DATELINE: PARIS, SEPTEMBER 7, 2015 |
Washington’s pawns in Paris: Laurent Fabius (l) and Hollande. A disgrace in many respects, but typical of the new vassalage instituted by Washington via prostituted politicians.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his Monday, September 7, seven Syrian citizens go to court in Paris to pursue their civil suit against French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. The five men and two women all lost family members and close friends in massacres by armed rebels supported by Fabius in word and deed. They are asking for one euro of symbolic damages.
In the end the suit will almost surely be thrown out. The September 7 hearing is on an appeal against an earlier ruling that the courts cannot judge acts of the government in this case, even if the complaint is founded. And yet this futile lawsuit makes a crucial point that Western politicians and media would much prefer to ignore.
Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation. And so far, they are getting away with it. The massive refugee crisis swamping Europe is just the beginning of the troubles that these unscrupulous leaders have brought on their own countries.
Laurent Fabius can fairly be called a French neoconservative. His alignment with Israeli policies is seen in the fact that he was the most reluctant of the foreign ministers involved in the Iranian nuclear negotiations to agree to the final settlement.
He has been one of the most gung-ho advocates of regime change in Syria, a country long on the neocon hit list for its Arab nationalism and support for the Palestinian cause.
Western leaders share major responsibility for making much of the world unfit for normal human habitation.
The Syrian plaintiffs note that:
Fabius: Overt promoter of international war crimes, but above the law, and therefore untouchable.
* On May 29, 2012, Fabius declared that France would intervene against the Syrian regime.
* On August 17, 2012, Fabius declared that Syrian President Bashar el Assad “did not deserve to be alive on earth”.
* On December 14, 2012, speaking out against the Obama administration decision to designate the Al Nusra Front as a terrorist group, Fabius objected that the Al Nusra Front was “doing a good job on the ground”.
* On March 13, 2013, Fabius announced that France and Britain were going to deliver arms to the rebels.
As a group, the plaintiffs maintain that by his declarations, Foreign Minister Fabius stirred up civil war in Syria and encouraged armed rebel attacks against the existing government. Individually, each of the plaintiffs lost family members and close friends in armed attacks and massacres carried out by the al Nusra militia allied rebel groups.
Israel’s Ghastly Twin: the “Islamic State”
[dropcap]U[/dropcap]nder U.S. leadership and Israeli influence, French political leaders have championed “regime change” in Libya and Syria on the tacit assumption that civil war would be better for the people of those countries than living under a “dictatorship”. In practice, however, most people can get along better without a vote than without a roof over their heads. Or without their heads.It is hardly surprising that the carefully filmed and diffused videos of “Islamic State” (IS) disciplinary methods have caused panic among people living in their path of conquest.
War causes people to become refugees. Western media pay close attention to refugees only when they like the “story”. Huge attention was paid to Kosovo Albanians fleeing temporarily from the 1999 NATO war against the Serbs, because those refugees could be described as victims of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” and thus as justification of the NATO war itself.
But no such media concern was aroused over the much greater number of refugees who fled from the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq and have never returned. Over a million Iraqi refugees fled into Syria, where they were well received.
The situation in the Middle East is critical. Armed by leftover U.S. military equipment in Iraq, enriched by illicit oil sales, its ranks swollen by young Jihadis from all over the world, the Islamic State threatens the people of Lebanon and Jordan, already struggling to take care of masses of refugees from Palestine, Iraq and now Syria. Fear of the decapitating Islamic fanatics is inciting more and more people to risk everything in order to get to safety in Europe.
The Islamic State is truly the horrible enemy caricature of the “Jewish State”, another political entity based on an exclusive religious identity. Like Israel it has no clearly defined borders, but with a vastly larger potential demographic base.
The only force that can stop the Islamic State from expanding its fanatic rule over all of Mesopotamia and beyond is the Syrian State led by Bashar al Assad. The choice is not between Assad and “Western democracy”. The choice is between Assad and the Islamic State. But Western leaders have still not fully dropped their demented cry: “Assad must go!”
Refugees, Migrants and Terrorists
The front pages of some of Britain’s daily newspapers showing an image of the body of Syrian three-year-old boy Aylan are pictured in London, on September 3, 2015. The image spread like lightning through social media and dominated front pages from Spain to Sweden, with commentators unanimous it had rammed home the horrors faced by those fleeing war and conflict in the Middle East and Africa. AFP PHOTO/JUSTIN TALLIS
…
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he results of this madness are washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Images and sentiment have replaced thinking about causes and effects. One photo of a drowned toddler causes a media and political uproar. Are people surprised? Didn’t they know that toddlers were being torn to pieces by U.S. bombing of Iraq, by U.S. drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen? What about the toddlers obliterated by NATO’s war to “free Libya” from its “dictator”?The current refugee crisis in Europe is the inevitable, foreseeable, predicted result of Western policy in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi’s Libya was the wall that kept hundreds of thousands of Africans from migrating illegally to Europe, not only by police methods but even more effectively by offering them development at home and decently paid jobs in Libya. Now Libya is the source both of economic migrants and of refugees from Libya itself, as well as from other lands of desperation. In order to weaken Sudan, the United States (and Susan Rice in particular) championed creation of the new country of South Sudan, which is not a country at all but the scene of rival massacres driving more and more fugitives toward unwelcoming countries.
The famous photo of little Aylan drowned in the Mediterranean is used very largely to make Europeans feel guilty. The leaders should indeed feel guilty – and not least the rich egomaniac Bernard-Henri Lévy, who prides himself on having talked the French government of Nicolas Sarkozy into starting war against Libya, where, he claimed, there were no Islamic extremists, but only pro-Westerners yearning for democracy. Thanks to NATO, Islamic extremists have since run roughshod over the whole country.
Bernard Henri-Levy: BHL, the excremental French fake intellectual adored by the capitalist media, a regular on Charlie Rose. Here enjoying the pleasures of fame and money with his wife, Arielle Dombasle. One more proof there is no God.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has agreed to take in eight hundred thousand Syrian refugees. This is admirable on humanitarian grounds. Germany is economically strong and demographically weak; with its gradually shrinking population, middle class Syrians, many of them terrified Christians, may seem to be a welcome addition to the population. But it deepens political divisions within Germany and in Europe.
This is particularly the case in the new EU countries of Eastern Europe. Starting with Hungary, their leaders are making it clear that those countries are above all concerned with their ethnic identity, and don’t want to take in a lot of people who don’t speak their language. Unlike countries of Western Europe, the Eastern European tier of ethnic states have no tradition of taking in immigrants and no ideological attachment to the Western human rights ideology. In Eastern Europe, “human rights” sounded good to use against Russia and the Soviet Union, but stops there.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Greek crisis already put heavy strains on the unity of the European Union. For the first time, many people are questioning the whole idea. The crisis showed that there is no real sense of solidarity between the peoples of Europe; when it comes to the crunch, Germans are Germans and Greeks are Greeks, and “European” is an abstraction. The refugee crisis is showing new cracks in “European unity”.Most of Europe today is suffering from massive unemployment, especially the Southern countries where refugees first land: Greece, Italy, Spain. European Union economic policies, already strangling Greece, do not favor job creation for hundreds of thousands of newcomers. Even professionally qualified refugees will find it difficult or impossible to get around rules protecting their professions in host countries. Most jobs they manage to get will probably be low level and illegal, undercutting wages and working conditions in the host countries.
Moreover, it is impossible in the present mass movement of people to distinguish “refugees” from economic “migrants” – that is, from men simply seeking better work opportunities. The EU today has little to offer then, and resentment of this unsought immigration is certain to improve the political fortunes of the nationalist right.
There is another reason that many European citizens feel less than enthusiastic about welcoming hundreds of thousands of unknown foreigners into their communities. The Islamic State has openly boasted of sending terrorists into Europe among the refugees, with the clear intention of committing violent acts to destabilize the West. Of course, the threat of terrorism is being used cynically by governments to enforce police state measures, but that does not mean that the threat of terrorism is unreal. Unfortunately, it exists – thanks very largely to the policies of those very same Western governments.
The refugee crisis should be seen as the warning signal that the United States and its NATO allies – especially Britain and France – are bringing the world to a state of chaos that is going to keep spreading and that is approaching a point of no return. It is quick and easy to break things. Putting them back together may be impossible. Civilization itself may be more fragile than it seems.
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1 comment
Europe has variably collaborated with the U.S. in the imperialistic wars which have caused this African/Middle Eastern/European refugee crisis (and the one in Ukraine). Thus, U.S. AND Europe must share responsibility as the ROOT cause of the crises.
Look at the maps here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_Libya
Note the European countries that collaborated with the U.S. in destroying Libya, the country which formerly had the highest human development index in Africa. Then the refugees began pouring out of the hell-hole that the U.S. and E.U. created, and thousands of bodies began piling up at the bottom of the Mediterranean. I agree with Luciana Bohne (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/05/02/europes-heart-of-darkness/) and Finian Cunningham (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2015/09/05/migrant-crisis-tests-eus-foundations/ and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42765.htm ):
“Last year, Italy was forced into cancelling its national maritime rescue program, Mare Nostrum, for the thousands of migrants who venture across the Mediterranean on rickety boats from Libya. That program was costing the Italian government about €120 million a year to run, but other EU members, Britain in particular, were reluctant to contribute to the facility, and so Rome was obliged to terminate it.” (Note: “Forced”? Or just lacking sufficient moral fiber?)
“Mare Nostrum, which saved 150,000 people in search and rescue operations on the sea. It was substituted with Operation Triton http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30039044, supervised by an agency called Frontex. The proposed ten-point plan calls for a strengthening of Triton and Frontex. Neither is in the business of rescuing people.”
“ ‘At a joint meeting of Foreign and Interior Ministers, chaired by High Representative / Vice-President Federica Mogherini and held in Luxembourg, Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Commissioner Avramopoulous presented a 10 point plan of the immediate actions to be taken in response to the crisis situation in the Mediterranean.’ The plan envisions the solution as a militarization of the problem; launching aggressive operations against the smugglers in Libya with Apache helicopter gunships and employing the security forces of Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Mali, and Niger to monitor and detect potential “migrants” in order to restrict their avenues of escape via the treacherous sea, the only approach still open after the European Union has shut the land borders tight. In addition, the EU is looking into the possible use of drones, which Israel, the largest exporter of drones in the world, had tested effectively on Gaza last summer. Israel routinely advertises for-sale weapons as “tested in the field.” ”
“The vast majority of the refugees to the EU are from war-torn Syria, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration. Up to 12 million of Syria’s population – half the total – have been displaced by more than four years of conflict in that country. A war that has been fuelled covertly by the United States, Britain and France seeking regime change against President Bashar al Assad. Also fuelling the war in Syria are Western allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Israel…
Last week, in Germany, angry far-right extremists attacked a care centre for asylum seekers near Dresden. Mobs chanted racist slogans, screaming for the migrants to go back to their countries.
Go back to their countries? Yes, that’s right. You know the war zones that haughty European states like Britain and France have ignited and inflamed in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in Africa.
Which makes you wonder: who are the real fascists? The anti-immigrant mobs on the streets, or the coiffured politicians in fancy suits and plush government offices?”
No, Europe’s response is “too little, too late”. Yes, some countries, like Germany are now forced to change their tune when confronted with the inescapable reality. The same Germany which has been on the forefront of promoting the re-emergence of Naziism in Europe by virtue of its collaboration with the U.S. in support of the fascist coup regime in Kiev and its attacks on civilians in Donbass with heavy weapons, and promoting all of the associated Orwellian MSM lies, dissembling and propaganda. And in stark contrast with the European lapdogs of the U.S., with their “too little too late” response to the refugee crisis in southern Europe, consider the Russian response to the refugee crisis in Ukraine. Ironically, Europe must share “direct, primary, basic, fundamental” causal responsibility with the U.S. as a ROOT cause of BOTH the African/Middle Eastern/European refugee crisis AND the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Except that Russia has behaved very differently than the U.S. and Europe. Russia has absorbed hundreds of thousands of refugees from Donbass — people who have been grieviously injured by the U.S. and EU-supported war against them. Russia has done this without fanfare and without coersion, in an incredibly efficient and humane and GENEROUS and MORAL fashion. (By no means the first time that Russia has behaved in a moral fashion in comparison with the West.) But, instead of eliciting praise from the U.S. and EU, Russia is demonized and subject to sanctions designed to harm it economically (which have largely backfired). This puts the EU’s response to its refugee crisis, a crisis in which it had a large hand in creating, to shame.
And what about Syria? Has the EU been working to prevent the U.S. from destroying the legitimate, democratically elected government there, in the service of U.S. hegemonic, imperialistic designs, by training and funding Takfiri terrorists (all the while pretending to fight against these same terrorists)? Here is a reliable, articulate, authentic voice from the region with the Syrian perspective regarding who bears causal responsibility for the Syrian component of the refugee crisis. Note who Sarah Abdallah cites FIRST: “Calling on European colonialist powers, Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia and now even the illegitimate Israeli regime to “do more” vis-à-vis Syria’s refugees is like asking a gang of arsonists to put out a forest fire they started and are still fueling, to paraphrase the words of Dr. Bashar al-Assad. This Imperialist-manufactured “refugee crisis” is not merely being used by the Western-Zionist mainstream media, liberal so-called “solidarity activists” and the NGO-Human-Rights-Industrial-Complex to renew their calls for “regime change” in Damascus, nor is it just an attempt to destroy the resistant identity and social fabric of the Syrian Arab Republic, but most importantly, it serves the Zionist project against the Arab and Islamic worlds, as the depopulation of ancient civilizations such as Syria and Iraq is integral to the expansionist “Greater Israel” scheme (i.e. the establishment of a Zionist entity which stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates), just as the case is with the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Make no mistake, there is only one genuine solution to the issue: Washington and its cronies completely ending their sponsorship of the Takfiri terrorists and getting the fuck out of our region once and for all. In other words, stop the flow of foreign fanatics into Syria and let Syrians safely return to a stable homeland where they rightfully belong. Get the picture?”
Exactly…
Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. I’ll believe that Germany is repentant and genuine when it starts devoting 10% of its GDP over the next several decades to repairing the damage from its imperialistic collaboration with the U.S., rebuilding the lives and homes of its victims who were forced to flee their war-torn countries and rebuilding the countries that it has been complicit in destroying. This applies to all the other countries of the EU as well. And millions of CDs of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, to be distributed to all of Europe’s victims, along with the generous aid packages (https://www.greanvillepost.com/der-musik-musica/ and https://www.greanvillepost.com/2013/01/21/ode-to-joy-beethoven-flashmob-in-sabadell-spain/ )
Luciana Bohne is completely correct. Europe’s heart in the past has overwhelming been one of darkness. “And thus, today, a supposedly post-Nazi liberal Europe treats desperate victims as they once treated desperate Jews, shutting the borders, restricting immigration, turning them back to the hell they came from—for the forcible return, too, is in the plan. So much for “Ode to Joy,” Beethoven’s hymn to universal brotherhood, which is the anthem of this European Union of Hypocrisy! One of the Requiem masses might be more appropriate—or even Berlioz’ “Dies Irae” from Symphonie Fantastique. After all, Europe has almost as high a quotient of culture to choose from as it has of genocides.”
Will that change? Ode to Joy or Requiem mass or Dies Irae? We’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath.
NOTE: The writer is a senior contributing editor to The Greanville Post.