In Bed With the Devil: David Cameron and Saudi Arabia

IRAN is mistrusted by the UK and America. North Korea is the world’s bête noir, ruled by a vicious Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. And the barbaric terrorist acts of Isis, (Daesh) constantly shock the world.

But top of this list of evil should be Saudi Arabia – degenerate, malignant, pitiless, powerful and as dangerous as any of those listed above.

Yet strangely this super oil rich state – currently in negotiations to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan – is a close friend to David Cameron and his Conservative government.

Why?

This strange friendship needs to be examined more closely.

As I revealed in my blog last year: https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/jerusalem-to-riyadh-an-axis-of-evil Saudi Arabia is one end of an axis of evil in the Middle East with its clandestine friend in terror, Israel.

Saudi Arabia systematically transmits its sick form of Islam across the globe, instigates and funds hatreds, while crushing human freedoms and aspiration.

Meanwhile, Western Governments, including the UK, France and the USA bow to its rulers under the smokescreen that they are our most important “friend” in the region.

Yet Saudi Arabia executes one person every two days.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was set to be beheaded then crucified for taking part in pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring. He was a teenager then. The crucifixion was set aside last October amid world-wide pressure, but the young man still face the prospect of execution or countless years in jail.

Raif Badawi, a blogger who dared to call for democracy, was sentenced to 10 years and 1,000 lashes.

Just three weeks ago as the world celebrated a New Year, Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry said it has executed 47 so-called “terrorists”, including Shia religious leader Nimr al-Nimr in one day.

The executions led to protests in dozens of countries.

But here in the UK our prime minister was almost silent over the mass executions by the Sunni kingdom.

His Number 10 spokeswoman simply read out a statement, which said: “The Government has set out its position clearly that we’re opposed to the use of the death penalty under any circumstances.”

The Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was increasingly critical of Britain’s links with Saudi Arabia.

The shadow human rights minister, Andy Slaughter, condemned the relationship and wrote to the justice secretary, Michael Gove, asking him to confirm that discussions of judicial cooperation were continuing with the Saudis and calling for them to “cease immediately”.

“It is not right that the UK should be actively cooperating with a justice system that shows such flagrant disregard for the most basic human rights and the rule of law,” he said.

But, the pernicious Saudi influence is spreading fast and freely.

Late last year, King Salman offered to build 200 mosques in Germany for recently arrived refugees, many of whom are Muslims. He offered no money for resettlement or basic needs, but Wahhabi mosques, the Trojan horses of the secret Saudi crusade which turns Muslim against Muslim, and undermines modernists.

The late Laurent Murawiec, a French neocon, wrote: “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadres to foot soldiers, from ideologists to cheerleaders.”

Remember that most of the 9/11 killers were Saudi; so was the al-Qaeda hierarchy.

In the 14 years that have followed 9/11, the Saudis have become more aggressive, more determined to win the culture wars.

They pour money into Islamist organisations and operations, promote punishing doctrines that subjugate women and children, and damn liberal values and democracy.

Recently is was revealed that Saudi Arabia and Israel have been giving unquantifiable aid to ISIS in their bigger war against Iran.

For the past yea,r the Saudis have also been pursuing a cruel bombing campaign in Yemen, that has left thousands of innocent civilians dead.

And all the while David Cameron has been aiding and abetting this slaughter.

Yesterday it was revealed that UK sold Saudi Arabia more than £1 billion of bombs in three months.

Government figures show that the UK sold Saudi Arabia £1,066,216,510 of weapons, including bombs and air-to-air missiles, between July and September 2015.

The arms were sold to Saudi at a time when the kingdom was heavily bombing Yemen, where Riyadh is leading an Arab coalition aimed at pushing back perceived Iran-backed Houthi rebels in order to reinstall the exiled government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The UN says more than 7,000 people have been killed in Yemen’s war, including nearly 3,000 civilians.

The international body has reported that more than 80 percent of the country’s 24 million people require some form of humanitarian assistance.

Saudi Arabia has been accused of bombing multiple hospitals in its raids, including several clinics supported by the international charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.

But Mr Cameron has defended the UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia, describing the kingdom as a key ally in the fight against terrorism.

“Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is important for our own security,” he said. “They are opponents of Daesh and the extremism and terror it spreads.

“In terms of our arms exports I think we have some of the most stringent controls anywhere in the world and I’ll always make sure they are properly operated.

“We’re trying to do everything we can to make sure that the work done by Saudi Arabia is properly targeted and it’s right that we should do that. We’re working with them and others on behalf of the legitimate government of Yemen.”

Angus Robertson, the Scottish National Party’s leader at Westminster, said Mr Cameron should admit to British involvement in Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Yemen – where the UK is also providing arms, training and advice.

“Thousands of civilians have been killed in Yemen, including a large number by the Saudi air force and they’ve done that using British-built planes, with pilots who are trained by British instructors, dropping British-made bombs, who are coordinated by the Saudis in the presence of British military advisors,” Mr Robertson said during Prime Minister’s Questions.

“Isn’t it time for the Prime Minister to admit that Britain is effectively taking part in a war in Yemen that is costing thousands of civilians lives and he has not sought parliamentary approval to do this?”

Mr Cameron rejected the suggestion that the UK was taking part in the conflict, but admitted that British advisors had a role in Saudi Arabia.

“Just to be absolutely clear about our role: we’re not a member of the Saudi-led coalition, British military personnel are not directly involved in the Saudi-led coalition’s operations, personnel are not  involved in carrying out strikes, directing or conducting operations in Yemen or selecting targets and we’re not involved in the Saudi targeting decision making process,” he said.

“But yes – do we provide advice, help and training in order to make sure that countries actually do obey the norms of humanitarian law? Yes we do.”

Meanwhile, international criticism of Saudi Arabia is starting to be heard.

In late December UN human rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein said that a “disproportionate” number of attacks of civilians in Yemen had come from the Saudi-led invasion force.

“I have observed with extreme concern the continuation of heavy shelling from the ground and the air in areas with high a concentration of civilians as well as the perpetuation of the destruction of civilian infrastructure – in particular hospitals and schools – by all parties to the conflict, although a disproportionate amount appeared to be the result of airstrikes carried out by Coalition Forces,” he said.

Human rights group Amnesty International UK has also accused the Government of ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of civilian targeting by the Saudi Arabian air force.

“Angus Robertson has raised an important point about the UK’s involvement in Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen, a campaign we’re told involves British advisers actually located in the Saudi ‘control room’,” said Allan Hogarth, the group’s head of Policy and Government Affairs.

“Thousands of Yemeni civilians have already been killed in a barrage of indiscriminate Saudi airstrikes in the country and whatever advice Britain has been giving to the Saudis has apparently done little to prevent this appalling death toll.

“Meanwhile, the UK is selling billions of pounds worth of weapons to the Saudis in the full knowledge of the grave risk that they’ll be used to kill Yemeni civilians.

“Instead of brushing aside Mr Robertson’s questions, the prime minister should immediately suspend export licences for all further UK arms bound for Saudi Arabia and allow a full investigation into allegations of serious breaches of international humanitarian law by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

In December 2015 Saferworld and Amnesty International accused the British government of breaking international law in its arms sales.

A legal opinion commissioned by the two groups concluded: “Any authorisation by the UK of the transfer of weapons and related items to Saudi Arabia… in circumstances where such weapons are capable of being used in the conflict in Yemen, including to support its blockade of Yemeni territory, and in circumstances where their end-use is not restricted, would constitute a breach by the UK of its obligations under domestic, European and international law.”

So why does our ruling establishment acquiesce to the evil that is Saudi Arabia?

We know it is up to no good, but too often evidence is suppressed.

This week, my long time journalist friend Felicity Arbuthnot detailed some of this acquiescence in a detailed expose titled: UK Advisors Working Actively Alongside Bomb Targeters.

She wrote: “According to the Daily Telegraph: “British military advisers are in control rooms assisting the Saudi-led coalition staging bombing raids across Yemen that have killed thousands of civilians, the Saudi Foreign Minister and the Ministry of Defence have confirmed.”

Briefing the Telegraph and other journalists the Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said that the UK and other countries in the control centre: ” … are aware of the target lists.”

The “target list” would seem to have included five attacks on schools, disrupting the remaining shreds of normality for 6,500 children. “In some cases the schools were struck more than once, suggesting the strikes were deliberately targeted”, states a report by Amnesty International.

“In October 2015 the Science and Faith School in Beni Hushayash, Sana’a was attacked on four separate occasions within the space of a few weeks. The third strike killed three civilians and wounded more than 10 people.” The only school in the village, it provided education for 1,200 students.

In the village of Hadhran, the Kheir School: “also suffered multiple air strikescausing extensive damage, rendering it unusable.” In the same village two civilian homes and a mosque were bombed, two children were killed, their mother injured, with one man killed and another injured whilst praying in the mosque.

“The director of another school in Hodeidah city, the al-Shaymeh Education Complex for Girls, which catered for some 3,200 students described her horror after the school came under attack twice within a matter of days in August 2015 killing two people. No students were present at the school during the attack, but a man and woman were killed.

“I felt that humanity has ended. I mean, a place of learning, to be hit in this way, without warning… where is humanity … ” she asked.

The al-Asma school in Mansouriya, was destroyed in a bombing in August. However, these horrors barely scrape the surface of the criminal and humanitarian outrage.

Yemen’s Ministry of Education showed Amnesty data revealing more than 1,000 schools inoperable, 254 completely destroyed, 608 partially damaged and 421 being used as shelter by those displaced by the Saudi led, UK assisted onslaught.

The UK is subject to the Arms Trade Treaty which entered in to force on the 24 December 2014 and which Britain has both signed and ratified (2 April 2014) which prohibits arms transfers: ” … if they have knowledge that the arms would be used to commit attacks against civilians, civilian objects or other violations of international humanitarian law.”

Britain “have knowledge that … arms would be used … against civilians or civilian objects” – it is seemingly also helping to plan them, with the US also providing arms and “intelligence.”

The targets for which the UK surely share responsibility also include three medical facilities supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres, the latest on 10 January, a hospital in Saada in the north of the country resulting in six deaths by the 17 January, in which eight were also injured, two critically.

“This is the third severe incident affecting an MSF health facility in Yemen in the last three months. On 27 October, Haydan hospital was destroyed by an airstrike … and on 3 December a health centre in Taiz was also hit”, with nine people wounded.

The exact co-ordinates of the facilities had been given to the Saudi led, British advised coalition, as they had when the US bombed the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on 3 October 2015.

It seems giving details of humanitarian facilities to trained killers is interpreted as an invitation to become target practice.

Other potential war crimes have included destruction of the Al-Sham water bottling factory, killing 13 workers about to head home from the night shift and: “markets, apartment buildings and refugee camps … eleven people in a mosque.”

Also destroyed last September was formerly one of the country’s largest employers, the ceramics factory, where Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch stated they had found definitive proof a UK made Marconi Cruise Missile used in the destruction.

Amnesty also stated that they had: “found evidence of apparent war crimes in connection with 13 airstrikes around the north-eastern Saada region, which killed about one hundred civilians including fifty nine women and twenty two children.”

Some population centres are so comprehensively decimated that survivors wonder if they are finally safe, since there is nothing left to bomb. 

Justice for so much in the region has been long delayed.”

Maybe, just maybe, this axis of evil is starting to unravel… but while the terror, beheadings and bombings continue, the blood of the innocents is on David Cameron’s hands.

 

Paris, Isis, Syria and The Bankruptcy of the Fourth Estate

SINCE the atrocities in Paris three weeks ago, the British press has been on overdrive to give us every twist, turn and snippet on who is to blame and what we “must do” to “protect our freedoms”.

Freedoms, which the same press tell us must be supported by restrictions, MI5 eavesdropping, tightened border controls and censorship once only dreamed of by George Orwell.

As a newspaper journalist for almost 30 years I have grieved deeply at the unbridled spin, sensationalism and political propaganda of the news reporting since Friday 13 November.

The ink is barely dry on the reports of Wednesday’s 10 hour debate in the House of Commons and the decision to bomb Syria, but already the pencils are being sharpened and the keyboards warmed to lead us to the next pre-ordained national conclusions.

I believe we are slowly witnessing a bankruptcy of freedom within our Fourth Estate.

For the uninitiated, the Fourth Estate commonly refers to the news media, especially print journalism or “the press”.

Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons. In 1841 Carlyle wrote: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”

He described the journalists’ role in representing the interests of “the people” in relation to the business and political elites who claim to be doing things in our names.

The intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries who gave us the conception of the Fourth Estate as a civil watchdog to keep an eye on those in power, also provided the philosophical argument for defining the public citizenry and the nation-state as two separate entities with differing interests.

But my belief is that position has been hi-jacked by corrupt big business ownership of our media.

If we accept the premise of the Fourth Estate, we also have to ask ourselves if the “national” and the “public” interest are the same thing. It might be easy to think that they are, but it would be a mistake.

They exist as ideas, but in reality the nation and the public are not homogeneous.

In a capitalist world both are divided along class lines. In this context, the national interest is about state secrecy and keeping things from us. On the other hand, the public interest is about disclosure and our right to know.

But if we look at who trained and funded the ISIS terrorists and which countries now sustain them to carry out attacks, such as those on Paris and Beirut, the press has not been forthcoming in its reporting. Instead it focuses on Muslims, refugees, border controls, divisions within the Labour Party and the “need” to bomb Syria.

Governments that claim to act in the public interest must face closer scrutiny of their actions. They must be called to account when overstepping the bounds of what citizens will support, or when taking actions that are clearly not in our interests. According to national polls, most British citizens were against bombing Syria, yet that fact was overtaken by another politically led agenda.

The news media – as the tribune of “the people” – must be constantly on guard and alert to actions of the state, particularly when those actions may harm the interests of citizens.

Have they really done that in their reporting about Middle East terrorism, ISIS and the need to bomb Syria? I don’t believe they have.

This separation between the people and the state becomes more important when the economic interests of the powerful so frequently dominate society.

But today, the state is the executive branch of the ruling class and its big business paymasters.

Almost 78 per cent of our press is owned by a handful of mostly foreign-based billionaires.

Our newspapers like to paint their own role as heroic – they are the brave defenders of democracy who hold our elected representatives to account.

Watergate is the archetype of this kind of journalism and it does occur now and again in the UK, but it is rare – perhaps the Telegraph’s revelations over MPs’ expenses in 2009 is one of those rare examples.

But too often, far from protecting our democracy, our papers subvert it.

In his Inquiry, Lord Leveson quoted some lines from Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day – Milne: “No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” Ruth: “I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.”

In a free press, the nature of the newspapers matter very much.

The nature of a paper is set by its owner. Press barons wield far more power and influence than all but a very few MPs and have, unsurprisingly, used it to further their own interests.

Since 2010, the barons have pushed the highly contentious argument that there is no alternative to Austerity and have largely ignored the stories of the widening social divisions and the swelling numbers at food banks – the 21st century’s soup kitchens.

Newspapers exercise power and influence in many ways. And one of their most powerful forms of influence is the ability to effectively set the political agenda for the other media and more widely, in parliament, the workplace, the home and the pub.

Newspapers put great store by the concept of editorial independence. Sometimes, it is a reality. The Lebedevs, for example, own papers – the Independent and the Evening Standard – which take markedly different political stances.

Too often, however, editorial independence is a sham. Proprietors choose editors who they know share their views.

In my own experience I witnessed this at first hand when Margaret Thatcher’s close friends the Barclay Brothers bought The Scotsman in 1997. Within a few months, the new owners had their own right wing editors, the odious Andrew Neil and his Fleet Street bulldog Martin Clarke installed in the editors’ chairs. It took this vile pair less than a year to transform a newspaper, once the bastion of Scottish broadsheet journalism, into a pale imitation of the Daily Mail.

Rupert Murdoch’s candour at the Leveson Inquiry was revealing. He said that if someone wanted to know his opinion on a subject they should just read the leader in the Sun.

That most newspaper owners should seek to define the political stance taken by their publications is not especially surprising. Newspapers are rarely profitable and it is therefore difficult to avoid the conclusion that ‘the press barons are in newspapers for power, influence and easy access to the establishment’.

Likewise, the mechanisms through which owners can, and do, interfere with or shape content to promote particular viewpoints are not difficult to identify; they range from directly dictating the line a newspaper should follow on particular issues, to appointing senior staff with a shared political outlook, as well as forms of indirect influence over the ethos of the organisation which may prompt journalists to engage in ‘self-censorship’.

The Sun’s infamous claim following the 1992 general election that ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won it’ is widely known. Yet, in almost half of all general elections since 1918 ‘one newspaper or another has claimed to have swung the result’.

The Fourth Estate is now more powerful than ever, but it is no longer the once heralded “civil watchdog to keep an eye on those in power”.

It is shaped by two dominating principles – sensationalism and simplification, the consequence of “hyper commercialisation”.

It has led to ever fiercer ratings and circulation wars, which inevitably leads to what is called “dumbing down”. To succeed, the media industry tries to appeal to the lower instincts of people.

Of course it is one thing to pander to lower instincts. But they have to be there in the first place, and so has the willingness to be pandered to. In the end, people have a choice.

One has to face an unpalatable reality: Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets are giving the people what they want – fun, games and entertainment – which in some ways is more “democratic” than the cultural elites, who tried imposing their values and standards on the masses.

In the “democratic age” news and information have been transformed. The way politics is covered has changed radically.

Papers don’t report news, they present it according to their preferences and prejudices.

The growth of columnists has led to the birth of a Commentariat. It contains a few excellent and analytical minds, but all too often reasonable, balanced voices are drowned out by journalists who seem untainted by facts or deeper knowledge but replace this with gleefully presented prejudices. Look no further than Katie Hopkins or Jan Moir for examples of this type.

A lot of modern political journalism ignores context and complexity, presenting everything in black and white, while the nature of politics most of the time is a balancing act between contradictory interests and demands.

News has thus become more superficial and sensational. The need for images and pictures is greater than ever. Note how the single photograph of a dead Syrian child on a Mediterranean beach in September this year shaped the Western view. For a short time our newspapers referred to the hapless refugees by the correct terms rather than the “swarms of migrants” favoured by David Cameron and Nigel Farage.

But that didn’t last and following the Paris attacks these self-same Syrian refugees were being labelled migrants and potential terrorists by our press.

Sensationalism and oversimplification are affecting the output of all media. There is less room for a balanced approach, for analysis instead of going for the crass headline or extraordinary story. The merciless hunt for weaknesses and inconsistencies of politicians and other public figures has become prevalent.

All this has contributed to change democratic politics for the worse. The electorate has become hostile and distrustful of the media and politicians alike.

Trust has broken down threefold, between people and politicians, media and people, journalists and politicians, with the latter now observing each other with deep distrust and mutual antipathy. A vicious circle has established itself.

The chances of the public receiving the information they need to participate in democracy is declining even more.

Democracy and civil society need informed citizens, otherwise they will have difficulties in surviving. Without a free Fourth Estate, aware of its own power and responsibility, an informed citizenship cannot be sustained.

What our democracies have got today is an electorate which is highly informed about entertainment, consumer goods and celebrities, while being uninterested in and deeply cynical about politics, equipped with short attention spans and a growing tendency to demand instant gratification.

If this trend cannot be reversed the political arena might become even emptier than it is now.

 

Terrorism – The Common Worry of Everyone, Including Iran

IRAN has been the bogey country of the West since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and its public demonization by the USA.

Anyone of a certain age will remember the portrayal of its then leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Western media as all that was “wrong with Islam”.

Matters weren’t improved in 1989 by the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy and in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.

Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from Muslim anger over the novel.

The Iranian government backed the fatwa against Rushdie until 1998, when the succeeding government of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said it no longer supported the killing of Rushdie.

But all is never as it seems, particularly when the US and UK’s right wing press is involved, and by 1991 Iraq had replaced Iran as the West’s Bête Noire.

Comical in all of this was that many Americans believed Iraq and Iran were actually the same country!

The fact that today the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia all want to either bomb or control Iran, speaks volumes for its power and status in the Middle East.

Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979, when the monarchy was overthrown and clerics assumed political control under supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

The Iranian revolution put an end to the rule of the Shah, who had alienated powerful religious, political and popular forces with a programme of modernization and Westernization coupled with heavy repression of dissent.

Persia, as Iran was known before 1935, was one of the greatest empires of the ancient world, and the country has long maintained a distinct cultural identity within the Islamic world by retaining its own language and adhering to the Shia interpretation of Islam.

A brief political history of modern Iran is perhaps warranted.

In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected as the prime minister. He became enormously popular after he nationalized Iran’s petroleum industry and oil reserves.

But he was deposed in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, an Anglo-American covert operation that marked the first (and not the last) time the US had overthrown a foreign government during the Cold War.

After the coup, the Shah became increasingly autocratic and Iran entered a decades’ long period of close relations with the USA.

While the Shah increasingly modernised Iran and claimed to retain it as a fully secular state, arbitrary arrests and torture by his secret police, the SAVAK, were used to crush all forms of political opposition.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became an active critic of the Shah’s White Revolution, and publicly denounced the government. In 1963 Khomeini was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months.

After his release in 1964, Khomeini publicly criticized the United States government. The Shah sent him into exile.

In 1974, the economy of Iran was experiencing double digit inflation, and despite many large projects to modernize the country, corruption was rampant and caused large amounts of waste.

By 1976, an economic recession led to increased unemployment, especially among millions of young people who had migrated to the cities of Iran looking for construction jobs during the boom years of the early 1970s.

By the late 1970s, many of these people opposed the Shah’s regime and began to organize and join the protests against it.

An Islamic Revolution began in January 1978 with the first major demonstrations against the Shah.

After a year of strikes and demonstrations paralyzing the country and its economy, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled the country and Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran in February 1979, forming a new government. After holding a referendum, in April 1979, Iran officially became an Islamic Republic.

Then on November 4, 1979, a group of students seized the United States Embassy in Tehran and took 52 personnel and citizens hostage, after the US refused to return Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to Iran to face trial in the court of the new regime.

Attempts by the Jimmy Carter administration to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and a failed rescue attempt, helped force Carter out of office and brought Ronald Reagan to power. On Carter’s final day in office, the last hostages were finally set free as a result of the Algiers Accords.

Following the Iran–Iraq War, in 1989, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his administration concentrated on a pragmatic pro-business policy of rebuilding and strengthening the economy without making any dramatic break with the ideology of the revolution.

In 1997, Rafsanjani was succeeded by the reformist Mohammad Khatami, whose government attempted to make the country more democratic.

Hassan Rouhani was elected as President of Iran on June 15, 2013, and his victory improved the relations of Iran with many other countries.

Now with warfare raging across the Middle East, most neutral observers view Iran as a necessary bulwark against ISIS and the dirty tricks of the USA, Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Against that background Iran’s constitutional Leader of the Revolution Sayyid Ali Khamenei has now written an unprecedented second open letter to young people in the West.

Entitled: Today Terrorism is Our Common Worry, he speaks clearly and with a hand of friendship to the West, but is also openly critical in the role the USA has played in the creation of ISIS and the brutality of Zionist Israel.

The letter, a condemnation of terrorism, can also be seen as a plea for self-reflection and clarification of misreported facts at a time of heightened tensions, bloodshed, war, occupation, hate.

Here is his unedited letter in full. I recommend you read it at least twice!

“The bitter events brought about by blind terrorism in France have once again, moved me to speak to you young people.

The bitter events brought about by blind terrorism in France have once again, moved me to speak to you young people.  

For me, it is unfortunate that such incidents would have to create the framework for a conversation, however the truth is that if painful matters do not create the grounds for finding solutions and mutual consultation, then the damage caused will be multiplied.

The pain of any human being anywhere in the world causes sorrow for a fellow human being.  The sight of a child losing his life in the presence of his loved ones, a mother whose joy for her family turns into mourning, a husband who is rushing the lifeless body of his spouse to some place and the spectator who does not know whether he will be seeing the final scene of life- these are scenes that rouse the emotions and feelings of any human being. 

Anyone who has benefited from affection and humanity is affected and disturbed by witnessing these scenes- whether it occurs in France or in Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or Syria. 

Without a doubt, the one-and-a-half billion Muslims also have these feelings and abhor and are revolted by the perpetrators and those responsible for these calamities. 

The issue, however, is that if today’s pain is not used to build a better and safer future, then it will just turn into bitter and fruitless memories. I genuinely believe that it is only you the youth who by learning the lessons of today’s hardship, have the power to discover new means for building the future and who can be barriers in the misguided path that has brought the west to its current impasse.  

Anyone who has benefited from affection and humanity is affected and disturbed by witnessing these scenes- whether it occurs in France or in Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or Syria.  

It is correct that today terrorism is our common worry.  However, it is necessary for you to know that the insecurity and strain that you experienced during the recent events, differs from the pain that the people of Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan have been experiencing for many years, in two significant ways. 

First, the Islamic world has been the victim of terror and brutality to a larger extent territorially, to greater amount quantitatively and for a longer period in terms of time. Second, that unfortunately this violence has been supported by certain great powers through various methods and effective means. 

Today, there are very few people who are uninformed about the role of the United States of America in creating, nurturing and arming al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their inauspicious successors. 

Besides this direct support, the overt and well-known supporters of takfiri terrorism- despite having the most backward political systems – are standing arrayed as allies of the west while the most pioneering, brightest and most dynamic democrats in the region are suppressed mercilessly. The prejudiced response of the west to the awakening movement in the Islamic world is an illustrative example of the contradictory western policies.

I genuinely believe that it is only you the youth who by learning the lessons of today’s hardship can be barriers in the misguided path that has brought the west to its current impasse.  

The other side of these contradictory policies is seen in supporting the state terrorism of Israel. 

The oppressed people of Palestine have experienced the worst kind of terrorism for the last 60 years. 

If the people of Europe have now taken refuge in their homes for a few days and refrain from being present in busy places- it is decades that a Palestinian family is not secure even in its own home from the Zionist regime’s death and destruction machinery.

What kind of atrocious violence today is comparable to that of the settlement constructions of the Zionist regime?

This regime- without ever being seriously and significantly censured by its influential allies or even by the so-called independent international organizations- everyday demolishes the homes of Palestinians and destroys their orchards and farms. 

This is done without even giving them time to gather their belongings or agricultural products and usually it is done in front of the terrified and tear-filled eyes of women and children who witness the brutal beatings of their family members who in some cases are being dragged away to gruesome torture chambers.  

In today’s world, do we know of any other violence on this scale and scope and for such an extended period of time?

Shooting down a woman in the middle of the street for the crime of protesting against a soldier who is armed to the teeth- if this is not terrorism, what is? This barbarism, because it is being done by the armed forces of an occupying government, should not be called extremism? Or maybe only because these scenes have been seen repeatedly on television screens for 60 years, they should no longer stir our consciences.

The military invasions of the Islamic world in recent years- with countless victims- are another example of the contradictory logic of the west. The assaulted countries, in addition to the human damage caused, have lost their economic and industrial infrastructure, their movement towards growth and development has been stopped or delayed and in some cases, has been thrown back decades. 

Despite all this, they are rudely being asked not to see themselves as oppressed.  How can a country be turned into ruins, have its cities and towns covered in dust and then be told that it should please not view itself as oppressed? Instead of enticements to not understand and to not mention disasters, would not an honest apology be better? 

The pain that the Islamic world has suffered in these years from the hypocrisy and duplicity of the invaders is not less than the pain from the material damage.

Dear youth! I have the hope that you- now or in the future- can change this mentality corrupted by duplicity, a mentality whose highest skill is hiding long-term goals and adorning malevolent objectives.

Dear youth! I have the hope that you – now or in the future – can change this mentality corrupted by duplicity, a mentality whose highest skill is hiding long-term goals and adorning malevolent objectives.  In my opinion, the first step in creating security and peace is reforming this violence-breeding mentality. 

Until double-standards dominate western policies, until terrorism- in the view of its powerful supporters- is divided into “good” and “bad” types, and until governmental interests are given precedence over human values and ethics, the roots of violence should not be searched for in other places.

Unfortunately, these roots have taken hold in the depths of western cultural policies over the course of many years and they have caused a soft and silent invasion. 

Many countries of the world take pride in their local and national cultures, cultures which through development and regeneration have soundly nurtured human societies for centuries.  The Islamic world is not an exception to this. 

However in the current era, the western world with the use of advanced tools is insisting on the cloning and replication of its culture on a global scale.  I consider the imposition of western culture upon other peoples and the trivialization of independent cultures as a form of silent violence and extreme harmfulness. 

Humiliating rich cultures and insulting the most honoured parts of these, is occurring while the alternative culture being offered in no way has any qualification for being a replacement.  For example, the two elements of “aggression” and “moral promiscuity” which unfortunately have become the main elements of western culture, have even degraded the position and acceptability of its source region.      

So now the question is: are we “sinners” for not wanting an aggressive, vulgar and fatuous culture? Are we to be blamed for blocking the flood of impropriety that is directed towards our youth in the shape of various forms of quasi-art? 

I do not deny the importance and value of cultural interaction.  Whenever these interactions are conducted in natural circumstances and with respect for the receiving culture, they result in growth, development and richness. 

On the contrary, inharmonious interactions have been unsuccessful and harmful impositions.

We have to state with full regret that vile groups such as DAESH are the spawn of such ill-fated pairings with imported cultures. 

If the matter was simply theological, we would have had to witness such phenomena before the colonialist era, yet history shows the contrary.  Authoritative historical records clearly show how colonialist confluence of extremist and rejected thoughts in the heart of a Bedouin tribe, planted the seed of extremism in this region. 

How then is it possible that such garbage as DAESH comes out of one of the most ethical and humane religious schools which as part of its inner core, includes the notion that taking the life of one human being is equivalent to killing the whole humanity?

One has to ask why people who are born in Europe and who have been intellectually and mentally nurtured in that environment are attracted to such groups?  Can we really believe that people with only one or two trips to war zones, suddenly become so extreme that they can riddle the bodies of their compatriots with bullets? 

On this matter, we certainly cannot forget about the effects of a life nurtured in a pathologic culture in a corrupt environment borne out of violence.  On this matter, we need complete analyses, analyses that see the hidden and apparent corruptions. 

Maybe a deep hate – planted in the years of economic and industrial growth and borne out of inequality and possibly legal and structural prejudice – created ideas that every few years appear in a sickening manner. 

Any rushed and emotional reaction which would isolate, intimidate and create more anxiety for the Muslim communities living in Europe and America not only will not solve the problem but will increase the chasms and resentments.

In any case, you are the ones that have to uncover the apparent layers of your own society and untie and disentangle the knots and resentments. Fissures have to be sealed, not deepened.

Hasty reactions is a major mistake when fighting terrorism which only widens the chasms.

Any rushed and emotional reaction which would isolate, intimidate and create more anxiety for the Muslim communities living in Europe and America- which are comprised of millions of active and responsible human beings- and which would deprive them of their basic rights more than has already happened and which would drive them away from society- not only will not solve the problem but will increase the chasms and resentments.

Superficial measures and reactions, especially if they take legal forms, will do nothing but increase the current polarizations, open the way for future crises and will result in nothing else.  

According to reports received, some countries in Europe have issued guidelines encouraging citizens to spy on Muslims.  This behaviour is unjust and we all know that pursuing injustice has the characteristic of unwanted reversibility.  Besides, the Muslims do not deserve such ill-treatment. 

For centuries, the western world has known Muslims well- the day that westerners were guests in Islamic lands and were attracted to the riches of their hosts and on another day when they were hosts and benefitted from the efforts and thoughts of Muslims- they generally experienced nothing but kindness and forbearance.

Therefore I want you youth to lay the foundations for a correct and honourable interaction with the Islamic world based on correct understanding, deep insight and lessons learned from horrible experiences. 

In such a case and in the not too distant future, you will witness the edifice built on these firm foundations which creates a shade of confidence and trust which cools the crown of its architect, a warmth of security and peace that it bequests on them and a blaze of hope in a bright future which illuminates the canvass of the earth.”

 

Bombing Syria and Killing Innocence – Now is the Time to Stand Up and Be Counted

AS Parliament prepares to debate air strikes in Syria, Prime Minister David Cameron will assure the Commons that such bombings are unlikely to lead to civilian casualties while he makes the case for immediate military intervention.

Who is he trying to kid?

Over the past few days Tory defence spokesmen have argued that British missiles are now so sophisticated that they don’t cause many civilian casualties as “collateral damage”.

What a sinister phrase that is – it is lawyer’s language for saying where hundreds of innocents would have been killed previously, now it is merely a few dozen.

But we already know the US led air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has killed more than 3,000 innocent civilians up to August this year. An estimated 460 further deaths have occurred since then.

So as a socialist and card carrying member of the Labour Party I ask why our official parliamentary opposition is suddenly not on the side of innocent people and humanity?

Twelve years ago, many Labour MPs disgracefully marched into the lobbies side by side with Iain Duncan Smith’s Tories to vote for an illegal war in Iraq.

Jeremy Corbyn and 138 other Labour MPs stood up for the membership of the Party and voted against them.

The war proved to be an absolute disaster for Iraq, for Britain and for The Labour Party and has forever tainted Tony Blair as a war criminal.

But now it seems some Labour MPs – including many in the Shadow Cabinet – are going to repeat their mistakes and vote with David Cameron to bomb Syria?

Do they have such scant regard for peoples’ lives.

As George Galloway wrote this morning: “The price will now be paid in Syrian blood, and not only their blood.”

And turning on the pro war members of the Labour Shadow Cabinet, he added: “No shadow cabinet members position is worth the bones of a single Syrian civilian or the blood of a single British serviceman or woman, or the lives of a single member of the public here in Britain.”

There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to our military and political leaders.

Our leaders are careful to distinguish between the explosives we drop from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies are depraved enough to use.

Our government speaks alarmingly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives) which they now spuriously claim ISIS is seeking, as opposed to the likes of US and British “precision” cruise missiles.

This is alarming, given the well-known extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from “smart” bombs, in every conflict from Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya over the past 12 years.

Moreover, our own warmongers do not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons we have regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate.

Advocacy groups have now highlighted the thousands of civilian casualties likely to result from airstrikes this year alone as Mr Cameron, prepares to make his case for attacking ISIS in Syria.

Airstrikes in populated areas of Syria and Iraq caused 3,165 civilian deaths and injuries in the year up to August, according to Action on Armed Violence (AOAV).

One of the attacks investigated was on Fadhiliya, Iraq, on 4 April where witnesses and local politicians said a family of five had died, including a pregnant woman and an eight-year-old girl.

It follows the widely reported US bombing of a hospital run by NGO Doctors Without Borders, killing 22 people and injuring dozens more.

Increasing scrutiny on civilian casualties may now hopefully impact the debate over whether Britain extends its bombing mission against ISIS from Iraq into Syria.

In 2013, David Cameron was humiliated when 30 Tory rebels joined with Labour and other parties to oppose bombing forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn, suffered a backlash after urging Labour activists to pressure MPs (including Shadow Cabinet members) against supporting airstrikes.

Despite this, Mr Corbyn continues to enjoy strong support among Labour’s grassroots membership with 75% of party members calling for the MPs not to vote for airstrikes in Syria.

This means those who have expressed support for bombings may find themselves at odds with their own constituency membership.

Labour MPs who still plan to support the Tories are courting deselection before the next election, to be replaced by candidates who more accurately reflect party policy (which is to block air strikes, let’s not forget).

But more to the point, our intervention and bombing in Syria is not aimed at alleviating the suffering of Syrians or addressing the root causes of the conflict, and it’s not even about ISIS.

The immense humanitarian crisis wrought by the civil war in Syria, says Middle East expert Samer Abboud, is lost in the discussion around the Syrian conflict.

Humanitarian conditions are getting worse, not better, as the conflict persists.

“There is such an obsession with ISIS and an irrational fear of Syrian refugees in the West that encourages us to ignore the very real suffering of Syrians who have to live while spectacular and exceptional violence surrounds them,” he says.

“While there seems to be international consensus around confronting ISIS and in the utility of military force to do so, the growth of the coalition fighting ISIS to include Russia, France, and potentially Germany and the UK, is not a positive development in the Syrian conflict.

“The expansion in the number of countries bombing Syria further internationalises the conflict and creates more layers to this already complicated and multilayered conflict.

“When France began its bombing campaign against ISIS in retaliation for the Paris attacks, its targets included a medical clinic and an uninhabited forest.

“One wonders why these were chosen as targets.

“There is no institutional or economic heartland that a bombing campaign could destroy that would have an immediate impact on the group’s ability to capture and retain control of territory.

“The aerial campaigns also avoid the heart of the problem, which is the material and ideological structure that sustains ISIL.

“ISIS does not acquire its wealth through large-scale development projects, nor is there a robust productive capacity in ISIS-controlled areas that is connected to regional markets.

“Most of their material resources come from donations and support from regional actors as well as a sophisticated system of predatory economic activity that encourages the group’s fighters to loot and tax the Syrian population to acquire the resources to sustain their activities.

“How can a bombing campaign undermine the material basis of ISIS when so much of it is structured around predatory behaviour?

“Let us not also forget that, for the most part, ISIS’s military strength is based on small arms.

“The reliance on small arms means that ISIS has expanded in Syria with relatively limited resources. Moreover, as we have seen in the attacks of the past two months, including the use of an improvised pop can as a bomb placed on the Russian plane [which crashed] in Sinai, ISIS relies on limited resources that are not susceptible or vulnerable to aerial bombardment,” he adds.

So where to now then Mr Cameron?

Already the most powerful air forces in the world are bombing the Islamic State. Even were it the right thing to do, the RAF could add little to their so-far ineffective efforts.

Everybody agrees that ISIS can only be defeated by a ground army which can secure some support from the people of the region itself.

Not finding one, Mr Cameron has invented a mythical 70,000-strong opposition army – his own version of Tony Blair’s infamous “45 minute warning” over Iraq.

This has rightly drawn widespread disbelief – to the extent that this “army” exists at all, it is largely fighters aligned with either al-Qaeda or the Turkish neo-fascist “Grey Wolves”, who are hardly “moderate” and will never turn against ISIS.

The truth is that there needs to be a peace agreement between the Assad regime and its opponents leading to a transitional administration which could then take on ISIS.

But for years, David Cameron has worked against such an agreement.

Former Tory MP and respected journalist Matthew Parris agrees.

He wrote in The Times: “Jeremy Corbyn is right. Joining the bombing in Syria will do nobody any good. And the funny thing is, I think that in its heart Britain knows that.”

We do, and now is the time to stand up and be counted.

Pol Pot, Palestine and Pilger

ON Friday I signed off my fortnight of continuous writing about the ongoing slaughter in the Middle East with a tribute to my journalist hero John Pilger.

And I make no apologies by beginning this week with Mr Pilger once again.

Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John has now updated this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and what we can do about it.

I believe it is essential reading:

 

From Pol Pot to ISIS: The Blood Never Dried

IN transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.

As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again.

A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air.

The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.”

A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism.

The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common.

Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of ‘Shock and Awe’ and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey.

The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity.

Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege.

Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.

The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.”

When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”.

The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce.

Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  the government in Syria.

This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes.

In 2013, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia.

The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS.

Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers of violence in the Middle East – the Americans and Europeans – must themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home.

There should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear.

Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered.

The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”.

Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”.  Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

 

Zionist Lies and Suppression of the Truth

SO I have come to end of 14 days of almost continuous writing about the ongoing slaughter in the Middle East.

This small journey started two Fridays ago when I challenged the official statements and propaganda of the killing of so-called Jihadi John.

In my 1,500 word piece entitled Roll On John I pointed at CIA and Mossad dirty tricks and false flag attacks and how all is not as it seems.

Like the rest of the world I was stunned some eight hours later by the massacres in Paris.

So many more pieces followed, including I Cried for You – Now It’s Your Turn to Cry Awhile which looked at the double standards within Western media in grieving over the Paris killings while ignoring similar atrocities in Beirut and Nigeria and Beyond the Horizon o’er the Treacherous Sea which examined the US and Israeli funding and arming of ISIS.

There were many more articles, culminating in a look at how apartheid Israel is supported and allowed to thrive by Christian Zionism in the West.

Now almost 20,000 words later (not including the poems) I need to take stock before I decide how to move on, and whether what I am writing must now become a fully-fledged campaign.

But I cannot do this without doing two things.

First to thank the wonderful friends I have made over the past fortnight, fellow campaigners for a free Palestine and others for a more general peace in the Middle East.

So for the lovely Jane and Samantha in the USA, Nahida, Elleanne and Jackie here in the UK, the amazing warrior Anissa in Paris, Shirene in South Africa, the historian and compiler Hayat in Iran and my long-time friends in Pakistan and India, thank you all.

But before I take a weekend break, I need to pay homage to my one true living journalist hero: John Pilger.

John set me out on the path of investigative journalism when I first read his book Distant Voices way back in 1992.

Since that first reading it has been my journalist’s bible… never accept what you are told by the State, because often it is a pack of lies! So dig and keep digging until you find the truth.

What follows is a piece written by John in 2007 about the situation in Palestine and Israel. It is as relevant then as it is now:

 

Israel: An important marker has been passed

by John Pilger

FROM a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem.

I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat.

He extended his hand and did not let go.

“I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer,” he said in measured English. “Over there, I played many musical instruments; I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks.

“When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, “Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!”

“So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar . . . I am not even a peasant now.”

“How do you feel about all that?” I asked him.

“Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel . . . yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can’t win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them . . .”

That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers.

Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain.

At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been “taken away . . . very ill”.

No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust. And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of the age” refuses to be buried in the dust.

For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied, thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli state’s commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever.

Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven from their home.

The alleged threat of Arab leaders to “throw the Jews into the sea”, used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.

In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud.

The building of their “settlements” has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops, children from their schools, families from each other.

We now know that Israel’s destruction of much of Lebanon was pre-planned.

As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent “civil war” in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30billion military “aid package” for Israel, the world’s fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France.

No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world’s tyrannies comes close.

International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel.

There is nothing like it in UN history. But something is changing. Perhaps last summer’s panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world’s TV screens provided the catalyst.

Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair – and latterly Obama and Cameron – and the incessant use of the inanity, “terror”, together with the day-by day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one of its principal sources, Israel.

I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many “friends of Israel” advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different. “Boycott a cure for cancer?” was its main headline, followed by “Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?” Who would want to do such things? “Some British academics want to boycott Israelis,” was the self-serving answer.

It referred to the University and College Union’s (UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

As John Chalcraft of the London School of Economics pointed out, “the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand”.

The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the liberation struggle. In Britain, an often Jewish-led academic campaign against Israel’s “methodical destruction of [the Palestinian] education system” can be translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied territories into the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children on their way to school.

These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm.

The country’s biggest union, Unison, has called for an “economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott” and the right of return for Palestinian families expelled in 1948.

Remarkably, the Commons’ international development committee has made a similar stand.

In April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the national executive council.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s exports under an EU-Israel Association Agreement.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked and Israel’s trading preferences suspended.

This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott has “gone global” was unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of anti-Semitism would ensure silence.

When the British lecturers’ decision was announced, the US Congress passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as “anti-Semitic”. (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)

This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at Columbia University were once burned down.

Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film was never shown.

When the BBC’s Independent Panel recently examined the corporation’s coverage of the Middle East, it was inundated with emails, “many from abroad, mostly from North America”, said its report. Some individuals “sent multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group mobilisation”.

The panel’s conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not “full and fair” and “in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”. This was neutralised in BBC press releases.

The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic state, to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving this.

Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa’s whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, “will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century . . . They would have to choose.”

And so would the rest of us.

 

The Eyes of Nostradamus, World War 3 and the End of the World

I AM a middle-aged post-graduate educated man, a sceptic and a realist with a huge back catalogue of real life experiences… my writing reveals that I only deal in hard fought facts.

But certain events in my life have led me to believe that there are many things in this universe which are still hidden from us.

If you are unsure what I mean then please read two of my blogs from 2013: There’s no exit in any direction… except the one that you can’t see with your eyes https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/theres-no-exit-in-any-direction-except-the-one-that-you-cant-see-with-your-eyes/ and Something is Happening, But You Don’t Know What It Is https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2013/11/02/something-is-happening-but-you-dont-know-what-it-is/

There is a personal juxtaposition of finding faith in something powerful and unseen, to reasoning that same faith away with the science of reason.

But reason doesn’t come into what I am now about to write.

Following Monday’s shooting down of a Russian jet by a Turkish warplane on the Turkey/ Syria border, there is a growing feeling that the powder keg which until now was a Middle East conflict could erupt into something much bigger.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin held an emergency cabinet meeting in the Kremlin to evaluate the implications of the downing of the Russian Su-24.

“Today they practically declared war on us by shooting down our fighter jet. Our patience wears thin with Erdogan and his criminal clique who is accomplice in all atrocities committed by ISIS terrorists,” said Mr Putin.

“To avoid a bitter war which nobody craves, for several times, I told Americans to muzzle their rabid dog in Turkey,” he added, vowing that the ‘revenge’ is what the Turkish dictator will receive in return.

His tone is alarming, especially as Turkey is a member of NATO and thereby protected by other NATO powers, including the USA, France and the UK.

Matters were exacerbated late last night with the news that China will join Russia in the bombing of ISIS – it already has an aircraft carrier stationed nearby.

There is now a feeling that we could be as close to a world war as we were in the early 1980s.

It is now I ask readers to take a leap of faith before they read on.

Way back in 1973, while I was still at school, a song by Al Stewart made me aware of 16^th century French Renaissance seer Nostradamus.

Al’s song Nostradamus is mesmerising and timeless and led me to find out more this strange man from half a millennia ago.

Michel de Nostredame was a mystic, best known for his quatrains which are considered by today’s mystics as astounding prophecies.

Nostradamus completed 942 quatrains which he organised into Centuries – groups of 100 quatrains. A quatrain is simply a poem with four lines. They were written mainly in French with a bit of Italian, Greek, and Latin thrown in.

He intentionally obscured the quatrains through the use of symbolism and metaphor, as well as by making changes to proper names by swapping, adding or removing letters, to avoid being tried as a magician or witch.

So as an open-minded teenager I rushed out to buy a book recommended by Al Stewart, called The Prophecies of Nostradamus, translated and edited by Erika Cheetham. That now yellowing tome sits beside me as I type this blog.

Most of Nostradamus’s quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles.

A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from farther east and south headed by the so-called Third Antichrist, directly reflecting the 16^th century Ottoman invasions and the earlier Saracen equivalents.

All of this is presented in the context of the imminent end of the world.

Nostradamus has been credited, for the most part in hindsight, with predicting numerous events in world history, from the Great Fire of London, and the rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, to the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre.

Let’s look at some of Al Stewart’s own words to see how he and I both translated Nostradamus’ quatrains back in 1973:

A king shall fall and put to death by the English parliament shall be (a direct reference to the execution of Charles 1 in 1649)

Fire and plague to London come in the year of six and twenties three (1665-66)

An emperor of France shall rise who will be born near Italy

His rule cost his empire dear, Napoloron his name shall be (referencing Napoleon Bonaparte 1769-1821)

From Castile does Franco come and the Government driven out shall be (General Franco 1892-1975)

An English king seeks divorce, and from his throne cast down is he (Edward VIII 1894-1972)

One named Hister shall become a captain of Greater Germanie

No law does this man observe and bloody his rise and fall shall be (Clearly Adolf Hitler 1889-1945)

In the new lands of America three brothers now shall come to power

Two alone are born to rule but all must die before their hour (Edward, John and Robert Kennedy?)

Two great men yet brothers not make the north united stand

Its power be seen to grow, and fear possess the eastern lands (could this be the alliance between Barrack Obama and President Putin or even Obama and Cameron or Hollande?)

Three leagues from the gates of Rome a Pope named Pol is doomed to die (the last Pope named Paul (Pol?) was Pope John Paul II, who also happened to be Polish (Pol?) and died in 2005)

A great wall that divides a city at this time is cast aside (Bearing in mind this interpretation was made in 1973, I have long assumed this to be the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But it may foretell the fall of the Apartheid wall in Israel which keeps Jews and Muslims apart.)

These are the signs I bring to you to show you when the time is nigh

Many researchers of Nostradamus, who died in 1566, are now convinced he correctly foretold the barbaric acts being committed by ISIS in the Middle East, including its declared bid to capture areas of Europe to fulfil its Caliphate.

One website – Nostradamus 2242 – claims World War 3 will begin this year as a result of the struggle with ISIS and the world could end in 2242 – some 27 years from now.

The website lists a four-verse quatrain from which it is claimed warns of the unfolding events in Iraq and Syria.

It said Nostradamus had been translated as saying: “He will enter wicked, unpleasant, infamous, tyrannizing over Mesopotamia.

“All friends made by the adulterous lady, land dreadful and black of aspect.”

The website says: “An amazing quatrain about Iraq’s ordeal and tyranny in the ongoing sectarian violence, particularly on the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion, the surging of Al-Qaeda and the organisation of ISIS.

“ISIS’ target is Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. ISIS is also the most wealthy terrorist organization in the world, thanks to its numerous contributors.”

Many are speculating whether ISIS would start the next world war, and whether its leader is the Antichrist that Nostradamus warned against.

Nostradamus researchers had already identified the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden as being the third and final anti-Christ. Or could it be closer to home: Barrack Obama, or, heaven help us, Donald Trump?

This problem with dates has led some Nostradamus researchers to conclude we are already in a World War 3, which started in 1999 (the year of the ill-fated Israel/Palestine Peace Accord), and should therefore come to an horrific conclusion, “probably involving nuclear weapons”, in 2026.

Reports suggest ISIS has managed to obtain 40kg of uranium from the University of al-Mosul when it occupied the Iraq city, and have declared wanting to take over Spain, Greece and most of the Balkans.

There is mention of Russia in the Nostradamus verses and some have linked ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as suspect number one for being the Third Antichrist (Napoleon and Hitler being the first two).

Author and researcher John Hogue, described as “a world authority on Nostradamus and the prophetic traditions of the world” believes Nostradamus did predict ISIS and the US interventions in Iraq.

He said: “Let’s fast “foreword” back to that future foreseen four-and-a half centuries ago, when Nostradamus predicted a modern “crusader” army would occupy Mesopotamia (Iraq) and then foretold the outcome.

“Century 3, Quatrain 61 of Les Propheties (The Prophecies) reads: “The great host and sect of cross bearers [crusaders], Will be massed in Mesopotamia [Iraq].

“Of the nearby river [the Euphrates] the fast company, that such a law will hold for the enemy.”

He added: “Nostradamus’ quatrains are clearer as we draw close to the events and details cloaked in their codes and riddles.

“Nostradamians during the Saddam Hussein era made a mistake I often exposed. They incorrectly defined who line one’s “He” was as being Saddam Hussein.”

In any case, Mabus does not see the disastrous end of the new world war, because he is killed at the beginning.

Nostradamus predicts the war of the Third Antichrist will be the longest of the three.

Napoleon’s war, as Nostradamus accurately predicted lasted 14 years (1799–1814), followed by another famous time prediction for Napoleon’s escape from exile on Elba in 1815 to lead France for a 100 days until his final defeat at Waterloo.

Nostradamus did not tag a specific length to Hitler’s war but he left powerful clues accurately framing the war in time. In his Epistle prophecies he earmarked the years 1937, 1941 and 1945 as the beginning, middle and end of the conflict.

He was slightly off on the start – it was 1939 – but 1941 did see the turning of the tide with the Second Antichrist’s disastrous invasion of Russia, started on the same day of the 129 year anniversary of the First Antichrist’s invasion, no less. Hitler’s war did end in 1945.

In a passage written in 1558 about the three Antichrists in his Epistle to Henry II, Nostradamus said the following: “Finally the third [Antichrist] will cause an inundation of human blood, and one will not find Mars [the God of War] fasting for a long time… After that, the Antichrist will be the infernal prince again for the (third and) last time.”

Mabus soon dies when a comet will pass.

John Hogue claims the time-frame reduces the “Mabus” comet candidates to three: Comet Hyakutake in 1996, Hale-Bopp in 1997 and the brightest and most dramatic of them all, the sudden flare up of Comet McNaught in mid-January 2007.

“For 20 years I have declared Saddam Hussein to be my personal choice as the man who would be Nostradamus’ Mabus,” says John Hogue.

“In brief, for the uninitiated, the reason being that the law of anagram allows one to reverse in lower case the name “mabus” into “subam.” You can reverse again any letters, such as getting “d” out of “b” and get “sudam.” Phonetics play in the rules. If a similar vowel can be derived, for instance changing “u” to the long, Arabic “a”–sounding like “uhh” or “awh”= (Suh’dam, Sawh’dam) you get “Sadam.” In anagramming, you can add or subtract redundant letters. In this case, add a “d” and you get: “Saddam.”

Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging at dawn of 30 December (Iraqi Time) 2006.

Roughly a week later, Comet McNaught passing close to the sun, suddenly and unexpectedly began bursting into a brightness that by the middle of January 2007 competed with the sunset’s afterglow. The comet core and tail rivalled the brightness of the planet Venus.

It is now highly likely that Saddam is Nostradamus’ Mabus and McNaught is the comet running at the end of the Mabus prophecy.

What then follows is expressed in a Renaissance French euphemism: horrible defaite–in other words, the most terrible undoing imaginable, a destruction and mass killing that spares neither animals nor people.

Already the war in Syria and Iraq and rumours of war planned by the US and Israel (both nuclear states) against Iran has led to leaks suggesting that both have considered factoring in weapons of mass destruction powerful enough to bore into subterranean Iranian nuclear facilities.

Israeli and US sources have already drawn up plans for hypothetical air strikes on Iranian nuclear installations with tactical nuclear weapons.

Iran in turn has threatened to use any weapons it possesses in a counterstrike including regional ballistic missiles possibly tipped with chemical or biological weapons falling from the sky on US bases in Iraq, the Gulf States and Israeli cities.

Nostradamus warns of much worse to come in the new war.

“All the Kingdoms of Christianity, and even those of the infidels [Muslims], will tremble for the space of 25 years… so many evils shall be committed by the means of, Satan, the infernal Prince, that almost the entire world will be found undone and desolate.”

Another Nostradamus researcher Ted Montgomery is more graphic in his interpretation of the Prophecies: “During World War 3 there will be massive naval, air, and land battles. The ultra-secret weapons that are brought forth will shock and stun the world.

“The Antichrist will not hesitate to use bacteriological warfare, as well as conventional warfare, causing hunger, fire and plagues. The causative organisms will be more virulent than ever before and, hence, increasingly lethal.

“When the Antichrist is taking over Europe, nuclear weapons will wreak havoc like lightning strikes, and from them a “milky rain” will occur. Weapons currently beyond our imagination will wreak unparalleled devastation. Corpses will litter the landscape. The very earth will “cry out in pain.”

“The Antichrist will be so terrible, horrible, and powerful that the rightful rulers of countries will be utterly terrified and will not do anything to stop his ravages. Entire dynasties will be wiped out.

“A major nuclear confrontation will occur in the Middle East. The aggressor will have broken a promise not to use nuclear weapons in warfare. Naval fleets kept in the area by other powers will be scattered in ruins from the violence of the blast.

“Radioactive fallout will have adverse effects on people, animals, and weather; and erupting volcanoes will turn the water of that part of the ocean a muddy red colour. Because of this, bodies will appear to float in blood. Because of the blasts and earth changes, rivers will change their course, and political boundary lines based on them will be redrawn.

“The US will have a Democratic president at the time. He will get involved with the conflict as a way of trying to stimulate the economy from a depression.”

But sceptics of Nostradamus argue with so much conflict in the Middle East it is easy to link any one of them to the verses and when looked at together then don’t add up with today’s ISIS events or earlier ones.

According to some Nostradamus researchers, he explained a “King of Terror”, wearing a blue turban, would rise to power from Greater Arabia during the late 1990s, wage war around the world.

They interpret him saying the “King of Terror” would form an alliance with Russia to wage war on the US and Europe, starting with a nuclear strike on New York City.

Is this where reality and the supernatural really meet?

Time will tell.

 

Frankie Boyle on the fallout from Paris: ‘This is the worst time for society to go on psychopathic autopilot’

(This is quite possibly the funniest and most poignant commentary on the Middle East crisis I have read in a very long time. Written by Frankie Boyle and it appears in today’s Guardian, 24 November, 2015)

 FROM authoritarian power grabs to Andrew Neil’s nonsensical eulogy, the reaction to the Paris attacks proves that we haven’t learned from our past mistakes.

There were a lot of tributes after the horror in Paris. It has to be said that Trafalgar Square is an odd choice of venue to show solidarity with France; presumably Waterloo was too busy. One of the most appropriate tributes was Adele dedicating Hometown Glory to Paris, just as the raids on St-Denis started. A song about south London where, 10 years ago, armed police decided to hysterically blow the face off a man just because he was a bit beige.

In times of crisis, we are made to feel we should scrutinise our government’s actions less closely, when surely that’s when we should pay closest attention. There’s a feeling that after an atrocity history and context become less relevant, when surely these are actually the worst times for a society to go on psychopathic autopilot. Our attitudes are fostered by a society built on ideas of dominance, where the solution to crises are force and action, rather than reflection and compromise.

If that sounds unbearably drippy, just humour me for a second and imagine a country where the response to Paris involved an urgent debate about how to make public spaces safer and marginalised groups less vulnerable to radicalisation. Do you honestly feel safer with a debate centred around when we can turn some desert town 3,000 miles away into a sheet of glass? Of course, it’s not as if the west hasn’t learned any lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. This time round, no one’s said out loud that we’re going to win.

People seem concerned to make sure that Islam gets its full share of the blame, so we get the unedifying circus of neocons invoking God as much as the killers. “Well, Isis say they’re motivated by God.” Yes, and people who have sex with their pets say they’re motivated by love, but most of us don’t really believe them. Not that I’m any friend of religion – let’s blame religion for whatever we can. Let’s blame anyone who invokes the name of any deity just because they want to ruin our weekend, starting with TGI Friday’s.

The ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, evaded detection by security services by having a name too long to fit into one tweet. How could the most stringent surveillance in the world not have picked up Abdelhamid Abaaoud before? I mean, they’d have got him even if they just went through lists of terrorists alphabetically.

We’re always dealing with terror in retrospect – like stocking up on Imodium rather than reading the cooking instructions on your mini kievs. The truth is that modern governments sit at the head of a well-funded security apparatus. They are told that foreign military adventures put domestic populations at risk and they give them the thumbs up anyway. Charitably, the safety of their populations just aren’t of great concern to them. Realistically, domestic terrorist attacks play into their agenda: they allow them to grab ever more authoritarian powers with which to police their increasingly unequal and volatile societies. Of course, no one wants to believe that our government isn’t interested in our safety, just like everyone really wanted to believe that Jimmy Savile cared about whether kids got to meet Duran Duran.

It’s not an insult to the dead to wonder why France, a $2tn economy, couldn’t make a better offer to its disenfranchised youth than a bunch of sick bullies grooming them on the internet. It’s not apologism to try to understand why something happened. When Syria’s drought kicked in, 25% of the population became unemployed. The vast majority of the country’s livestock has died over the past decade. A lot of Isis are farmers with nowhere to go, their entire industry destroyed – you’d think they’d have more sympathy for journalists. Those who think radicalising a youngster has nothing to do with climate – have you seen Tatooine?

No one is saying climate change causes terrorism. Stop thinking that a global death cult is caused by one thing – it’s a complex situation involving several different countries and ideologies, not a rattling sound in your washing machine. Personally, I think that for all our blaming religion, there will be peace in the Middle East when the oil runs out. But knowing their luck, then somebody will invent a way of making fuel by mixing sand and falafel.

Maybe the west’s approach is right. After all, if you’ve got a massive fight in, say, a pub car park, the best way of solving it is clearly standing well back and randomly lobbing in fireworks. You can’t get rid of an ideology by destroying its leaders; you’d think if there’s anything “Christian” countries should know, it’s that. Europe has rejected the death penalty on moral grounds, and yet we relax this view when it comes to a group who want to be martyred. You can’t bomb ideas. If your kid shits on the carpet, you can’t stop them by bombing the person who invented shit – though it would tidy up ITV’s Saturday night schedule.

Andrew Neil went viral with an impassioned eulogy that, like most eulogies, was just inaccurate nonsense in the form of nice memorable words strung together with angry sad words. A speech that would have made those named within it proud, but only because a good few of them were nihilistic absurdists. Listing the great French thinkers in a tribute to nuclear power showcased the worst aspect of historical fame: these were figures Neil could name but appeared to know nothing about.

For a list supporting the French government’s foray into bombing its former colony he chose Satie, a composer so questioning of state he put a question mark into La Marseillaise; Zola, a man so adamant about the function of a fair and full trial he may have been murdered for his beliefs; Rousseau – “Those who think themselves masters of others are greater slaves than they”; Ravel, who rejected all state honours; Gauguin, a passionate defender of indigenous peoples; and Camus, the great Algerian-born philosopher, who died in 1960, a year before he would’ve been thrown into the Seine at the orders of the Nazi head of the Parisian police.

Out of his list of peacenik, thoughtful, anti-government icons, one of the few who might have been in favour of bombing Syria was Sartre, and that’s only because he thought we were all dead anyway. Of course, we mustn’t forget Coco Chanel, who Neil threw on to the list in such a blatant “if we don’t include a woman we’ll get into trouble” rush, he didn’t notice a quick wiki would reveal her to be a Nazi spy. These are the people who made France great, because what they asked of France was to question, to look death in the eye, to commit to full trials and never resort to military force, to step away from government, away from indigenous lands, to never see themselves as superior, and most, most of all, for people to stop regurgitating rhetorical cliches and think for themselves.

Neil asked us to consider who will be remembered in 1,000 years, and the answer of course is Thkkkkkkkzzzzxrrkksd, the insane Cockroach Emperor, who revolutionised the mining of our bones for fuel. But let’s go with his conceit. A thousand years is a long time; the first book published in French wasn’t until 1476. Goodness knows what an Islamic caliphate would have been doing 1,000 years ago? They built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, one of the first universities in the world; they asked scholars of all faiths to translate every text ever written into Arabic; they demanded the first qualifications for doctors, founded the first psychiatric hospitals and invented ophthalmology. They developed algebra (algorithms are named after their Arab father) and a programmable machine … a computer. They introduced Aristotle to Europe, Al-Jahiz began theories of natural selection, they discovered the Andromeda galaxy, classified the spinal nerves and created hydropower using pumps and gears.

And Neil is right – we don’t remember any of that. Not to say that this is what Isis want – Isis are like the group that closed the House of Wisdom, the next caliphate who decided science was irreligious. Isis want to destroy the knowledge that Islam is a beautiful, scientific and intelligent culture, and we are way ahead of them.

We want Paris to be remembered in 1,000 years and we don’t remember the names of the victims 10 minutes after reading them – we don’t remember Amine Ibnolmobarak, a Moroccan émigré who was designing an architectural solution to the 2,000 deaths at Mecca; we don’t remember Elsa Delplace and her mother Patricia San Martin, who died shielding Delplace’s young son from bullets. We remember that the female terrorist was blond and one had no pants on. We remember that the terrorists came in with refugees even though they don’t seem to have done, especially since they were all French or Belgian. We expect our descendants to remember Daft Punk and we don’t even remember that invading Iraq caused the birth and rise of Isis. And we won’t remember any of this once the new series of Britain’s Got Talent starts.

 

The British Media’s ‘Grotesquely Selective’ Reporting of Terror Attacks

IT is sometimes times strange how events and people come together.

Yesterday, I was enjoying a day out in Ludlow – a small market town in deepest sleepy south Shropshire. It was a day to revisit the place where I spent seven years of my life and enjoy a pie and a pint of bitter in one of my old haunts. A day to forget about the horrors of national and global politics and my own life battles and just enjoy some R&R.

Suddenly, while sitting down to a rather scrummy steak and blue cheese pie and chips, my mobile phone pinged. I glanced down and was amazed to see an email from and old journalist friend called Fred, whom I had not spoken with in about 17 years!

Fred is a well-travelled and widely read former Reuters’ foreign correspondent and a hugely respected writer. More than that, he is a lovely man with a good sense of right and wrong and natural justice.

His email was a ‘hello’ but also a rant against right wing broadcaster (and former Sunday Times editor) Andrew Neil, who the previous day, on national TV, had tried to take the moral high ground on the issue of ISIS and the terror attacks on Paris, Beirut and Yemen.

Fred and I have both had the misfortune to work for Andrew ‘Brillo’ Neil and know his devious and nasty ways too well. Fred summed Neil well: “I still maintain, that if our islands were ever invaded by some new Nazi Germany, he and Charles Moore would be among the first into collaborator SS officer uniforms.”

In my opinion Andrew Neil is a grotesque caricature of everything that is wrong with the British media.

But, I digress, and the less about Andrew Neil, the better.

Having digested Fred’s email and the pie quite well, I switched off from news and views again and lost myself in an old antique emporium before driving slowly back to Wolverhampton.

Once home I settled down on the sofa with another beer to catch up on over two dozen emails and Facebook messages which had dropped in while I was enjoying my day trip.

Then I was stopped in my tracks for the second time in a day. Among the messages was a wonderful piece in the Huffington Post concerning thoughts about the recent terror attacks from the UK’s most respected foreign correspondent John Simpson – a former colleague of Fred.

What follows, coalesces our joint feelings about the propaganda type bias of the reporting of the attacks on Paris, Beirut and Yemen.

This is the Huffington Post report. I believe it is essential reading:

John Simpson has hit out at the British media’s “grotesquely selective” reporting of deaths from terror attacks around the world.

 

Admitting he is “depressed” over where newspapers and television are headed, John says he is disheartened at how foreign correspondents have “almost vanished” in recent years.

“You see newspapers which used to pride themselves on foreign coverage – like The Daily Telegraph – now just rewrite stories from other people,” the veteran journalist says. “I absolutely despair when I see how that’s happened.”

“It’s grotesquely selective actually. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think the [Paris attacks] don’t matter, it matters hugely what happened in Paris. It’s one of the most important things of this decade. It’s just that you know, 130 people die in other countries and we shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded to that simply because we’re more interested in Paris.”

According to Simpson, it is where people are being killed which decides the extent of coverage.

“It matters less when it happens in Lebanon because Lebanon is a country which, although is quite close, is not where most people go.

“Honestly, I spend a lot of my time reporting from Iraq and you know, once a week, there are dozens of people killed in bomb attacks and suicide attacks and so forth. And it scarcely gets a mention. And the same thing in Afghanistan.

“I can rant about this from hour to hour because it makes me so angry that we should walk into other people’s countries and completely demolish whatever system they might have had beforehand, and then after, when the pressure gets a bit too great and you walk out, we never notice again what’s happened.”

Simpson says he doesn’t think there should necessarily be equality between “any one thing and another”, as he admits the Paris attacks was more important than the bombings in Beirut – but only in one sense.

“It’s likely to have a bigger effect on Western policy than the Lebanon attacks. So only in that sense.”

British media was recently criticised for not reporting on recent incidents in Beirut, although several outlets had in fact drawn attention to the events. “We just aren’t so interested,” the 71-year-old says simply.

“There’s no doubt about it. The British media is not as interested in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, as it is in other places. And I feel that’s really wrong.”

As for the reasoning behind the lack of interest, geographical distance “certainly” plays a role, but according to Simpson it is because “almost no news organisation” has bureaus in Kabul, Baghdad or other Middle Eastern cities.

“Yes, there are companies which honourably report there – Reuters, the BBC – but by and large the newspapers which once reported quite heavily on Iraq and Afghanistan and other places have left. It’s partly money, it’s partly safety.

“I don’t want everything I say to be regarded as a criticism. It’s just a statement of what’s happening. But the result of that is we seem not to be so interested really in deaths in one part of the world compared to another.

“Journalism has changed out of all recognition from when I started,” he continues, although he admits that was around 50 years ago.

“But it stayed the same until about 10 or 15 years ago. I suppose it’s the dawn of the new century, but I’m really very kind of depressed about the way that newspapers and television has developed.

“The jobs are fewer, the pay is much, much less. I’m afraid we’re back to where we used to be a century or more ago, in the late Victorian or early Edwardian period, when journalists were pretty much self-financed.

“So all those courses in media studies which were producing really high qualified and able people have suddenly kind of hatched up in the sands because the money to employ them is not there anymore.”

Nor, according to Simpson, is the high quality reporting on government policies, which has instead been replaced with politician’s slanging matches.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to cover the accusations and name-calling, politics has always had that element. But the policy elements in this are what don’t get reported so much now.

“If you don’t do serious articles about policy, it is a bit, you know,” he pauses, searching for the right word, “empty”.

“I remember when I was younger the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian, all would talk about public policy a great deal. Newsnight used to be very concerned about the nature of education policy, and of things that other people tended not to be very interested in, like water supply and so forth. Now that’s all finished, you don’t get that kind of thing from the broadcasters any more than you get from the newspapers.”

As for journalists trying to identify the “real” pressing issues of today, “it’s a question of sorting out the chaff from the wheat”.

“The chaff is all the talk about it”, Simpson explains. “Social media, the chit chat that goes on.

“The wheat is a proper understanding of how things work. I’m afraid it’s boring but it means plugging into the old traditional political party system.”

I ask Simpson to take his journalism hat off for a moment, and tell me what his proudest moment of his career was; reporting from Belgrade during the Kosovo War, disguising himself in a burqa to enter Afghanistan in 2001, being present during the Beijing Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989?

But it’s none of these.

“It would be silly not to mention the fall of the Berlin wall, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of communism in Russia. These were all epoch-making things. But if you ask me what I was most proud of, I’m proudest of having done something that nobody noticed, scarcely got used by the BBC, but which was really difficult to do.

“It’s nothing that anybody except me would have noticed. But there’s a town called Fallujah in Iraq which was attacked by the Americans with weapons of such deep questionability that the incidence of birth defects among children is astronomically high. Even still. And I made it there and I went and saw it and I spent only one morning there because it was so, it was really difficult. I mean, Fallujah now, it’s this death sentence to go there.

“It was hard. And the rewards weren’t very great and the BBC paid almost no attention to the story and it just got me a shoal of attacks from the US, but that was,” he pauses, seemingly caught up with memories of that small town, 69km west of Baghdad. “I felt that was what I ought to be doing. Not the grand stuff, but just trying to show what was really happening.

“Of all the stuff I’ve ever done, I am proudest of that.”

 

 

Dirty Tricks, Murder and the Masters of War

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

 

You that never done nothin’

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

 

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

 

You fasten the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

As young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

 

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

(Bob Dylan, 1963)

 

SIX days have now passed since the atrocities in Paris, and it seems that the Western governments’ strongest efforts to pin the blame on radical ISIS jihadists is not going to plan.

Increasing numbers of observers and journalists are now questioning the role that the USA’s CIA and Israel’s Mossad may or may not have had in the killing of at least 129 people.

I have already written about the dirty propaganda behind the supposed killing of ‘Jihadi John’ in Roll On John https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/roll-on-john and the unanswered questions behind the Paris murders Beyond the Horizon Oer the Treacherous Sea https://seagullnic.wordpress.com/2015/11/16/beyond-the-horizon-oer-the-treacherous-sea but now we need to look in greater depth at the USA’s murky interference in the Middle East.

In one of the fiery oratories for which he was well-known, the late Hugo Chávez once stated that “the American empire is the greatest menace to our planet.”

Looking at the history of US engagement in Latin America, it is easy to see why Chávez made such a claim.

From overthrowing democratically elected leaders, operating death squads, and torturing civilians, the history of US involvement in the region helped create a widespread popular backlash that persists to this day.

Since the late 1980s the USA’s theatre of war has switched from Latin America to the Middle East, and many of the same tactics of that period were redeployed on the other side of the world.

Since the end of World War 2 the world’s biggest super power has:

• Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.

• Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

• Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

• Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.

• Interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

Investigations reveal that Pentagon officials at the highest levels oversaw torture facilities during the war in Iraq in 2003. The evidence includes: rooms used for interrogating detainees stained with blood; children tied into extreme stress positions with their bodies beaten to discoloration and others tortured with high voltage electricity and waterboarding.

Most chillingly, a veteran of the United States’ “dirty war” in El Salvador was reported to have been brought in to personally oversee the interrogation facilities.

As described by Iraqi officials this programme was condoned at the highest levels of the US military and utilized “all means of torture to make the detainee confess … using electricity, hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails”.

At the now infamous School of the Americas, thousands of Latin American “special forces” were explicitly trained in torture techniques by US handlers. Many of those SOA graduates took their new training home to El Salvador, where they waged a war that killed an estimated 80,000 Salvadoran civilians.

The creation and patronage of locally trained indigenous militias – such as we are seeing with ISIS – to wreak havoc among subject populations in pursuit of American military objectives is a tactic that seems to have been adapted to the present day with great effect.

The USA’s most prominent trained paramilitaries were the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF), an elite counterterrorism force referred to as “the dirty brigade”.

Trained and guided by US military advisers at every level of its hierarchy, the ISOF was structured so as to place it outside the confines of normal oversight by international observers.

The use of torture, the patronage of sectarian proxy forces, and the facilitation of widespread human rights abuses all characterize US policy in the “war on terror”.

Evidence has emerged that ISIS and its military advances in northern Iraq and Syria has been shaped and controlled out of Langley, Virginia, and other CIA and Pentagon outposts as the next stage in spreading chaos in the world’s second-largest oil state, Iraq, as well as weakening Syrian stabilization efforts.

There is widely corroborated evidence that MI6 cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

So a year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

But all is not as it seems.

According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance.

According to one report, residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”

We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” – arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria.

According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.

Key members of ISIS were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials.

The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence ran a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.

Advertised publicly as training of ‘non-extremist’ Muslim jihadists to wage war against the Syrian Bashar Assad regime, the secret US training camps in Jordan and elsewhere trained perhaps several thousand Muslim fighters in techniques of irregular warfare, sabotage and general terror.

Former US State Department official Andrew Doran wrote in the conservative National Review magazine that some ISIS warriors also hold US passports!

Iranian journalist Sabah Zanganeh notes: “ISIS did not have the power to occupy and conquer Mosul by itself. What has happened is the result of security-intelligence collaborations of some regional countries with some extremist groups inside the Iraqi government.”

Very revealing is the fact that almost two weeks after the dramatic fall of Mosul and the ‘capture’ by ISIS forces of the huge weapons and military vehicle resources provided by the US to the Iraqi army.

Whatever the final details that emerge, what is clear in the days since the fall of Mosul is that some of the world’s largest oilfields in Iraq are suddenly held by Jihadists and no longer by an Iraqi government determined to increase the oil export significantly.

Of course this is not the story given to us by our Western media, most of which owned by the same billionaire big businessmen which in turn manipulate our governments.

War propaganda often demands the abandoning of ordinary reason and principle, and the USA’s Dirty War in the Middle East demonstrates this in abundance.

Normal ethical notions of avoiding conflicts of interest, searching for independent evidence and disqualifying self-serving claims from belligerent parties have been ignored in much of the western debate.

As in previous wars, the aim is to demonise the enemy, by use of repeated atrocity claims, and so mobilise popular support behind the war.

In the words of leading Nazi, Hermann Goering: “Why of course the people don’t want war… that is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along.

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Today those who finance and arm the sectarian groups have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

We now know is the air campaign against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has killed more than 450 innocent civilians, according to a new report, even though the US-led coalition has so far acknowledged just two non-combatant deaths.

More than 5,700 air strikes have been launched in the campaign, which had its first anniversary this week with its impact on civilians largely unknown.

Now Airwars, a project by a team of independent journalists, has published details of 52 strikes with what it believes are credible reports of at least 459 non-combatant deaths, including those of more than 100 children.

One of the attacks investigated was on Fadhiliya, Iraq, on 4 April where witnesses and local politicians said a family of five had died, including a pregnant woman and an eight-year-old girl.

These figures do not take into account any more civilian deaths caused by French and US airstrikes since last Friday’s Paris atrocities.

Finally to give some insight into the impact of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Wikileaks obtained and decrypted a previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007.

It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad.

After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well.

The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths occurred.

Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on http://collateralmurder.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&sns=fb

It is frightening in its content and a chilling sub text of the way the USA treats its friends and enemies.

It is also clear why the USA is so keen to bring Wikileaks founder and the director of the video into its custody.

As British Prime Minister Lloyd George said in 1916: “If the people really knew the truth the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”