties ahead: Putin and Yanukovich are not friends, Ukrainian leaders are prone to renege, the US and the EC have a lot of resources. But meanwhile, it is a victory to celebrate this Christmas tide. Such victories keep Iran safe from US bombardment, inspire the Japanese to demand removal of Okinawa base, encourage those seeking closure of Guantanamo jail, cheer up Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, frighten the NSA and CIA and allow French Catholics to march against Hollande’s child-trade laws.

***

What is the secret of Putin’s success? Edward Lucas said, in an interview to the pro-Western Ekho Moskvy radio: “Putin had a great year – Snowden, Syria, Ukraine. He checkmated Europe. He is a great player: he notices our weaknesses and turns them into his victories. He is good in diplomatic bluff, and in the game of Divide and Rule. He makes the Europeans think that the US is weak, and he convinced the US that Europeans are useless”.

I would offer an alternative explanation. The winds and hidden currents of history respond to those who feel their way. Putin is no less likely a roguish leader of global resistance than Princess Leia or Captain Solo were in Star Wars. Just the time for such a man is ripe.

Unlike Solo, he is not an adventurer. He is a prudent man. He does not try his luck, he waits, even procrastinates. He did not try to change regime in Tbilisi in 2008, when his troops were already on the outskirts of the city. He did not try his luck in Kiev, either. He has spent many hours in many meetings with Yanukovich whom he supposedly personally dislikes.

Like Captain Solo, Putin is a man who is ready to pay his way, full price, and such politicians are rare. “Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth?”, asked a James Joyce character, and answered: “His proudest boast is I paid my way.” Those were Englishmen of another era, long before the likes of Blair, et al.

While McCain and Nuland, Merkel and Bildt speak of the European choice for the Ukraine, none of them is ready to pay for it. Only Russia is ready to pay her way, in the Joycean sense, whether in cash, as now, or in blood, as in WWII.

Putin is also a magnanimous man. He celebrated his Ukrainian victory and forthcoming Christmas by forgiving his personal and political enemies and setting them free: the Pussy Riot punks, Khodorkovsky the murderous oligarch, rioters… And his last press conference he carried out in Captain Solo self-deprecating mode, and this, for a man in his position, is a very good sign.

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

2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.

Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.

The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.

Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.

The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.

I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.

The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.

When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?

If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.

Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.

The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.

Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.

Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police. 
“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.

The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.

This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.

I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.

When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.

In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.

According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.

From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. 4FDDuRSgzFk Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.

In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.

Source: Paul Craig Roberts

Federal Reserve 100 Years of Failure

Researching economic publications on the first century of the Federal Reserve System provides a wealth of financial information that attempts to explain the way the central bank works. Rarely will the academic studies and official reports address the raw nature of a money creation by a private banking monopoly. The common practice of disparaging sources outside government or corporatist business circles, attempts to avoid addressing, much less confronting the plutocracy that controls the debt created money system.

One such source list of the ownership of the Federal Reserve, compiled by Thomas D. Schauf appears on The Federal Reserve Scam! However, before getting to the particulars of the actual families behind the central banking cabal, it is important to go directly to the source of the primary chronicler who investigated and exposed the scheme. The late, , video reveals the entire sordid background.

Now review 25 Fast Facts About The Federal Reserve You Need To Know, from ETF Daily News that advises investors. The way these items play into the central banking model practiced by all 187 nations that belong to the IMF, demonstrates that banksters of the most select rank, are behind continued debt bubbles that are strangling the world.

On the Left Hook site by Dean Henderson, a five part series on the Federal Reserve provides added documentation. Mr. Henderson cites from Part 1 in this series, The Federal Reserve Cartel: The Eight Families, “They are the Goldman Sachs, Rockefellers, Lehmans and Kuhn Loebs of New York; the Rothschilds of Paris and London; the Warburgs of Hamburg; the Lazards of Paris; and the Israel Moses Seifs of Rome.”

 

Finally, watch the video by . Mr. Griffin explains the broad picture in simple and clear terms.

With such definitive information available and widely known within financial circles, why is the public so content to remain in the dark? They live under the aftermaths of the Federal Reserve is a Cache of Stolen Assets, but resign themselves to the oblivion of lost expectations and the burden of diminished opportunities.

“Think about who really owns the land, the buildings and the resources in our country. In order to really understand the scope and extent of the economy, the differential between actual Main Street enterprise, that feeds, clothes and shelters the population, is minuscule when compared to the financial assets, both liquid and real property, that is under the command and control of the central bank.”

The political class and the business establishment simply refuse to buck the controllers of the currency. Attempts for a Jackals of Jekyll Island – Federal Reserve Audit, are pushed aside because any accountability for the Fed would ripple throughout the entire world fiat paper banking system. “The FED’s grip on the global moneychangers’ racket is based upon maintaining the U.S. Federal Reserve funny money, as the reserve currency for the planet. The value and worth of Treasury Bills and Bonds are on the path to have the value of

Reichsbank marks. Recognize the enemy that is destroying the country and world economy.”The Cato Institute provides a working paper, Has the Fed Been a Failure?, that traces the history, avowed mission and actual results of the Federal Reserve System. This scholarly approach acknowledges that other financial frameworks are “relatively easy to identify viable alternatives to the adoption of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.”

“However, recent work suggests that there has been no substantial overall improvement in the volatility of real output since the end of World War II compared to before World War I . . . the Fed cannot be credited with having reduced the frequency of banking panics or with having wielded its last-resort lending powers responsibly. In short, the Federal Reserve System, as presently constituted, is no more worthy of being regarded as the last word in monetary management than the National Currency System it replaced almost a century ago.”

Lastly, the essay, Who Owns The Federal Reserve?, by Ellen Brown, substantiates that the “Fed is privately owned, and its shareholders are private banks. In fact, 100% of its shareholders are private banks. None of its stock is owned by the government.”

Since the adoption of a private banking, money creation venture, the dollar has lost virtually its entire store of value. The currency has lost its universal acceptance, as multiple alternatives circulate to replace its reserve status.

The Federal Reserve’s First 100 Years: A Dismal Record by Dan Ferris, identifies the ultimate consequence of the stewardship under a central bank. “The century prior to the Fed, despite setbacks, was a century of improvement in the dollar’s value. The century after it, despite enormous gains in productivity, was a century of rampant Federal Reserve destruction of the dollar’s value.”This failure to maintain and preserve the integrity of the dollar is no accident. The actual purpose of the architects of the Federal Reserve System has never changed. Consolidate the control of money into a concealed cartel of banking houses that ultimately decide economic and political policy.

Dispensing of credit to corporatist projects, owned or run by reliable operatives of the cabal is the objective. The only beneficiaries are the original stockholders.

“Under the terms of the Federal Reserve Act, public stock was only to be sold in the event the sale of stock to member banks did not raise the minimum of $4 million of initial capital for each Federal Reserve Bank when they were organized in 1913 (12 USCA 281). Each Bank was able to raise the necessary amount through member stock sales, and no public stock was ever sold to the non-bank public.”

For the rest of Americans, the Federal Reserve conspiracy is an ongoing theft syndicate. It only takes the will to admit the undeniable. Without the courage to abolish this usury monster, the next century will witness the total destruction of the country.

White-Washing Mandela’s Memory

After his mother was raped, and then murdered along with his father last year, sobbing 12-year-old Amaro was gagged and drowned in scalding bathwater. And that’s how the youngest member of the Viana family became a statistic: another in a long line of white South African victims of black violence.

It’s an understatement to say that such crimes have a racial component, yet the government run by the African National Congress — Nelson Mandela’s party — denies even that. It claims that whites are more likely to be victimized in South Africa, one of the world’s most crime-ridden nations, only because they’re wealthier. And this surely is a factor. Yet it doesn’t explain the white car-jacking victim tied behind his vehicle and dragged until his flesh was torn from his back.

Or the young child bludgeoned to death after his parents were murdered.

Or the two-year-old baby thrown into boiling oil.

Or the countless other cases of black-on-white rape, torture and mutilation, incidents clearly driven by more than just greed.

Anecdotal? Try this on for size: numerous whites are murdered every day in South Africa, and the total killed since 1994 currently amounts to more than 70,000. In fact, the world’s most dangerous profession is now that of Boer (white Afrikaner) farmer, with a murder rate of 310 per 100,000 (the homicide rate in London is 3 per 100,000).  Not surprisingly, where South Africa boasted 128,000 commercial farmers in 1980, the number has now been whittled down to 40,000.

If that sounds to you like it’s knocking on genocide’s door, you’re not alone. The respected organization Genocide Watch places white South Africans in the sixth stage of the genocidal process.

There are only seven stages, by the way, with the last — and next for SA whites — being extermination.

If you’re shocked that you haven’t heard anything about this, don’t be. It’s even less politically correct to talk about the extermination of whites than that of Christians, who are currently persecuted in many Muslim lands. The SA police often aren’t interested in investigating crimes against whites (especially since they perpetrate some of them), and the Western media were only concerned about reporting on SA whites when they could be demonized. And the press certainly won’t find its honest pen now, in the midst of its effort to beatify the recently deceased Nelson Mandela. This brings me to my main point.

Mandela, Great Man of Peace, never had much to say about the impending genocide of whites (well, he did have one thing to say, but I’ll get to that).

It isn’t that he didn’t hear the rumblings. Why, SA president Jacob Zuma himself is famous for publicly singing the song “Kill the Boer,” whose lyrics include: “We are going to shoot them; they are going to run. Shoot the Boer; shoot them, they are going to run. Shoot the Boer. We are going to hit them; they are going to run; the Cabinet will shoot them with the machine-gun. The Cabinet will shoot them with the machine-gun….” Not much left for interpretation there.

Once again, this is the president of the country — and just watch and note the feeling with which he sings the song.

Then there’s former head of the African National Congress Youth League Julius Malema. While he’s now an ardent foe of Zuma and wants the SA presidency himself, they certainly are of one mind on musical matters: is a video of Malema disgorging his rendition of “Kill the Boer.” And I don’t remember Mandela, Great Man of Peace, ever making a statement about how singing a genocidal song probably isn’t a prescription for racial unity.

This isn’t to say Mandela belongs in even remotely the same category as Zuma or Malema. Not at all.

Mandela didn’t exhibit nearly the same passion when he about killing whites.

Some may point out that Mandela could rock the boat only so much, as some in SA already criticized him for being far too conciliatory toward SA whites — a sellout. Yet if this is why he turned a blind eye to a genocidal movement, and even paid some lip service to it, he sold out the principles of racial harmony and egalitarianism the Western world has ascribed to him. Is this the stuff of which great men are made?

And that’s the point. Mandela isn’t praised as merely someone who had a few admirable qualities, which would be justifiable. After all, it isn’t everyone who could spend 27 years in prison and emerge with a message of forgiveness. He is, rather, becoming what Napoleon considered a foundational building block of history: an “agreed upon myth.”

But the man was always far different from the myth. Mandela founded the armed wing of the ANC, known as Umkhonto we Sizwe. And while current reportage often implies that the US’s branding him a terrorist in the 1980s was a national disgrace, the truth is that the Great Man of Peace was a terrorist. In fact, the SA government offered to release him from prison in 1985 if only he’d renounce violence. He refused to do so.

Of course, Mandela could have just agreed and then resumed his militancy once freed, and that he instead stood on principle is praiseworthy. Moreover, there are things worth fighting for, dying for and, even, being violent for. But what was Mandela’s cause?

While Mandela denied being a communist during his terrorism trial, it’s now known that he was allied with the Communist Party of South Africa. He was supported by Fidel Castro, and the ANC and its Umkhonto we Sizwe received financial support from the Soviet Union. Rounding out his leftist credentials, Mandela also advocated abortion and faux marriage.

Not surprisingly, his ANC used communist-level violence. Mandela admitted that the organization would regularly use torture on suspected “enemy agents,” with most of its victims during the Apartheid era being fellow blacks. Poor laborers were killed in bombings, and Zulus associated with the Inkatha Freedom Party were sometimes dispatched by “necklacing,” which is when a tire is filled with fuel, placed around a victim’s neck and set alight. Mind you, this “technique” was endorsed by Mandela’s wife at the time, Winnie.

Of course, Mandela didn’t seek to purge whites from SA upon becoming president. What he did do, however, was take this racial minority — which had willingly relinquished political power — and initiate the process of stripping them of economic opportunity via anti-white racial quotas. The result is that poverty exploded among Afrikaners, and, with jobs often denied them, it is said that hundreds of thousands of whites now live in squatter camps. Mandela, true to form, had nothing to say about this.

And this spirit of persecution is intensifying. As Genocide Watch put it, writes the Daily Mail, “[T]he murders of ‘Afrikaner farmers and other whites is organised by racist communists determined to drive whites out of South Africa, nationalise farms and mines, and bring on all the horrors of a communist state.’” And Malema is forming a new political party with the expressed purpose of “fighting white males.” You see, whites are South Africa’s “Bush” — everything is their fault. Mandela and his cohorts hobbled the country with a corrupt government and listing economy, but whites’ economic activity is to blame. So their property must be expropriated. They must be taken down a notch. Then the ANC will arrive in the promised land.

The best thing I can say about Nelson Mandela is that he wasn’t Jacob Zuma or Julius Malema. And maybe he delayed the inevitable. But the inevitable is that whites will be purged from SA, with the only question being how many will escape before that final stage and final solution. Whatever the details, at least this time Mandela will have a good excuse for saying nothing.

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: 

The Wahhabi-Likudnik War of Terror

The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in Beirut – with at least 23 people killed and 170 wounded – was a de facto terror attack happening on 11/19. Numerology-wise, naturally 9/11 comes to mind; and so the case of the Washington-declared war on terror metastasizing – largely conducted by oozy forms of Saudi “intelligence”.

Yet don’t expect the “West” to condemn this as terror. Look at the headlines; it’s all normalized as “blasts” – as if children were playing with firecrackers.

Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan’s (aka Bandar Bush’s) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here’s another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action.

Nuance also applies. Bandar Bush’s strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon.

While Hezbollah welcomes the fight, wherever it takes place, Tehran’s position is more cautious. It does not want to go all out against the Saudis – at least for now, with the crucial nuclear negotiation on the table in Geneva, and (still) the possibility of a Geneva II regarding Syria. Yet the House of Saud is not welcoming Geneva II anytime soon because it has absolutely nothing to propose except regime change.

On Syria, the main pillar of Bandar Bush’s strategy is to turn the previously “Free” Syrian Army into a “national army” of 30,000 or so fully weaponized hardcore fighters – mostly supplied by the “Army of Islam”, which is nothing but a cipher for the al-Qaedesque Jabhat al-Nusra. King Playstation of Jordan, also known as Abdullah, collaborates as the provider of training camps near the Syrian border. Whatever happens, one thing is certain; expect Bandar Bush’s goons to be carrying out more suicide bombings on both Lebanon and Syria.

The Zionist/Wahhabi/Salafi axis

The dodgy al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades in theory exist since 2005, placing the odd bomb here and there. One sheikh Sijareddin Zreikat tweeted responsibility for the Beirut terror attack. Curioser and curioser, the claim was “discovered” and translated into English by the Israeli disinformation website SITE. [1]

Yet another Israeli intelligence disinformation site, DEBKAfile, claimed the terror attack was an Iran/Hezbollah false flag, based on a “Saudi warning” reaching “Western intelligence agencies, including Israel”. [2] The rationale, according to “Saudi intelligence”, was “to convince Hezbollah fighters consigned against their will to the Syrian battlefield”.

This does not even qualify as pathetic. Hezbollah is basically defending the Lebanese-Syrian border, and has only a few hundred fighters inside Syria. Moreover, no string of suicide bombings will deter Hezbollah and Tehran from regaining control of what really matters in the Syrian strategic context; the Qalamoun area.

Qalamoun, ringed by mountains, is a 50-kilometer stretch bordering the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, between Damascus and al-Nabk, and right on the absolutely critical Damascus-Homs corridor of the M5 highway. The Syrian army is on the offensive in Qalamoun. Recapturing the whole area is just a matter of time. This means controlling the northern approach to Damascus. Hezbollah is helping in the offensive out of Bekaa valley. This does not mean they will camp out in Syria afterwards.

Now for the false flag accusation. As far as real false flags are concerned, one just has to re-examine three recent international bombings that supposed victimized Israel. In India the bomb had no projectiles; it barely injured an Israeli attache. In Azerbaijan the bomb was miraculously “discovered” before it went off. And in Thailand, the bomb exploded too soon, injuring only a nearby Iranian.

Crass Israeli disinformation is unmasked when it leaps into this conclusion:

If Tehran is capable of such atrocities merely as a diversionary tactic, then perhaps Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin ought to take a really hard look at their negotiating partner across the table before signing a major deal Wednesday, Nov. 20, which leaves Iran’s nuclear program in place.

So this neatly ties up with the current Israeli hysteria about the Geneva negotiations, which also includes the umpteenth report by a News Corporation outfit, London’s Sunday Times, that Saudi Arabia will help Israel to attack Iran. [3]

It also ties up with the proverbial US shills spinning, gloating rather, that, “strategically, this de-facto Israeli alliance with the Saudis is an extraordinary opportunity for Israel”. [4]

Even such shills have to admit that the House of Saud is “blocking formation of any government in Lebanon, for example, to obstruct Iran’s ally, Hezbollah”. “Blocking” of course is a euphemism to normalize suicide bombing.

And then comes the ultimate wishful thinking disguised as “analysis”; Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu “bidding to replace the United States as military protector of the status quo”. Translation; the Likudniks dreaming of becoming the new military Mob boss of petrodollar Wahhabis.

The enablers

Bandar Bush’s strategy – weaponizing and providing cover to Salafis, jihadis and every patsy or mercenary in between – will go on unabated. After Bandar Bush convinced Washington to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qataris, the Saudis are the supreme warfare go-to channel. The Bandar Bush machine has ties with virtually every jihadi outfit in the Levant.

It certainly helps that Bandar has the perfect cover; the fact that he knows and has cajoled every significant player in Washington. In the US, Bandar Bush remains a dashing hero, even eliciting fawning comparisons with Gatsby. [5] Right. And my name is actually Daisy.

Even with its own embassy attacked in Lebanon, Iran is maintaining an extremely calibrated approach. The number-one priority is the nuclear negotiations in Geneva with the partner that really matters, the US. This explains Iran blaming the Beirut terror attack on the proverbial “Zionists”, and not Saudi-enabled jihadis posing as “rebels” and part of the whole Bandar Bush nebula.

For the moment though, enough of Orwellian newspeak. What happened in Beirut was a terror attack, cheered by Israel, and fully enabled by Saudis; a graphic display by the Likudnik-House of Saud axis.

Notes:

1. Al-Qaida-linked group claims responsibility for deadly Beirut attack, Ha’aretz, November 19, 2013.
2. Incredible! Beirut bombings killing 25 people were self-inflicted by Iran and Hizballah as a diversionary tactic, DEBKAfile, November 19, 2013.
3. Israel, Saudi Arabia Unite For Attack On Iran, RT, November 17, ’13.
4. The stakes of an Iranian deal, Washington Post, November 15, 2013.
5. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s Gatsby, Master Spy, The Daily Beast, November 16, 2013.

Pepe Escobar is the author of  (Nimble Books, 2007),  (Nimble Books, 2007), and  (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at . 

Source: Asia Times

What America Will Look Like In 2050 – Illiteracy, Racial Dysfunction

Illiteracy and racial dysfunction…

Current U.S. Census Bureau figures show 22.3 percent of American citizens live below the poverty line.  That equates to 69,520,000 Americans.  They cannot secure a livable-wage job in order to pay for food, home, medical care and basic living in this country.

Within 37 years, demographic experts project an additional 100 million legal immigrants flowing into the United States of America.  They expect to arrive from Africa, Indonesia, India, China, the Middle East, Mexico, Central America, South America and many of the poverty-stricken countries of the world.  Their impact on America: they will force the addition, in sheer numbers, of an additional population enough to duplicate our 20 top metropolitan cities in the U.S. in 2013.

(Source: Pew Research Center, U.S. Population Projections by Fogel/Martin and the U.S. Census Bureau document those demographic facts.)

But what most Americans fail to understand stems from the fact that world human population expires at 57 million annually. Humans not only replace 57 million people, but also add an additional 80 million, net gain, to the planet annually. Total: 7.1 billion people in 2013.  That’s 137 million new babies that need to be watered, fed, housed, warmed, medicated and educated annually.  Unfortunately, those countries with those fecundity rates cannot educate that many new children annually.  They lack teachers, books, supplies and schools.  Tragically, over 10 million children starve to death annually. (Source: United Nations Population figures.)

The tragedy of America’s 1965 immigration bill added 100 million immigrants within 40 years; then, the 1986 amnesty accelerated the speed of the onslaught and now the proposed S744 amnesty bill expects to add another 100 million immigrants within 35 years or less.  Those desperate immigrants will pour into America at 200,000 every 30 days, along with their birth rates, diversity visas and chain-migration.

This five-minute video presents an example of illiteracy and what it costs you as this woman birthed 15 kids on welfare:

Why do you think those countries around the world suffer misery and starvation within their societies?  What causes it?  Why can’t they duplicate Western skills for filling grocery stores to the brim with food like you see all across America?   Answer: illiteracy, lack of intellectual horsepower, cultural poverty, lack of water and arable land.

Unfortunately, we inject those factors into the USA at blinding speed. The new amnesty provides for two million, that’s 2,000,000 million third world immigrants annually.  They average 900,000 births annually, which equals 9 million in 10 years. That’s a total of 2.9 million legal immigrants annually. (Source: Dr. Steven Camorata, )  When you look at S744, you see 250,000 green cards annually and many more visas on all levels. We could see that 100 million accelerate our population even faster than the predicated 37 years to rush from 316 million to 438 million.

Along the way, we lack the funds, the teachers, the schools, the resources and the languages to teach the endless millions of kids inundating our failing school systems.  Over 85 languages create linguistic chaos in my Denver, Colorado school system with minimum of 50 percent dropout rates and as high as 67 percent.  Detroit, Michigan runs 76 percent dropout rates as reported by Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News.

We face colossal cultural and educational dysfunction.  What one factor drives failed states around the world?  Answer: illiteracy.

With over 42 million Americans who cannot read, write or perform simple math, we face enormous challenges that we will not be able to solve. Some 48.1 million Americans subsist on food stamps today. They cannot work, function, feed or house themselves.  Do any of us possess any idea what the next 100 million immigrants will mean as to food stamps, section 8 housing, welfare and medical care? How will we cope with their languages?

(Source: Tyler Durden, , “23 percent of Americans illiterate.”)

Racial and linguistic segregation across America

When people lack education, but see wealth on TV, they react. When they can’t attain it, they shoplift, steal cars, form gangs and dwell in underworld ethnic enclaves.  You can see it in most failed countries in the world.

Today in Jackson, Mississippi, with a 90 percent African-American population, they elected a mayor who promotes changing five southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina into a separate Republic of New Black Afrika.

Journalist Andrea Ryan wrote, “Raising his fist in a black power salute during his swearing in, the newly elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi was true to his character as a former leader of the black supremacy group, .  The group is dedicated to transforming five of the Southern states into an independent socialist black nation.  Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, born in Detroit as Edwin Finley Taliaferro, is a radical activist, and co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.  He’s, also, being praised by the Nation of Islam, who wrote in their publication, Final Call, that .’

In Detroit, Michigan, now 93 percent Black and Middle Eastern population, Muslims expect to dominate that population as their numbers grow in the USA from their current seven million to well over 20 million by 2050.  They possess the capacity to use the U.S. Constitution to install Sharia Law by voting power of the majority.  At some point, another Mayor Chokwe Lumumba could rise out of the ashes of Detroit to lead it toward a separate state or country.

In the UK, France and Belgium, Sharia Law Muslims thugs prowl the streets to beat up on anyone uninformed enough to visit during the night. Last month, in London, England, ten Sharia “police”, caught on video, beat an American boy senseless and disfigured his face because he walked into the “no go zone” in the Muslim sector. France features over 70 “no go zones” dominated by Muslims.

Solid estimates in the USA show 22 Islamic “villages” guarded and walled off from public scrutiny in Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan and Oregon.

In Los Angeles, the legal and illegal Mexican-Latino population overwhelms schools, housing, hospitals and food stamp stores. California features four million illegal migrants and most of them work underground or with forged papers.  They defraud food stamp and housing welfare rolls.  Spanish fast becomes THE language of southern California.  Unfortunately, they fled Mexico where the average child drops out of school by sixth grade. They repeat that cultural practice in California.  At some point, a Spanish Chokwe Lumumba will rise out of the quagmire of Los Angeles to lead that arena into a satellite state of Mexico.

Short video on “EBT” (Electronic Benefits Transfer) food stamp cards paid for by your tax dollars to feed illiterate Americans who even ship the food to other countries. A rapper shows how to use them, steal them, trade them and defraud with them:

What does this all add up to in our country?

• A first world country cannot continue at that level of excellence in the face of illiteracy and intellectual dysfunction.
• A first world country cannot maintain its culture, language and educational levels of excellence by injecting itself with multiple languages, cultures and cultural illiteracy.
• One look at the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Belgium and Holland offers a depressing look at the final outcome of mass immigration from disparate cultures and failed-states worldwide.
• Multiculturalism, illiteracy and multi-lingualism do not, cannot and will not maintain America as a cohesive, viable, educated and first world civilization.
• Since it’s not working in 2013, how will it work with another 100 million added immigrants within 37 year?  Answer: it will not!

This video brings this entire Western world nightmare into sharper focus:

“Immigration by the numbers—off the chart” by Roy Beck

This 10 minute demonstration shows Americans the results of unending mass immigration on the quality of life and sustainability for future generations: in a few words, “Mind boggling!”  

Our situation will not become any prettier as we discuss the exhaustion of oil, resources and arable land in the next part of this series.

The Most Effective Weapon Of The Globalists

We often hear talk about the all-powerful global elite and how they are invincible. They are not invincible, they are blinded by their avarice, decadence and insatiable desire to dominate a humanity that they hold in such disdain.

As I have studied their playbook and have learned their mindset, as a result, I have learned that they have vulnerabilities. Just like a quarterback that doesn’t like pressure as they attempt to pass from the “pocket”, they can be forced to scramble.

I have seen time and time again that when their evil agendas are exposed in the light of day, they run for cover. The latest example of this global elite acquiescence to the will of the people was in Syria when their agenda was exposed by the truthful media. The alternative media was relentless in our exposing the fact that the CIA shipped in the chemical weapons so that al-Qaeda would use them on the Syrian civilians. As a result, the puppet Obama had to run for cover and we have not hear the word “Syria” come from his mouth or the mouth of warmonger, John McCain, since the globalist agenda was exposed. Enlightenment and education would seem to be the keys to turning back the globalist invasion of the United States.

Why Aren’t There More Syria’s?

I have recently been wondering why don’t we have more “Syria’s”? If we can make these criminal central bankers retreat in the face of one of their most important objectives, the temporary preservation of the Petrodollar which would be accomplished by taking out Syria and then Iran, then why can’t we take dismantle the rest of their agenda? When we look at our victory over the Syrian issue, it is baffling to try and explain why we could be so stupid in so many other areas.

What kind of nation would tolerate endless wars of occupation which are serving to bankrupt the country?

What kind of nation would tolerate criminal Wall Street bankers engaging in an illegal Ponzi scheme (i.e. the derivatives) and then bailing out these felons with our own tax money?

What kind of nation would tolerate a Nancy Pelosi who has admitted to engaging in insider trading in the stock market and then let her also get away with telling the people that we need to pass Obamacare to see what’s in it?

What kind of nation would tolerate a Senator, like Diane Feinstein and her husband, making a billion dollars from the sale of post office buildings?

What kind of nation would tolerate a US senator, John McCain, who has given aid and comfort to al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria and then defend their murderous ways

What kind of nation would tolerate a president who has a half-brother, Malick Obama, running finance for the Muslim Brotherhood and then having this president support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya?

What kind of nation would murder 53 million, and counting, of its most vulnerable citizens without blinking an eye?

What kind of citizenry would tolerate its elected leaders while they pass and implement a health care system based upon the British NHS which pays bonuses for euthanizing the elderly?

What kind of citizenry would tolerate its elected leaders handing over control of the military to the United Nations?

What kind of nation would tolerate the specter of sex rings (you will be hearing a lot about this in upcoming weeks) in and around the White House?

What kind of nation would tolerate its megabanks and their laundering of drug money and child sex trafficking money through their institutions? Oh yes, they have paid fines, but nobody has gone to jail.

What kind of a nation would tolerate the prevalence of false flag events, from the Boston Marathon Bombing to the 7/7 London Bombings to the attacks on 9/11 to the contrived Gulf oil explosion and not think the nation is not in grave danger as November 13th and the Grid EX II drill approaches?

What kind of citizenry would tolerate these violations of the public trust? The answer is simple. Only an incredibly stupid and dumbed down population would tolerate these abuses from their banker-controlled government?

The Globalist Number One Weapon

The number one weapon that is used against humanity in order to further the globalist agenda is induced stupidity. Many older foreigners are in awe as they witnessed the dumbing down of America in just a few short decades.

We Americans were once known for our culture, innovations, creativity and work ethic. Phrases like “made in America” use to mean something. There was a time in this country when our elected leaders feared the people. Today, leaders like Feinstein, Pelosi, Reid, Obama and McCain mock America on a daily basis as they tell the same lies and engage in the same criminal behaviors with impunity.

How Dire is America’s Intellectual Deficit?

America’s intellectual deficit starts right at the top of the intelligence pyramid, namely with its intelligence quotient (IQ). The USA scores the lowest in national average IQ among the developed countries of the world, at a national average score of 98. The data is obtained from IQ and Global Equality by Dr. Richard Lynn (professor of Psychology, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland) and Dr. Tatu Vanhanen (University of Tampere, Finland).

Take a look at this poster child for American stupidity.

A Snapshot of Stupidity

Are we really surprised at the following?

• 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.
• 55% of the U.S. population does not know that the Sun is a star.
• 25% believe we won our independence from a country OTHER than Great Britain.
• 29% couldn’t name the Vice President.
• 73% couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War.

Political Stupidity

The following are facts which should inspire a collective sense of national shame.

• 3% can identify the first President of the United States.
• 10% know how many justices sit on the Supreme Court.
• 14% know who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
• 23% can correctly identify the two houses of the U.S. Congress.
• 22% of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

And, please explain to me, how in the hell did we elect this moron, TWICE?

And how many stupid people would sign this petition to repeal the First Amendment?

Conclusion

The greatest weapon the central banksters have at their disposal is the inducement of mass stupidity. The masses of this country are so stupid that one has to wonder if this country is even worth saving. Can America be saved despite the widespread ignorance which has spread across the country like an out of control pandemic?

The number one enemy facing the American people are not the Chinese, the Iranians, the Bilderbergers or any other liberty-destroying group. The number one enemy facing America is its profound level of stupidity!

Why did America rise up and collectively tell Obama “no” to invading Syria? As I search for an answer, I realize that if a lazy dog does not move, the sun will still shine on its posterior once a day. Is that what happened in Syria? Or was it likely that the alternative and truthful media in this country were unified in their voice and their approach to the public, for a 30 day period, got our message got through. Psychologists call this the “confirmation bias” which works by repeating a belief often enough that the recipients of the message come to believe it. We see this with the global warming phenomenon. Despite the shoddy science behind the claims of an impending eco-disaster, the people are willing to “go green”. Perhaps if we redoubled our efforts in the alternative media, we might see dramatic results in terms of waking up a dumbed down population.

We can debate the causes of our national stupidity, but it does not matter. The fact remains is that we are a stupid people. The lesson learned here is that America’s stupidity manifests itself in making us into becoming a nation of sheep. Sheep are waiting to be led and they will follow the loudest voice. This means that all of us in the alternative media need to redouble our efforts. We probably will not stop the coming crash, but we might soften the landing and make it easier to pick up the pieces after the fact.

Source: Dave Hodges  |  The Common Sense Show

War On Terror Advocate To Head Homeland Security

Obama intends to nominate former Defense Department general counsel Jeh Johnson as new DHS chief.

He’s responsible for endorsing some of Washington’s most lawless policies. His rap sheet reveals great cause for concern. More on him below.

Post-9/11, police state terror followed. Obama expanded it.

It’s unprecedented in size, scope and ruthlessness.

DHS is America’s Gestapo. The November 25, 2002 Homeland Security Act established it. Twenty-two federal agencies were combined under one authority.

They include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security, the Secret Service, FEMA, National Protection and Programs Directorate, and the Coast Guard among others.

DHS concentrates unprecedented executive branch military and law enforcement empowerment. It’s a rogue agency. It’s insidious.  It’s a police state apparatus writ large. It’s a dagger at the heart of freedom.

• Its four main mandates include:

• border and transportation security;
• emergency and disaster preparedness;
• developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons countermeasures; and
• centralizing storage and analysis of potential threat information.

US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) was established months earlier (April 25, 2002). Doing so was unprecedented.

For the first time, America’s mainland, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Gulf waters, Florida straits, and portions of the Caribbean were militarized. Troops may be deployed on US streets.

Doing so violates core 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus Act principles.

They prohibit using federal and National Guard forces for domestic law enforcement except as constitutionally allowed or expressly authorized by Congress in times of insurrection or other national emergency.

No longer. Usurped diktat authority lets presidents claim emergency powers, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and deploy federal and/or National Guard troops on US streets to suppress whatever is called disorder.

Fundamental freedoms are endangered. First Amendment ones matter most. Without them all others are at risk. They include free expression, assembly, religion, and right to petition government for redress.

Police state ruthlessness defines today’s America. International, constitutional and US statute laws no longer matter. They lie in history’s dustbin.

Diktat power replaced them. No one any longer is safe. Doing the right thing is dangerous. Guilt by accusation is policy.

Anyone can be arrested, held uncharged, and detained indefinitely. Due process, judicial fairness, and other civil rights no longer protect.

If confirmed, Johnson will replace Janet Napolitano. She reflected the worst of repressive governance. Throughout her tenure, she violated fundamental rule of law principles.

She terrorized Latino immigrants. She waged war on Occupy Wall Street. She obstructed FOIA requests.

She advanced America toward full-blown tyranny. Expect Johnson to pick up where she left off. His record gives pause for concern.

His legal career combined private and government service. From 1989 – 1991, he was GHW Bush’s Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

From 1998 – 2001, he was Clinton’s Air Force Department general counsel. He’s currently a Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner.

His former Defense Department responsibilities included legal review and approval of all military related operations.

An unnamed senior Obama administration official said:

“The president is selecting Johnson because he is one the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders, having served as the senior lawyer for the largest government agency in the world.”

“During his tenure at the Department of Defense he was known for his sound judgment and counsel.”

It includes defending military commission prosecutions. They’re for so-called “unprivileged enemy belligerents.” Bush called them “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Francis Boyle called this designation a “quasi-category to create an anti-matter universe of legal nihilism where human beings (including US citizens) can be disappeared, detained incommunicado, denied access to attorneys and regular courts, tried by kangaroo courts, executed, tortured, assassinated and subjected to numerous other manifestations of State Terrorism.”

Johnson supports all of the above. Doing so qualifies him to head DHS. He endorses targeted assassinations by drones or other means.

He defends lawless NSA spying. He champions waging war on terror at home and abroad.

On November 30, 2012, he addressed the Oxford Union in London. He titled his talk “The Conflict Against Al Qaeda and its Affiliates: How Will It End?”

He claimed credit for working with Congress “to enact the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2009.” It renewed its initial 2006 authorization.

It scrapped habeas protection. It granted sweeping police state powers. They’re unchanged today. MCA states:

“(N)o (civil) court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause for action whatsoever…relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission (including) challenges to the lawfulness of (its) procedures…”

With or without evidence, “Any person is punishable who aids, abets, counsels, commands, procures,” or in any way provides “material support” to alleged terrorists.

Charged suspects are guilty by accusation. Enhanced interrogations (aka torture) are authorized.

So is denying detainees international law protections. Presidents can authorize military commissions at their discretion.

Torture coerced confessions are admissible. Hearsay and secret evidence is permitted. Kangaroo court justice follows.

Johnson vowed to keep fighting Al Qaeda. “(W)e are taking the fight directly to AQAP (Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula),” he said.

He omitted explaining that Washington uses Al Qaeda and similar groups strategically as enemies and allies.

He called targeting Al Qaeda “a new kind of war. It is an unconventional war against an unconventional enemy.”

He implied that old rules don’t apply. Waging war on Al Qaeda won’t “end in conventional terms,” he said.

The most “unconventional” tactics are used. Fundamental rule of law principles are violated doing so.

On February 16, 2012, New York City Bar President Samuel Seymour wrote Johnson, saying:

“(W)e write to express our concern with the Order Governing Written Communications Management for Detainees Involved in Military Commissions, dated December 27, 2011.”

“The Association is alarmed at the dramatic impingement on the attorney-client privilege resulting from the procedures set forth in the Order.”

“The sanctity of the attorney-client privilege is fundamental to our system of justice.”

“If the Order is implemented, (it) will be gravely undermined.”

“We urge the appropriate authority to vacate the Order and (replace it with) a (proper) legal framework.”

It’s in stark contrast to civil proceedings. It’s fundamentally unfair and unjust.

Seymour’s letter was comprehensive. It was lengthy. It ran nine pages.

He concluded saying “the Association believes the Written Communications Order is problematic because it invades the attorney-client privilege, inappropriately inserts outsiders into the defense team, and reverses the presumption that the privilege should be respected, all on a blanket basis and without any particularized showing of need.”

“We believe the Order threatens to undermine the proper functioning of the adversary system and” helps delegitimize military commission prosecutions.

On March 18, 2013, Johnson spoke at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School.” He titled his address “A ‘Drone Court:’ Some Pros and Cons.”

He claimed “appropriate lethal force” made America’s homeland safer. It’s never been less safe.

He advocates drone killings. He asked what about establishing a drone court? He’s comfortable about an authority acting as judge, jury and executioner.

He wants it kept within the executive branch. Targeted assassination authorizations aren’t suited for judicial review. Quick action is needed to implement them.

Doing so violates core international, constitutional and US statute laws. Johnson didn’t explain. Nor that drones mostly kill innocent civilians.

A tiny fraction of deaths are so-called “high value targets.” Innocent men, women and children comprise most others. It doesn’t matter.

Johnson calls “targeted lethal force” justifiable. “The essential mission of the US military is to capture or kill an enemy,” he said.

In a February 2012 Yale Law School address, he called US citizens fair game.

“Belligerents who also happen to be US citizens do not enjoy immunity where non-citizen belligerents are valid military objectives,” he said.

“(U)nder well-settled legal principles, lethal force against a valid military objective, in an armed conflict, is consistent with the law of war and does not, by definition, constitute an ‘assassination.’ ”

America’s domestic “war on terror” will be in good hands with Johnson. Expect freedom to suffer another major body blow. Perhaps it won’t survive his tenure. Ends justifying means alone matters.

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 War On Terrorism … Or Whatever

“U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group.” 1

Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?

For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game. Washington and its main Mideast allies in the conflict – Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – have not impeded the movement to Syria of jihadists coming to join the rebels, recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while Qatar and the Saudis have supplied the rebels with weapons, most likely bought in large measure from the United States, as well as lots of of what they have lots of – money.

This widespread international support has been provided despite the many atrocities carried out by the jihadists – truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims’ bodies (most charming of all: a Youtube video of a rebel leader cutting out an organ from the chest of a victim and biting into it as it drips with blood). All this barbarity piled on top of a greater absurdity – these Western-backed, anti-government forces are often engaged in battle with other Western-backed, anti-government forces, non-jihadist. It has become increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public as one of pro-democracy “moderates” locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria. Here’s a brief survey:

Afghanistan, 1980-early 1990s: In support of the Islamic Moujahedeen (“holy warriors”), the CIA orchestrated a war against the Afghan government and their Soviet allies, pouring in several billions of dollars of arms and extensive military training; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year; pressuring and bribing Pakistan to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary.

It worked. And out of the victorious Moujahedeen came al Qaeda.

Bosnia, 1992-5: In 2001 the Wall Street Journal declared:

It is safe to say that the birth of al-Qaeda as a force on the world stage can be traced directly back to 1992, when the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic issued a passport in their Vienna embassy to Osama bin Laden. … for the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. 2

A few months later, The Guardian reported on “the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims – some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in “the war against terrorism”. 3

In 1994 and 1995 US/NATO forces carried out bombing campaigns over Bosnia aimed at damaging the military capability of the Serbs and enhancing that of the Bosnian Muslims. In the decade-long civil wars in the Balkans, the Serbs, regarded by Washington as the “the last communist government in Europe”, were always the main enemy.

Kosovo, 1998-99: Kosovo, overwhelmingly Muslim, was a province of Serbia, the main republic of the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, Kosovo separatists – The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – began an armed conflict with Belgrade to split Kosovo from Serbia. The KLA was considered a terrorist organization by the US, the UK and France for years, with numerous reports of the KLA having contact with al-Qaeda, getting arms from them, having its militants trained in al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, and even having members of al-Qaeda in KLA ranks fighting against the Serbs. 4

However, when US-NATO forces began military action against the Serbs the KLA was taken off the US terrorist list, it “received official US-NATO arms and training support” 5 , and the 1999 US-NATO bombing campaign eventually focused on driving Serbian forces from Kosovo.

In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, an independence so illegitimate and artificial that the majority of the world’s nations still have not recognized it. But the United States was the first to do so, the very next day, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory.

The KLA have been known for their trafficking in women, heroin, and human body parts (sic). The United States has naturally been pushing for Kosovo’s membership in NATO and the European Union.

Nota bene: In 1992 the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs reached agreement in Lisbon for a unified state. The continuation of a peaceful multi-ethnic Bosnia seemed assured. But the United States sabotaged the agreement. 6

Libya, 2011: The US and NATO to the rescue again. For more than six months, almost daily missile attacks against the government and forces of Muammar Gaddafi as assorted Middle East jihadists assembled in Libya and battled the government on the ground. The predictable outcome came to be – the jihadists now in control of parts of the country and fighting for the remaining parts. The wartime allies showed their gratitude to Washington by assassinating the US ambassador and three other Americans, presumably CIA, in the city of Benghazi.

Caucasus (Russia), mid-2000s to present: The National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House have for many years been the leading American “non-government” institutions tasked with destabilizing, if not overthrowing, foreign governments which refuse to be subservient to the desires of US foreign policy. Both NGOs have backed militants in the Russian Caucasus area, one that has seen more than its share of terror stretching back to the Chechnyan actions of the 1990s. 7

“Omission is the most powerful form of lie.” – George Orwell

I am asked occasionally why I am so critical of the mainstream media when I quote from them repeatedly in my writings. The answer is simple. The American media’s gravest shortcoming is much more their errors of omission than their errors of commission. It’s what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. So I can make good use of the facts they report, which a large, rich organization can easier provide than the alternative media.

A case in point is a New York Times article of October 5 on the Greek financial crisis and the Greeks’ claim for World War Two reparations from Germany.

“Germany may be Greece’s stern banker now, say those who are seeking reparations,” writes theTimes, but Germany “should pay off its own debts to Greece. … It is not just aging victims of the Nazi occupation who are demanding a full accounting. Prime Minister Antonis Samarass government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945. … The call for reparations has elicited an emotional outpouring in Greece, where six years of brutal recession and harsh austerity measures have left many Greeks hostile toward Germany. Rarely does a week go by without another report in the news about, as one newspaper put it in a headline, ‘What Germany Owes Us’.”

“The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt. … Some members of the National Council on Reparations, an advocacy group, are calling for more than $677 billion to cover stolen artifacts, damage to the economy and to the infrastructure, as well as the bank loan and individual claims.”

So there we have the morality play: The evil Germans who occupied Greece and in addition to carrying out a lot of violence and repression shamelessly exploited the Greek people economically.

Would it be appropriate for such a story, or an accompanying or follow-up story, to mention the civil war that broke out in Greece shortly after the close of the world war? On one side were the neo-fascists, many of whom had cooperated with the occupying Germans during the war, some even fighting for the Nazis. Indeed, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, acknowledged in August 1946 that there were 228 ex-members of the Nazi Security Battalions – whose main task had been to track down Greek resistance fighters and Jews – on active service in the new Greek army. 8

On the other side was the Greek left who had fought the Nazis courageously, even forcing the German army to flee the country in 1944.

So guess which side of the civil war our favorite military took? … That’s right, the United States supported the neo-fascists. After all, an important component of the Greek left was the Communist Party, although it wouldn’t have mattered at all if the Greek left had not included any Communists. Support of the left (not to be confused with liberals of course) anywhere in the world, during and since the Cold War, has been verboten in US foreign policy.

The neo-fascists won the civil war and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency, named and modeled after itself, the KYP. For the next 15 years, Greece was looked upon much as a piece of real estate to be developed according to Washington’s political and economic needs. One document should suffice to capture the beauty of Washington’s relationship to Athens – a 1947 letter from US Secretary of State George Marshall to Dwight Griswold, the head of the American Mission to Aid Greece, said:

During the course of your work you and the members of your Mission will from time to time find that certain Greek officials are not, because of incompetence, disagreement with your policies, or for some other reason, extending the type of cooperation which is necessary if the objectives of your Mission are to be achieved. You will find it necessary to effect the removal of these officials. 9

Where is the present-day Greek headline: “What The United States Owes Us”? Where is the New York Times obligation to enlighten its readers?

The latest step in the evolution of America’s Police State

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

So say many Americans. And many Germans as well.

But one German, Ilija Trojanow, would disagree. He has lent his name to published documents denouncing the National Security Agency (NSA), and was one of several prominent German authors who signed a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to take a firm stance against the mass online surveillance conducted by the NSA. Trojanow and the other authors had nothing to hide, which is why the letter was published for the public to read. What happened after that, however, was that Trojanow was refused permission to board a flight from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to Miami on Monday, September 30. Without any explanation.

Trojanow, who was on his way to speak at a literary conference in Denver, told the Spiegel magazine online website that the denial of entry might be linked to his criticism of the NSA. Germany’s Foreign Ministry says it has contacted US authorities “to resolve this issue”. 10

In an article published in a German newspaper, Trojanow voiced his frustration with the incident: “It is more than ironic if an author who raises his voice against the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within a state for years, will be denied entry into the ‘land of the brave and the free’.”11

Further irony can be found in the title of a book by Trojanow: “Attack on freedom. Obsession with security, the surveillance state and the dismantling of civil rights.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who oversees the NSA and other intelligence agencies, said recently that the intelligence community “is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes.” 12

It’s difficult in the extreme to see how this criterion would apply in any way to Ilija Trojanow.

The story is a poignant caveat on how fragile is Americans’ freedom to criticize their Security State. If a foreigner can be barred from boarding a flight merely for peaceful, intellectual criticism of America’s Big Brother (nay, Giant Brother), who amongst us does not need to pay careful attention to anything they say or write.

Very few Americans, however, will even be aware of this story. A thorough search of the Lexis-Nexis media database revealed a single mention in an American daily newspaper (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), out of 1400 daily papers in the US. No mention on any broadcast media. A single one-time mention in a news agency (Associated Press), and one mention in a foreign English-language newspaper (New Zealand Herald).

Notes

1. Washington Post, September 26, 2013 ↩
2. Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
3. The Guardian (London), April 22, 2002 ↩
4. RT TV (Moscow), May 4, 2012 ↩
5. Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2001 ↩
6. New York Times, June 17, 1993, buried at the very end of the article on an inside page ↩
7. Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post, “Barbarians at the Gate: Terrorism, the US, and the Subversion of Russia”, August 30, 2012 ↩
8. Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, October 16, 1946, column 887 (reference is made here to Bevin’s statement of August 10, 1946) ↩
9. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, Vol. V (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 222-3. See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, chapter 3 for further details of the US role in postwar Greece. ↩
10. Associated Press, October 2, 2013 ↩
11. Huffington Post, “Ilija Trojanow, German Writer, Banned From US For Criticizing NSA”, October 1, 2013 ↩
12. Washington Post, October 5, 2013 ↩

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