“Jihadi John,” imperialism and ISIS

“Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.”

RT.COM (Screengrab)

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Thursday, the Washington Post revealed the identity of “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operative featured in grisly videos depicting the beheading of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning.

The Post named the ISIS member as Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old who was born in Kuwait and raised in London. He is described in a CNN report as “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

The media reporting on this identification has been dominated by discussions of the psychology of terrorism and the role of Islamist ideology, along with speculation as to why someone from such a background would choose to engage in such barbaric acts.

All of these banalities are part of a campaign of deliberate obfuscation. Purposefully left in the shadows is the central revelation to accompany the identification of “Jihad John”—the fact that he was well known to British intelligence, which undoubtedly identified him as soon as his image and voice were first broadcast in ISIS videos.

Not only did Britain’s security service MI5 carefully track his movements, it carried out an active campaign to recruit him as an informant and covert agent. As the British daily Guardian put it Thursday, MI5 has “serious questions” to answer about its relations with Emwazi.

Chief among these questions is whether the intelligence agency was successful in its recruitment efforts. In other words, did Emwazi go to Syria with MI5’s foreknowledge and blessings?

If there is doubt as to whether Emwazi was recruited, it is clear that other ISIS jihadists have been. The BBC reported that British intelligence has refused to name Emwazi for “operational reasons.” It adds: “The practice by intelligence agencies of approaching jihadist sympathisers to work for them is likely to continue. It’s believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State ‘capital’ of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice.”

At its heart, the case of “Jihadi John” is of significance because of what it says about the real relationship between Western imperialism and ISIS. In the final analysis, ISIS is a product of the interventions by Washington and its allies in the region.

Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.

It is not only a matter of these movements emerging out of the mayhem, death and destruction unleashed by the US military and CIA in these countries at the cost of well over a million lives and wholesale social devastation.

Like Al Qaeda before it, ISIS is a creation of US and Western imperialism, unleashed upon the peoples of the region in pursuit of definite strategic aims. In Libya, Islamists now affiliated with ISIS provided the principal ground forces for the US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, ISIS, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist militias have played a similar role in a war for regime-change that has been backed by Washington and its allies.

By all accounts, so-called “foreign fighters” comprise the largest component of the “rebels” who have sought to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past three-and-a-half years. Estimates have put their number at over 20,000, with recruits drawn from throughout Europe, North America, Central Asia and elsewhere.

While the media presents the flow of these fighters into Syria as something of a mystery, the question of how they have gotten there can be easily answered. The CIA, MI5 and other Western intelligence agencies have not merely turned a blind eye to Islamists traveling from their respective countries to the Syrian battlefield, it has offered them active encouragement. Turkey, a key US ally, has facilitated the flow of these elements across its border into Syria.

It should be recalled that Western governments and media painted forces like ISIS in Syria as democratic “revolutionaries” waging a progressive struggle against a tyrant. The war, which was stoked through orchestrated provocations, was cited as a justification for “humanitarian” intervention.

Arms and funding poured in to back the largely Islamist “rebels,” even as Washington and its allies steadily escalated the threat of direct intervention. The Obama administration went to the brink of launching a savage bombardment of Syria in September 2013, only to beat a tactical retreat in the face of unexpected opposition.

The Islamist forces on the ground in Syria felt themselves the victims of a double-cross. Much like the CIA’s Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs a half-century earlier, their promised US air support did not come and they lashed out in retribution. Ultimately, this took the form not only of the serial beheadings of Western hostages, but also the debacle inflicted upon the US-trained security forces in Iraq.

Washington has hypocritically seized upon the beheadings in an attempt to whip up support for its new intervention in the Middle East. But when similar atrocities were carried out by ISIS and its cohorts against Syrian Alawites, Christians and captured conscripts, the Obama administration looked the other way.

In the wake of the revelations about “Jihadi John,” Britain’s Tory Prime Minister David Cameron issued a ringing defense of the country’s security services, describing its members as “incredibly impressive, hard-working, dedicated, courageous.” He declared his sympathy for their “having to make incredibly difficult judgments.” He insisted that “the most important thing is to get behind them.”

If Britain were a functioning democracy, the revelations about the role of MI5 and its relations with Mohammed Emwazi and ISIS generally would be the subject of a parliamentary inquiry that could spell the fall of the government.

However, in London, as in Washington, the government has been largely taken over by the military and intelligence apparatus, whose crimes are systematically covered up with the aid of a complicit corporate-controlled media.

For workers in Britain, the US and internationally, these revelations only underscore the necessity to build up a genuine antiwar movement based on a socialist and internationalist program and in intransigent opposition to all attempts to exploit the crimes of ISIS—the Frankenstein’s monster created by imperialism—to justify the escalation of war abroad and repression at home.

[box] Bill Van Auken is a senior editorial writer with wsws.org, organ of Social Equality Party. [/box]

[printfriendly]

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Skipping The Speech for All the Wrong Reasons

By David Swanson

Netanyahu: An unrepentant fanatic and warmonger with a big American media following. Now his arrogance has put him on a collision course with a segment of the US ruling class. (Screen grab)

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]on’t get me wrong, I’m glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu’s speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It’s too close to Netanyahu’s election. (That doesn’t persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then “politics” wouldn’t be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don’t want the U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech is hardly the same as backing coups in Ukraine and Venezuela or giving Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons every year.)

The Speaker didn’t ask the President. (This is likely the big reason that Democrats are promising to skip the speech.) I’m actually amazed more of them haven’t made that promise. Netanyahu seemed to me to miss the extent to which the United States has become a term-limited monarchy. Congress typically wants to pass the buck on wars to the President. The President typically controls one of the two parties quite tightly. But do I actually care that Congress didn’t consult the President? Hell no! Imagine if, during the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq, Congress had offered a joint-session microphone to El Baradei or Sarkozy or Putin or, indeed, Hussein to denounce all the bogus claims about WMDs in Iraq? Would you have been outraged by the impoliteness toward President Bush or delighted that a million people might not get killed for no damn reason?

Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, “I’m skipping the speech because I’m opposed to killing Iranians.”

These kinds of reasons do have a practical weakness: they lead to calls for postponing the speech, rather than canceling it. Some other reasons have more serious flaws.

The speech damages bipartisan U.S. support for Israel. (Really? A slim minority of the President’s party skips the speech for a laundry list of lame excuses and suddenly the United States is going to stop providing all the free weapons and vetoing every attempt at legal accountability for the crimes of the Israeli government? And that would be a bad thing if it actually happened?)

The speech hurts the critical effort of negotiations to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (This is the worst of the bad reasons. It pushes the false idea that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon and threatening to use it. It plays right into Netanyahu’s fantasies of poor helpless nuclear Israel the victim of Iranian aggression. In reality, Iran has not attacked another nation in modern history. If only Israel or the United States could say as much!)

As I said, I’m glad anyone’s skipping the speech for any reason. But I find it deeply disturbing that an enormously important and deeply moral reason to skip the speech is obvious and known to every member of Congress, and while most are acting against it, those acting in accordance with it refuse to articulate it. The reason is this: Netanyahu is coming to spread war propaganda. He told Congress lies about Iraq in 2002 and pushed for a U.S. war. He has been lying, according to leaks this week of his own spies’ information and according to the understanding of the U.S. “intelligence” services, about Iran. It is illegal to spread war propaganda under the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Israel is a party. Congress is struggling to keep up with the wars President Obama is continuing, launching, and risking. Here’s one war Obama seems not to want, and Congress is bringing in a foreign leader with a record of war lies to give them their marching orders. Meanwhile, an agency of that same foreign government, AIPAC, is holding its big lobby meeting in Washington.

Now, it is true that nuclear energy facilities create dangerous targets. Those drones flying around French nuclear plants scare the hell out of me. And it is true that nuclear energy places its possessor a short step away from nuclear weaponry. Which is why the U.S. should stop spreading nuclear energy to countries that have no need of it, and why the U.S. should never have given nuclear bomb plans to Iran or sentenced Jeffrey Sterling to prison for allegedly revealing that act. But you can’t accomplish good by using horrific mass murder to avoid horrific mass murder — and that’s what Israeli-U.S. aggression toward Iran means. Stirring up a new cold war with Russia in Syria and Ukraine is dangerous enough without throwing Iran into the mix. But even a war that confined itself to Iran would be horrifying.

Imagine if we had one Congress member who would say, “I’m skipping the speech because I’m opposed to killing Iranians.” I know we have lots of constituents who like to think that their progressive Congress member secretly thinks that. But I’ll believe it when I hear it said.

War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.

Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.

Sign up for occasional important activist alerts here http://davidswanson.org/signup

Sign up for articles or press releases here http://davidswanson.org/lists

This email may be unlawfully collected, held, and read by the NSA which violates our freedoms using the justification of immoral, illegal wars absurdly described as being somehow for freedom.
[/box]

[printfriendly]

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

The “Stalin Question” lives on

THE STALIN QUESTION
=By= Steve Jonas
(with additional commentary by Michael Faulkner)

The truth about the Stalin period, still debated in the light of new historical findings, and the enormous accumulated weight of countless layers of hostile propaganda, is essential to the discussion of humanity’s options if it is ever to escape the clutches of capitalism.

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]irst let me say that I have never wavered in my belief that if a) the human species is to survive and b) the world is to be made a better place for all living things, the political/economic system called capitalism — based on the private ownership of the means of production, operated by the owners primarily for their own benefit with the principal focus being on the accumulation of profit and capital, must someday be replaced by some form of socialism — a political/economic system in which there is common ownership of the means of production, operated in order to produce the greatest good for the great number.

BELOW: Khrushchev’s denunciations shook the party’s rank and file around the world and gave ammunition to socialism’s class enemies, but some of his criticisms have also been questioned. The Soviet period between the two world wars is certainly one that refuses to accept black and white characterizations.

The mode of ownership of the means of production is key. This is because the human species is the only one which requires for its survival the conversion of elements found in the environment into goods and services of a different nature. It is the mode of ownership of the means of conversion, otherwise known as the relations of production, what is done with any surpluses that are produced, and who owns the outcomes of production in the first instance, which defines the nature of the society.

Now, there are many people around the world who generally agree with this proposition but look at, or have looked at, the Soviet experiment and have said something like “nah, it can never happen; Stalinism proved that socialism cannot work and never will.” Thus we have to think of something else {although except for various forms of anarchy and “self-determination” no one seems to have come up with anything that a) might have a chance of seizing the ownership of the means of production from the capitalists who are not, as they have displayed over-and-over again since 1917, not going to give up without one helluva fight, and b) might have a chance at operating an increasingly complicated advanced industrial society.

Well, first I say to such claims “let’s take a look at Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War.” This was the first armed conflict in history that attempted to replace the feudal order of society with one based on mercantile capitalism. In short, the Cromwellians lost. Now one who liked the general idea of mercantile capitalism could have said, “Ah me, the war is lost; feudalism will never be replaced; we might as well just accept it.” Or they might have said, “you know, this was just the first step. I see another revolution coming [which would be the Glorious Revolution of 1688] and then perhaps mercantile capitalism will really take off.” It is unlikely that they would have, at that time, also anticipated the Industrial Revolution that began in the 18^th century and directly led to industrial capitalism, but hey, you never know.

[box] The American media often mirrors accurately the attitude of US ruling circles toward specific subjects, leaders or political systems. In the covers below, Time Magazine, one of the nation’s pre-eminent opinion-shapers, cues the audience on its evolving views of Stalin. In the first cover, on the left (1933), the magazine is already characterizing Stalin as a cold-blooded mass murderer. In the center image (1942), during the short-lived WW2 antifascist alliance, the Soviet leader is depicted in neutral terms, with subtle admiration for his troops, clad in winter garb. By 1953, with Stalin recently deceased, the propaganda slant is back, depicting the Kremlin as a ruthless web of spiders. (Click on images for maximum resolution.) [/box]

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hen I like to cite the famous quote from Leon Trotsky (nee Lev Bronstein) that “Stalin would be the grave-digger of communism,” and the Lenin Testament that warned against his takeover of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). [Communists never ascend to power by normal, rightful means, supported by the masses; in US propaganda playbooks, they always “take over”.—Ed]
…
Stalinism was NOT the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. As suggested to me by my long-time English friend, colleague, and historian/political scientist with a special interest in 20^th century Germany and the Soviet Union, Michael Faulkner, whose columns are now published regularly on The Greanville Post, in some of the many discussions/exchanges of opinion we have had on this subject: “the view that it is was held by both Stalinists and hard-line anti-communists. The former approve of it and accept it as true socialism and the latter excoriate it and warn that this is where all socialist revolutions must lead. The outcome of the debates in the Bolshevik party in the late 1920s was by no means a foregone conclusion.”

(LEFT) “Long live Stalin’s air force!”, proclaims this wartime poster, in 1943. The cult of personality was already an accepted fact of life.

As detailed by Nikita Khrushchev in his very important book, Khrushchev Remembers, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), Stalin committed many crimes. He did not believe in the Leninist principles of collective leadership and Democratic Centralism. He came to believe that in order to stay in power and see his politics through he had to silence anyone who disagreed with him. For one reason or another, by one means or another he was able to gather about him a body of armed men and back them up with a rigged “judicial” system, who/which would do his bidding no matter what. It is ironic that it was “special bodies of armed men” that Lenin described as central to state control for whichever class happened to have control of the state apparatus.

Michael Faulkner has added the following thoughts on this matter: “I don’t think that Stalin was deeply interested in a vast accumulation of personal power and therefore I don’t think it is appropriate to think of him as a dictator in that conventional sense. He was (or at least regarded himself as) a Marxist and a dialectical materialist, for whom what he called “Marxism-Leninism’ was the ideology determining his existence. As you know, he invented the phrase. [Functionally] he was a dictator nevertheless. By the early 1930s at the latest he had probably come to regard himself as the ultimate guardian and trustee of the October Revolution. He may have kidded himself that he operated a system of ‘collective leadership’ but by the end of the 1930s, after the purges, he had eliminated all real and imagined opposition. He had come to believe that through his superior grasp of the theory and practice of ‘class struggle’ the destiny of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ rested entirely on his shoulders.”

For Stalin, of course, “silencing” his opponents eventually came to be killing them. Thus Stalin, over the years, killed off many of the best potential civilian and military leaders of the CPSU and the nation as well as many of the best rank-and-file members of the Soviet Communist Party. So the killing was not just a horrendous crime in itself, but it was also a crime in terms of the future of the nation.

Stalin’s other major crime was his failure to prepare the nation for the Nazi invasion in 1941, for which he was given ample warning, both by his own intelligence services and by deserters from the Wehrmacht build-up that was taking place along the then-border between the Soviet and Nazi German “General Gouvernement” portions of Occupied Poland. Because of this he was responsible for many unnecessary deaths, both civilian and military, and much destruction in the Soviet territory that would eventually be occupied by the forces of the Third Reich.

However, unlike the other Great Dictator of the period, Adolf Hitler, for one reason or another, Stalin was able to delegate enough of the major military decision-making to the generals of his who survived the Purges of the late-30s, so that the equivalent of the series of disastrous military mistakes that Hitler made from the time of the Battle of Moscow in December, 1941 onwards, was avoided.

At the same time, it is impossible to know whether or not without Stalin’s control of the Party and the Government in the 1930’s, the forced farm collectivization which was absolutely necessary for the forced industrialization which was absolutely necessary for the military build-up which did, along with the heroism of the Soviet military and civilian populations, eventually lead to the total victory of the allies over Nazi Germany, would have occurred.

Michael Faulkner adds: “He believed totally in ‘socialism in one country’ and also in the inevitability of capitalist encirclement and the eventual invasion by one or more capitalist powers. In 1931 he predicted that ‘We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced capitalist states of the West; we have 10 years to catch up. We shall either succeed or go under.’ That was meant in earnest. . . If Stalin had not been in power, would there have been a forced march of collectivization and industrialization at all?

“Under an alternative leadership (e.g.) Nikolai Bukharin, could there have been collectivization and industrialization either without force, or at least without the tyrannical use of force which characterized the Stalinist method? If such an alternative had been adopted, could it have achieved similar results in the 10 years available before the Nazi invasion of 1941? Questions like this, hypothetical though they may be, are important. If the answer is that there was no alternative to the Stalinist forced march (and let’s not forget what the enormous cost was in human lives, political terror and the decimation of a whole generation of Bolsheviks), then we have to admit that without Stalin and Stalinism there could have been no victory over Nazi Germany. However, if that was the price that had to be paid it is not easy to accept that the regime that triumphed over Nazism was in any sense that we might want to recognize, a socialist regime.”

Finally, in understanding the failure of the Soviet experiment in general and Stalinism in particular, one has to understand that Stalin, his predecessors and his successors, were all operating within the context of the “75 Years War Against the Soviet Union,” led before World War II by the United Kingdom, France, and Nazi Germany, during the War by Nazi Germany, and after the War by the United States. It is highly unlikely that in that context, regardless of the leadership, once the United States had decided in the early 1960s not to accept any form of Khrushchev’s offer of “peaceful co-existence,” any form of the Soviet Union could have survived.

One major task for future socialists, having assumed the leadership of the political/economy of a given country, is to figure out how to make sure that individual dictatorship, even socialist individual dictatorship (which is different from the Marxist concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), with the potential concomitant development of the Cult of Personality (which happened in China too), does not occur. That is of course a task for another time and space. But one can establish the principles of government on which the outcome would be based. There needs to be an enforceable Constitution with meaning. The Soviet Union had one, but no one in the government or the Party paid much attention to it. There has to be a means for the prevention of the concentration of power in the hands of one person, which means that there has to be true collective leadership on the Leninist mode (much easier said than done, in a revolutionary or immediate post-revolutionary situation). Finally, under overall Party leadership, there still, at some meaningful level, has to be separation of powers (I think). MUCH easier said than done, and I shall thus leave it here.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Both Steve Jonas and Michael Faulkner, men with a multidisciplinary background ranging from medicine to academia, serve as senior contributing editors to The Greanville Post. Besides The Greanville Post, their articles are also published widely on several other prominent political blogs, including OpEdNews, TPJ, and Buzzflash. Further details about their background can be read on our editors bios page.

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

The Fallacy of Rising Anti-Semitism

Anti What?
Anti-semitism is not on the rise, argues the author, but, though tightly suppressed in the mainstream media, anti-Jewish feelings die hard. Israel’s rightwing policies and the Neocons influence in world politics may indeed be feeding the beast.

(The//Intercept.com)

by URI AVNERY

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nti-Semitism is on the rise. All over Europe it is raising its ugly head. Jews are in danger everywhere. They must make haste and come home to Israel before it is too late.

True? Untrue?

Nonsense.

Practically all the alarming incidents which have taken place in Europe recently – especially in Paris and Copenhagen – in which Jews were killed or attacked – had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

All these outrages were conducted by young Muslims, mostly of Arab descent. They were part of the ongoing war between Israelis and Arabs that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. They are not descended from the pogrom in Kishinev and not related to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In theory, Arab anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, since Arabs are Semites. Indeed, Arabs may be more Semitic then Jews, because Jews have mingled for many centuries with Gentiles.

But, of course, the German publicist Wilhelm Marr, who probably invented the term Antisemitismus in 1880 (after inventing the term Semitismus seven years earlier) never met an Arab in his life. For him the only Semites were Jews, and his crusade was solely against them.

(Adolf Hitler, who took his racism seriously, applied it to all Semites. He could not stand Arabs either. Contrary to legend, he disliked the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled to Germany. After meeting him once for a photo-opportunity arranged by the Nazi propaganda machine, he never agreed to meet him again.)

So why do young Muslims in Europe shoot Jews, after killing cartoonists who have insulted The Prophet?

Netanyahu’s extreme rightwing policies have ignited a huge wave of antisemitism around the world. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)

Experts say that the basic reason is their profound hatred for their host countries, in which they feel (quite rightly) that they are despised, humiliated and discriminated against. In countries like France, Belgium, Denmark and many others, their violent rage needs an outlet.

But why the Jews?

There are at least two main reasons:

The first is local. French Muslims are mostly immigrants from North Africa. During the desperate struggle for Algerian independence, almost all the Algerian Jews sided with the colonialist regime against the local freedom fighters. When all Jews and many Arabs emigrated from Algeria to France, they brought their fight with them. Since they now live side by side in the crowded ghettos around Paris and elsewhere, their mutual hatred lives on and often leads to violence.

Members of the Anti-Zionist community of Jerusalem visiting the mourning family of Youssef al-Ramouni, 32, A Palestinian bus driver who was bruised, beaten and hung late on Sunday, in a district of Jerusalem close to Jewish settlements and Palestinian neighborhoods. Jewish anti-Zionists oppose Israel and its policies of “associated imperialism.”
READ BELOW THE FULL LETTER OF CONDOLENCES SENT BY THE CHIEF RABBI OF NETUREI KARTA

[learn_more caption=”LETTER OF CONDOLENCE. CLICK ON THIS BAR”]

Following is the letter of condolences:
November 19, 2014

In the Name of the Almighty, the Beneficent, the Merciful Letter of Consolation To the mourning Rammouni family

We Palestinian Jews are participating in the grief and deep sorrow of the Rammouni family, of the shocking murder in cold blood by Zionist murderers of their beloved son, husband, and father, Mr. Yusuf Hassan, may he rest in peace.

In addition, it is noteworthy, that Jewish people for the past two thousand years, have respected the Jewish law and refrained from treading on the Temple Mount. It is a cardinal sin for a Jewish person to enter the holy Temple Mount. Only Zionists and their fellow heretics have the audacity to breach this awesome dictate of the Almighty. It is crystal clear according to traditional Judaism that such an action is totally forbidden. We demand of the U.N. and all of the human rights organizations to send to Palestine international forces that will protect the lives of our Palestinian brothers from the Zionist indiscriminate attacks and vandalism.

The sovereignty should return to the Palestinian regime on all of Palestine, with Al-Quds as its capital city. In this opportunity we are sending our deep condolences to all of the Palestinian families who have lost family members by the Zionist murders in the last few weeks. We are praying to Allah for the complete healing of all the wounded by the Zionist cruel forces. We hope for the day when we will be able to live in peace with our Palestinian brothers, the way we lived in Palestine before the Zionist occupation. May the Allah reveal His glory throughout the world, and bring about a time when all humanity will serve Him in harmony and joy. INSHALLAH.
….
Signed in pain and anger, Rabbi Meir Hirsh Leader of Neturei Karta Palestine.
Read the original here
[/learn_more]

REGULAR ARTICLE RESUMES HERE

The second reason is the ongoing Arab-Zionist conflict, which started with the mass immigration of Jews to Arab Palestine, continued with the long list of wars and is now in full bloom. Practically every Arab in the world, and most Muslims are emotionally involved in the conflict.

But what have French Jews to do with that far-away conflict? Everything.

When Binyamin Netanyahu does not miss an opportunity to declare that he represents all the Jews in the world, he makes all the world’s Jews responsible for Israeli policies and actions.

When Jewish institutions in France, the US and everywhere totally and uncritically identify with the policies and operations of Israel, such as the recent Gaza war, they turn themselves voluntarily into potential victims of revenge actions. The French Jewish leadership, CRIF, did so just now.

Neither of these reasons has anything to do with anti-Semitism.

Anti-semitism is an integral part of European culture.

Many theories have been put forward to explain this totally illogical phenomenon, which borders on a collective mental disease.

My own preferred theory is religious. All over Europe, and now also in the Americas, Christian children in their formative years hear the stories of the New Testament. They learn that a Jewish mob was shouting for the blood of Jesus, the gentle and mild preacher, while the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilatus, was desperately trying to save his life. The Roman is depicted as a humane, likeable person, while the Jews are seen as a vile, despicable mob.

This story cannot be true. Roman rulers all over the Empire used to crucify potential troublemakers. The behavior of the Jewish authorities in the story does not conform to Jewish law. But the New Testament story, written long after the death of Jesus (whose real Hebrew name was Jeshua), was aimed at the Roman audience the Christians were trying to convert, in hot competition with the Jewish missionaries.

Also, the early Christians were a small, persecuted sect in Jewish Jerusalem, and their grudge lives on to this very day.

The picture of the evil Jews crying out for the death of Jesus is unconsciously imprinted in the minds of the Christian multitudes and has inspired Jew-hatred in every new generation. The results were slaughter, mass-expulsions, inquisition, persecution in every form, pogroms, and finally the Holocaust.

There has never been anything like this in Muslim history.

The Prophet had some small wars with neighboring Jewish tribes, but the Koran contains strict instructions on how to deal with Jews and Christians, the People of the Book. They had to be treated fairly and were exempted from military duty in return for a poll tax. Throughout the ages there were some rare anti-Jewish (and anti-Christian) outbreaks here and there, but Jews in Muslim lands fared incomparably better than in Christian ones.

If this had not been so, there would have been no “Golden Age” of Muslim-Jewish cultural symbiosis in medieval Spain. It would have been impossible for the Muslim Ottoman empire to accept and absorb almost all the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from medieval Spain, driven out by their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella. The outstanding Jewish religious thinker, Moses Maimonides (the “Rambam”) could not have become the personal physician and adviser of the outstanding Muslim sultan, Salah-al-Din al-Ayubi (Saladin).

The present conflict started as a clash between two national movements, Jewish Zionism and secular Arab nationalism, and had only slight religious overtones. As my friends and I have warned many times, it is now turning into a religious conflict – a calamity with potentially grievous consequences.

Nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

So why does the entire Israeli propaganda machine, including all Israeli media, insist that Europe is experiencing a catastrophic rise of anti-Semitism? In order to call upon European Jews to come to Israel (in Zionist terminology: “make Aliya”).

For a Zionist true believer, every Jew’s arrival in Israel is an ideological victory. Never mind that once in Israel, new immigrants – especially from countries like Ethiopia and Ukraine – are neglected.

As I have frequently quoted: “Israelis like immigration but don’t like immigrants”.

In the wake of the recent events in Paris and Copenhagen, Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly called upon French and Danish Jews to pack up and come at once to Israel for their own safety. The prime ministers of both countries have furiously protested against these calls, which insinuate that they are unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens. I suppose that no leader likes a foreign politician to call upon his citizens to leave.

There is something grotesque in this call: as the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz remarked, Israel is the only place in the world where Jewish lives are in constant danger. With a war every few years and violent incidents almost every day, he had a point.

But in the wake of the dramatic events, many “French” Jews – originally from North Africa – may be induced to leave France. They may not all come to Israel. The US, French Canada and Australia offer tempting alternatives.

There are many good reasons for a Jew to come to Israel: a mild climate, the Hebrew language, living among fellow Jews, and what not. But running away from anti-Semites is not one of them.

Is there real anti-Semitism in Europe? I assume that there is.

In many European countries there are old and new super-nationalist groups, who try to attract the masses by hatred of the Other. Jews are the Others par excellence (along with Gypsies/Roma). An ethno-religious group dispersed in many countries, belonging and not belonging to their host countries, with foreign – and therefore sinister – beliefs and rituals. All the European nationalist movements which sprang up in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were more or less anti-Semitic.

Jews have always been, and still are, the ideal scapegoat for the European poor. It was the German (non-Jewish) socialist August Bebel who said that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid guys”.

With frequent economic slumps and a widening gap between the local poor and the multinational super-rich, the need for scapegoats is rising. But I do not believe that these marginal groups, even if some of them are not so marginal anymore, constitute a real anti-Semitic surge.

Be that as it may, the outrages in Paris and Copenhagen have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

The Greek Tragedy: Some things not to forget, which the new Greek leaders have not.

Costa Gavras’s Z, with Yves Montand in the role of a martyred leader of the left, gave the world the anatomy of a CIA-supported right-wing coup, this time in his homeland in Greece. The film remains highly relevant to this day, since US criminality, if anything, is now even more outrageous.

By William Blum

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merican historian D.F. Fleming, writing of the post-World War II period in his eminent history of the Cold War, stated that “Greece was the first of the liberated states to be openly and forcibly compelled to accept the political system of the occupying Great Power. It was Churchill who acted first and Stalin who followed his example, in Bulgaria and then in Rumania, though with less bloodshed.”

The British intervened in Greece while World War II was still raging. His Majesty’s Army waged war against ELAS, the left-wing guerrillas who had played a major role in forcing the Nazi occupiers to flee. Shortly after the war ended, the United States joined the Brits in this great anti-communist crusade, intervening in what was now a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency (KYP in Greek).

In 1964, the liberal George Papandreou came to power, but in April 1967 a military coup took place, just before elections which appeared certain to bring Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the KYP, the CIA, and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a “communist takeover”. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine.

George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father, had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.

Still from Z (Costa Gavras, 1968)

Andreas Papandreou was arrested at the time of the coup and held in prison for eight months. Shortly after his release, he and his wife Margaret visited the American ambassador, Phillips Talbot, in Athens. Papandreou later related the following:

I asked Talbot whether America could have intervened the night of the coup, to prevent the death of democracy in Greece. He denied that they could have done anything about it. Then Margaret asked a critical question: What if the coup had been a Communist or a Leftist coup? Talbot answered without hesitation. Then, of course, they would have intervened, and they would have crushed the coup.

Another charming chapter in US-Greek relations occurred in 2001, when Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street Goliath Lowlife, secretly helped Greece keep billions of dollars of debt off their balance sheet through the use of complex financial instruments like credit default swaps. This allowed Greece to meet the baseline requirements to enter the Eurozone in the first place. But it also helped create a debt bubble that would later explode and bring about the current economic crisis that’s drowning the entire continent. Goldman Sachs, however, using its insider knowledge of its Greek client, protected itself from this debt bubble by betting against Greek bonds, expecting that they would eventually fail.

Will the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – collectively constituting the International Mafia – allow the new Greek leaders of the Syriza party to dictate the conditions of Greece’s rescue and salvation? The answer at the moment is a decided “No”. The fact that Syriza leaders, for some time, have made no secret of their affinity for Russia is reason enough to seal their fate. They should have known how the Cold War works.

I believe Syriza is sincere, and I’m rooting for them, but they may have overestimated their own strength, while forgetting how the Mafia came to occupy its position; it didn’t derive from a lot of compromise with left-wing upstarts. Greece may have no choice, eventually, but to default on its debts and leave the Eurozone. The hunger and unemployment of the Greek people may leave them no alternative.

The Twilight Zone of the US State Department

“You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop … the Twilight Zone.” (American Television series, 1959-1965)

State Department Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015. Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki, questioned by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Psaki: Current designated liar for the Washington mafia.

Lee: President Maduro [of Venezuela] last night went on the air and said that they had arrested multiple people who were allegedly behind a coup that was backed by the United States. What is your response?

Psaki: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of longstanding policy, the United States does not support political transitions by non-constitutional means. (sic) Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful, and legal. We have seen many times that the Venezuelan Government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan Government to deal with the grave situation it faces.

Lee: Sorry. The US has – whoa, whoa, whoa – the US has a longstanding practice of not promoting – What did you say? How longstanding is that? I would – in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a longstanding practice.

Psaki: Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history –

Lee: Not in this case.

Psaki: – is that we do not support, we have no involvement with, and these are ludicrous accusations.

Lee: In this specific case.

Psaki: Correct.

Lee: But if you go back not that long ago, during your lifetime, even – (laughter)

Psaki: The last 21 years. (Laughter.)

Lee: Well done. Touché. But I mean, does “longstanding” mean 10 years in this case? I mean, what is –

Psaki: Matt, my intention was to speak to the specific reports.

Lee: I understand, but you said it’s a longstanding US practice, and I’m not so sure – it depends on what your definition of “longstanding” is.

Psaki: We will – okay.

Lee: Recently in Kyiv, whatever we say about Ukraine, whatever, the change of government at the beginning of last year was unconstitutional, and you supported it. The constitution was –

Psaki: That is also ludicrous, I would say.

Lee: – not observed.

Psaki: That is not accurate, nor is it with the history of the facts that happened at the time.

Lee: The history of the facts. How was it constitutional?

Psaki: Well, I don’t think I need to go through the history here, but since you gave me the opportunity –- as you know, the former leader of Ukraine left of his own accord.

………………..

Leaving the Twilight Zone … The former Ukrainian leader ran for his life from those who had staged the coup, including a mob of vicious US-supported neo-Nazis.

If you know how to contact Ms. Psaki, tell her to have a look at my list of more than 50 governments the United States has attempted to overthrow since the end of the Second World War. None of the attempts were democratic, constitutional, peaceful, or legal; well, a few were non-violent.

The ideology of the American media is that it believes that it doesn’t have any ideology

So NBC’s evening news anchor, Brian Williams, has been caught telling untruths about various events in recent years. What could be worse for a reporter? How about not knowing what’s going on in the world? In your own country? At your own employer? As a case in point I give you Williams’ rival, Scott Pelley, evening news anchor at CBS.

In August 2002, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told American newscaster Dan Rather on CBS: “We do not possess any nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”

In December, Aziz stated to Ted Koppel on ABC: “The fact is that we don’t have weapons of mass destruction. We don’t have chemical, biological, or nuclear weaponry.”

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein himself told CBS’s Rather in February 2003: “These missiles have been destroyed. There are no missiles that are contrary to the prescription of the United Nations [as to range] in Iraq. They are no longer there.”

Moreover, Gen. Hussein Kamel, former head of Iraq’s secret weapons program, and a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, told the UN in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed its banned missiles and chemical and biological weapons soon after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

There are yet other examples of Iraqi officials telling the world, before the 2003 American invasion, that the WMD were non-existent.

Enter Scott Pelley. In January 2008, as a CBS reporter, Pelley interviewed FBI agent George Piro, who had interviewed Saddam Hussein before he was executed:

CBS’ pathetic Pelley. A clueless presenter.

PELLEY: And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?

PIRO: He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

PELLEY: He had ordered them destroyed?

PIRO: Yes.

PELLEY: So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk? Why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?

For a journalist there might actually be something as bad as not knowing what’s going on in his area of news coverage, even on his own station. After Brian Williams’ fall from grace, his former boss at NBC, Bob Wright, defended Williams by pointing to his favorable coverage of the military, saying: “He has been the strongest supporter of the military of any of the news players. He never comes back with negative stories, he wouldn’t question if we’re spending too much.”

I think it’s safe to say that members of the American mainstream media are not embarrassed by such a “compliment”.

In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter made the following observation:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the [putative] systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Cuba made simple

“The trade embargo can be fully lifted only through legislation – unless Cuba forms a democracy, in which case the president can lift it.”

Aha! So that’s the problem, according to a Washington Post columnist – Cuba is not a democracy! That would explain why the United States does not maintain an embargo against Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Guatemala, Egypt and other distinguished pillars of freedom. The mainstream media routinely refer to Cuba as a dictatorship. Why is it not uncommon even for people on the left to do the same? I think that many of the latter do so in the belief that to say otherwise runs the risk of not being taken seriously, largely a vestige of the Cold War when Communists all over the world were ridiculed for blindly following Moscow’s party line. But what does Cuba do or lack that makes it a dictatorship?

No “free press”? Apart from the question of how free Western media is, if that’s to be the standard, what would happen if Cuba announced that from now on anyone in the country could own any kind of media? How long would it be before CIA money – secret and unlimited CIA money financing all kinds of fronts in Cuba – would own or control almost all the media worth owning or controlling?

Is it “free elections” that Cuba lacks? They regularly have elections at municipal, regional and national levels. (They do not have direct election of the president, but neither do Germany or the United Kingdom and many other countries). Money plays virtually no role in these elections; neither does party politics, including the Communist Party, since candidates run as individuals. Again, what is the standard by which Cuban elections are to be judged? Is it that they don’t have the Koch Brothers to pour in a billion dollars? Most Americans, if they gave it any thought, might find it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic election, without great concentrations of corporate money, would look like, or how it would operate. Would Ralph Nader finally be able to get on all 50 state ballots, take part in national television debates, and be able to match the two monopoly parties in media advertising? If that were the case, I think he’d probably win; which is why it’s not the case.

Or perhaps what Cuba lacks is our marvelous “electoral college” system, where the presidential candidate with the most votes is not necessarily the winner. If we really think this system is a good example of democracy why don’t we use it for local and state elections as well?

Is Cuba not a democracy because it arrests dissidents? Many thousands of anti-war and other protesters have been arrested in the United States in recent years, as in every period in American history. During the Occupy Movement two years ago more than 7,000 people were arrested, many beaten by police and mistreated while in custody. And remember: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer; virtually without exception, Cuban dissidents have been financed by and aided in other ways by the United States.

Would Washington ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known members of that organization? In recent years the United States has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents. While others may call Cuba’s security policies dictatorship, I call it self-defense.

The Ministry of Propaganda has a new Commissar

Last month Andrew Lack became chief executive of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US government-supported international news media such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. In a New York Times interview, Mr. Lack was moved to allow the following to escape his mouth: “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram.”

So … this former president of NBC News conflates Russia Today (RT) with the two most despicable groups of “human beings” on the planet. Do mainstream media executives sometimes wonder why so many of their audience have drifted to alternative media, like, for example, RT?

Those of you who have not yet discovered RT, I suggest you go to RT.com to see whether it’s available in your city. And there are no commercials.

It should be noted that the Times interviewer, Ron Nixon, expressed no surprise at Lack’s remark.

Notes

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, chapters 3 and 35

“Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt”, Spiegel Online (Germany), February 8, 2010. Google “Goldman Sachs” Greece for other references.

U.S. Department of State Daily Press Briefing, February 13, 2015

Overthrowing other people’s governments: The Master List

CBS Evening News, August 20, 2002

ABC Nightline, December 4, 2002

“60 Minutes II”, February 26, 2003

Washington Post, March 1, 2003

“60 Minutes”, January 27, 2008

Democracy Now!, February 12, 2015, Wright statement made February 10

Al Kamen, Washington Post, February 18, 2015

Huffington Post, May 3, 2012

New York Times, January 21, 2015

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to this website are given.

[printfriendly]

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?