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Al Skeilbiyyeh – on the 23rd March 2019 I entered the Syrian Christian town of Al Skeilbiyyeh. Between 4 and 5pm, at least four villages to the west of the town were attacked by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) forces embedded to the north of the villages.  HTS is a poorly disguised rebrand of Al Qaeda or Nusra Front in Syria and now controls the majority of Idleb province and terrorist-held areas of Northern Hama bordering Al Skeilbiyyeh. 

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One of the child victims of the suspected chemical attack in Northern Hama, arriving at Al Skeilbiyyeh hospital. (Photo: local photographer)

The villages of al-Rasif, al-Aziziyyeh, al-Khandaq and al-Jayyid were hit by an estimated 5 mortars. 34 victims of a suspected chemical attack were brought to Al Skeilbiyyeh hospital after being treated at the scene of the attack. I spoke to pediatrician, Dr Modhesh Farha who informed me that three children were among the victims, one of whom was severely affected with breathing difficulties. By the time I arrived at the hospital at around 11pm, two of the children had been released back to their families.

One of the victims suffering with breathing difficulty – Sajiaa Abu Kahla, from the village of al-Khandaq (Photo: Vanessa Beeley) 

Medical staff and doctors told me that victims were washed at the scene of the attack before being brought to the hospital where doctors had administered oxygen, saline drips, antibiotics in some cases, and cortisone (steroids) for the shock. Symptoms described to me included – respiratory problems, sinus problems, skin blisters, damage to the cornea of the eyes and nausea. While I was speaking with doctors in front of one patient, she went into what appeared to be a toxic shock reaction (also confirmed by the doctor). The following video shows this moment – warning, it is distressing:

I spoke with some of the victims who were already starting to recover. They described the attack taking place between 4 and 5pm. They are used to regular mortar attacks from the extremist groups embedded in the surrounding countryside but this was the first time they had experienced what appears to have been a chemical attack. The nephew of one victim, Sajiaa Abu Kahla, from the village of al-Khandaq (see photo above), described his aunt struggling to breathe after inhaling the white “smoke” that was seen after the attack, he told me:

“Smoke, white smoke, its color was white, it covered the land, this was in the village of al-Rasif”.

Another victim I spoke to, Nawfal Tawbar, described the same white smoke that hovered about one meter above the ground and was very thick and static. He told me that he had also had difficulty breathing, he reported a stinging in his sinuses. Tawbar also reported a strong smell of bleach from the smoke. This testimony was repeated almost without variation by all victims I manged to interview despite the chaos in the hospital as ambulances brought more patients for treatment. Tawbar’s interview is here:

We were told at the hospital that a Syrian/Russian team had been immediately despatched to collect soil samples etc and to ensure the area was safe for residents to return to once they had recovered sufficiently. HTS were being held responsible for the attack. To date, I am unaware if the OPCW has been mobilised to investigate this event. Previously, on 24th November 2018, so-called “moderate rebels” appeared to use chemical weapons in an attack on districts of western Aleppo, the OPCW has not produced a final report on this attack so far, despite having deployed the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in December 2018 and January 2019.

As far as I am aware no colonial media outlet reported on this suspected chemical attack. A quick google search reveals two reports by SouthFront and AlMasdar News and local news agencies. There were no White Helmet theatrics to attract western media, no opportunity to further criminalise the Syrian government and its allies. The wrong kind of Syrians were affected by this attack – the villages and towns in this region are steadfast in their resistance against the U.S coalition campaign to destabilise Syria and to topple the Syrian government – their voices, their suffering does not serve the agenda of the NATO-aligned media.

Ongoing terrorist attacks

The towns of Al Skeilbiyyeh and Mhardeh, about 3o minutes apart, have been under sustained attack by the HTS-controlled extremist armed groups over the last few weeks. Despite a Russian/Turkish brokered ceasefire, the armed groups have systematically been targeting civilian and residential areas in both towns. In Mhardeh, the electrical power station is constantly under attack which has a detrimental effect on the whole country as it supplies electricity to an extensive area of Syria, including Damascus.

I had previously visited Al Skeilbiyyeh shortly after a particularly destructive series of attacks. Commander of the local, volunteer National Defence Forces, Nabel Alabdalla, told me that he believed the “rebels” were using a new, more destructive form of C4 explosive that was capable of causing much more widespread damage to entire neighbourhoods. Al Skeilbiyyeh had received more than 25 rockets/mortars over a three week period, invariably targeting schools, civilian homes and busy markets. Watch my full interview with Nabel just a few days after one of the attacks:

On September 7th 2018, the same armed groups supplied and promoted by the U.S coalition, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had targeted Mhardeh with ground-launched cluster munitions. Two days later, the same munitions were used to target Al Skeilbiyyeh causing considerable damage to infrastructure but thankfully not claiming any lives.

In Mhardeh, 13 civilians were murdered in this attack, some dying later in hospital from the awful wounds they had sustained. Shadi Yousef Shehda lost his three children, his wife and his mother in the Mhardeh massacre. I met with Shadi over Christmas 2018 when he told me that he would never leave the “city of the sun”, Mhardeh, despite his unimaginable grief and loss.

#Syria#Aleppo scenario all over again

"Syrian government, with Russia’s support, is ramping up its bombing of schools & hospitals, targeting civilian infrastructure in the opposition holdout of #Idlib" acc to 'activists' & #WhiteHelmets

Remember #LastHospital, etc in Aleppo? https://t.co/s36kffpDyy

— Malinka🔸Tanya P (@Malinka1102) March 28, 2019

Again, these attacks barely register in western media while the hysteria over retaliatory attacks by the Syrian Arab Army and allies is commonplace. Without these defensive measures by the SAA and Russia who knows how many more civilians would have lost their lives by now in the towns bordering terrorist-held northern Hama and Idleb. This threat to besieged Syrian towns appears to be of no consequence to media in the West.

One of the ground launched cluster munition rockets that targeted Al Skeilbiyyeh in September 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

As one National Defence Forces soldier says in this video…. “the terrorists are cowards” – they will never face the soldiers of Al Skeilbiyyeh on the battlefield, they prefer to kill or maim the elderly, children, pregnant women – on 16th March 2019 three children were injured during one attack, one child later died from their wounds. Ayat Mahmoud, a young Palestinian woman from Damascus living in Al Skeilbiyyeh was also killed in this attack. She was pregnant, her child was due in one week. What did these children or an unborn child do that they should be targeted by western-sponsored terrorism in their own homes.

This shameful aspect of this externally fomented war is hidden from view by The Guardian, the BBC, CNN and Channel 4 and others, it is unreported and disappeared just as many of the terrorist atrocities have been conveniently ignored throughout the 8 year war that has been waged against the Syrian people.

The UK Foreign Office (UK FCO) has poured £ 2.8 billion into “humanitarian aid” for Syria. Aid that is supplied predominantly into areas controlled by HTS, including Idleb. On the 27th March 2019, Ambassador Jonathan Allen, UK Deputy Permanent Representative to UN, made a statement at the Security Council Briefing on Syria during which he proudly confirmed the expenditure of taxpayers money that has serious potential to be financing terrorism in Syria (emphasis added):

 At the Brussels Conference, the United Kingdom pledged £400 million – or $530 million. And indeed we have mobilised over £2.81 billion to the Syrian Crisis since 2012 – that’s over £3.7 billion. That’s our largest ever response. 

Allen makes no mention of the armed group attacks on the Syrian Christian communities in the region. Nor does he mention that the UK FCO intelligence asset, the White Helmets, are embedded with the armed groups (including HTS) in Madiq Citadel just 500m from the outskirts of Al Skeilbiyyeh town.

No reports have been issued by the White Helmets condemning the targeting of children and civilian areas by the armed groups, or the use of prohibited weapons including potential chemical weapons last weekend – meanwhile the UK FCO continues to claim that a primary role of the White Helmets is to document “war crimes”.  Apparently the White Helmets only report on alleged “war crimes” committed by the Syrian government, army or allies that coroborrate an aggressive UK FCO interventionist policy, and not on the daily crimes committed by the extremist armed groups against defenceless civilians.

Confronting terrorism with resistance and steadfastness

The newly restored bell-tower in Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

What enables these besieged towns to keep resisting and to weather the storm that has threatened them for more than 6 years since the armed groups consolidated in Northern Hama and Idleb?

According to Nabel Alabdalla, it is the steadfastness of the ordinary people, their refusal to abandon their land and their country. It is the belief in the “way of the martyr“, the ultimate sacrifice for their mother, Syria. The soldiers I have spoken to across Syria and their families genuinely believe that the greatest honour bestowed by God is that of dying for their country, dying to defend their families, their people and their way of life.

One of the volunteer NDF soldiers in Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

This belief in solidarity, unity, resistance and ultimate victory for the righteous forms the backbone of the fighting forces that have defended Syria for eight arduous and devastating years.

View from the Assumption of the Virgin Mary monastery that has been targeted many times by the terrorist groups less than 500m away. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The morning after the suspected chemical attack we all gathered at the church in Al Skeilbiyyeh. The chaos of the previous night was still fresh in our memories, soldiers had been deployed to guard the hospital in case HTS decided to target it. This was a new day. The day of blessing the newly rebuilt bell-tower that had been destroyed in a previous terrorist attack, a project personally undertaken by Nabel Alabdalla.

Nabel Alabdalla in Al Skeilbiyyeh with commander of Mhardeh NDF, Simon AlWakil. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The bell had been gifted to Al Skeilbiyyeh by the Russian Orthodox church almost 200 years ago. The church had been built around the bell. Now history came full circle as the bell was restored to its rightful place and a service was held to celebrate this momentous demonstration of resistance and to honour the martyrs whose bloodshed and sacrifice has made such events possible.

The Patriarch blesses the recently restored bell-tower in Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The service in the simple  church was a moving and powerful recognition of the “way of the martyr”, tears were shed quietly by the families, mothers and wives of the soldiers who have given their lives to protect their loved ones. As I witnessed the sharing and outpouring of grief and pride, I began to fully comprehend why this town will never kneel to hatred and violent extremism.

Elderly lady wearing the traditional headdress of Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

In front of me sat an elderly lady almost bent double, perhaps with arthritis. She wore the traditional headdress of Al Skeilbiyyeh. During the service, despite her physical discomfort, she rose when required and prostrated herself on the floor to pray. Her unwavering belief in prayer and the power of the protection of the Virgin Mary seemed to sustain her throughout the hour long service.

In front of her sat another elderly lady, her hair pulled back in a silver twist. She sat next to a young child wearing a black bow in her hair. Both were transfixed by the ceremony, old and young absorbed in the making of history and the dreams of a future without war.

During the service in Al Skeilbiyyeh church. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

After the service, we all entered the courtyard to witness the blessing of the bell-tower and to hear the bells being rung by the sons of martyrs, the honoured few who are given this privilege. The town’s brass band accompanied the bell-ringers filling the air with the sound of music that echoed across the valley towards the gatherings of armed groups, defying them to attack on this glorious Sunday morning.

The guns and mortars were silenced. Despite all the threats and the impotent extremist rage, the people of this town still stand proud and strong – “carrying the candles of peace and love in one hand and with the other hand on the trigger of the gun” as Nabel Alabdalla has often said.

The following video is a compilation of the bell-ringing. The passion demonstrated by the bell-ringers is indicative of the love these people have for their history, their culture, their town and their country. This is why this war will be won by Syrians (and allies) defending Syria and why the U.S Coalition of terror will never be victorious, there is no place in this secular society for ideological extremism and tyranny.

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This article was originally published on 21st Century Wire.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. Please support her work at her Patreon account. 

Everyone knows the reality in Venezuela. Assistance is based on medical ethics: No patient is asked about political affiliation or payment. Doctors are trained in the values ​​of the Revolution, which speak for themselves, no inoculation is needed

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The history of Cuban international collaboration is marked by adherence to ethical precepts established in our state’s conduct and positions. Our government does not interfere in the internal affairs of any country and respects national sovereignty and international law. The hundreds of thousands of compatriots who provide their services on five continents believe in, and abide by, these principles. Thus, strengthened by these beliefs, we work in the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has welcomed the second largest number of internationalist Cubans, since January 1, 1959, surpassed only by the sister nation of Angola, which lived, worked, fought, and died with a great number of our sons and daughters. Venezuela is also the country in which Cuban collaborators participate in the widest range of sectors, including sports, culture, education, communications, agriculture, the food industry, science, energy, and transportation, among others.

With the popular victory and the arrival of Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías to the Presidency, the Bolivarian Revolution put human beings at the center of its work. For the first time, many marginalized and poor Venezuelans were treated like valued citizens, with access to social programs that the government implemented, backed by 73% of the GDP investment to benefit the majority.

Thus the social missions emerged, created and driven forward by Chávez as “the soul of the Revolution,” given their inclusive, popular, participative, democratic, human, solidary, and genuinely socialist nature.

Within this context, into the heart of the people and their revolution, came Cuban collaborators. Fidel delineated the fundamental principles of the cooperation: First of all: serve the Venezuelan people well, prepare those who will follow us, and care for our brigades. These premises have been, are, and will be what guides the Cuban presence in this sister country.

Misión Barrio Adentro Salud (Into the Neighborhood Health Mission) has had the greatest impact. Our collaborators are distributed in 24 states and 335 municipalities of the country. They live in all parishes and offer services in more than 1,500 facilities. They can be found on the steep hillsides, with the poor, and just as easily on the rolling hills where the rich and middle class bourgeois population lives.

Hearts in Venezuela

Everyone knows the reality in Venezuela; assistance is based on medical ethics.No one is asked about political affiliation or payment. They are people, patients, human beings … and that is enough to sensitize doctors trained in the values ​​of the Revolution, which speak for themselves, no inoculation is needed.

Examples abound in the daily work and at exceptional moments, such as those during the opposition thug violence (guarimbas) of 2017, or January 22-23 this year, and even more recently, on February 23, when those who suffered gunshots, blows, and even burns, both Chavistas and supporters of the opposition, were treated by Cubans at Comprehensive Diagnostic Centers, all with the same disposition and quality attention.

At these centers, after a clinical examination, the most direct, effective method of identifying an ailment, patients without distinction may undergo tests, receive treatment with medication, rehabilitation, or surgery, and, if necessary, specialized assistance in Cuba.

Supervision? Yes, it exists, but differs significantly in focus as compared to what the enemies of Cuba and Venezuela propose. As in any other part of the world, statistics are gathered, not in the mercantilist sense, but to evaluate the impact of treatment and preventative work on health and quality of life.

In the 18 years since Misión Barrio Adentro Salud was launched, 1.552 billion medical consultations have been provided, 1,473,317 lives saved, and 3,391,967 surgeries performed.

Among the 10,388 services offered are assistance to the disabled, orthodontics, ophthalmological treatments, and ongoing support for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes. In only ten years, 209,607 patients suffering from diabetic foot ulcers have been treated with HebertProt-P, a high-impact product of Cuban science, which has contributed to lowering amputations to 3% among those treated, while Venezuelan statistics show that 40 to 60% of patients who do not receive the Cuban product require amputation.

Something that distinguishes the work of the health system developed by the Bolivarian Revolution through the Barrio Adentro mission – first with Cuban doctors and now with the new generation of Venezuelan community doctors in the 13,617 popular clinics – is field work, door to door, with integrated teams and the participation of other community actors, not to seek votes or apply political pressure, but to practice social medicine, that which, from the soul, cures disease.

No Cuban Agents or Soldiers

Grateful Cubans remain in Venezuela, voluntarily and with a high sense of courage and revolutionary integrity. Those who fulfill a solidary duty remain united with Venezuelans in the face of aggression and threats from imperialism and its lackeys. Only those who came looking for the good life have abandoned the cause. There are no Cuban agents or soldiers on Bolivarian soil, only collaborators who value peace, love, and life, who teach and learn every day.

As in Cuba and through Mission Robinson – a name taken from the pseudonym of Simón Bolívar’s teacher – 3,095,546 Venezuelans have learned to read and write, using in this lofty cause Cuba’s “Yes, I can” method.

We can affirm with certainty that the Venezuelan people are now more cultured and freer; thinking, reasoning, and deciding their own future, thanks to the social missions of Venezuela and Cuba.

Constitutional President Nicolás Maduro Moros has strengthened the Hugo Chávez Frías Missions and Great Socialist Missions System, reaffirming that they constitute a source of social, economic, and political power. Shoulder to shoulder, for peace and love, Cubans will always accompany you.

In context:

• No Cuban doctor denies service to a patient and much less risks the life of one to achieve political ends.
• Cuban international medical collaboration has existed for over 55 years and has a presence in 124 countries, with more than 400,000 health workers providing services.
• Since Cuban medical collaboration began in Venezuela, more than 140,000 health workers have participated, offering millions of medical consultations, while more than 24,000 Venezuelan community doctors have been trained.
• The Barrio Adentro I and II missions have brought health to the people, altruistically, as characterizes our professionals.
• Only those who support the coup from abroad would attempt to sully their honor.
• Cuban collaboration in Venezuela is an expression of the solidarity defended by Fidel and Chávez.
• More than 220,000 Cuban specialists from different sectors have served on Bolivarian soil over the years. This is the real Cuban army, not the one that coup leaders concoct.

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Featured image: President Díaz-Canel visits Venezuelan patients being treated by Cuban doctors. Photo: Estudio Revolución

There is an inseparable connection between the pursuit of an ecological future and the pursuit of justice. We can have both or we will have neither. That needs to be our guide for the economic and ecological transformation to come.

Two underlying global dynamics are leading us toward self-destruction.

First, economic activity is relentlessly driving ecological damage through pollution, depletion, and habitat destruction. The result is the accelerating sixth global mass extinction of the Anthropocene. This is extraordinary.

A cataclysmic event with global geophysical consequences for the ecosphere is the result of self-conscious human action. In the past, periodic mass extinction were unleashed by forces like mass volcanism pouring gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, or the result of a huge meteor strike ending the age of dinosaurs killing most living creatures and leading to the extinction of 75% of all species.

The truth is that current human conduct is unsustainable. Unless substantially reformed, it will end as a consequence of ecological collapse and the great dying now underway. Mass death will be shared by humanity and not just by others, the insects and amphibians now vanishing globally at alarming rates. Mitigating the consequences of the great dying will require deliberate and quick action to eliminate fossil fuel pollution, to pursue a zero pollution, zero waste industrial ecology, to practice an ecological agriculture, forestry, aquaculture.

Second, is understanding that the practice of pollution, depletion, habitat destruction rests upon injustice, inequality, and enormous disparities of power between the few and the many. The world led by a billionaire class is incompatible with both the effective practice of democracy and an ecological turn. While some billionaires may harbor ecological sentiments, the existing market rules under which they have created and expand their wealth and power are based upon the practice of ecological pillage and inequality as usual.

Our central task is more than just installing solar panels and wind machines. The good news is that an ecological turn is both within our technical capabilities and can be guided by straightforward reforms of the price system and a legal mandate for fiduciary responsibility as the pursuit of ecological ends and justice. Our difficulties are largely political, and therefore amenable to democratic processes and insistent demands of millions, and soon to be billions, in the street.

Guiding the pursuit of profit or surpluses toward ecological ends, for a global market system to restore and protect the global ecosphere and the global commons of air, soil, ocean means first, comprehensive new ecological market rules that send clear price signals for sustainability where sustainable goods and services are cheaper gain market share and become more profitable, and second, a legally binding definition of fiduciary responsibility that the pursuit of economic growth results in ecological improvement in the context of social and ecological justice, for example, the replacement of fossil fuels with energy user owned renewables.

The social and economic context is a global convergence upon sustainable and just norms for all. The results are ecological sustainability, shared global prosperity, and building a global peace system that replaces a war system.

The rise of toxic nationalism, of Trumpism in the United States and similar excrescences globally are a reaction, in part, to the inequality and unfairness of business as usual. What is particularly pathetic in this expression of desperation is a willingness to embrace climate denial and polices of roll back of all ecological regulations as part of the relief promised by Trump et. al. whose message is wrapped in familiar racist tropes against dark skinned immigrants and the “danger” posed by desperate migrants seeking asylum.

The economics of efficiency and zero fuel cost renewables with falling capital costs and improving efficacy is leading by fits and starts toward a global renewable transformation. At the same time, the deepening and emergent consequences of climate change will lead to serious action. While elements of the Republican Party will continue to deny the reality of climate change, these policies have the same shelf life as denying gravity because falling down is unpleasant. Wild fire, floods, droughts, super storms, winter tornadoes, crop failures are making it clear that the clock is ticking louder and louder. The necessity to deal with the consequences of climate change before geophysical forces foreclose options is become clearer by the minute. The debate is now switching to what must be done, and how to do it.

Our key global challenge is to create the financial tools and market rules to encourage ecological economic growth in a way that supports social and ecological justice. We will have both ecological sustainability and social justice or we will have neither. That is the lens through which to scrutinize and pursue a Green New Deal and our future policies.

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Roy Morrison builds Solar Farms. His next book (forthcoming) is EEG: Reversing Climate Change and Building an Ecological Civilization.

The Mother of Parliaments is now home to the mother of all crises. Brexit has tested the UK’s institutions and unwritten constitution to their limits. We are in uncharted waters – and in Theresa May’s case, in a rapidly sinking boat without a life vest.

The Maybot – inept, and stubborn as a mule – is determined to push through her hated Brexit deal. This is despite the fact that she has racked up the first and fourth largest defeats in parliamentary history.

But she had a big shock, not from Michel Barnier, but from the Speaker of the House of Commons. Mr Bercow used a precedent dating from 1604 to block her plans. As a result, the Tory leader is unlikely to be able to batter her opposition into submission by endlessly re-submitting her deal to a “meaningful vote”. Bercow has become yet another thorn in the side of May’s government amid Britain’s constitutional drama.

Government in name only

Faced with a hostile parliament, May demagogically appealed to the “people” to help her to resolve the crisis. “You’re tired of the infighting, you’re tired of the political games,” she said, blaming the parliamentarians. “I am on your side.”

But the Prime Minister’s speech backfired, alienating everyone – Leavers and Remainers alike. It is looking extremely unlikely she will ever get her deal through. She has well and truly flogged the proverbial dead horse.

Weary MPs have rubbed salt in the Tory leader’s wounds by voting to “take back control”, giving themselves a say in how to resolve the parliamentary paralysis. But it is not clear if this is even possible. The only clear majority in Parliament is against a no-deal Brexit. Yet this is the default option if the eventual deadline (whenever that may be) comes without reaching a majority for any other alternative.

Tory Brexiteers are fuming at the thought of seeing a “Brexit in name only” deal being passed. Meanwhile, with the Prime Minister and her party now deprived of any power, Britain is left with a government in name only.

The EU is also getting increasingly frustrated, fearing the worst. “This is a circus that is beyond comprehension,” said one senior EU diplomat working on Brexit. Another senior Brussels figure involved in talks likened it to “dealing with a failed state”. Faced with a broken prime minister with a last minute dodgy plan, what can the EU offer?

Sharpening the knives

Many of May’s own side are loudly and publicly calling for her to resign. The Tories are at each other’s throats, fiddling while Rome burns. The only thing that unites them is the feeling that the current Conservative party leader should go.

“I’m afraid it’s all over for the PM,” tweeted George Freeman, Tory MP. “She’s done her best. But across the country you can see the anger. Everyone feels betrayed. Government’s gridlocked. Trust in democracy collapsing. That can’t go on.”

Dominic Grieve, another Tory MP and former Attorney General, said in the Commons debate that he had “never felt more ashamed to be a member of the Conservative party”. He then predicted that if the government did not get a grip, “we will spiral down into oblivion – and the worst thing is, we will deserve it”.

Nigel Evans, a former deputy speaker, said that as far as May’s leadership was concerned, “trust is waning, ebbing away”. Her own MPs have accused her of betrayal. Her authority is in tatters.

But there is no time for a leadership contest before the new 12 April Brexit deadline. And who would even replace May? The potential candidates are a veritable rogues’ gallery.

Ruling class panicked

Faced with further defeats in the House of Commons, May’s government could see itself on the receiving end of a no-confidence vote. The whole crisis could end in the fall of the government and a general election.

Even the gutter press is panicking about such a possibility, with an editorial in The S** headed: “Brexiteer and Remainer Tories are close to giving power to Marxist Jeremy Corbyn.” The article states:

“We do not believe the Tories will win an election if panicked Remain MPs have halted Brexit, especially with Mrs May in office. They will be punished by Leavers they have failed and Remainers who have already jumped ship. Corbyn is one of Britain’s most reviled politicians, in a crowded field. But his party… could win by default if Tory voters don’t turn out… Tory MPs must wake up. This is not a parlour game. An election has never looked closer. Handing power to Corbyn will define your careers.”

They are terrified by the looming prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour government. Their analysis of a defeat for the Tories is correct. The Tories are deeply divided and in a state of disarray.

For a socialist Labour government!

Out of desperation, big business have thrown their weight (and significant sums of money) behind the call for a so-called ‘People’s Vote’ over Brexit, doing everything in their power to mobilise a mass crowd for the recent pro-EU march in London.

But a second referendum will do nothing to address the burning issues facing working-class communities across the country. Instead, it threatens to divide workers even further.

Instead of a ‘People’s Vote’ over Brexit, we need a ‘People’s Vote’ over this government. The Labour leadership should press a vote of no confidence in the Tory government, which is hanging by a thread. A mass campaign – with rallies and demonstrations across the country – should be organised to force a general election.

Britain is in the midst of a deep economic, political, social and constitutional crisis. The ruling class has lost control. There has never been a better time to clear out the Tories and bring to power a Labour government committed to bold socialist policies.

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As Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman clamor for a war against Iran, they seem to have conveniently forgotten the destruction and mayhem wrought by the American invasion of Iraq 16 years ago.

These war drummers are underestimating the potential negative consequences of the war and overestimating the Iranian people’s dislike of their theocratic regime. They, like the advocates of the Iraqi invasion in the winter of 2002 and early spring 2003, are confusing Iranians’ dislike of the ayatollahs with their potential embrace of a foreign invader.

On the eve of the Iraq war, former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the Vice President Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President David Addington all claimed that the Iraqi invasion aimed at liberating the country from the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. Removing Saddam from power, they maintained, would eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and bring stability, security, and democracy to Iraq.

As developments unfolded over the past 16 years, the “liberation” claims proved to be bogus. The invasion and the decision to de-Ba’athify Iraq and dissolve the Iraqi military created an environment conducive to sectarianism, insurgency, and terrorism. The vacuum that followed the regime collapse, the incompetence of the American administration in the “Green Zone,” and the pervasive corruption of the new Iraqi governing councils was quickly filled by pro-Iranian militias, al-Qaeda, and later the Islamic State. The promise of stability and security was replaced by chaos, bloodshed, and mayhem.

The massive destruction of Iraq and the horrendous human and material cost the American “liberation” caused for the country will be child’s play compared to what could happen if Trump and his Israeli and Saudi allies decide to attack Iran. Unlike Iraq—which the British cobbled together after World War One out of the Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds under a minority Sunni rule—  Iran has been in existence for centuries with a vast territory and a huge population. If attacked, Iran has the capability to retaliate against its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia. Its air and missile forces could quickly destroy the oil and gas facilities and the water and power grids on the Arab side of the Gulf. A war against Iran could easily spread to the Gulf and the Levant. The entire region could go up in flames.

Hubris and Ignorance

The Bush administration was not willing or interested in answering the “morning after” questions regarding the post-Saddam future of Iraq. Whenever I and others urged policy makers to consider the law of unintended consequences and what could go wrong in Iraq following the invasion, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dismissed our concerns and arrogantly claimed that the U.S. military and civilian administration following the invasion would be able to control the situation in Iraq. Their hubris regarding America’s power and ignorance of Iraqi realities on the ground led to a total breakdown of Iraqi society following the demise of the Saddam regime.

The Trump administration seems to be equally arrogant and ignorant about Iran. It has displayed a similar disregard for strategic thinking about the future of Iran beyond the clerical regime. The Iranophobes within the administration seem to be more obsessed with Iran than the Bush administration was ever with Iraq.

Instead of relying on calm, expert-based analysis, Secretary of State Pompeo has made a series of trips to the region that have involved bullying, threats, and hilarious, if not tragic, mischaracterizations. In a recent conversation with Christian broadcasters in Jerusalem, Pompeo waxed eloquent about God’s presumed divine plan designating Trump as a possible savior of the “Jewish people,” Sunni Islam, Maronite Lebanon, Alawite Syria, and the rest of the world from the perceived modern-day Persian “Hamans.”

The American foreign policy process is in serious trouble if Pompeo truly believes that Trump could be the twenty-first-century version of Queen Esther or Hadassah and that this religious vision could chart the path to a grand strategy in the Middle East. When warped religious interpretations are offered as a substitute for rationally debated policy, whether by a radical Wahhabi Salafist, an evangelical Christian, or an ultra-Orthodox Jew, democratic governments should fear for their future. Invoking the divine as an inspiration or a justification for violence against another country, much as Osama bin Laden did on the eve of 9/11, is a rejection of rational discourse and a return to the barbarism of previous epochs.

Pompeo’s imagined “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East has been reduced to supporting Netanyahu’s upcoming election bid, threatening Hezbollah in Lebanon, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and lambasting any state that does business with Iran. His ambassador-designee to Saudi Arabia, John Abizaid, told Congress that the threat from Iran supersedes concerns for human rights in Arab autocracies.

Furthermore, Trump administration policy operatives, including John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani, have treated an Iranian group called the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK as a legitimate alternative to the clerical regime in Iran. The MEK, however, is a terrorist cult that has received funding from all sorts of dubious sources and is often used as a tool by outside groups, states, and organizations, including intelligence services of regional and international state actors, to further an anti-Iran agenda.

Similarly, the Bush administration viewed Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi émigré, and the organization he founded, the Iraqi National Congress, as the legitimate alternative to the Saddam regime in Iraq. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld fully bought into Chalabi’s snake-oil sales. Chalabi was instrumental in instigating America’s invasion of Iraq at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American and Iraqi lives. Iraq has never recovered from that ill-fated, unnecessary war. Bolton and Giuliani are as susceptible to MEK’s claims as Cheney and Rumsfeld were to Chalabi’s.

For the sake of whipping up regional animus toward Iran and preparing the ground for a war against the “Persian menace,” Pompeo in effect has told Arab autocrats that so long as they keep mouthing anti-Iran rhetoric, Washington will ignore their despicable human rights record and the continued repression of their people. The thousands of political prisoners in Egyptian, Saudi, and Bahraini jails will have to wait for another day.

Arab regimes have become masters in the art of communicating with their American benefactors. During the Cold War, they received American aid as long as they brandished anti-Communist slogans. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and with the rise of terrorism, these same strongmen were happy to adopt an anti-terrorism rhetoric in order to continue receiving American military and economic aid. Their current anti-Iran public posture is the latest phase in their communication with Washington and is as equally profitable as the previous two phases.

When some regional politicians demurred about getting tough with Iran, as happened during Pompeo’s recent visit to Lebanon, he did not hesitate to threaten them with a panoply of economic sanctions. Vice President Mike Pence used similar language at the recent meeting in Warsaw to berate and even threaten America’s European allies if they dared to take a conciliatory posture toward Iran. The European reaction to Pence’s speech showed that his pathetic performance backfired. Pompeo’s Warsaw meeting ended in utter failure.

Iran Nuclear Deal

Managing Iran’s malign behavior through the Iran nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was a stroke of diplomatic genius, which former Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz negotiated. The Obama administration placed Iran’s objectionable behavior in two baskets—a nuclear basket, which they addressed through the Iran deal, and a non-nuclear one, which the Obama administration was to address once the nuclear inspection became operational and Iran fully compliant. That approach would have worked: most experts judged Iran to be in compliance with the conditions of the nuclear deal. Unfortunately, President Trump decided not to recertify the agreement.

Trump’s decision contradicted the judgment of most nuclear and intelligence experts about Iran’s compliance. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for example, affirmed Iran’s compliance in more than a dozen of its successive quarterly reports and as recently as earlier this month.

In his open testimony to Congress in January, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats stated that Iran continued to comply with the deal even after Trump announced his intention to scuttle it. Coats said, “We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device.” Iran was of course cheating in other areas, according to the DNI’s testimony, but not on the nuclear agreement.

In a statement issued April 25 of last year, over two dozen Israeli senior military and intelligence officials judged that it was “in Israel’s best interest that the United States maintains the nuclear agreement with Iran.” The Israeli statement went on to say that “The current deal is better than no deal” and that “Iran’s destructive regional policies and actions, its support for acts of terrorism, its presence in Syria, and its ballistic missiles program should be dealt with outside the framework of the agreement.” This was precisely the position of the Obama administration when it negotiated the deal in the first place.

The Path Forward

Fifty-plus retired American generals and diplomats, in a statement published earlier this month, urged the Trump administration to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and work on resolving outstanding concerns with Iran diplomatically. They advised against a war because they saw no good outcome. The statement did not seek to exonerate Iran’s destabilizing behavior and its involvement in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon. Nor did the retired senior leaders ignore Iran’s link to terrorism. The statement, however, pointed out, among other things, that the 2015 nuclear deal “put limitations on Iran’s nuclear program that provided assurances that it would not be used to develop weapons, improved American intelligence about potential future development and significantly improved the security of the United States and our allies.”

Additionally, the retired generals and diplomats emphasized that Iran is complying with the agreement and that, under the JCPOA, Iran is barred from engaging in nuclear weapons development program, which prevents it from producing a nuclear device. “Reentering the agreement and lifting the sanctions will greatly enhance United States’ ability to negotiate improvements and enable us to address concerns with the existing agreement.”

Coming from these military and policy realists, who are dedicated to the security of this country, Israel, and America’s allies, this advice is grounded in sane strategic analysis, not in theological whimsy.

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Dr. Emile Nakhleh was a Senior Intelligence Service officer and Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Research Professor and Director of the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico, and the author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World and Bahrain: Political Development in a Modernizing State.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

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The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy, writes Pepe Escobar.

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Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above?

As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war.

Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back, metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.

But GWOT would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head, the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee” declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.

Since January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”

Remember these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul, Afghanistan.

Considering that Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than “moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of culture jamming.

Show Me The Big Picture

A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5^th columnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.

The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.

To add to the conceptual confusion, despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s this startling nugget. Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed.

“Two European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.

Is there a method to this madness? An attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.

When we mix this with the recent India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.

At the same time, there were two almost simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.

The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of no-holds-barred hybrid war to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.

Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got

What applies to the heartland of course also applies to the backyard.

The case of Venezuela shows that the “all options on the table” scenario has been de facto aborted by Russia, outlined in an astonishing briefing by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and then subsequently detailed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj at a crucial RIC (part of BRICS) summit in China,Lavrov said,

“Russia keeps a close eye on brazen US attempts to create an artificial pretext for a military intervention in Venezuela… The actual implementation of these threats is pulling in military equipment and training [US] Special Forces.”

Lavrov explained how Washington was engaged in acquiring mortars and portable air defense systems “in an East European country, and mov(ing) them closer to Venezuela by an airline of a regime that is… rather absolutely obedient to Washington in the post-Soviet space.”

The U.S. attempt at regime change in Venezuela has been so far unsuccessful in several ways. Plan A – a classic color revolution -has miserably failed, in part because of a lack of decent local intelligence. Plan B was a soft version of humanitarian imperialism, with a resuscitation of the nefarious, Libya-tested responsibility to protect (R2P); it also failed, especially when the American tale that the Venezuelan government burnt humanitarian aid trucks at the border with Colombia was a lie, exposed by The New York Times, no less.

Plan C was a classic Hybrid War technique: a cyberattack, replete with a revival of Nitro Zeus, which shut down 80 percent of Venezuela’s electricity.

That plan had already been exposed by WikiLeaks, via a 2010 memo by a U.S.-funded, Belgrade-based color revolution scam that helped train self-proclaimed “President” Random Dude, when he was just known as Juan Guaidó. The leaked memo said that attacking the Venezuelan power grid would be a “watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

But even that was not enough.

That leaves Plan D – which is essentially to try to starve the Venezuelan population to death via viciously lethal additional sanctions. Sanctioned Syria and sanctioned Iran didn’t collapse. Even boasting myriad comprador elites aggregated in the Lima group, exceptionalists may have to come to grips with the fact that deploying the Monroe doctrine essentially to contain China’s influence in the young 21^st century is no “cakewalk.”

Plan E—for extreme—would be U.S. military action, which Bolton won’t take off the table.

Show Me the Way to the Next War Game

So where do all these myriad weaponizations of chaos theory leave us? Nowhere, if they don’t follow the money. Local comprador elites must be lavishly rewarded, otherwise you’re stuck in hybrid swamp territory. That was the case in Brazil – and that’s why the most sophisticated hybrid war case history so far has been a success.

In 2013, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks revealed how the NSA was spying on Brazilian energy giant Petrobras and the Dilma Rousseff government beginning in 2010. Afterwards, a complex, rolling judicial-business-political-financial-media coup ended up reaching its two main objectives; in 2016, with the impeachment of Rousseff, and in 2018, with Lula thrown in jail.

Now comes arguably the juiciest piece of the puzzle. Petrobras was supposed to pay $853 million to the U.S. Department of Justice for not going to trial for crimes it was being accused of in America. But then a dodgy deal was struck according to which the fine will be transferred to a Brazilian fund as long as Petrobras commits to relay confidential information about its businesses to the United States government.

Hybrid war against BRICS member Brazil worked like a charm, but trying it against nuclear superpower Russia is a completely different ball game. U.S. analysts, in another case of culture jamming, even accuse Russia itself of deploying hybrid war – a concept actually invented in the U.S. within a counter-terrorism context; applied during the occupation of Iraq and later metastasized across the color revolution spectrum; and featuring, among others, in an article co-authored by former Pentagon head James “Mad Dog” Mattis in 2005 when he was a mere lieutenant general.

At a recent conference about Russia’s military strategy, Chief of General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov stressed that the Russian armed forces must increase both their “classic” and “asymmetrical” potential. In the U.S. this is interpreted as subversion/propaganda hybrid war techniques as applied in Ukraine and in the largely debunked Russia-gate. Instead, Russian strategists refer to these techniques as “complex approach” and “new generation war”.

Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation still sticks to good ol’ hot war scenarios. They have been holding “Red on Blue” war games simulations since 1952 – modeling how the proverbial “existential threats” could use asymmetric strategies. The latest Red on Blue was not exactly swell. RAND analyst David Ochmanek famously said that with Blue representing the current U.S. military potential and Red representing Russia-China in a conventional war, “Blue gets its ass handed to it.”

None of this will convince Empire of Chaos functionary Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently told a Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon will continue to refuse a “no first use” nuclear strategy. Aspiring Dr. Strangeloves actually believe the U.S. can start a nuclear war and get away with it.

Talk about the Age of Hybrid Stupidity going out with a bang.

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Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.

Radical armed factions, including Al Qaeda off-shoot in Syria, are preparing a false flag chemical attack in Idlib, the last province under the control of the opposition forces, Russian Defense Ministry claimed. The preparations are supervised by French and Belgian intelligence and involve members of the notorious self-styled rescue group White Helmets, according to the Ministry.

Head of Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria Major General Viktor Kupchishin announced that a cargo of a poisonous substance, likely chlorine-based, has been already delivered to the villages of Khan Shaykhun and Kafr Zita located in southern Idlib. Another batch was sent to Maarat Misrin north of the eponymous provincial capital Idlib city. The substance was packed in canisters disguised as oxygen and natural gas tanks, Kuptchishin added.

Both Khan Shaykhun and Kafr Zita are close to an observation point established by the Turkish army, with the distance between the outpost and the villages less than 10 kilometers.

It is expected that the poisonous gas will be dispersed near the locations of military positions and warehouses of the armed factions that were recently hit by the Russian air strikes. Officers of French and Belgian intelligence who were covertly dispatched to the area have already filmed some of the strikes with the intention to present the footage as “proof” of Russia’s responsibility for the alleged attack.

Local residents were recruited to play the roles of chemical attack victims and received training in faking the symptoms of a choking agent poisoning. White Helmets members will be present in the area to “rescue” the victims and provide footage from the ground, while militants of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, arguably the most powerful armed faction in Idlib and a former affiliate of Al Qaeda, will seal the area to secure the perimeter.

On an even more ominous note, the Russian general said that there is “a distinct possibility” that the perpetrators will subject a number of the local residents to exposure to chemical warfare agents to ensure casualties among them and make the footage more “authentic”.

This is not the first time Russia has issued warning of a false flag chemical attack by the opposition forces. Perhaps the most striking example of a similar plot is the attack that occurred in Douma city almost a year ago. Back then, the opposition blamed the Syrian Air Force for using chemical weapons against civilians and succeeded in pushing the US and allies to launch missile strikes at a number of Syrian army positions in Damascus and Homs provinces.

It would appear that due to systematic defeats suffered by the armed factions, the opposition has revived its attempts to play the “chemical card” at the approval of its foreign backers. Despite having been exposed multiple times, this tactic remains a valid threat to the fragile stability that is hesitantly returning to Syria.

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Ahmad Al Khaled is Syrian journalist, Official Representative of Special Monitoring Mission to Syria.

Saturday, March 30, marked the 43rd anniversary of Land Day for Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories.

The anniversary is all about Palestinian resistance against Israeli theft of their land, displacing them for exclusive Jewish development and use.

It’s against the systematic transformation of historic Palestine into a state affording rights to Jews alone, Arabs treated like nonpersons, Israeli Arab citizens, 20% of the population, treated like fifth column threats.

March 30 was also the one-year anniversary of weekly Great March of Return demonstrations in Gaza against Israel’s illegal suffocating blockade, an act of war without declaring it.

Two million Gazans are held hostage by Israeli viciousness, the world community doing nothing to relieve their suffering, nothing to hold Israel accountable for high crimes too serious to ignore.

They include three premeditated wars of aggression on the Strip since December 2008, along with intermittent terror-bombings and cross-border incursions, civilians threatening no one harmed most.

Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old Gaza medic killed by an Israeli sniper on June 1, treating an injured man, undated photo from Palestine Live on twitter.

On Saturday, Sabreen al-Najjar, mother of 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar, commemorated her daughter’s murder at the hands of an Israeli sniper – an angel of mercy paramedic, a victim of Gaza’s killing fields.

Dressed in white attire, identifying her as a first responder medic, she was lethally shot in the neck and back, an exploding dum dum bullet destroying her heart, killing her instantly.

“My daughter…Razan…was (lethally) shot by an Israeli sniper while wearing her white uniform and trying to rescue those injured protesting for their rights,” said Sabreen, adding:

“During Razan’s short life, she was confined to a densely populated, prison-like strip of land, surrounded by Israeli blockades and walls.”

“She witnessed three Israeli military aggressions that wounded and killed thousands of innocent Palestinians. For her and for all Palestinians, the Great Return March is our cry for justice.”

“As we stand together peacefully, every weekend, for the rights and freedoms freely given to others without hesitation, it’s the obligation of the international community to act and stop supplying Israel with the weapons that it used to kill Razan and so many others like her.”

“I call on organizations and states to implement our Palestinian call for a military embargo against Israel so that we can live in freedom and peace.”

Gaza-based BDS community organizer Abulrahman Abunahel said

“(f)or more than seven decades, Palestinian people have been struggling to return to their homes from which they were uprooted in the Nakba in 1948.”

“Israel denies us our right of return. On the first anniversary of the ongoing Great March of Return in Gaza, we reiterate the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions for Palestinian rights.”

“It is high time to fully isolate and prosecute the Israeli regime of settler-colonialism, occupation, and apartheid. The bloodshed in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine must be stopped.”

According to Gaza’s health ministry, Israeli soldiers killed 266 Palestinians, injuring over 30,000 others since Great Gazan March of Return demonstrations began one year ago.

On Saturday, Israeli snipers killed four Palestinians, injuring 316 others, including 86 children and 29 women, said Gaza’s health ministry – many seriously during all Great March of Return protests, including yesterday’s.

Razan and two other Palestinian medics were killed, 665 others wounded, and 112 ambulances damaged, Gaza’s health ministry explained.

At least two clearly identified journalists by their attire were killed, dozens of others wearing press IDs injured.

Israeli soldiers and other security forces routinely attack peaceful Palestinian demonstrators throughout the Territories with live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets, toxic tear gas, and other repressive tactics.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) condemned Israeli use of lethal force against peaceful protesters threatening no one – how its regimes confront all nonviolent demonstrations, falsely blaming Palestinians for high crimes committed against them.

Like ahead of all Great March of Return demonstrations, the IDF set up fortified positions on the Israeli side of the border, snipers positioned with orders to use live fire and other toughness against peaceful protesters.

Israeli media reported that the IDF deployed three brigades of combat troops and an artillery battalion along the Gaza border, along with 200 snipers.

PCHR:

“According to observations by (its) fieldworkers (on the ground in Gaza), Israeli forces…stationed in prone positions and in military jeeps along the fence with Israel continued to use excessive force against the (peaceful) demonstrators by opening fire and firing teargas canisters at them.”

As in previous weeks, tens of thousands of Gazans turned out on Saturday, including entire families. Threatening no one, Israeli soldiers fired on them for target practice, gunning down or otherwise injuring hundreds.

Reporting on what happened on Saturday, the NYT featured a photo of a Palestinian demonstrator using a sling shot to hurl a likely stone in the direction of Israeli forces, safely behind barricades, too far away to be harmed – instead of showing IDF snipers gunning down Palestinians in cold blood.

The Times turned truth on its head, calling Saturday events “mostly peaceful” – entirely so by Palestinians, nothing of the kind by IDF soldiers, attacking them unrestrained.

The photo published by the Times was unrelated to Saturday protests, showing black smoke from burning tires.

Haaretz reported the following:

“As part of understandings reached between Israel and the Palestinians through Egyptian mediation on Friday, Palestinians refrained from setting ablaze car tires at the protest sites.”

The Times (and other US media) falsely accused Gazans of hurling “dozens of homemade bombs” at Israeli soldiers. Nothing of the kind occurred. Demonstrators were entirely peaceful as during other Great March of Return protests.

The Times quoted IDF spokesman, Lt. Col Jonathan Conruus’ Big Lie, claiming

“(i)t’s clear that Hamas controls the level of violence (sic),” adding:

“When they want less violence (sic), we see that they can keep people back from the fence. And when they want more violence (sic), they get more violence (sic).”

The Times lied saying

“Israel made a point before Saturday of cautioning its soldiers against taking shots that might hit unintended targets.”

Fact: The Netanyahu regime and IDF consider civilians legitimate targets, including young children and women – 86 children and 29 women wounded by live fire, rubber-coated steel bullets, and toxic tear gas on Saturday.

Many thousands of Gazans have been protesting weekly and other times against their virtual incarceration in the world’s largest open-air prison.

Though unable to change things, their courage against a brutal occupier got worldwide attention. With nothing to lose, they’re unlikely to quit as long as their suffering continues.

A Final Comment

On March 29, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)  explained major media calls to renounce violence is almost exclusively directed at Muslims, saying:

“A FAIR survey of the phrase “renounce violence” in the New York Times over the past 10 years shows that 95 percent of the time the demand is made of Muslim organizations, people or political parties, the most prominent being the Taliban and Hamas.”

“There are zero instances of anyone in the Times — whether reporters quoting officials or columnists — from March 28, 2009, to March 28, 2019, insisting or suggesting that the United States, Israel or any white-majority country ‘renounce violence.’ ”

The above information should surprise no one. The self-styled newspaper of record and other establishment media operate as virtual imperial press agents – supporting US-led NATO and Israeli wars of aggression, along with their other hostile actions against targeted nations and people.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Virginian State Senator Richard H. Black has told the Syria Times e-newspaper that besides influencing Israeli elections, the United States is financially vested in controlling the occupied Syrian Golan because Halliburton, an American oil company, is actively engaged in exploring for oil and national gas under the auspices of the Israeli government.

He has asserted that this act is being done in clear violation of International law.

The Senator’s remarks came in response to a question on the reasons behind US President Donald Trump’s recognition of the occupied Syrian Golan as ‘Israeli territory’.

“President Trump recognized the occupied Golan as Israeli territory because of the upcoming Israeli parliamentary elections on April 9. The Trump administration has done everything in its power to shift the election’s outcome in favor of Netanyahu,” Sen. Black said.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu faces a wide variety of indictments of criminal corruption. These have increased in substance and seriousness over time. In response, the Trump administration has done everything in its power to bolster Netanyahu, viewing him as an ally in the Middle East. It has reversed several long-standing U.S. policies in order to favor Netanyahu against his opposition in the pending elections. The recognition of Jerusalem was a similar attempt to bolster Netanyahu’s political viability, in the face of his criminal corruption scandals,” he added.

The US lawmaker made it clear that although President Trump has power, under domestic law, to recognize the annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan, the President’s action is inconsistent with international law. Following the 1967 Israeli War, UN Resolution 242 called for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories. In 1981, Israel enacted legislation to annex the Syrian Golan, but the United Nations adopted Resolution 497, which said that their action was null and void.

“The domestic law was established by a United States Supreme Court decision in 2015. Ironically, the decision of Zivotofsky v. Kerry recognized President Obama’s authority to disregard a federal statute requiring him to recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem,” Sen. Black stated.

He referred to the fact that the Arab League condemned U.S. recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan, while the 28 countries of the European Union unanimously affirmed that the Golan is occupied territories, which are not a part of Israel.

“Turkey, Iran, and Russia have all expressed disapproval of the U.S. recognition,” the senator added, stressing that the recognition of Israeli control of the Golan will have little practical effect.

US is interfering in foreign elections today

Asked about benefits US can get from such move, the Senator replied:

“For the most part, President Trump’s objective is to influence the elections of a foreign state. Ironically, President Trump was just exonerated by the Special Counsel on claims that he colluded with Russia to influence his own Presidential election. While no one can seriously believe that President Trump did so, there is no doubt that the United States is forcefully engaged in distorting the outcome of elections in many foreign countries.”

He went on to say:

“There is great irony in the United States interfering in foreign elections today. We have just spent two years with the United States in turmoil, as Special Prosecutor Robert Muller worked to discover evidence that Russia had attempted to influence this country’s elections. If the United States views interference in its own elections as a serious matter, it has no business subverting the electoral processes of other nations. The United States should not reverse long-standing Mideast policies simply to prevent Israel from conducting honest elections, free from foreign influence.”

Peace

The senator concluded by saying:

“Peace will not come to the Middle East until its nations focus their efforts on developing their own nations and their domestic resources without seizing the lands and resources of their neighbors. Nations benefit by mutually agreed borders that are respected and not continually violated by airstrikes, outside support for terrorists, and sanctions which cause suffering among the poor.”

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Featured image is from The Syria Times

Second in a four-part series on the 70^th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The first installment  in this series discussed how NATO was set up partly to blunt the European Left. The other major factor driving the creation of NATO was a desire to bolster colonial authority and bring the world under a US geopolitical umbrella.

From the outset Canadian officials had an incredibly expansive definition of NATO’s supposed defensive character, which says an “attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies.” As part of the Parliamentary debate over NATO external minister Lester Pearson said: “

There is no better way of ensuring the security of the Pacific Ocean at this particular moment than by working out, between the great democratic powers, a security arrangement the effects of which will be felt all over the world, including the Pacific area.”

Two years later he said:

“The defence of the Middle East is vital to the successful defence of Europe and north Atlantic area.”

In 1953 Pearson went even further:

“There is now only a relatively small [5000 kilometre] geographical gap between southeast Asia and the area covered by the North Atlantic treaty, which goes to the eastern boundaries of Turkey.”

In one sense the popular portrayal of NATO as a defensive arrangement was apt. After Europe’s second Great War the colonial powers were economically weak while anti-colonial movements could increasingly garner outside support. The Soviets and Mao’s China, for instance, aided the Vietnamese. Similarly, Egypt supported Algerian nationalists and Angola benefited from highly altruistic Cuban backing. The international balance of forces had swung away from the colonial powers.

To maintain their colonies European powers increasingly depended on North American diplomatic and financial assistance. NATO passed numerous resolutions supporting European colonial authority. In the fall of 1951 Pearson responded to moves in Iran and Egypt to weaken British influence by telling Parliament:

“The Middle  East is strategically far too important to the defence of the North Atlantic area to allow it to become a power vacuum or to pass into unfriendly hands.”

The next year Ottawa recognized the colonies of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos as “associated states” of France, according to an internal report, “to assist  a NATO colleague, sorely tried by foreign and domestic problems.” More significantly, Canada gave France hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment through NATO’s Mutual Assistance Program. These weapons were mostly used to suppress the Vietnamese and Algerian independence movements. In 1953 Pearson told the House:

“The assistance  we have given to France as a member of the NATO association may have helped her recently in the discharge of some of her obligations in Indo-China.”

Similarly, Canadian and US aid was used by the Dutch to maintain their dominance over Indonesia and West Papua New Guinea, by the Belgians in the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, by the Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and by the British in numerous places. Between 1950 and 1958 Ottawa donated a whopping $1,526,956,000 ($8 billion today) in ammunition, fighter jets, military training, etc. to European countries through the NATO Mutual Assistance Program.

The role NATO played in North American/European subjugation of the Global South made Asians and Africans wary of the organization. The Nigerian Labour Party’s 1964 pamphlet The NATO Conspiracy in Africa documents that organization’s military involvement on the continent from bases to naval agreements. In 1956 NATO established a Committee for Africa and in June 1959 NATO’s North Atlantic Council, the organization’s main political decision-making body, warned that the communists would take advantage of African independence to the detriment of Western political and economic interests.

The north Atlantic alliance was designed to maintain unity among the historic colonial powers — and the US — in the midst of a de-colonizing world. It was also meant to strengthen US influence around the world. In a history of the 1950-53 US-led Korean war David Bercuson writes that Canada’s external minister “agreed with [President] Truman, [Secretary of State] Dean Acheson, and other American leaders that the Korean conflict was NATO’s first true test, even if it was taking place half a world away.”

Designed to maintain internal unity among the leading capitalist powers, NATO was the military alliance of the post-WWII US-centered multilateral order, which included the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, International Trade Organization (ITO) and the United Nations. (For its first two decades the UN was little more than an arm of the State Department.)

A growing capitalist power, Canada was well placed to benefit from US-centered multilateral imperialism. The Canadian elite’s business, cultural, familial and racial ties with their US counterparts meant their position and profits were likely to expand alongside Washington’s global position.

NATO bolstered colonial authority and helped bring the world under the US geopolitical umbrella, from which the Canadian elite hoped to benefit.

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Featured image: National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, centre, and Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance as Justin Trudeau holds a press conference at NATO headquarters. (Source: Yves Engler)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro landed in the Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday reciting the Hebrew phrase “Ani ohev et Israel”—‘I love Israel’ in English. Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed the Brazilian leader to his first official visit to Israel.

During his four day visit to the country that has been waging a rocket strike campaign on the Gaza Strip over the past week, Bolsonaro will also meet with President Reuven Rivlin and visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. He is also set to visit the Home Front Command, the Israeli rescue mission that helped with rescue efforts in Brazil after the collapse of the Brumadinho Dam in January that left at least 206 people dead.

Bolsonaro will meet with representatives of the Brazilian community in Israel and the two are expected to discuss bi-lateral agreements.

At the Israeli airport Netanyahu praised the Brazilian leader for his “faith in our shared heritage” and his commitment to improving Israeli-Brazilian ties.

“When you entered your post in January, we opened a new era in Israel-Brazil relations,” said the prime minister. “On your first visit outside the American continents, you’re in Israel to bring our relations to a new high.”

Netanyahu went on:

“Just as I saw the great admiration for Israel and me in Brazil, I am sure you will meet admiration for Brazil and you in Israel. Israelis love Brazil – most of all the warmth and happiness of its people.”

According to Haaretz, the two will visit a technology innovation exhibition that includes self-driving cars and Bolsonaro may tour an Israeli drone factory whose machines have the capability to conduct facial recognition from high above the ground.

“Brazil is a large country with large potential. I am sure Brazil’s potential under your leadership will come to fruition – not just for Brazil, but for Israel-Brazil relations.”

As he stepped off the plane Sunday morning, Bolsonaro told Netanyahu:

“I’m excited to be here. We want to be like you, as is written in the Bible, said the right-wing Brazilian leader who was sworn-in last Jan. 1. “The friendship between our two countries is historic. We must take advantage of the potential of our relations,” he added.

Netanyahu is hoping the Bolsonaro visit will boost support from his domestic far-right factions so that they eventually get him re-elected in the nation’s upcoming Knesset, or parliamentary, ballots April 9. The prime minister’s popularity has slipped more as he’s being charged with corruption.

The Israeli leader also wants to convince Bolsonaro to follow through with his months-old promise to follow U.S. suite and move the Brazilian embassy to Jerusalem. The move could further shut down a two-state agreement between Israel and Palestine for the time being.

Marco Bastos, a political analyst, told Haaretz that the move would please two of Bolsonaro’s major supporters: evangelicals and the Brazilian Jewish community.

“The new right in Brazil is trying to imitate the new right in the US. There’s no real strategic interest in moving the embassy,” Bastos said, citing Brazil’s long tradition of friendly relations with nearly all foreign countries.

The Israeli leader told reporters at the airport that Bolsonaro had arrived at a “tense time, therefore I instructed the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) to spread out fully around the Gaza Strip.”

Last week was the first time in several years that the Israeli reserve was called up to control the area at the border with the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Fighting between the IDF and Hamas escalated last Monday after a rocket hit a home near Tel Aviv that injured seven people. Netanyahu immediately blamed Hamas for the act and Israel carried out a wave of retaliatory strikes, leaving five Palestinians wounded and killed at least one Palestinian medic at Great March of Return protests.

The Palestinian health ministry data shows that four Palestinian medics were killed in 2019 in the West Bank and Gaza by Israeli military fire while performing their jobs.

A U.N. report published on Feb. 28 found Israel has likely committed crimes against humanity in Gaza targeted children, health workers, and journalists at the Gaza protests.

“We are ready for every scenario and, if needed, for a broader campaign. We will do what is needed for Israel’s security,” Netanyahu said to his Brazilian counterpart.

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NATO and NATO member states, separately and together, destroy non-belligerent countries as policy. They destroy the rule of international law, they destroy socially uplifting economies, they destroy democratic political economies, they create millions of refugees, and their wars of aggression impose the death penalty on millions.

NATO committed these crimes against the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond.

We in the West are responsible for this.  We are the brutal, globalizing dictators[1].

These imperial wars of aggression kill, brutalize, and diminish, men, women, and children. There is not anything humanitarian about NATO wars.  These wars have been, and are being, sold to gullible domestic populations by ubiquitous criminal war propaganda[2].

When Westerners enlist for the military, they are killing, and dying, and being crippled (mentally and physically), based upon war lies.

As NATO and its allies destroy sovereign states and their peoples, we are all diminished and impoverished. The political economies advanced by NATO are predatory and dictatorial. Prey countries become enslaved to imperial diktats. Increasingly, too, transnational agencies of imperialism – driven by publicly bailed-out monopoly “capitalism”, and failed neoliberal economic schemes[3]– impose “internal imperialism” on domestic populations. Countries such as Canada are losing their sovereignty and increasingly becoming “treatied substates”[4], subservient to failed, impoverishing, neoliberal economic ideologies and globalizing military alliances such as NATO.

Canada needs to break free from NATO’s impoverishing, imperial diktats.  We need a sovereign, independent foreign policy. It can be done, and it should be done. Article 13[5] of the NATO constitution provides us with the legal mechanism to do so.

See full text of North Atlantic Treaty here 

All we need is the political will for peace, justice, and sovereignty to make it happen.

Zafar Bangash at Canada Out of NATO Rally, Toronto, ON.  March 30, 2019.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Mark Taliano, “Who are the ‘Brutal Dictators’?” Global Research, 28 February, 2019, (https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-are-the-brutal-dictators/5669959) Accessed 31 March, 2019.

[2] Mark Taliano, “Frayed Colonial Media Propaganda Transmission Lines. Fake Atrocities Used to Justify ‘Humanitarian War Crimes’.” Global Research, 16 February, 2019. ( https://www.globalresearch.ca/frayed-colonial-media-propaganda-transmission-lines-fake-atrocities-used-to-justify-humanitarian-war-crimes/5668769)        Accessed 31 March, 2019.

[3] Mark Taliano, “Why Canada Needs To Stop Embracing Corporatocracy.” Huffington Post, 10/06/2014. (https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/mark-taliano/canada-corporatocracy_b_4722414.html?utm_hp_ref=ca-neoliberalism) Accessed 31 March, 2019.

[4] Robin Mathews, “The Trans Pacific Partnership: Canada and Imperial Globalization – Part one.” American Herald Tribune, 20 May, 2016. (https://ahtribune.com/world/americas/916-ttp-canada.html) Accessed 31 March 2019.

[5] The North Atlantic Treaty/ Washington D.C. – 4 April 1949. (https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm) Accessed, 31 March, 2019.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

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On our most recent episode of 9/11 Free Fall, host Andy Steele is joined by the leaders of AE911Truth and the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry to discuss our lawsuit filed this week against the FBI, which takes aim at the Bureau’s failure to include certain key evidence in its congressionally mandated 9/11 Review Commission Report from 2015.

This show is recommended listening for all those who wish to have a deeper understanding of this historic litigation and how it may play out in the next one to two years.

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An explosive report by Reuters confirms that John Bolton sabotaged the denuclearization talks between Kim Jong un and Donald Trump in Hanoi in February. According to a March 29 exclusive by journalists Lesley Wroughton and David Brunnstrom:

“Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper” demanding that Kim surrender all of his “nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States.” Trump also added a number of unrelated demands including “fully dismantling” all “chemical and biological warfare program(s)…. and ballistic missiles, launchers, and associated facilities.” Trump surprised Kim by demanding complete, unilateral disarmament in exchange for a flimsy promise to lift economic sanctions sometime in the future. Naturally, Kim rejected the offer.

Here’s more from the same article:

“The document appeared to represent Bolton’s long-held and hardline “Libya model” of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly….North Koreans rejected Bolton’s repeated demands for it to follow a denuclearization model under which components of Libya’s nuclear program were shipped to the United States in 2004.

Seven years after a denuclearization agreement was reached between the United States and Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the United States took part in a NATO-led military operation against his government and he was overthrown by rebels and killed” (“Exclusive: With a piece of paper, Trump called on Kim to hand over nuclear weapons”, Reuters)

Bolton presented Kim with an offer he knew Kim would reject, the same offer that led to the destruction of Libya and the savage murder of Gaddafi. Bolton wanted the talks to fail so he could push for tougher sanctions that would pave the way for regime change. That was his goal. Kim’s nuclear weapons were never the target, they were merely the pretext for intensifying the economic strangulation, the relentless belligerence and the threats of war.

But why would Trump agree to go along with this fraud? And why has Trump deployed more troops to Syria while green-lighting Israel to annex the Golan Heights?

Is there a connection between Trump’s (recent) foreign policy reversals and the termination of the Mueller investigation? Did Trump make a deal with his deep state antagonists to get Mueller off his back?

It’s hard to say, but there was no reason for Mueller to wrap up the investigation. The probe was doing exactly what it was supposed to do: Create a 4th branch of government that was empowered to hector, harass and indict anyone it chose in order to keep the administration on the defensive, derail any effort to normalize relations with Russia, and undermine the legitimacy and moral authority of the president. Why would Mueller give up all that if it wasn’t part of some undisclosed Grand Bargain?

He wouldn’t.

On a personal level, Trump trusts Kim which is why he probably wanted to cut a deal. An article in last week’s Korea’s Hankyoreh news supports this view. Check it out:

“During the North Korea-US summit in Hanoi last month, US President Donald Trump reportedly had a positive perspective on relaxing sanctions on North Korea provided that there was a “snapback” clause that would reinstate sanctions if the North failed to implement its agreement. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui made this statement during a briefing to foreign diplomats in Pyongyang on Mar. 15, but her full remarks hadn’t been made public until now.

According to the text of Choe’s remarks released on Mar. 25, she said, “When we made a practical proposal in the talks, President Trump adopted the flexible position that an agreement would be possible if a clause was added stating that the sanctions could be reinstated if North Korea resumed nuclear activities after the sanctions were lifted.” But Choe went on to say that, “because of their continuing hostility and mistrust, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House National Security Advisor John Bolton created obstacles to the two leaders’ efforts to have constructive negotiations, and ultimately the summit didn’t produce meaningful results.”

. … According to Choe’s statement … the two leaders appear to have explored the possibility of trading Yongbyon’s shutdown for partial sanctions relief. … Choe’s remarks imply that the ultimate reason the summit concluded without an agreement was because of resistance from Pompeo and Bolton.” (“Trump responded positively to relaxing sanctions with “snapback clause” during Hanoi summit”, Hankyoreh News)

The Hankyoreh article corroborates much of what is stated in the Reuters piece. Both articles acknowledge that the nuclear talks were scuppered by Bolton.

The media has consistently misled its readers about what actually took place at Hanoi and who should ultimately be held responsible for its failure. According to CNN:

“Kim had demanded total sanctions relief upfront in exchange for only partial denuclearization, leaving the two sides at an impasse….(Wrong) Trump cast his decision to walk away as evidence that he will not accept a bad deal, (Wrong) but the abrupt conclusion of his much-ballyhooed second summit nonetheless amounted to the most stinging setback yet in his effort to achieve North Korea’s denuclearization through direct talks with its leader…. (Wrong, it wasn’t a setback, it was deliberate.)

More than anything, the failure to produce results during the second summit called into question the personality-driven diplomacy that has been at the core of Trump’s effort to end the North Korean nuclear threat.” (Wrong, again) (“Takeaways from the Trump-Kim Hanoi summit”, CNN)

None of this is true. The meetings didn’t fail because of Trump’s “personality-driven diplomacy”. They failed because Bolton deliberately blew them up. That’s what happened. As one would expect, virtually everything CNN tries to pass off as evenhanded, thoroughly-researched journalism is nothing more than misleading gobbledygook served up by political activists. (The dismal Hanoi coverage helps to show that the Trump-collusion fiction was not a “one off”, but a critical feature of media policy which aims to shape the news according to the political agenda of elites.)

But if the Trump administration is unwilling to honestly negotiate with the North, then how can Kim possibly move forward with his plan to establish peaceful relations with his friends in the South and his allies in the region?

The only way forward for Kim is to bypass the Trump administration altogether and strengthen relations with those who will help him achieve his strategic objectives. He must show that he is a trustworthy partner who is willing to continue along the path of denuclearization regardless of the obstacles and provocations created by the United States. He must continue to seek the input of leaders in Beijing, Moscow and Seoul and prove to them that he is unwaveringly committed to ridding the peninsula of its nuclear weapons in the interests of peace and security. Kim must welcomeinternational weapons inspectors to monitor the decommissioning of his nuclear arsenal and his nuclear enrichment plants. He must increase the frequency of his visits to Seoul where his public approval ratings have skyrocketed and where his efforts for peace and reunification are applauded by nearly 80% of the people. He must “promote his own denuclearization timetable” and present his case to the UN Security Council for review. He must convince the public that he will not backtrack on his ironclad commitment to dialogue, cooperation, economic integration and peace.

According to Hankyoreh News, Kim’ Jong un’s chief of staff and protocol officer made a secret trip to Moscow last week “fueling speculation that Kim Jong-un may be about to pay a visit to Russia.” At the same time, a senior national security official (Kim Hyun-chong) from South Korea visited Russia as well.

Can you see what’s going on? What these secret meetings suggest is that regional leaders are now developing a “post-Hanoi” strategy that will take into account Kim’s eagerness to cooperate and Washington’s obstinate rejection of any policy that does not further enhance its own vicious grip on power. The Trump team is no longer in the loop. Regional bigwigs are taking matters into their own hands and moving forward.

As we pointed out in an earlier piece, Kim is neither a firebrand nor ideological. He is a contemporary man who who wants to make his own mark on the world, lead his country into the modern era, and join the coalition of nations that are fast becoming the biggest trading block in history.

Here’s how author John Delury summed it up in a recent op-ed in the New York Times:

“Mr. Kim wants to be a great economic reformer…(He wants to) shift the regime’s focus, from security to prosperity….He wants North Korea to … catch up with and integrate into the region, and it’s in everyone’s interest to help him do so…”(“Kim Jong-un Has a Dream. The U.S. Should Help Him Realize It”, New York Times)

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

A new ‘Political Manifesto’ has demanded an indefinite moratorium on the environmental release of GMOs in India pending independent and rigorous biosafety risk assessment and regulation.

The documents states:

“GMO contamination of our seeds, our foundation seed stock, will change the structure of our food at the molecular level. Any harm or toxicity that there is will remain, without the possibility of remediation or reversibility.”

Signed by high-profile organisations and individuals, including farmer’s organisation Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU), the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, Aruna Rodrigues (Lead Petitioner: Supreme Court GMO PIL), Kavitha Kuruganti and Vandana Shiva as well as dozens of co-signatories, the manifesto demands the introduction of a biosafety protection act, which would prioritise India’s biosafety and biodiversity and implement the GMO moratorium, while preventing the import of any GMOs into India.

The manifesto also calls for a ban on the herbicides glyphosate and glufosinate as well as for national consultations and a parliamentary debate to formulate policy to establish and incentivize agroecological systems of farming as a means of avoiding ecosystems collapse. In addition, the document wants a pledge that farmers’ traditional knowledge and inherent seed freedom will remain secure and that there should be no patents on GMO seeds or plants.

The release of the manifesto coincides with the upcoming 2019 Indian general election, which begins in April.

The current Modi-led administration has presided over an accelerating push within official circles for GM agriculture. There has also been creeping illegal contamination of the nation’s food supply with GMOs. This might seem perplexing given that the ruling BJP stated in its last election manifesto: “GM foods will not be allowed without full scientific evaluation on the long-term effects on soil, production and biological impact on consumers.”

Readers are urged to read the five-page ‘Political Manifesto Demand With Regard to GMOs/LMOs‘. It sets out clear and cogent arguments for the moratorium and contains the list of signatories.

Five high-level reports: no to GMOs 

In India, five high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops: the ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal (2010); the ‘Sopory Committee Report’ (2012); the ‘Parliamentary Standing Committee’ (PSC) Report on GM crops (2012); the ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (2013); and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment and Forests (2017).

These reports conclude that GM crops are unsuitable for India and that existing proper biosafety and regulatory procedures are inadequate. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the TEC was scathing about the prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. The TEC recommended a 10-year moratorium on the commercial release of GM crops. The PSC also arrived at similar conclusions.

However, the drive to get GM mustard commercialised (which would be India’s first officially-approved GM food crop) has been relentless. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has even pushed the process by giving it the nod, but the cultivation of GM mustard remains on hold in the Supreme Court due to a public interest litigation brought by lead petitioner Aruna Rodrigues.

Rodrigues argues that GM mustard is being undemocratically forced through with flawed tests (or no tests) and a lack of public scrutiny: in effect, there has been unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. Moreover, this crop is also herbicide-tolerant (HT), which, as stated by the TEC, is wholly inappropriate for a country like India with its small biodiverse, multi-cropping farms.

GMOs in the food system

Despite official committees and reports advising against GMOs, they have already contaminated India’s food system. Back in 2005, for instance, biologist Pushpa Bhargava noted that unapproved varieties of several GM seeds were being sold to farmers. In 2008, Arun Shrivasatava wrote that illegal GM okra had been planted in India and poor farmers had been offered lucrative deals to plant ‘special seed’ of all sorts of vegetables.

In 2013, a group of scientists and NGOs protested in Kolkata and elsewhere against the introduction of transgenic brinjal in Bangladesh – a centre for origin and diversity of the vegetable – as it would give rise to contamination of the crop in India. In 2014, the West Bengal government said it had received information regarding “infiltration” of commercial seeds of GM Bt brinjal from Bangladesh.

In 2017, the illegal cultivation of a GM HT soybean was reported in Gujarat. Bhartiya Kisan Sangh, a national farmers organisation, claimed that Gujarat farmers had been cultivating the HT crop illegally. There are also reports of HT cotton (again illegally) growing in India.

A study by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment found that due to lax enforcement, a deeply flawed labelling system and corporate deception, Indian supermarkets are inundated with GM foods. The results show the large-scale illegal presence and sale of GM processed foods in the country.

All of this is prompting calls for probes into the workings of the GEAC and other official bodies which have been asleep at the wheel or deliberately looking the other way. The latter could be the case given that senior figures in India misguidedly regard GM seeds (and their associated chemical inputs) as key to ‘modernising’ Indian agriculture.

Despite reasoned argument and debate against the cultivation of GM crops or the consumption of GM food in India, we are witnessing GMOs entering India anyhow. Rohit Parakh of India for Safe Food says that the government’s own data on the import of live seeds indicates that imports continue, including that of GM canola, GM sugar beet, GM papaya, GM squash and GM corn seeds (in addition to GM soybean) from countries such as the USA, with no approval from the GEAC.

In finishing let’s look at a warning from 10 years ago, when it was predicted that Bt brinjal would fail within 4-12 years if introduced in India. It seems that’s precisely what has happened to Bt cotton in the country. The last thing India needs is another ill thought out GMO experiment pushed through without proper independent assessments that consider health and environmental outcomes or the effects on farmers’ livelihoods and rural communities.

Indeed, a recent paper by Prof Andrew Paul Gutierrez concludes that extending implementation of GM technology to other crops in India will only mirror the disastrous implementation of Bt cotton, thereby tightening the economic noose on still more subsistence farmers for the sake of profits.

It is therefore a timely and much needed intervention by a coalition of groups and individuals to put forward a call for a moratorium on GMOs.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

In a major blow to the Donald Trump administration’s oil and gas policy, on Friday a federal judge ruled the president’s order opening massive swathes of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to oil and gas drilling operations illegal, the Washington Post reported.

According to the Post, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason’s decision impacts around 98 percent of the Arctic Ocean, but only “undersea canyons in the Atlantic, as opposed to the entire Eastern Seaboard” (roughly 5,937 square miles deemed important to wildlife including “marine mammals, deep-water corals, valuable fish populations and migratory whales”, the Associated Press wrote). The judge found that while the president has the power under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw leasing permits, that office cannot unilaterally grant permits without the approval of Congress.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” Gleason wrote. “… As a result, the previous three withdrawals issued on January 27, 2015 and December 20, 2016 will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.”

Per the AP, lawyers for the Trump administration argued that allowing presidents to designate land as protected against drilling but not revoke that status “is one-way ratchet that broadly authorizes any one President to limit the national potential for leasing, exploration, and development in the OCS for all time while simultaneously tying the hands of that same President and all future presidents, even if those limits prove unwise or contrary to the critical national priorities that OCSLA advances, including energy development and national security.”

Gleason also revoked a Department of the Interior land-swap deal that would have allowed small Alaskan town, King Cove, to build a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, the Post wrote. That reserve is home to rare birds and other wildlife and has long enjoyed wildlife protections, though locals said they needed to be able to construct a road through it for emergency medical evacuations. Per the Post, Gleason didn’t buy this logic:

Opponents counter that the federal government has provided millions in funding to give town residents alternative forms of transport, and warn that a road would fragment critical habitat. They also cite expert testimony that any road through the refuge would be impassable during snowstorms.

“Here, [former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s] failure to acknowledge the change in agency policy and his failure to provide a reasoned explanation for that change in policy are serious errors,” Gleason wrote.

Another federal judge ruled earlier in the week that the Trump administration failed to perform a serious analysis of environmental impacts when it approved two gas drilling operations in western Colorado, the paper added, while earlier in March another ruling halted a 300,000-acre gas and oil lease in Wyoming over a failure to consider its potential impact on the climate. According to the New York Times, the White House has lost about 40 environmental cases in federal courts under Trump.

“The statutes and the Supreme Court have been silent on the authority of a president to modify or reduce a predecessor’s protections of these public lands, waters and monuments,” Vermont Law School environmental law professor Patrick Parenteau told the Times. “But these decisions are showing that if a president wants to reverse a predecessor’s environmental policy, they have to give a cogent reason why. Just saying ‘energy dominance’ is not enough. Saying ‘I won the election’ is not enough.”

Industry officials, for their part, say that the Arctic and Atlantic ocean plans can proceed as the case works its way through the federal appeals process, the Post wrote. There’s also the possibility some of these cases will make it to the Supreme Court, which is dominated by a Republican majority and is likely to rule more in line with the White House’s wishes.

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War is not merely a matter of sowing death, much of it needless; it entails preserving a rationale to perpetuate it.  The mistake often made about reading, consulting and listening to the harrowing tales of those who have perished in battle or those who survived them is to presume that these should not happen again.  Politicians, generals and strategists are all in the game: the dead are merely a reminder that more blood must be shed.  Weak, imprecise terms are thrown about by way of justification: they died so that we could be free.  Forget the bungling, the bad faith, the expediency.

One ample manifestation of this distasteful indulgence is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.  This particular entity can hardly be said to be short of cash but was promised $498 million that would have gone to other starved national institutions.  Half a billion is hardly a pittance, and the war memorial complex has been preparing since the announcement was made last year.

The proposal is meant to address a few points, some structural, others specific to narrative.  (Wars are about stories, often distorted ones, especially when massaged by the State.)  Spatial issues have become significant; Australia remains busy fighting the wars of others, and so finds itself running out of commemorative room.  Officials feel that more should be made for a modern generation of fighters.

There is also push towards trendy digitisation, a pneumatic substitute that does wonders to hide rather than illuminate conflict; every site where Australians have fallen will have a display, termed Places of Pride.  A focus on Australia’s more recent involvements will also be a priority.  In the words of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison,

“It means the Australian War Memorial will be able to display more of their collection and proudly tell the stories from recent years in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.”

For Australian War Memorial director, Brendan Nelson, Australian military deployments from the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean conflict and Vietnam were “largely told” in crowded confines.

“Yet the service of 70,000 young Australians in the Middle East Area of operations of the past two decades currently covers only two percent of available space.”

No opposition was registered by Bill Shorten’s Labour Party to this excessive splurge.  Sniffing the prospects of a future government portfolio, Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs Amanda Rishworth stated her party’s unconditional approval of the bloated funding proposal to the defence forces.

“Whatever political arguments we have in the chambers on either side of this room, both parties are […] united in our respect for your service.”

To be sure, there have been various Australians irritated and outraged by the measure.  Last month, they decided, via The Honest History website, to add their signatures to a letter signed by 83 or so, 24 of which, for what it’s worth, have received the Order of Australia.  Thomas Keneally has been traditionally indignant at the proposed folly, as have other authors. But the opposition has not merely come from scribes and wordsmiths who might be accused of progressive tendencies.  There is an air of protesting officialdom about many of them.  Paul Barrett, former Department of Defence secretary, is a signatory, as is Brendon Kelson and Liam Hanna, former director and assistant directors of the AWM.

Nelson’s sins have been those of zeal wedded to money.  He, the signatories accuse, tout “the Memorial as telling ‘our story’” yet show “excessive veneration of the Anzac story”.  This denied “the richness of our history.”  There was also an element of plain old vandalism about the whole matter.  “His and his Council’s ambitions will destroy the Memorial’s character and entail the demolition of Anzac Hall, opened in 2001 and winner of the 2005 Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture.”

The voices generally tread the line of fine logic.  ANU history academic Frank Bongiorno is unconvinced by the heralded role a ballooning war memorial is meant to have.

“The AWM is already a very large institution, and I don’t buy into a lot of the discussion about the AWM having a therapeutic role in relation to healing returned service personnel as a justification for this.  The notion you have to spend a half-a-billion to play that role appropriately and functionally just doesn’t seem plausible to me.”

Of the political parties, only the Greens have offered some measure of sense, though these do take aim at the more patriotic sensibilities of the war crazed.  Arms manufacturer sponsorship, for instance, should end; the Frontier Wars and the Tent Embassy should be commemorated and recognised.

While valuing the War Memorial, Senator Richard Di Natale suggested that the expansion “to showcase military hardware is deeply inappropriate, especially when our other National Institutions don’t have the funds to repair their leaky roofs.”  Australia’s National Institutions, reminded former Greens Senator and leader Christine Milne, spoke of the corrosion caused by the “efficiency dividends” principle to Australia’s National Institutions. The sacred will have an endless money pot.

Selling war and its merits has been the crass way states have done so for centuries and Australia’s inflated expenditure in the name of remembering the dead exceeds that of other states by some margin.  Memorials should be a reminder of loss and warning; they have become, instead, the means by which the apologetics for conflicts past, present and future can be promoted.  The redirection of funds to the AWM says much about the priorities of the Morrison government, supported, as it were, by the Labor opposition: the war complex needs feeding, even as the roof of the National Gallery of Australia leaks.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

For four years the Saudis (with US backup) have been bombing neighboring Yemen to force them to accept a Saudi-backed president that was overthrown.

Due to Saudi bombs and a total blockade, millions face starvation and tens of thousands of children have already died of starvation. It is the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the globe, yet the US Congress cannot muster the will to tell President Trump that he does not have authority to continue backing up Saudi aggression with US military power.

Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

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Recently returning to the U.S. on a flight from Venice, too-bored-to-read syndrome drove me to watch a movie. I chose “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which recently won an Academy Award for lead actor Rami Malek, who truly did turn in a memorable performance in a film that was otherwise plodding and predictable. As the credits were rolling, I noticed that the movie’s executive producer was none other than Arnon Milchan, an Israeli media billionaire who has spent most of his career in Hollywood. My immediate thought was, “Why is this scumbag still making movies in Hollywood? Why isn’t he in jail?”

Milchan earned my opprobrium the easy way, by spying for Israel to the detriment of the country that has made him rich and relatively famous, which is the United States of America. The Milchan tale is just one part of the successful effort by Israel to obtain the technology and raw materials for its secret nuclear arsenal. Preventing nuclear proliferation was a major objective of the U.S. government when in the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy learned from a CIA report that Tel Aviv was developing a nuclear weapon. He told the Israelis to terminate their program or risk losing American political and economic support but was killed before any steps were taken to end the project.

Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage.” The 2005 report stated that,

“Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.”

The Mossad frequently uses so-called sayanim in its espionage, which means diaspora Jews that it recruits on the basis of a shared religion or concern for the security of Israel. The threat coming from Israeli embassy operatives inside the United States is such that the Department of Defense once warned that Jewish Americans would likely be the targets of intelligence approaches.

Israel accelerated its nuclear program after the death of Kennedy. By 1965, it had obtained the raw material for a bomb consisting of U.S. government-owned highly enriched weapons-grade uranium obtained from a company in Pennsylvania called NUMEC, which was founded in 1956 and owned by Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. NUMEC was a supplier of enriched uranium for government projects but it was also from the start a front for the Israeli nuclear program, with its chief funder David Lowenthal, a leading Zionist, traveling to Israel at least once a month where he would meet with an old friend, Meir Amit, who headed Israeli intelligence. NUMEC covered the shipment of enriched uranium to Israel by claiming the metal was “lost,” losses that totaled nearly 600 pounds, enough to produce dozens of weapons. Such was the importance of the operation that in 1968 NUMEC even received a private incognito visit from spymaster Rafi Eitan.

Also, there was physical evidence relating to the diversion of the uranium. Refined uranium has a technical signature that permits identification of its source. Traces of uranium from NUMEC were identified by Department of Energy inspectors in Israel in 1978. The Central Intelligence Agency has also looked into the diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant and has concluded that it was part of a broader program to obtain the technology and raw materials for a nuclear device for Israel.

With the uranium in hand, the stealing of the advanced technology needed to make a nuclear weapon is where Milchan comes into the story. Milchan was born in Israel but moved to the United States and eventually wound up as the founder-owner of a major movie production company, New Regency Films. In a Nov. 25, 2013 interview on Israeli television Milchan admitted that he had spent his many years in Hollywood as an agent for Israeli intelligence, helping obtain embargoed technologies and materials that enabled Israel to develop a nuclear weapon. He worked for Israel’s Bureau of Science and Liaison Acquisition division of Mossad, referred to as the LAKAM spy agency.

Milchan, a long-time resident of the United States who clearly still has significant business interests in this country as evidenced by “Bohemian Rhapsody,” explained in his interview, “I did it for my country, and I’m proud of it.” He also said that “other big Hollywood names were connected to [his] covert affairs.” Among other successes, he obtained through his company Heli Trading 800 krytons, the sophisticated triggers for nuclear weapons. The devices were acquired from the California top-secret defense contractor MILCO International. Milchan personally recruited MILCO’s president Richard Kelly Smyth as an agent before turning him over to another Heli Trading employee Benjamin Netanyahu for handling. Smyth was eventually arrested in 1985 and cooperated in his interrogation by the FBI before being sentenced to prison, which means that the federal government knew all about both Milchan and Netanyahu at that time but did not even seek to interview them and ultimately did nothing about them.

I would like to think that the next time Milchan arrives at Los Angeles International Airport on business he will be met by federal marshals and FBI agents before being whisked off to some nice, quiet place for a chat. But don’t bet on it. Milchan is possibly no longer traveling regularly to the U.S., though he retains a residence in California, and his “confession” suggests that he believes himself to be bulletproof. He has also recently been involved in a bit of controversy in Israel itself, where the police have recommended that he be charged with bribery connected with the ongoing investigation of corruption by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Milchan, it seems, spent one million shekels ($250,000) on luxury items that he gave to Bibi as a reported quid pro quo to exempt his substantial income from taxes when he returned to Israel to live in 2013.

In an interesting additional element to that story, the police investigation determined that in 2014 Netanyahu approached then-Secretary of State John Kerry to intervene and arrange for a long-term American visa for Milchan, who was at the time dealing with difficulties relating to his U.S. status, possibly due to the 2013 admission that he had been spying. In any event, the visa was granted and Milchan continued to make more movies, and money, in Los Angeles.

The tragedy is that spying for Israel appears to be regarded as something like a victimless crime, but in the case of Milchan it was dead serious, involving as it did nuclear proliferation on behalf of a nation that might generously be described as aggressively paranoid. And note that Netanyahu, the very “statesman” who received 29 standing ovations from Congress, was also involved in the major Mossad operation to steal from the United States. In fact, even though the Israelis continue to rob America blind, it is extremely difficult to be punished for doing so.

Prosecutions for Israeli spying are so few because the Department of Justice is unwilling to pursue them, according to a retired FBI agent who claimed that hundreds of potential prosecutions were rejected for political reasons. The actual convictions involve crimes so egregious that they cannot be ignored or covered up, like conversations overheard at lunch, as when Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin provided intelligence on Iran to American Israel Public Affairs Committee staffers Keith Weissman and Steve Rosen, as well as to officials in the Israeli embassy. Franklin went briefly to jail and was recently reported to be waiting tables in West Virginia.

U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, America’s most damaging spy of all time, stole enough top-secret codeword material to fill a room before he was arrested and convicted. He obtained Israeli citizenship while in prison and is now free on parole, living in New York City. Apart from that, nada!

Time to change all that. Milchan and others are not friends of the United States but quite the contrary, and deserve to be treated like any other spy. The American people should demand that the government begin to recognize that fact and act accordingly. Telling Hollywood that it is not good PR to keep allowing Israeli spy Milchan to make millions is a possibility, but sanctioning him to put him out of business would be an even better place to start.

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This article was originally published on American Free Press.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from American Free Press

“Iran is the main threat in the Middle East, and confronting the Islamic Republic is the key to achieving peace in the entire region”. As American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pronounced these words in Poland, on February 13, Iran was hit by a kamikaze attack: 42 Pasdaran dead in the Southeastern provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan. The attack was claimed by the Sunni jihadist group Jaish al-Adl, who decided to hit while the country celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. The event was met by the almost total silence of our own media. “It is no coincidence if Iran was hit by terror on the day the Warsaw circus begins”– tweeted Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad JavadZarif –”especially when supporters of the same terrorists are applauding from the streets of Warsaw.”

To Zarif, the presence of the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, did not go unnoticed, and was protested by the Mojahedin-e Khalqs in the streets of the Polish capital, during the “Conference for the Stabilization of the Middle East”, organised by the United States. Its stated purpose was to create a united front against Iran. American Vice President Mike Pence was present, as were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner, senior advisor for Middle Eastern affairs and son-in-law of the tenant of the White House. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came as interim Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs. At this summit, which assembled more than 50 countries, there were delegations led by Ministers from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, while Egypt and Tunisia sent deputy ministers. Leaving the absentees aside, Tehran can count on the support or neutrality of Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as that of Turkey, a non-Arab Sunni power.

Coinciding with the Polish summit, Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan was in Sochi with his counterparts from Iran and Russia, Hassan Rohani and Vladimir Putin, who gathered there for a new meeting of the Astana trio concerning Syria. On the other hand, after the defeat of Daesh in Syria, the United States and Israel do not accept the influence of the Shia red crescent and Russia, which now extends from the heart of Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. Could it be that the Warsaw Summit is aimed not only at Iran but also against Putin’s Russia and China?

Let’s work in order, and return for a moment to Warsaw. It is no coincidence that the United States chose this location – in the North and at the same time in the East – to talk about the Middle East. Washington has indeed promised Warsaw that it will increase the number of troops from “Fort Trump” to counter the announced danger of a Russian invasion (in reality announced only by NATO’s powerful communication apparatus). There is one condition – the Polish government must cancel the contracts it has already signed with the Chinese company Huawei for the development of the 5G network. Washington knows that whoever wins the communications war wins the world. Thus in Warsaw, while satisfying Bibi’s belligerent impulses, it is strengthening NATO along the border with Russia, which is now surrounded, and protects its now obsolete hegemony of the Celestial Empire that advances, and once again divides Europe.

East Asia is now the number one threat to Washington, but the investments that gravitate around the new Silk Road are rife in Brussels, which, in the midst of an economic and institutional crisis, is not willing to interrupt trade with Iran. Significant in Warsaw was the absence of the High Representative for Foreign Policy of the EU, Federica Mogherini, who is currently working on a new financial mechanism that circumvents US sanctions against Tehran. However, Italy, although exempt from US sanctions, has already frozen purchases of Iranian oil (perhaps with persistent hopes in the oil wells of Libya), and immediately responded to the US appeal by sending Minister of Foreign Affairs, Enzo MoaveroMilanesi to Warsaw.

Among the European countries, in addition to Italy, only the UK was present, sending Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt, who brought with him the scent of a “hard Brexit”. Other European countries attended, but with lower-profile delegations. On the other hand, the same Israeli military secret services – notes the Washington Post, which also highlights a further difference of approach within the American establishment – revealed on February 13 that Iran “has not violated the agreement on nuclear power”, confirming what was declared by American intelligence some days before.

It would therefore seem that this time, the very efficient Israeli intelligence services delayed in providing information to Netanyahu who tweeted on impulse: “What is important in this meeting – and it is not secret, because there are many – is that this is an open meeting with representatives of the main Arab countries, who are sitting together with Israel to advance the common interest: our war on Iran.” But then someone intervened to calm Bibi’s spasmodic frenzy and his tweet, and so with the same speed with which it was published, it disappeared into the dark underworld of the world wide web. In his speech in Warsaw, the Israeli Prime Minister thus limited himself to talking about the need to “fight Iran”, causing, amongst other results, the forthcoming opening of diplomatic relations by several Arab countries, including Yemen, Oman, and Bahrain. Jared Kushner’s Tcefoah plan, on hold for two years, has gone almost unnoticed: the once-divisive Palestinian question has become almost irrelevant.

From Warsaw, once known for the military alliance between the former Soviet bloc countries, the first steps of the new Arab NATO against Iran would seem to be moving forward. The plan, known as the Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA), should focus on the heavyweights of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The creation of a regional anti-missile defense shield, which the United States and the Gulf countries have discussed for years without results, would now be an achievable goal. Israel is responsible for guiding the plan. What can we expect? The worst.

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Margherita Furlan is an independent journalist, co-founder of pandoratv.it. Focused on exposing the lies and propaganda in mainstream media news, she deals in particular with the Middle East and NATO. For more information and media inquiries please go to http://margheritafurlan.com

Featured image is from Anadolu Agency/Fatemeh Bahrami

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

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India probably thought that Russia would enthusiastically accept its entry into the “space super league” as Prime Minister Modi described it, but Moscow is actually pretty critical of New Delhi’s anti-satellite missile tests and urged it to join a Russian-Chinese multilateral mechanism for preventing the weaponization of space, something that it curiously announced around the same time as the Pakistan-Russia Consultative Group on Strategic Stability met in Islamabad and “agreed on the need for preserving multilateralism in the field of international security and disarmament”.

Indian Boasting Meets Russian “Balancing”

India’s anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test was heralded by Prime Minister Modi as an unprecedented achievement that catapulted his nation into the “space super league” of only four countries capable of pulling off this military feat, which he thought would boost his reelection prospects ahead of the upcoming onset of general elections that will continue into May. The Indian leader also intended to send a strong signal to China and Pakistan, one that he anticipated would be positively received by his American ally and passively accepted by his country’s Old Cold War-era Russian one, but while Washington is behaving as expected, Moscow is not. In fact, it can even be said that the Russian reaction took India off guard because New Delhi has yet to recognize the new reality of its relations with Moscow, which have undergone a drastic change since the Pulwama incident that accelerated previous trends.

Russia’s 21^st-century grand strategy is to “balance” between the various forces of Afro-Eurasia in order to facilitate the emerging Multipolar World Order and maintain harmony in the Eastern Hemisphere, to which end it commenced a game-changing rapprochement with former rival Pakistan that’s since seen Moscow prioritize its relations with the global pivot state in order to “make up for lost time”. Russia announced its “Return to South Asia” by offering to mediate between Pakistan and India following the recent uptick in bilateral tensions between them, but while this was warmly welcomed by Islamabad, it was shot down by New Delhi whose Ambassador to Russia was later proven to have lied about the reason for rejecting this unprecedented diplomatic outreach. It’s therefore not for naught that Russia’s response to India’s ASAT test was “diplomatically critical” and nothing like what New Delhi anticipated.

Russia’s Carefully Worded Response

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a carefully worded statement about this a day after the test on 28 March, with the Google Translated version being shared below because an official English translation has yet to be published on their website at the time of writing:

“We drew attention to the anti-satellite weapon test conducted by India on March 27, as a result of which an Indian spacecraft in a low near-earth orbit was hit by a interceptor ballistic missile as a target. We note the non-directionality of this test against a specific country declared by the Indian leadership, as well as their confirmation of the immutability of the New Delhi foreign policy to prevent the deployment of weapons in outer space and thereby the development of an arms race in it.

 At the same time, we are compelled to state that this step of India in many respects was the result of the substantially degraded situation in the field of arms control. Russia has repeatedly warned that the destructive actions of the United States to undermine the entire architecture of international security and strategic stability, including the one-sided and unlimited expansion of the global US missile defense systems, as well as the reluctance to abandon plans for putting weapons into space, make other states think about improving their own similar potentials in the interests of strengthening their national security. We urge Washington to take a responsible position, think again and abandon the insane, and most importantly – absolutely unrealizable – the idea of ​​universal military domination. It is still possible to stop the arms race unfolding in various regions of the world. It is important to assist the responsible states in maintaining an adequate level of international security and stability.

 For our part, we intend to continue taking all the necessary steps to prevent an arms race in outer space. With the support of a solid group of like-minded people, the idea of ​​developing a multilateral legally binding instrument for keeping outer space peaceful based on the Russian-Chinese draft treaty on preventing the placement of weapons in outer space, the use of force or the threat of force against space objects, as well as a multilateral initiative – political obligations not to place weapons first in space. We offer our Indian partners to actively join these joint efforts of the international community.”

As can be seen, Russia hinted that India is a “rogue state” whose strategically destabilizing test was influenced by the US, which sent the signal that it would be acceptable for its ally to do this at the time that it did after recently pulling out of the INF Treaty and creating its so-called “Space Force”.

The Chinese & Pakistani Angles

Another important point to pay attention to is the last one where Russia urged India to join the multilateral mechanism that it proposed together with China to prevent the weaponization of space. It’s extremely unlikely that India will do this, however, seeing as how the whole point of this test was to send an aggressive signal to its Asian Great Power neighbor and “fellow” BRICS “frenemy”, though it’s not surprising that Russia would play the part of the Eurasian “balancer” by publicly suggesting that it join that framework. Although Russia’s intentions were positive in doing so and aimed at preserving peace in the supercontinent, India’s ruling Hindutva supremacists must have taken supreme offense at its suggestion because it implies that the two rising powers are equals unlike the BJP’s implied attitude towards its neighbor, especially in the hyper-jingoist run-up to the general elections.

Furthermore, it’s extremely curious that Russia’s statement came a day before the Pakistan-Russia Consultative Group on Strategic Stability met in Islamabad and “agreed on the need for preserving multilateralism in the field of international security and disarmament”, with this outcome once again showing that Islamabad is much more responsible of a regional actor that New Delhi is which has yet to signal any interest whatsoever in Moscow’s multilateral security proposal. Both the symbolism and timing of this development shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere coincidence since it undoubtedly sent a powerful political signal that the previous state of affairs has changed in South Asia and that Russia seems to have more in common with Pakistan nowadays than it does with India, with the first-mentioned aiming to unite Eurasia through its global pivot state grand strategy while the latter is trying to divide it through the US’ “Indo-Pacific” paradigm.

Concluding Thoughts

India’s present leadership has proven itself to be remarkably short-sighted in recent weeks when it comes to advancing the country’s strategic interests, having been both humiliated by Pakistan after its reckless response to the Pulwama incident and now “diplomatically criticized” by Russia following its irresponsible election gimmick of an ASAT test. Just like the latest events accelerated previous trends involving Russia’s position towards South Asia, so too have they also done the same for India’s one towards Eurasia, with it now being evident that New Delhi is siding more closely with Washington than with its notional BRICS “partners” in Moscow and especially Beijing. Given the clear pattern that’s visibly being established, it can be expected that India will continue to engage in strategically destabilizing unilateral action at the behest of its new American patron as it moves away from its erstwhile policy of “multi-alignment” and towards a new US-influenced model instead.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Venezuela’s crude oil production plummeted by 142,000 barrels per day in February, according to OPEC data, after the Trump administration recognized a parallel government in Venezuela on January 23 and imposed new sanctions on the country. For the six months prior to February, Venezuela’s crude oil production had fallen by an average of 20,500 barrels per day (see below).

“This shows that the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in January had an immediate, very harsh impact on Venezuela’s economy, and on the general population, which depends on the export revenue from oil for essential imports including medicine, food, medical equipment, and other life-saving necessities,” said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Venezuela’s oil ouput was severel hit by the latest US sanctions (CEPR)

The loss of this oil production would be expected to cost Venezuela more than $2.5 billion in oil revenues if it remained unchanged over the next year; however, the decline is expected to get much worse over the year, due to the US sanctions. Total imports of food and medicine last year were about $2.6 billion.

Weisbrot noted that US sanctions since President Trump’s executive order of August 2017 imposing a financial embargo had already rapidly accelerated the decline of oil production, wiping out many billions of dollars of foreign exchange, in addition to other negative impacts on the economy.

On the demand side, imports of Venezuelan oil by the United States fell to zero for the first time, in the week of March 15, according to the US Energy Information Administration. This was down from 112,000 the previous week.

In addition to the cutoff of US oil imports, there are a number of other deadly impacts of the Trump administration’s January announcements, Weisbrot noted. By recognizing a parallel government, Washington and its political allies automatically introduced a trade embargo on Venezuela in most of the markets for its oil. At the same time, Venezuela has been cut off from most of the dollar-based, as well as European, financial systems, further constricting its ability to even pay for the imports that it can afford with existing foreign exchange. This is because Venezuelan government accounts, including those of the Central Bank and of the Republic of Venezuela, have been declared by those governments who have allied with Washington to be the property of the parallel government that they have recognized, rather than the current government of Venezuela.

While the Venezuelan economy was already in bad shape before US sanctions began, due to a collapse in oil prices and mistakes in macroeconomic policy, the sanctions especially since August 2017 have prevented the government from taking measures that could get rid of hyperinflation and allow for an economic recovery from a long depression.

“The economic damage caused by the Trump administration’s January decisions will have a serious impact on the health, including mortality, of the general population of Venezuela,” Weisbrot said.

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The Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip has reported, Saturday, that Israeli soldiers killed 266 Palestinians, and injured 30398 others, since the Great Return March processions started on March 30, 2018, which also marks Palestinian Land Day. Four Palestinians were killed, Saturday, and 316, including 86 children and 29 women, were injured.

The Health Ministry stated that the soldiers killed 266 Palestinians, including 50 children, six women and one elderly man, and injured 30398 others, including 16027 who were moved to various hospitals and medical centers.

It said that among the wounded are 3175 children and 1008 women, and added that 136 Palestinians suffered amputations; 122 in the lower limbs, and 14 in the upper limbs.

The Ministry also stated that the soldiers killed three medics, identified as Razan Najjar, 22, Mousa Jaber Abu Hassanein, 36, and Abdullah al-Qutati, 20, and injured 665 others, in addition to causing damage to 112 ambulances.

Among the slain Palestinians are two journalists, identified as Yasser Mortaja, and journalist Ahmad Abu Hussein, in the Gaza Strip, while the soldiers injured dozens of journalists.

The latest information does not include dozens of Palestinians who were killed and injured by the Israeli army after crossing the perimeter fence and were never returned to the Gaza Strip.

On Saturday, March 30, 2019, which marks Palestinian Land Day, and the first anniversary of the Great Return March in the Gaza Strip, the soldiers killed four Palestinians, identified as Mohammad Jihad Sa’ad (image on the right), 20, and Adham Nidal ‘Amara, 17, east of Gaza city, in addition to Tamer Hashem Abu al-Kheir, 17, and Bilal Mahmoud Najjar, 17, east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.

It is worth mentioning that Mohammad Jihad Sa’ad was killed, east of Gaza city, on Friday morning, before the processions started.

316 Palestinians were injured by Israeli army fire, on the same day, and were rushed to several hospitals in the Gaza Strip; among them are 86 children and 29 women.

Five of the wounded suffered very critical wounds, 9 sufferedserious wounds, 121 were moderately injured, and 181 sustained minor injuries.

• 64 Palestinians were shot with live fire.
• 16 Palestinians were shot with rubber-coated steel bullets.
• 13 Palestinians suffered wounds from shrapnel to several parts of the body.
• 46 Palestinians suffered teargas inhalation.
• 94 Palestinians were injured from gas bombs’ shrapnel.
• 83 Palestinians suffered cuts and bruises.

Image below: Tamer Abu al-Kheir 

Injuries by body part:

• 64 in the head or neck.
• 55 in the upper body.
• 16 in the chest and back.
• 18 in the pelvis and abdomen.
• 125 in the lower limbs.
• 34 suffered effects of teargas inhalation.
• 4 were injured in several parts of their bodies.

Injuries By Location:

• 39 in northern Gaza.
• 108 near Gaza city.
• 73 in Central District.
• 41 in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
• 55 in Rafah, southern Gaza.

Attacks against medical teams:

• Three medics injured by army fire.
• Three ambulances partially damage by army fire.
• Seven journalists injured by army fire.

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All images in this article are from IMEMC News

On the eve of the first anniversary of the “Great March of Return” at the Gaza border, lawyers and jurists around the world are calling on the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate and prosecute Israeli crimes against the Palestinians.

Today, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers presented a petition from the International Lawyers Campaign for the Investigation and Prosecution of Crimes Committed Against the Palestinian People to Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the ICC. The petition urges Bensouda to initiate a full investigation and prosecute violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law committed by Israeli officials in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The petition has garnered the support of tens of thousands of lawyers worldwide.

The petition condemns “the unimaginable atrocities that have been committed and continue to be committed by Israel against Palestinian civilians which deeply shock the conscience of humanity.”

It cites the well-established legal principle that victims of gross violations of international human rights law and serious violations of international humanitarian law “have a right to a remedy and reparation.”

The petition denounces “the failure and refusal” of Israel to hold accountable “those suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian civilians,” which has resulted in “abandoning the rule of law and replacing it with widespread impunity for Israeli officials who have sanctioned and for Israeli individuals who have perpetrated such crimes.”

Israel Bombs Gaza Ahead of Great March of Return Anniversary

On March 25 and 26, in anticipation of the forthcoming election and the anniversary of the Great March of Return, Israel pummeled Gaza with dozens of airstrikes, instilling terror in 2 million Palestinians.

On Saturday, March 30, tens of thousands of Palestinians are planning to walk toward the Gaza border to commemorate the March 30, 2018, launch of the Great March of Return. For the past year, during the weekly protests, tens of thousands of Palestinians have demanded an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the right to return to their homeland. In response, Israeli forces have engaged in violent and illegal repression against demonstrators.

UN Commission Documents Crimes by Israeli Leaders

On March 18, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, convened by the UN Human Rights Council, issued a 252-page report of its findings on the Great March of Return demonstrations.

“We present this comprehensive report with an urgent plea to Israel to immediately ensure that the rules of engagement of their security forces are revised to comply with international legal standards…. The excessive force that took place on 30 March, 14 May and 12 October 2018 must not be repeated,” Commission Chair Santiago Canton told the Human Rights Council.

The Commission found “reasonable grounds to believe that during these weekly demonstrations, the Israeli Security Forces killed and gravely injured civilians who were neither participating directly in hostilities nor posing an imminent threat to life. Among those shot were children, paramedics, journalists, and persons with disabilities. 183 people were shot dead, another 6,106 were wounded with live ammunition.”

Unless acting in lawful self-defense, the Commission noted,

“intentionally killing a civilian not directly participating in hostilities is a war crime. Serious human rights violations were committed which may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The Commission concluded that the Israeli Security Forces’ “conduct also violated international humanitarian law, which permits civilians to be targeted only when they ‘directly participate in hostilities.’ This purposefully high threshold was not met by demonstrators’ conduct, in the view of the Commission, with one possible exception.”

Furthermore, the Commission stated,

“Targeting unarmed demonstrators purely on the basis of their current or former political views, or their current or former membership of an armed group — and not on their conduct at the time — is impermissible in the view of the Commission.”

The Commission recommended that the government of Israel:

• Prohibit the use of lethal force against civilians who pose no imminent threat to life;
• Make sure the rules of engagement don’t sanction lethal force against “main inciters” as a status. Ensure the rules only allow lethal force as a last resort, where the target poses an imminent threat to life or is participating directly in hostilities;
• Do not allow targeting based solely on actual or alleged affiliation with a group rather than conduct;
• Investigate all protest-related killings to determine whether war crimes or crimes against humanity have been committed with a view toward accountability;
• Ensure prompt and effective remedies for those unlawfully killed or wounded; and
• Immediately lift the blockade on Gaza.

The Commission’s report will be forwarded to the ICC.

Petition Seeks Accountability in International Court for Israeli Leaders

In the summer of 2014, Israeli forces killed 2,200 Palestinians, nearly one-quarter of them children and over 80 percent of them civilians, in an operation dubbed “Operation Protective Edge.”

The following January, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine. In a preliminary examination, the Office of the Prosecutor determines whether there is sufficient evidence of crimes of sufficient gravity falling within the ICC’s jurisdiction, whether there are genuine national proceedings, and whether opening an investigation would serve the interests of justice and of the victims.

The petition from the International Association of Democratic Lawyers urges Bensouda to take the next step — from a preliminary examination to a full investigation into Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people. In an investigation, the Office of the Prosecutor gathers evidence, identifies suspects, and asks ICC judges to issue an arrest warrant or a summons to appear.

On April 8, 2018, in light of Israeli actions during the Great March of Return, Bensouda stated that

“any new alleged crime committed in the context of the situation in Palestine may be subjected to my Office’s scrutiny. This applies to the events of the past weeks and to any future incident.”

She added,

“I am aware that the demonstrations in the Gaza Strip are planned to continue further. My Office will continue to closely watch the situation and will record any instance of incitement or resort to unlawful force.”

She added,

“Violence against civilians – in a situation such as the one prevailing in Gaza – could constitute crimes under the [ICC’s] Rome Statute.”

Bensouda noted,

“Any person who incites or engages in acts of violence including by ordering, requesting, encouraging or contributing in any other manner to the commission of crimes within ICC’s jurisdiction is liable to prosecution before the Court, with full respect for the principle of complementarity.”

“Complementarity” means the court will take jurisdiction only over people whose home country is unwilling or unable to genuinely investigate and prosecute.

Israel has demonstrated its unwillingness to mount an impartial investigation into Operation Protective Edge. In August 2018, the Israeli military absolved itself of any wrongdoing in that operation.

The lawyers’ petition was inspired by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers’ previous international call for lawyers to support the campaign to free Nelson Mandela in the 1980s. Just as that campaign “proved to be for those living under Apartheid in South Africa,” the current petition “is an essential first step in securing equal justice under law” for the Palestinian people.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Time before the war, Syria was a peaceful place where we used to live at peace. Peace meant to us life. But now we lost life since we lost peace. My daughter, that little girl at that time of peace had had a dream of being a famous person. War has destroyed our castle of dreams. We found ourselves living dead, terrorism pervaded every single aspect of our life. We started to struggle in order to keep breathing in such an ocean of killing everywhere.

Many questions had raised in our minds, what did we do to all those western countries that made them support those terrorists who destroyed our country?? Why?? put yourselves in our shoes, would you accept that to your countries and your children. We didn’t lose just our little homes, we lost our big home Syria. War seems to be ended, but the fact is no, war never ends after war. Life is not the same, people are not the same, feelings are not the same. War, because of western support, destroyed Syrians from the inside. We suddenly found ourselves internally displaced have nothing but what we put on our bodies. We can rebuild the country, but can we make the dead people come back to life again ..no alas. And here is the tragedy.

We were a welcoming country. We never hurt any other country, then why?? Why did you do that to us??? It wasn’t easy for my children to experience such war and see rivers of blood in the street of our city Palmyra.

Days passed, then weeks, children started to lose temper and ability to stand all this. Many times my daughter Arwa fell unconscious. My daughter, who became 18 years old full of ambition and great expectations where to go??? What to do?? Arwa, my daughter, started studying architecture engineering. In spite of the bombs all the way long to her university going and coming back, she still has that insistence, she still has the same determination to be a famous person. Worked hard and now she is in the second semester of the fourth year. One more year Arwa will be graduated. What next. Her dream is still the same. Master then PHD. But where?? Who is going to help a girl with such glowing dream? If you can’t stop that absurd situation in Syria, at least give a help hand to people of Syria. Many students like to find better education out of Syria who is still suffering bad war effects. Most students are, like Arwa, looking for an opportunity of finding a university to continue study. Some must help, to make children regain their laugh and hopes. Help them to find an asylum. To give me the power to say; Arwa, wait, things will be better soon.

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Sumaya AlEssmael is an English language teacher in Palmyra, Syria.

 “This opposition campaign has been one of what was called the other day in the media, circus. It’s PR stunts. It’s about media publicity. As ever, the opposition has not learned the fundamental key root to change that they want to see in Venezuela, which is connecting with ordinary Venezuelan people.”

– Professor Julia Buxton (quoted in this week’s show.)

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Nicolas Maduro can no longer claim to be the legitimate president of Venezuela.

This is a familiar refrain playing out in Venezuelan opposition circles. A tune that the heads of State of Canada, the United States, and the Lima Group of countries are dancing to. And one that began to crescendo when National Assembly member Juan Guaido declared himself Interim President in January.[1][2][3]

As if to provide backing vocals to this political tune, mainstream Western media have trumpeted the ‘economic and humanitarian crisis rocking the country” – a convenient cacophony drowning out any discourse around foreign interference via sanctions and clandestine operations.[4]

Those operations have shown signs of evolving in the past two months.

A convoy of aid trucks from Cucuta, Colombia attempted to cross the border into Venezuela on February 23rd urged on by Juan Guaido himself, front and centre like some philanthropic carnival barker. When the USAID trucks arrived at the border, major press organs like the New York Times reported that Venezuelan security forces set the trucks on fire. Thanks to independent journalists like Max Blumenthal, it is now well established that it was anti-Maduro protesters, not pro-Maduro forces who set the trucks on fire, clearly as a vulgar publicity stunt to sell regime change for ‘humanitarian’ reasons.[5]

In March, the country has experienced two major power outages, plunging most of the country into darkness for days at a time. Guaido and supporters of the opposition are blaming the outages on corruption and mismanagement. Meanwhile, the Maduro government is claiming the outages resulted from criminal attacks on the country’s electrical infrastructure by forces supporting the opposition.[6][7]

Venezuelan authorities have also arrested Guaido’s chief of staff Roberto Marrero and lawyer Juan Planchart, claiming their involvement in a plot to hire mercenaries to execute targeted killings and acts of sabotage, all in the interests of promoting regime change.[8]

The US has increased its sanctions. President Trump has demanded Russia abandon Venezuela, with his Vice President calling the delivery of military planes to the Bolivarian Republic “an unwelcome provocation.”[9]

With the prospect of a military conflict ramping up, the Global Research News Hour returns to the topic of Venezuela with analysis supplied by longtime Venezuela watcher and researcher Julia Buxton.

Professor Buxton’s exacting analysis incorporates an analysis of the roots of the political crisis in the country, including candid admissions of failures on the part of Maduro to adequately address ongoing economic challenges. She points to the shortcomings of the opposition as well as the background role of neoliberal Harvard University based Venezuelan ex-pat Ricardo Hausmann, as well as a new generation of activists, and intellectuals who cannot recall the pre-Chavez era. Maduro’s substantial dependence on the military comes under scrutiny in this week’s comprehensive interview. Professor Buxton also notes the country’s growing dependence on China, and how that relationship is threatening the aims of the Bolivarian revolution.

A presentation by Buxton to a group of Winnipeg based activists on March 25th, and a follow-up conversation at University of Winnipeg-based CKUW studio dominates this 60 minute program.

Julia Buxton is Professor of Comparative Politics at Central European University’s School of Public Policy, and Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory, Swansea University. A specialist on Latin America and an expert on Venezuela, receiving her PhD from the London School of Economics, Buxton has thematic expertise on democratisation and transition processes, post conflict recovery, and conflict analysis, including conflict sensitive design and policy implementation, as well as gender and gender sensitive design. She has authored numerous books and articles on Venezuela in the Chavez period and on Latin America in general.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 254)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time. 

Notes

1. Ana Vanessa Herrero and Ernesto Londoño (Jan. 15, 2019), ‘Venezuela Opposition Declares Maduro Illegitimate, and Urges Defections’, New  York Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/world/americas/guaido-maduro-venezuela.html
2.  https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2019/01/canada-rejects-the-maduro-regimes-illegitimate-mandate-in-venezuela.html
3. https://sputniknews.com/us/201901121071414741-usa-venezuela-maduro-bolton/
4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-is-the-cbc-lying-about-venezuela-trudeau-government-favors-us-intervention/5657040
5. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/
6. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-idUSKCN1RB0MB
7. https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14404
8. https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14402
9. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-pence-guaido-venezuela-1.5073588

Less than a week ago, President Macron was lambasting Italy for signing agreements with China in the context of their New Silk Road, alias President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in the same breath he was criticizing China for attempting to undermine Europe with new trade individual country deals under the pretext of BRI. However, Italy, also scolded by Brussels for her single-handed deals with China, was, in fact, the first G7 country for signing a number of contracts with China to use Italian ports under the BRI, making Italy also the first official EU partner of China’s BRI.

In his zeal of becoming Europe’s new king, Macron also called on all EU members not to go their own way with China, but to jointly negotiate with China “new deals” under the BRI. A joint EU to be strong and equal to the economic and trade behemoth, China. Indeed, solidarity is always ‘good’- but Europe is the last bit of Mother Earth’s territory that has ever shown any solidarity and cohesion among her neighbors and co-members of this illustrious non-union club, called the European Union.

Yet, surprise-surprise! On President Xi’s next stop, Paris, coming from Italy, Macron rolled out the red carpet for the Chinese President and, according to RT, went on to sign billions worth of new contracts with the Asian leader. If this looked like a Macron U-turn, it was a Macron U-turn. As an afterthought he invited German Chancellor, Madame Merkel and EU President Junker to Paris for a photo-Op under the Arc de Triomphe – just to make sure his about-face was not to be misinterpreted.

President Xi also signed a multi-billion-euro deal – may be as much as € 30billion – for some 300 passenger jets from Airbus. Though Airbus is a European venture, its main manufacturing plants are in France. This is an especially hard blow to Boeing, after the company’s 737 MAX disasters. Weakening Boeing is also weakening an important US military contractor.

As was to be expected, Washington didn’t like Italy’s moving closer to the East by signing several BRI contracts, and even less so, while the EU, represented by Jean-Claude Juncker, Angela Merkel, Germany and Emmanuel Macron, France, were welcoming President Xi today in Paris. Showing a little sympathy to friend Trump, Merkel observed to Reuters, “We, as Europeans, want to play an active part and that must lead to certain reciprocity and we are still wrangling over that a bit.” – Showing Washington that not all is lost will surely give the empire a grain of hope.

Exactly 6 years ago, President Xi Jinping launched the BRI, the most ambitious and largest economic development project in recent history. On President Xi’s second state visit to Germany in March 2014, he specifically offered Madame Merkel to become (at that time) the western most link for the BRI. But Madame Merkel just snubbed at the proposal and let it go. She was too close to Washington, and, who knows, maybe received marching orders from Obama and his handlers, to leave her fingers from tightening relations with China.

As the Chinese are not pushy, Mr. Xi went home and pursued this massive project further. Within the next 30 years at least, it will build multi-trillions of Chinese Yuans-worth of infrastructure, interconnected research and education centers, industrial development, facilitate cultural exchange – it will build bridges among people. The BRI is so important that the Chinese National Assembly decided in 2017 to incorporate it into the Chinese Constitution.

Today BRI spans the globe with some six land and maritime routes. More are under preparation. BRI is not to invade and take over the world, as the west would like you to believe. The New Silk Road is instead promoting a multi-polar world. It will pave the way towards a new world order, but not the one the Rothschilds &Co. are dreaming about, but one that promotes equal partnership and solidarity among countries.

It is amazing, the west was a sleep for 6 years, or didn’t want to see. Maybe the Washington driven war machine simply thought it will go away. But it didn’t and doesn’t. China has the world’s strongest economy according to Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) indicators (that’s all that really counts), surpassing the US in 2017. With the BRI, and an ever-stronger currency, the Yuan, due to a stable and steadily growing distributive economy, and in a military and strategic alliance with Russia, China is literally unbeatable. Hence, as basically a last-ditch effort, Washington’s multiple attempts at trade wars. It’s a publicity stunt, to make the world believe the US is still calling the shots. In reality, the New Silk Road is most likely the vehicle to drive the United States warrior arrogance into the ground. Good riddance.

And let’s not forget, BRI is intimately linked with Russia, not only physically as in transport infrastructure, but also strategically for purposes of economic development of henceforth forgotten and neglected countries and regions. So far the esperando west has not even reacted to this “imminent threat”, as perceived by Washington, the Russian haters. If they would add Russia and China together as the new Silk Road front, they would pee in their pants – as they may realize their days of never-ending treachery and lies would soon end. Therefore, better that the Ostrich pulls only one eye out of the sand, blinking at China. Lying to themselves, and of course to their people, is just one more nail in the coffin of the west.

We may not be there yet, as war threats, and attempts at regime change from the neofascist Trump team are still very much “on the table”. But with Russia’s far superiority in military power, and the Chinese economic masters, this table may soon be symbolically blown apart, meaning, will the commanding and reigning elite living a lush and ego-centric lifestyle really want to run the risk of being out-nuked? – Because a new war will not just be played out in Europe, like the last two WWs; nor will New Zealand offer a safe haven for those elite and super rich, who have already secured their properties in this far-away land. – Don’t think so. They, the dark state elite, who pull the strings, rather live in safe a world and enjoy their bounties stolen over hundreds of years, as long as they last, even under a Russia-China and multipolar SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) sponsorship.

When that recognition dawns on western minds, that all that counts is economics – economics that may bring more equality, a better life and harmony among nations, and more prosperity for more people on this planet earth.

Did Mr. Macron and his European counterparts just see the light? Did he realize that being the king of vassal Europe is really meaningless and that it’s high time to jump the sinking boat? Only the near future will tell.

Another scenario is that China has long realized the futurelessness of the EU, and instead of banking their trade agreements with a potentially dead body, they approach country by country, Greece, Italy, France, Germany – who is next? – Because, even with the collapse of the European Union, the 28 countries must and will survive. So, trade agreements with each one of them individually have an infinitely higher value, than signing up with a block of unsolidary, uncoordinated, even in some cases hostile-to-each-other nations – with a fiat currency that is doomed, as it will never survive in such a non-union constellation – without even a Constitution pointing to a common vision.

Why the Europeans can’t see that for themselves, and run away from this disaster called Brussels, is a miracle for me. If a Martian would watch the human behavior on our Mother Earth from outer space, he, she or it would laugh no end at our abject schizophrenic behavior – but at the same time with tears of sadness, as humanity is hell-bent to self-destruct.

Well, Roi Macron will not let go, he is not (yet) allowed to let go. His paymasters, those that put him there, the Rothschild financial clan & Co. have not gotten enough out of him yet, in terms of milking Europe to the bones. How much more can Macron’s naïve pathological egocentricity still give? – By launching the military, the first time since 1948, with live ammunition against harmless, unarmed protesters, the Yellow Vests, his French co-patriots (although he is an Über-French, he is a wannabe European king), is maybe the last nail in Macron’s coffin – figuratively speaking.

As Tom Luongo so aptly describes,

“There are few people in this world more odious than French President Emmanuel Macron after his behavior this week. I’m sure there are child molesters who are worse. But as a man who is pivotal in the future of hundreds of millions of people, his decision to order the French military to quell the Yellow Vests protests with live ammunition is simply vile. Macron outed himself as the very symbol of what animates the globalist elite he represents. Disdain.”

Those black-hooded “protesters”, who plant the violence, burn down bank entrances, break windows and loot shops, are nothing less than paid agents-provocateur. You may have noticed, in the hundreds of demo-videos circulating on internet, the police leave them pretty much alone – orders from the Macron regime. Will the military be loyal to deceitful, despicable Macron, or to the nation, i.e. to the people? That remains the question, as fissures within the military are already noticeable.

So, Macron’s about-face, or U-Turn, after having scolded Italy for going it alone, instead of ’collectively’ with the EU, may be by orders of the financial monarchs who forced him with millions of false propaganda into the French Presidency – and who may now also see the light: Europe is no longer a viable bet.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^stCentury; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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DoD Orders $250 Million of Gas Masks – What Do They Know?

By Zero Hedge, March 31, 2019

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Avon Protection Systems Inc., Cadillac, Michigan, a $245,961,250 firm-fixed-price contract for production of M53A1 Chemical Biological Protective Mask systems, according to the DoD contract website.

Xi’s Visit Sets Tone for China-EU Relations

By Liu Caiyu and Yang Sheng, March 30, 2019

The outcome of Xi’s visit to Europe is “beyond expectations” and extremely “practical” in terms of deepening China-Europe relations. The visit sets the tone for the future of the relations, Chinese analysts noted on Wednesday.

The BRICS New Development Bank: Corruption-riddled Development Finance

By Prof. Patrick Bond, March 30, 2019

The BRICS New Development Bank is having its Annual General Meeting on 1-2 April, here in South Africa. There’s information about the meeting here, including public sessions. Critics meet to discuss the Bank on 31 March – 3 June in Cape Town and Johannesburg, especially to interrogate bank loans to South Africa.

Syria: Is US Fighting ISIS or Liquidating Assets?

By Tony Cartalucci, March 30, 2019

From US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memos dating back to 2012 noting efforts to create a “Salafist” [Islamic] “principality” [State] in eastern Syria precisely where ISIS rose and now clings to its “final stronghold,” to the obvious fact that ISIS’ fighting capacity was only possible through extensive state sponsorship – it was already clear that the US and its partners in regime change against Syria had been using terrorists including ISIS as proxy ground forces.

NATO’s Unrelenting Expansion Could Trigger a Major Nuclear War

By Shane Quinn, March 30, 2019

Less than two years ago Montenegro became the 29th state to join NATO, an American-led military alliance that has become a far-reaching intervention force since the USSR’s demise. The accession of mighty Montenegro to NATO must have set hearts fluttering across the Atlantic in Washington.

Pentagon Audit: Evidence Proving $21 Trillion Unaccounted For – Opening Statement

By David DeGraw, March 29, 2019

As you will see in detail throughout this series of reports, not only have trillions of taxpayer dollars been knowingly dumped into a shockingly unaccountable black hole, Congress is not even sure how much money has been appropriated and given out in the first place.

Welcome to Hell: Peruvian Mining City of La Rinconada

By Andre Vltchek, March 29, 2019

No one can agree how high above the sea level that La Rinconada really lies at: 5,300 meters or 5,200 meters? On the access road, a metal plate says 5,015. But who really cares? It is indisputably the highest settlement in the world; a gold mining town, a concentration of misery, a community of around 70,000 inhabitants, many of whom have been poisoned by mercury.

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The recent announcement by United States President Donald Trump that the US will recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights draws attention yet again to the double standards applied by NATO and its satraps including Australia to the issues of territorial integrity, the right to self-determination, and international law. Three cases illustrate the duplicity and double standards of the Western nations. They may be reviewed chronologically.

The Golan Heights form part of the sovereign territory of the state of Syria. It, along with the West Bank of Palestine (then part of Jordan) and the Gaza strip were seized by Israel at the conclusion of the Six Day War between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. Israel has remained in occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights ever since. It maintains a blockade on Gaza to the immense suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants.

It is well-established international law (Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949) that states may not continue to occupy territory seized as a result of war. On 22ndof November 1967 the United Nations Security Council in resolution 242 unanimously called on Israel to withdraw its forces from occupied territory. This was ignored by Israel, just as it has violated 32 United Nations resolutions since 1968, easily the single biggest offender (Turkey is second with 24 violations over the same time period).

In 1981 Israel passed the Golan Heights Law in which it purported to annex the Syrian Golan Heights. United Nations Security Council resolution 497 of 17th of December 1981 declared that purported annexation “null and void and without legal effect.”

That Israel continues to ignore its obligations under international law is not surprising. That the United States, other NATO countries, and Australia not only do not impose any sanctions on Israel for its continued violations, it does not even permit the discussion of such a possibility. Even to raise the issue invites immediate allegations of anti-Semitism and other absurdities from the immensely powerful Jewish lobby in most western states.

Trump’s announcement follows a similar declaration last year to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This is also not only a violation of international law, it is contrary to resolutions the United States itself has supported in the past (as with the Golan Heights).

Kosovo’s case is totally different but it raises a number of relevant points. Kosovo is ethnically and linguistically Albanian, although it formed part of the former Yugoslavia. There were strong elements within Kosovo that wanted independence from Yugoslavia.

That independence movement was supported by the United States. Between March and June 1999 the United States bombed Serbia to encourage the Serbs to withdraw their military forces from Kosovo. The bombing was without Security Council approval, was not within the provisions of the United Nations Charter, and was accordingly a gross violation of international law.

At the cessation of the bombing, on 10 June 1999, United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 gave Kosovo autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On the 17th February 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Yugoslavia. There was no referendum, but it is fair to say that the declaration was supported by the majority of Kosovans, especially those of Albanian ethnicity who comprised 88% of Kosovo’s population.

On 8 October 2008 the United Nations General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the Kosovo declaration of Independence. Their decision was announced on 22nd July 2010. The court noted the lengthy history of unilateral declarations of independence since the 17th century, with most of them opposed by the parent state.

The court concluded that “international law contained no prohibition of declarations of independence” (paragraph 79) and that “the declaration of 17th February 2008 did not violate general international law” (paragraph 84).

The United States had a particular interest in Kosovo, including in particular being able to establish a substantial military base there (Camp Bond Steel). That base functions, inter alia, as a major transit point for Afghan heroin under the control of United States and Allied forces in Afghanistan.

No sanctions were applied to the United States for its illegal bombing of Syria, nor on Kosovo for its unilateral declaration of independence. The majority of the world’s countries now recognise Kosovo as a separate independent state.

Crimea was factually different again, but also contains several relevant points. Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire since 1783. On 18 February 1954 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree transferring Crimea to Ukraine. There was no referendum of the Crimean people and had there been, the overwhelming likelihood is that the transfer would have been rejected.

The transfer seems to have been the brainchild of then Soviet leader Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian. The absence of democratic procedures is reinforced by the fact that the transfer was itself a violation of Soviet law.

In the following decades there was an uneasy relationship between the Crimeans and the Ukrainian government. Crimea enjoyed the status of being an “autonomous republic”. That uneasiness came to a head in February 2014 when the duly elected and internationally recognised government of Ukraine was overthrown in an American organized and financed coup d’état.

The new Ukrainian government was anti-Russian and frankly fascist in its orientation. Neither fact was acceptable to the Crimeans who, like the Albanians in Kosovo were overwhelmingly of one language, culture, ethnicity and identification with all things Russian.

A referendum was quickly organized (unlike Kosovo) and there was a voter turnout of 83.1%, of whom 95.5% voted in favour of reunification with Russia. The Russian Duma in turn voted to accept Crimea back into the Russian Federation.

The western media and politicians consistently use the term “annexation” to describe the reincorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The OED defines annexation as synonymous with “seizure, occupation, invasion, conquest, takeover, appropriation and expropriation.” None of these terms accurately describes the sequence of events in Crimea.

There is no difference in international law between what Kosovo did with the approval of the International Court of Justice and what the Crimeans did. The latter was arguably much more democratic as it followed an overwhelming referendum result in support of departure from Ukraine and rejoining with Russia.

The consequences however, have been very different. Russia has been subject to endless vilification. The Russian state and many political and business leaders have been subjected to sanctions. One has only to ask: would this have happened if Crimea had voted to leave the Russian Federation and join Ukraine? The overwhelming probability is that Crimea would have been welcomed with open arms and its people applauded for making the ‘right’ choice.

Crimea is strategically significant, which is why the British fought Russians there in the Crimean war (1853-1856), and why a prime geopolitical objective of the US interference in Ukraine was to deprive the Russians of the naval base at Sevastopol.

The history of these three episodes (Golan, Kosovo and Crimea) exemplifies the double standards and hypocrisy that characterizes western geopolitics. Trump’s latest statements on the Golan Heights only reinforce the point.

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James O’Neill is an Australian-based Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded Avon Protection Systems Inc., Cadillac, Michigan, a $245,961,250 firm-fixed-price contract for production of M53A1 Chemical Biological Protective Mask systems, according to the DoD contract website.

The Army estimates M53A1 gas masks will start delivery in the second half of this financial year ending September. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, will oversee the purchase order.

Avon Protection Systems is a world leader and major supplier to the military, law enforcement, first responders, and industrial sectors globally.

The M53A1 was developed to counter multiple threats encountered on the modern battlefield. “It provides excellent protection against traditional chemical and biological warfare agents, select Toxic Industrial Materials (TIMs) and particulate matter including radioactive dust,” read the M53 brochure.

According to the company, the M53A1 protects soldiers from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks. Specifically, the mask protects against mustard, sarin, soman, and VX nerve agents.

The order comes one month after the U.S. government introduced science-based guidelines for how first responders decontaminate large numbers of Americans after a chemical-weapons attack.

The guidelines, published last month, are the first in the U.S. to be based on extensive research and testing.

“Terrorist threats and the use of chemical weapons in Syria have heightened awareness of the need for improved preparedness against chemical attacks,” said Gary Disbrow, deputy director of the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which prepared the guidelines.

“First responders are supportive of the fact that it is evidence-based guidance, and not just, ‘We used this last time, and it seemed to work,’” he added.

With lightning speed, the Army and U.S. government have been actively preparing for a biological incident on the homeland. With threats harder to anticipate today, the act of preparation suggests some fears that an attack of some sort could be imminent.

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Governments throughout the Southern African Development Community (SADC) are working feverishly to provide relief to millions of people affected by cyclone Idai, a category three-to-four storm which has severely impacted three states, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, with some damage extending as far away as South Africa and Madagascar.

During the early morning hours of March 14 storms and subsequent flooding destroyed homes, crops, businesses and public institutions bringing normal life to a halt while local and international rescue operations scrambled to provide temporary housing and medical assistance to the communities directly hit by the cyclone.

In the strategic port city of Biera in central Mozambique’s Sofala Province, it has been estimated that 90 percent of the infrastructure of the municipality was been destroyed. Although the port itself, a lifeline for the landlocked states of Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe, remains largely intact, with such destruction of surrounding areas, it is expected that the recovery process will take years.

Biera has experienced exponential growth over the last two decades. The population more than doubled since 1997 and the prospects for economic development were enhanced due to the discovery of vast amounts of natural gas resources off shore in the Indian Ocean.

The cyclone winds prompted continuous rains resulting in the overflowing of rivers causing flooding which wiped away everything in its path. Official accounts of the number of deaths stands at the time of this writing at approximately 750.

However, in Biera, hundreds of bodies were lying along the roads in a gruesome scene. The number of corpses poses challenges for identification, storage and burials. With the widespread flooding, returning the deceased to surviving relatives for burials will be almost impossible.

Due to the massive dislocation, injuries and deaths, it is not surprising that cases of the water borne disease cholera have surfaced. In Mozambique there were 139 confirmed cases as of March 29 with many more being anticipated.  Nearly a million doses of the cholera vaccine are being rushed into the region through the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO) to avoid deaths which could extend into the thousands.

Cholera is contracted through contaminated water sources and if not treated could kill its victims within a matter of hours. In light of the conditions prevailing in the makeshift internally displaced persons camps, the disease could rapidly spread causing further social problems for Mozambique and the other affected SADC countries.

Southern African news website reports that:

“The provision of clean drinking water is a priority in effected areas with reports emerging that citizens of Beira, a city of 500,000 people, have taken to drinking the stagnant water that has gathered on the side of the road as relief efforts struggle to restore life in the region to normal. Hunger and water shortages have further increased the risk of Cholera infection as desperate people take to eating and drinking contaminated food and water. The United Nations estimates that 1.8 million people in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe are in need of aid, primarily food, clean drinking water and medical supplies. Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi has declared that all health care in the regions affected will be free until such time as the crisis has been warded off.”

In neighboring Zimbabwe, the government of President Emmerson Mnangagwa has taken a leading role in mobilizing aid to the damaged regions of the country. Most of the damage has taken place in Manicaland and Masvingo provinces with the towns of Chimanimani, Chipenge and Bikita bearing the brunt of the storm.

Zimbabwe cyclone Idai flooding in Manicaland during March of 2019

There have been over 100 people killed in the disaster in Zimbabwe while some 200,000 have been in the direct line of cyclone Idai on the border with Mozambique. The government in Harare reported on March 28 that $100 million is being allocated for aid and reconstruction of the damaged areas.

Malawi reports that 90,000 people were displaced by the cyclone. One aid organization based Ireland, Concern, reported that anywhere between 80 to 100 percent of the maize crop has been destroyed by the winds and flooding. (See this)

Economic Challenges within the SADC Region

All three states which were the epicenter of Idai are struggling against the broader political and economic forces imposed upon them by the Western industrialized countries. Mozambique, despite its natural resources and strategic location, was compelled in 2018 to renegotiate the terms of its financial obligations internationally. (See this)

A former Portuguese colony for five centuries, the people could only obtain their national independence through an armed struggle which lasted for a decade. In 1975, the oppressed nation gained its freedom under the leadership of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), which remains in power today.

The country then served as a rear-base and frontline state supporting the liberation movements in contiguous Zimbabwe and South Africa. As a result, the FRELIMO government was targeted for regime-change where the settler-colony of Rhodesia and South Africa, both backed by imperialism, funded counter-revolutionary groups to undermine the independence and nation-building efforts beginning in the late 1970s.

Since the end of the imperialist-engineered civil war in the early 1990s, Mozambique has been emerging as a developing state. With the energy resource findings of recent years the hopes for an economic take off was promising. However, the decline in commodity prices since 2014, coupled with western-backed loans and other financial obligations, has slowed growth. Other challenges include the emergence last year of an “Islamist” armed group in the north which has engaged in infrastructural sabotage and murder against civilians. Consequently, the FRELIMO government must focus much-needed resources on defense and security concerns to repel the violent threats.

Zimbabwe, also won its independence by waging an armed revolutionary war from the mid-1960s until 1979, when a negotiated settlement with the European-settler regime, led to multi-party, non-racial elections in which the Zimbabwe African National Union, Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) became the dominant party in 1980, extending its rule now for nearly 40 years. After a radical land redistribution program transferred land from the British commercial farmers to millions of Africans in 2000, Britain, the European Union (EU) and the United States have maintained sanctions against the ZANU-PF party and government creating tremendous economic problems.

Malawi, which gained its independence by way of political mobilization from Britain in 1964, is one of the world’s poorest states largely dependent upon agricultural production of tobacco, tea and sugar for export. More than half the population lives below the poverty line. As a result of its dependency on external trade, the country has run large deficits hampering its capacity for long term social and economic planning.

Climate Change and the Need for Economic Independence

The warming of the planet including ocean waters is often blamed for the worsening impact of cyclones and other weather-related issues. In Mozambique, Biera, the fourth largest city, had taken precautions to guard against floods stemming from heavy rains.

According to an article by Cara Anna published in the Associated Press dispatches for March 29, it says:

“Long and narrow with a 2,400-kilometer (1,500-mile) Indian Ocean coastline, Mozambique is on the frontline of fighting climate change in Africa, where most nations have little infrastructure and funding to cope. Rapidly growing coastal cities like Beira are especially at risk. The mayor (Daviz Simango) called it unjust that African nations face some of the toughest challenges while contributing little to global warming. People in rich, industrialized nations produce much of the carbon dioxide and other gases that are warming the planet by burning the most coal, diesel, gasoline and jet fuel.” (See this)

Humanitarian agency Oxfam works in Malawi where Country Director, John Makina, noted:

“People have been left with nothing. They need help now and in the months and years ahead to rebuild their communities in a way, which equips them for a world where climate change means extreme weather events such as Idai happen more often. Idai is yet another deadly warning of the impact of unchecked climate change unless governments, particularly major emitters, fail to cut emissions fast.” (See this)

Malawi children displaced by cyclone Idai during March 2019

Therefore, continuing economic dependency and rapid climate change must be addressed as foreign policy issues which threaten the future development of Southern African states. This imperative requires continental collaboration between all African Union (AU) member-states along with mass organizations, religious institutions, trade unions and youth. These issues are political in that they require immediate attention and correction to insure that Africa reaches its full potential which will result in genuine independence and sustainability.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege in Gaza – also the 43rd anniversary of Land Day – Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joins Palestinians and people around the world in encouraging all supporters of justice to join in solidarity actions at this critical time. Land Day has been marked since 1976 not only to highlight Palestinians’ connection to the land and their struggle to liberate it from ongoing colonialism, but also to remember the six Palestinians slain on 30 March of that year in Palestine ’48 as they protested against land theft and confiscation.

Palestinians in Gaza, 70 percent of them refugees denied their right to return home, marked Land Day in 2018 with a massive march, bringing tens of thousands and even more to the colonially-imposed “border” and its associated “fence.” They demanded not only an end to the suffocating siege under which they have suffered for over a decade, progressively intensifying and persisting through three devastating wars. They also brought to the forefront the core of the Palestinian struggle for liberation: the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands confiscated by Zionist colonization. It is a struggle that belongs not only to the Palestinians in Gaza, but to all Palestinians around the world, especially those in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and those Palestinians dispersed even further from their homeland.

For organizing in a mass, collective demonstration highlighting this most fundamental Palestinian right, these demonstrators have faced brutal repression and killing for nearly one year. Medics, journalists, children, elders and people with disabilities have been shot down in cold blood by Israeli occupation forces as they protested for their right. And despite the killing, they have persisted and remained, marching each Friday to claim their rights in an uprising that has inspired people around the world, and especially Palestinians, with a clear commitment to achieving their goals: return and liberation.

Indeed, the Israeli occupation state has repeatedly attempted to pressure Palestinians into stopping the marches, through continuing and intensified siege, military attack and brutal military might. Despite the impunity Israeli officials enjoy and the unparalleled support they receive from the U.S. government and other world powers, the reality of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity has perhaps never been so clear, as was recently affirmed in a new report by an independent commission of the UN Human Rights Council.

In the context of the fragmentation of Palestinians, the Great March of Return, on Land Day, has once again highlighted that the Palestinian struggle is one struggle – from Palestinian citizens of Israel in ’48 Palestine, to those in Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in the Gaza Strip, in Jordan, in the camps in Lebanon and Syria and everywhere around the world in exile and diaspora. To this number must also be added the nearly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, who through continued struggle inside the prisons continue to confront the siege and isolation imposed upon them as well.

Palestinians killed by occupation forces in the Great March of Return, have – like those shot down in extrajudicial executions and assassinations in the West Bank – had their bodies imprisoned by the Israeli occupation in an attempt to extort political concessions from Palestinians. In addition, participants from the demonstrations have themselves been kidnapped and imprisoned inside Israeli jails. Palestinian refugees who continue to be denied their right to return to their homes and lands may enter Palestine ’48 only when shackled, bound, tortured and imprisoned by the colonizing power that has confiscated that land.

Every uprising and act of resistance inside Israeli prisons is part of the same struggle against siege and isolation that the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege represents. The Gaza Strip itself is often described as an “open-air prison,” the siege another form of colonial torture and isolation akin to that imposed on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The struggle to break the siege is a struggle to break all of the sieges encircling Palestinians, from the ever-intensifying racist campaigns of discrimination and exclusion in Palestine ’48, the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, the raids, killings and colonial settlements in the West Bank, the isolation of Palestinian refugees in the camps, the criminalization and repression of Palestinian activism worldwide.

Since 30 March 2018, the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed that Israeli occupation forces have killed 266 people, including 50 children, six women and one elderly man. 30,398 people have been injured, 16,027 seriously enough to be hospitalized. The hospitalized Palestinians include 3,175 children and 1,008 women. During the demonstrations, 6,857 Palestinians have been shot with live bullets and another 844 with rubber-coated metal bullets. 1,503 were shot in the head and neck, 7,731 in the legs and 732 in the chest and back; 136 Palestinians have gone through amputations as a result. (This reflects another version of the infamous policy of Israeli commander “Captain Nidal” in shooting and disabling the Palestinian youth in Dheisheh and Aida refugee camps near Bethlehem.)

Medics Razan al-Najjar, Abdullah al-Qati and Musa Abu Hassanein were killed by occupation forces and 665 more were injured; 112 ambulances were damaged. Two journalists, Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hussein, were killed and 347 more were wounded.

Despite this great price, Palestinians are continuing to march to break the siege, to win freedom for all, from the prisons to the camps to the streets, fields and shores of Gaza (where fishers and farmers risk death or imprisonment to ply their trade and support their families and communities.) They continue to march, most centrally, for their right to return home, for liberation for Palestine.

This weekend, we urge you to answer the calls for solidarity – to join the marches, events and demonstrations taking place around the world, to echo the calls of Palestinians from inside the prisons of the Israeli occupation and the open-air prison in Gaza for an end to the siege and for the right to return.

A list of events and activities is below. We know this list is not fully comprehensive, and we urge people to send their additional events and actions to us on Facebook or via email at [email protected]. Please join your local events and join in the uprising that Palestinians in Gaza have been leading for the past year – continuing over 100 years of anti-colonial Palestinian resistance.

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U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today called on the inspector general for the Department of the Interior to investigate Acting Secretary David Bernhardt’s role in blocking a scientific assessment showing the pesticide chlorpyrifos threatens the existence of nearly 1,400 protected species.

Bernhardt’s efforts to suppress the studies, which were completed in October 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, were revealed in a document obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity through the Freedom of Information Act. Those findings were highlighted in a New York Times investigation published this week.

“We welcome any effort to shed light on this disgraceful scandal,” said Brett Hartl, director of government affairs at the Center. “It’s disgusting that after pesticide companies asked for evidence of catastrophic harm to endangered species to be buried, Bernhardt gladly pulled out the shovels.”

The determination by Fish and Wildlife Service scientists that the insecticide jeopardizes 1,399 plants and animals on the endangered species list prompted no action by the Trump administration to curb its use. Instead the administration worked to undercut the findings and delay all further efforts to assess and reduce the impacts of pesticides on endangered species.

Wyden’s request comes a day after he questioned Bernhardt about the buried assessments during the acting secretary’s confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, of which Wyden is a senior member.

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Featured image is from Boise State Public Radio

Chinese President Xi Jinping returned to Beijing on Wednesday after his visit to Europe, bringing a fruitful outcome and the visit assures the cooperative trend of China-EU relations, analysts noted.

The outcome of Xi’s visit to Europe is “beyond expectations” and extremely “practical” in terms of deepening China-Europe relations. The visit sets the tone for the future of the relations, Chinese analysts noted on Wednesday.

At the conclusion of Xi’s visit, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Paris that through the visit, the Chinese president has shown Europe and the world that China is standing on the right side of history, and will continue to promote China-EU relations, safeguard multilateralism and guide the reform of global governance, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.

Xi’s visit to Europe injects new impetus in China-Europe relations, Geng Shuang, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told a daily briefing on Wednesday.

“China always views Europe as a comprehensive strategic partner and an indispensable global power. Together with Europe, we will fulfill multilateralism, increase stability and certainty in the world and inject more positive energy and impetus for international cooperation,” Geng said.

Xi visited Italy, Monaco and France from March 21 to 26 and held “unprecedented” talks on building new global governance with the leaders of France, Germany and the EU in Paris.

During the visit, Italy became the first Group of Seven nation to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and also agreed to return 796 sets of Chinese cultural relics. China and France signed an agreement on future space cooperation in Paris, allowing France to fly its experiments on the Chang’e-6 mission.

The application of 5G in Monaco, which will become the first country in the world to be fully covered by a nationwide 5G mobile network, promotes China’s efforts in information infrastructure construction in Europe, analysts noted.

‘Icebreaker’

Overall, Xi’s visit to Europe was “fruitful” and the outcome “beyond expectations,” Ding Chun, director of the Center for European Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

In particular, Xi’s meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker not only reinforced bilateral ties but also sets the tone for the future of China-Europe relations, Ding said.

China and Europe are not “rivals” as the “EU-China: Strategic Outlook” issued by the European Commission described, but “partners,” Ding said.

From the articles and speeches Xi made, European leaders and people could feel the determination and sincerity that China has toward China-Europe relations and Xi’s charm in handling diplomatic matters, which is another prominent outcome of the visit, said Zhao Junjie, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of European Studies.

Xi’s visit to Italy brought BRI to a new level. The cooperation with Italy, as a major Europe nation, will be an icebreaker for the BRI to extend to the European continent, Zhao told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The BRI’s end point, either the maritime Silk Road or land Silk Road, is Europe, which cannot be replaced by other regions. But most European countries continue to hold a wait-and-see attitude, Zhao explained.

On March 23, Italy signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China to jointly advance the construction of the BRI.

Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said the deals were worth an initial 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) but had a potential value of 20 billion, Reuters reported.

(From left) Chinese President Xi Jinping, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Italian Labour and Industry Minister Luigi Di Maio and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at the signing ceremony in Rome on Saturday. Photo: AFP

Under the framework, the BRI will be continuously enriched with trade deals and investments. Italy’s olive oil and agricultural tourism would be new growth points for bilateral ties and China might invest in the port city of Trieste, Zhao said.

Trieste could be a key point of the Belt and Road Initiative, especially 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in Europe, which can spread benefits to more regions like southern and western Europe, Zhao said.

Germany expressed its willingness to participate in the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing in April, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Some European countries remain concerned on issues like reciprocity, but EU members are open to learn about the initiative, so if they find the BRI truly mutually beneficial, their stance could be changed, Feng Zhongping, director of European Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.

During Xi’s European visit, he also mentioned an increase in third-party market cooperation under the BRI project, which Zhao said would offer new opportunities for European nations interested in BRI to work with China in new markets.

Feng said that “some problems between China and the EU can’t be totally solved in one night, and issues like market access, transfer of technology and intellectual property still need to be addressed.”

After China passes its foreign investment law, European countries will find more opportunities and equal treatment in China, so this could be a positive sign, Feng noted.

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Featured image: Chinese President Xi Jinping (second from left), French President Emmanuel Macron (second from right), German Chancellor Angela Merkel (first from right) and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker attend the closing ceremony of a global governance forum co-hosted by China and France in Paris, France on Tuesday. Photo: Xinhua

Theresa May’s no-deal/deal went down by a 344 – 286 margin. Did her latest defeat signal three strikes and she’s out – her coup de grace of no return?

Britain has until April 12 to crash out of the EU with no deal or remain a bloc member, abandoning Brexit sine die, MPs strongly rejecting the former option.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, May offered to resign if MPs backed her no-deal/deal. As things now stand, she’ll likely either step down voluntarily or be pushed in the coming days, her tenure as prime minister since July 2016 pockmarked with failure.

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn called for new elections, stressing Britain won’t leave the EU without an acceptable deal, adding if May refuses to accept that, she has to go.

She called the implications of her third defeat “grave,” saying Britain is scheduled to leave the EU on April 12, adding she’ll continue pressing for an “orderly Brexit” – a notion she opposed all along without admitting it publicly as prime minister.

Other MPs called Brexit dead, wanting Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty revoked, stating:

“1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.”

“2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.”

“That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.”

“3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.”

“4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.”

“A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.”

“5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.”

In January 2017, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled against fast-tracking Brexit, saying “the government cannot trigger Article 50 without Parliament authorizing that course.” It’s for MPs to decide, not the PM or UK voters.

So far, MPs rejected eight variations of May’s no-deal/deal this week. On Monday, they’ll vote perhaps for the last time on still another alternative.

Before Friday’s vote, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow ruled that May could not call for a third vote without substantially changing her plan.

She split her no-deal/deal apart. Friday’s vote was on a transition period post-Brexit if occurs. Omitted for a future vote was the hard part – a declaration on Britain’s relationship with the EU if it leaves the bloc.

Her strategy let her circumvent Bercow’s ruling, accomplishing nothing else. Losing for the third time likely drove the final stake into Brexit.

Only its obituary remains to be written, along with postmortems about nearly three wasted years of parliamentary debates and negotiations with Brussels.

May’s days as prime minister are numbered. She and Brexit are doomed – the latter long before Friday’s vote.

Note: If majority MPs have a change of heart on Monday, agreeing to accept May’s deal after all, perhaps with minor changes, it’ll still be a no-deal/deal.

It’ll amount to Britain pretending to leave the bloc – doing it in name only, not in fact.

No wonder, millions of Brits, a likely majority, are fed up with what’s gone on, wanting either a new referendum or revoking Article 50, abandoning Brexit altogether.

I’ve favored a hard Brexit all along, a clean break, walking away and not looking back. Disruption would likely be much less severe than Brexit opponents claim, along with being relatively short-term.

Britain is a leading European country. Others on the continent surely want current economic, financial, and trade relations maintained. It’s mutually beneficial to all European nations to have things this way.

A year post-hard Brexit if occurs, Britain’s relationship with EU member states would likely be much the same as now.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Saudi nuclear power ambitions are well known. For months, the Trump and Saudi regimes have been negotiating the sale of US nuclear technology to the kingdom.

Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott explained that any country operating nuclear power plants “can theoretically manufacture 40 (nuclear) bombs a year” by producing plutonium, the fuel for nukes.

According to nuclear security expert Matthew Fuhrmann,

“(a)ny nuclear technology could be used for legitimate civilian things like producing electricity or making medical isotopes to treat cancer patients, but that same technology can give countries the ability to make nuclear weapons,” adding:

“You always want to think about what the possibilities might be, that a country may try and use things that were provided for peaceful purposes down the road towards military ends.”

The US intelligence community is concerned about whether Riyadh’s interest in nuclear power plants goes beyond wanting another energy source.

Israel is the region’s only nuclear armed and dangerous state, its open secret revealed long ago. Giving ruthlessly dangerous Saudi crown prince/de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) access to technology able to produce nuclear weapons would be madness.

Earlier he said if Iran “developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible” – knowing the Islamic Republic abhors these weapons, wanting them eliminated.

According to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Trump regime relations with the Saudis are “shrouded in secrecy,” Jared Kushner directly involved MBS. He once said he’s got Trump’s son-in-law “in his pocket.”

DLT, his children and Kushner prioritize wealth and power. Saudi Arabia is a super-wealthy family dictatorship masquerading as a nation state.

Trump has gone all-out to assure nothing interferes with US/Saudi business and political relations. He’s had longstanding business ties to the kingdom, including distress sales to royal family members when needing cash to meet debt obligations.

He pursues maximum Saudi revenues flowing to US corporate interests. The House Oversight and Reform Committee earlier said his regime is fast-tracking “the transfer of highly sensitive US nuclear technology” to the kingdom without required congressional review – in violation of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, US law regulating civilian and military uses of nuclear material.

The NEA prohibits the transfer of US technology to another country if there’s a risk it can be used to develop nukes. The NEA’s Section 123 states that nuclear technology transfers abroad are subject to congressional approval.

According to Reuters,

“US Energy Secretary Rick Perry has approved six secret authorizations by companies to sell nuclear power technology and assistance to Saudi Arabia, according to a copy of a document seen by (the news service) on Wednesday,” adding:

“Perry’s approvals, known as Part 810 authorizations, allow companies to do preliminary work on nuclear power ahead of any deal, but not ship equipment that would go into a plant, a source with knowledge of the agreements said on condition of anonymity.”

A Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) statement said

“each of the companies which received a specific authorization for (Saudi Arabia) have provided us written request that their authorization be withheld from public release.”

During House Energy and Commerce Committee testimony, Mike Pompeo was accused of attempting to circumvent congressional control over nuclear technology sales to foreign nations.

Senators Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio asked the Government Accountability Office to review Energy Department negotiations with the Saudis to determine if federal laws were violated.

Last week, Bush/Cheney envoy to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan said if the transfer of US nuclear technology to the kingdom “already occurred, or is being discussed, it’s likely in violation of the Atomic Energy Act section 123.”

It requires congressional approval for sales of nuclear technology to foreign governments – prohibiting use of the technology for development of nuclear weapons.

In dealing with a regime like the Saudis, its agreement to AEA section 123 won’t be worth the paper it’s written on. Like the US, NATO and Israel, the Saudis do whatever they please, defying rule of law principles.

The oil rich kingdom has no need for nuclear power as an energy source for its 33 million people. According to Fuhrmann, from its standpoint, it’s logical to believe the Saudis have a “strong strategic incentive to want nuclear weapons.”

The White House has been secretive about the kind of nuclear technology it seeks to sell the Saudis, noting it’s “highly sensitive,” the comment raising an obvious red flag.

As congressional approval is required for the sale or transfer of US nuclear technology to other countries, it’s up to its bipartisan leadership to block its sale to the Saudis.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Following an aggressive public relations campaign in which union officials questioned GM’s loyalty to ‘Canadian taxpayers’, General Motors has apparently agreed to keep its Oshawa facility partially open. No official announcement has yet been made, but there are rumours of a revised plan to retain 600-700 workers by investing $100-million to stamp the cargo beds for pick-up trucks.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about both this rumour and this plan. But even if true, before a desperate workforce reluctantly accepts that ‘some jobs, however few, are better than nothing’, more ambitious thinking should be considered.

The Oshawa facility currently supports 5,700-6,000 jobs: GM directly employs 2,200 hourly workers and some 500 salaried workers, with other companies employing over 3,000 to supply components (some working right inside the Oshawa facility). The new proposal means cutting this total by upwards of 5,000 jobs or 85 per cent.

Thinking Bigger

A little over a generation ago, GM alone employed 23,000 hourly and office workers in the city. The steady decline to GM’s current numbers was accompanied, each step of the way, by the consolation that ‘well, at least some of the jobs remained’. The continuation of that fatalistic and dispiriting response will leave Oshawa – even if the rumours of the stamping plant are correct – at only 3 per cent of the earlier peak.

With this loss of jobs comes a damaging loss of productive capacity – the potential to apply workers’ collective skills to make socially useful products. In the mid-1980s GM Oshawa was the largest auto complex in North America, with three assembly plants turning out some 750,000 vehicles annually while also manufacturing its own axles, batteries, and radiators.

Tony Leah, a maintenance welder in Oshawa, notes that if the rumours of an expanded stamping plant come to pass, the expanded stamping capacity would still occupy only “a tiny piece of the remaining 9-10 million square foot Oshawa complex… all of the assembly process equipment, technology, and space – Body Plant, Chassis Plant, Paint Shop, Supplier Park – [will] remain empty.”

The Unifor leadership deserves credit for pushing GM off its original ‘non-negotiable’ declaration that a complete closure was a done deal. Yet it also shows the limits of its overall strategy. The concessions made during the last round of bargaining were to no avail but contributed to weakening workers’ confidence to resist. The enthusiasm for the security the new trade agreement with the USA and Mexico would bring was badly misplaced. The same goes for a campaign primarily focused on hiring a public relations firm and choosing the main tactic as boycotting GM vehicles from Mexico.

It was of course always a stretch to expect GM to reverse itself on so fundamental a strategic decision as ending vehicle assembly in Oshawa. This might well have been the case even with a massive mobilization of autoworkers and the community. That’s why posing possibilities beyond GM was so critical. The union’s refusal to explore broader opportunities, ones that reached beyond GM, reflected a disheartening failure of imagination, a failure that reinforced a steady lowering of expectations on the part of the union leadership, its members, and the community more generally.

The politicians have been worse. Provincially, the Doug Ford government – fresh from putting up billboards declaring Ontario ‘open for business’ and frantic to get the negative reality of Oshawa out of the spotlight – meekly repeated GM’s mantra of Oshawa being ‘a done deal’. The Federal government, with which the union leadership claimed a special relationship, was only a few rhetorical steps behind in trying to dampen hopes.

Is a stamping plant really the best we can aspire to? After all the lamentations about Canada’s over-dependence on resources, and the recurrent task forces on developing a manufacturing base, how can we let those facilities we already have – like the Oshawa complex – fade away with so little resistance and popular outrage? And more directly: If the stamping plant does materialize, why would we give up on the rest of this massive complex?

A Tale of Conflicting Perspectives

Let’s start with General Motors’ decision to leave. The Oshawa plant is split between cars and trucks. GM has been losing interest in producing cars in Canada and the USA because their profit margins are low. Better, from GM’s perspective, to build those cars – or when the transformation to electric vehicles occurs – in Mexico or China.

As for the highly profitable trucks, GM is trying to sell as many of these as it can before environmental limits put the brakes on such sales. But the model Oshawa got in exchange for concessions was an older one that some had already seen as having only a transitional lifespan of perhaps 18 months until the new models were geared up in other plants. In any case, for GM a half empty plant (i.e. after car production goes) is a liability. More profitable from where the corporation sits is rationalizing capacity across all its operations and reallocating Oshawa’s remaining production elsewhere.

According to business consultants, and readily confirmed by the corporation, the Oshawa facilities regularly ranked at or near the top of all of GM’s operations in terms of productivity and quality. In the end, however, this turned out to not matter all that much. There’s a lesson here of note for workers everywhere: there comes a point when we must think beyond putting all our hopes in private corporations with interests antagonistic to our own.

Where the union disappointed was in refusing to come to grips with the fact that GM was no longer the salvation for working people, and in consequently not exploring – even as a last resort – other options. It rested with GM’s Oshawa retirees to pose the crucial question of a reorientation that went beyond appealing to GM.

The retirees noted the centrality of the accumulated sweat of workers to GM’s accumulated profits. They pointed as well to the mind-numbing $11-billion contribution the Canadian public made to keeping GM alive during the financial crisis. They especially took into consideration GM’s loss of interest in the facility. This led to the straightforward moral and practical conclusion of placing the facility and its equipment in public hands, and the retirees passed a resolution to that effect. The hourly workers followed by passing a similar resolution at a subsequent membership meeting.

This response is to be commended, but those votes involved a small fraction of GM retirees and workers. And though the local leadership did not oppose the resolutions, neither did they give them any profile. No public statements were issued to broadcast the resolutions, and they weren’t even reported on the local’s website. The national union paid zero attention to the resolutions.

The dismissive reaction of the local and national leadership was no doubt made easier by the fact that in itself, ‘nationalization’ alone is not enough of an answer. Though the sentiment broke with the union’s public relations response, enthusiasm is difficult to generate without a plan for what might follow. What needed elaboration was what a nationalized facility like that in Oshawa might actually produce.

What do Canadians need, and do the workers in Oshawa have the capacities and skills to produce such equipment and goods? If not, can those abilities be developed? And what role should all levels of government have in bringing those needs and capacities together?

Imagining a Credible Alternative

If workers came together in a room and brainstormed about what they might produce with some external support, they would likely come up with a significant list, some suggestions being stronger than others. Why not make some of the things we currently import? Why can’t we make some of the products that government and para-government institutions like schools and hospitals purchase? Could, for example, a part of the Oshawa facility make products needed by our aging population – could it make wheel chairs, wheel mobility scooters, disability ramps, home lifts, accessibility beds, oxygen treatment equipment?

The environmental crisis in particular holds out the promise of all kinds of potential jobs. If we are to prevent or at least limit the looming environmental catastrophe, it is clear that everything about how we work, live, travel, and transport goods will have to be transformed. Everything. This ranges across the accelerated production of wind turbines and solar panels; energy saving lighting, heat pumps, small motors and generators for energy transmission; energy efficient doors and windows as well as modified appliances for every home and office; electric cars and electric fleets of utility vehicles.

The last example – fleets of electric utility vehicles – seems the most obvious alternative for an assembly plant. Public vehicles will inevitably have to be electrified or run on renewable energy resources, and this means a growing market for electric post office vans for mail and package delivery (as suggested by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers), hydro vehicles doing maintenance and repair work, minibuses to supplement public transit, the electric scooters mentioned above for seniors and people with disabilities, and electrified vehicles in agriculture, mining, and construction.

With the stamping plant confined to a small part of the plant, the assembly of fleets of electric utility vehicles could occupy the main part of the plant. This might even give the stamping plant additional work making stampings for the fleets. Particularly important, it would mean that the life of the complex would not end if GM suddenly (but not surprisingly) decided that it would rather close the stamping plant and sell the larger facility to developers looking to build condos. If, with the fleet vehicles and the (rumoured) stamping plant excess capacity still remained, the unutilized subsections of the plant could focus on addressing the miscellaneous aging and environmental-related products cited above, or other products workers might come up with.

Much of the needed equipment and skills already exist in the Oshawa plant. The components sector, especially where GM work is being lost, has the ability and flexibility to shift to supporting parts for these vehicles. Further high-tech support could be brought together from the tool and die industry, metal fabricating, aerospace (propulsion systems, materials), the Waterloo computer corridor, and Canada’s experienced engineering and construction firms (all the more so if scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin were also made into a public enterprise!).

Moreover, an Oshawa complex converted to ‘green production’ and looking to the future might also include hiring hundreds of young engineers working on-site to consider what other needs and capacities might be developed. This would have the added advantage of contributing to building a national planning capacity to convert other threatened closings – of which there will be many – as well as generating new technologies and products which could help alleviate the environmental crisis.

From Ideas to Implementation

The indispensable condition for achieving the conversion of the GM Oshawa plant and keeping the jobs lies with the commitment of the Oshawa workers. No one else is as equipped to lead this fight and place an alternative on the agenda.

Moving to think bigger can be intimidating. But it seems criminal not to at least try and keep Oshawa alive. Furthermore, the history of the past few decades in auto and elsewhere convincingly shows that unless workers take a strong collective decision, things will keep getting worse.

If the workforce does organize itself around an alternative for the GM plant, the next step will be to rally other workers and potential allies. The recent teacher mobilizations in California provide an inspiration and a blueprint for building diversified community coalitions to limit corporate power and win support from the mayor and city council. With such support GM could be blocked from moving its equipment or selling the land (the build-out dates as of now seem to be the last quarter of this year), and the facility could instead be converted to a municipally-owned facility producing socially useful and environmentally-essential products.

This would clearly require substantial support from the provincial and federal governments to have their agencies purchase the Oshawa products and to fast-track the use of electric fleets. Both layers of government would also be critical to providing finance, developing needed skills, supporting a transport redevelopment agency to chart, facilitate, and monitor transport redesign, and developing a planning capacity that can address new closures next time they occur – and there will be no shortage of such ‘next times’ in auto and elsewhere.

Of course, Queen’s Park and Ottawa will not easily jump in. But facing a public campaign, the provincial government may be vulnerable to pressure given its promise of providing new manufacturing jobs and in the face of popular reaction to Ford’s massive cuts in jobs and services in health, education, and public transport. And the federal Liberals – weakened by the SNC-Lavalin scandal and with an election coming up – have offered a lot of rhetoric on both the environment and defending workers but have fallen far short of dramatic action on both counts.

It is unlikely that any such massive project would go forward without a feasibility study to show that all this is not just pie-in-the-sky. The crucial point is that addressing ‘feasibility’ is not a technical issue but a matter of struggling over the most basic principles that should govern our society. It cannot mean asking how much profit the facility would generate in competition with Mexico, China – or the USA and Europe for that matter. We have seen where such criteria take us. Rather, it demands another set of questions:

• What are the wider social benefits of the products being produced (are the products socially useful; do they contribute to addressing the pressing environmental crisis)?
• Can this project provide well-paying jobs with dignity for working people?
• Can the workers involved do the job effectively and at high quality?
• Does the project develop the future capacity of Canada to respond to future economic and social restructuring?

Conclusion

GM was bailed out on the assumption it would return the favour with sustained employment. It’s now the workers’ turn to be supported – in this case, however, with a social plan that benefits the entire community and not just a private corporation that can move on when the wind changes.

But first the Oshawa autoworkers must take a stand. They will need to put their own stamp on the remarkable resistance that has flowered elsewhere. Something historic is happening around the world – sometimes with dark and negative undercurrents, but at its best, inspiring and hopeful. Frustrations are overflowing over the loss of control over daily life, the growing inequalities and shrinking democracy, the perpetual insecurity, and the narrowing of hope across generations.

Fighting back has no guarantees, only possibilities worth considering and trying. Will Oshawa join this world-wide rebellion and find their own constructive way to say a loud ‘No!’ to the unrelenting lowering of expectations followed by a louder ‘Yes!’ to once again raising and creating new possibilities?

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A recent series of Russian strikes on positions of militant groups in the Syrian province of Idlib has once again caused a wave of mainstream media reports regarding civilian casualties caused by Russian bombings. According to “local activists” quoted by media, the Idlib strikes led to tens of civilian casualties. There are no MSM reports about casualties among members of militant groups or destruction of their infrastructure.

Since the very start of the Russian military operation in Syria, Russia has been under fire over its usage of unguided weapons – missiles and bombs – as a main mean of engagement. The key idea repeated by Western diplomats, military officials and media in various formats is the following:

While the US-led coalition carries out pinpoint strikes with precision weaponry, the Russian Aerospace Forces employ indiscriminate strikes with unguided bombs, which are often being dropped from high altitudes.

Both the US and Russia accuse each other in causing civilian casualties and humanitarian crises in Syria on a constant basis. Besides this, Washington and its allies have a much wider understanding of the term “moderate opposition” than Moscow has ever had.

A significant difference can also be observed on the level of employed weapon systems and munitions.

A guided bomb or a “smart bomb” is the type of bombs with guidance and control systems. Some versions even have small rocket engines increasing their range and control over their flight.

Guided weapons cost much more than their unguided counterparts, but supposedly allow to put fewer air crews at risk, spent less ordnance and reduce collateral damage. The creation of precision-guided munitions resulted in the retroactive renaming of older bombs as unguided bombs or “dumb bombs”; with these “dumb bombs” actively being used by Russia.

In August 2017, Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Lieutenant General Igor Makushev revealed that 50% of basic missions for wiping out militant facilities by airstrikes in Syria were performed by Su-24M bombers and Su-25SM attack aircraft. These aircrafts were designed to provide a fire support for ground forces and were using unguided weapons massively. Besides them, 250kg and 500kg unguided munitions were actively employed against infrastructure belonging to ISIS in eastern Syria by Tu-22M3 strategic bombers.

What mainstream media does not cover is that while the Russian Aerospace Forces massively used “dumb bombs”, the strikes themselves were “smart”. Russian warplanes employ specialized computer sub-system SVP-24 Gefest, which allows the use of unguided munitions as high-precision weapons.

Prior SVP-24 modernization of guidance systems were focused on the targets positioning. This is a road to the further increase the complexity and cost of employed weapons. The system incorporates a difference concept; it focused on the positioning of weapon carriers.

SVP-24 analyzes data of the GLONASS satellite navigation grouping on the mutual location of the aircraft and the target, takes into account the level of atmospheric pressure, air humidity, wind speed, the flight velocity, and some other factors to calculate the route, speed and altitude of dropping air-launched munitions, after which the warplane reaches a pre-determined position and conducts the strike in almost an automatic mode.

SVP-24 receives additional data from airborne early warning and control aircraft, like the A-50, other warplanes, and ground detection stations.

According to the Russian military, the usage of the SVP-24 ensured the efficiency of striking enemy installations with unguided bombs comparable with the accuracy of using smart bombs. The bombing accuracy is 4-7m from the altitude of 5-6km. Furthermore, aircraft with SVP-24 are capable of conducting strikes in free maneuver, out of the range of enemy’s local air defense.

Besides the obvious economic advantage of this approach, the SV-24 became one of the factors which allowed the Russian air group in Syria to increase the number of combat sorties per aircraft.

In one of the hottest years of the conflict – 2016, the Russians had about 70 aircraft deployed for operations (46-48 at Hmeimim and 32-36 from Admiral Kuznetsov). This group was conducting approximately 70-80 combat sorties per day. Therefore, one Russian combat aircraft was involved in at least one combat sortie per day.

At the same time, according to the Pentagon’s data, aircraft of the US-led coalition made about 19.68 combat sorties per day. Taking into account that the coalition had about 180 aircraft deployed for operations, one coalition aircraft was involved in 0.1 combat sortie per day.

These numbers lead to expected questions: Who was really fighting terrorists in Syria? And who was making money and perceiving its own political interests?

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Translated from the Spanish by Global Research. 

“A confession from [America’s] puppet pointing to evidence,” said journalist Gustavo Villapol Wednesday, noting that the deputy of the National Assembly in contempt Juan Guaidó confessed to be behind the attacks perpetrated against the National Electric Service (SEN) that have affected the Venezuelan people since last March 7.  

“The gentleman, Deputy Guaidó, has told the world that they are behind this devious and terrorist attack against the Electric System,” he said during an interview on the Punto de Encuentro program broadcast by Venezolana de Televisión.

[These are the quotations from Guaido’s statements at the National Assembly, video below  13′ 11″ – 14′ 09″,  GR editor]

“And I repeat, the cessation of darkness will definitely come with the cessation of usurpation,” culminates the self-proclaimed Juan Guaidó (VTV Fotogram)

“There will be no solution to the electrical problem, there will be no water to the houses much less domestic gas”. the parliamentarian of Voluntad Popular stated verbatim.

“We will generate the necessary internal pressure to add up in this process of definitive cessation of the usurpation,” he is heard saying in the video broadcast from the floor of the Federal Legislative Palace.

“And I repeat, the cessation of darkness will definitely come with the cessation of usurpation,” culminated his TV intervention.
Journalist Gustavo Villapol described Guaidó as a symbolic expression of the new political-military doctrine that Donald Trump is trying to develop from the presidency of the United States (USA).

Original Spanish text below

Title: Guaido confesó estar detrás del sabotaje eléctrico

“A confesión de títere relevo de pruebas”, afirmó este miércoles el periodista Gustavo Villapol, al advertir que el diputado de la Asamblea Nacional en desacato Juan Guaidó confesó estar detrás de los atentados perpetrados contra el Servicio Eléctrico Nacional (SEN) que han afectado al pueblo venezolano desde el pasado 7 de marzo.

“El señorito diputado Guaidó ha expresado al mundo que ellos están detrás de este ataque artero y terrorista contra el Sistema Eléctrico”, dijo durante una entrevista en el programa Punto de Encuentro que transmite Venezolana de Televisión.

• “No habrá solución al problema eléctrico, no habrá agua a las casas mucho menos gas doméstico”. manifestó textualmente el parlamentario de Voluntad Popular.
• “Vamos a generar la presión interna necesaria para ir sumando en este proceso de cese definitivo de la usurpación”, se le oye decir en el video transmitido desde el hemiciclo del Palacio Federal Legislativo.
• “Y lo repito, el cese de la oscuridad vendrá definitivamente con el cese de la usurpación”, culminó su intervención en el audiovisual.

Villapol calificó a Guaidó como expresión simbólica de la nueva doctrina política-militar que está intentando desarrollar Donald Trump desde la presidencia de Estados Unidos (EE.UU.).

Access complete Spanish text here

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Hundreds of migrants are being held by border agents in a fenced in encampment under a bridge in El Paso, leading to anger and accusations that the American government is holding people in “concentration camps.”

Images posted online by reporters and advocates painted a disturbing scene in the Texas city. Lines of migrants behind fencing, being processed by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), walked into a camp area that appeared to be standing room only.

This is what the Paso Del Norte Border Patrol station in El Paso looks like today. The queue of migrants who turned themselves in is stretched to the parking lot. pic.twitter.com/PTSblYP74R

— Valerie Gonzalez (@ValOnTheBorder) March 27, 2019

Reporters from The Washington Post caught pictures of crowds of migrants behind fencing.

This is El Paso right now, where hundreds of migrant families are being held in the parking lot of a Border Patrol station because there is no room for them inside, or anywhere else. pic.twitter.com/lFGZ9zRcZk

— Nick Miroff (@NickMiroff) March 27, 2019

Hundreds of migrants are being held under the Paso Del Norte Bridge in El Paso, near the site of @CBP Commissioner McAleenan’s press conference. pic.twitter.com/FeHWauFD53

— Bob Moore (@BobMooreNews) March 27, 2019

The encampment, which is referred to by CBP as a “transitional shelter,” was set up in the last month according to reporting from Buzzfeed.

“The tent that is set up underneath the Paso Del Norte port of entry and adjacent to the Border Patrol’s Processing Facility is a transitional shelter,” a CBP spokesperson told the outlet. “Due to the large volume of apprehensions within the El Paso Station’s Area of Responsibility, the agency has undertaken additional measures to facilitate processing.”

Photos of the hundreds of people held at the site spread over social media on Wednesday. The publicity came alongside an appearance at El Paso by CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan, who said that the border was “at its breaking point.”

“CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border,” said McAleenan, “and nowhere has that crisis manifested more acutely than here in El Paso.”

As a number of immigration advocates pointed out, that’s a hard sell in 2019 given the amount of border crossings two decades ago—crossings peaked at 1.6 million a year in 2000. The conditions in El Paso reminded some observers of the worst of humanity.

“This is a fucking concentration camp,” writer Lauren Hough said on Twitter. “We are running concentration camps.”

This is a fucking concentration camp. We are running concentration camps. https://t.co/D6KVPNgY04

— Lauren Hough (@laurenthehough) March 28, 2019

“It’s appalling,” said Women’s March communications director Sophie Ellman-Golan.

This looks like a concentration camp. It’s appalling.

— Sophie Ellman-Golan (@EgSophie) March 28, 2019

Meanwhile, according to reporting from The Texas Tribune, CBP pulled 750 agents from across Texas’s southern border’s ports of entry to El Paso to help with processing. There is no return date as yet for those agents, raising concerns that the border will become even more closed off in the near future.

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The BRICS New Development Bank is having its Annual General Meeting on 1-2 April, here in South Africa. There’s information about the meeting here, including public sessions. Critics meet to discuss the Bank on 31 March – 3 June in Cape Town and Johannesburg, especially to interrogate bank loans to South Africa.

The more we look at this institution, the more its rhetoric on sustainability and claims to offer an alternative approach to that of the Bretton Woods Institutions grate. The World Bank has a new leader, David Malpass, following a quite disastrous run by ex-leftist Jim Yong Kim (as predicted when he took up the post in 2012). With Malpass in the lead we can predict abundant hypocrisy when it comes to South African corruption, especially in Eskom and Transnet, as described in the attached files. To his credit, Malpass was honest, back in 2017:

Malpass: “They’re often corrupt in their lending practices, and they don’t get the benefit to the actual people in the countries. They get the benefit to the people who fly in on a first-class airplane ticket to give advice to the government officials in the country, that flow of money is large, but not so much the actual benefit to normal people within poor countries, and that’s what I’d like to see change.”

Rep. Maxine Waters:“Do you have an example of that?”

Malpass: “Well, for example, we have countries such as South Africa that are deteriorating rapidly as their government is unable to provide efficiency and effectiveness… South Africa is heavily indebted and not making progress and is not being well served by its relationships with international financial institutions.”

True! South Africans are pushing the Bank to write off its largest-ever loan now: Eskom’s Medupi, a $3.75bn corruption-riddled coal-fired power station, a garantuan white elephant. Last Sunday, a national tv town-hall show – The Big Debate – explored this question of lender liability.

Just as Donald Trump appointed the idiot Malpass with no BRICS opposition, Jair Bolsonaro will appoint the next BRICS Bank president.

The BRICS Bank is facing the same questions about Odious Debt in relation to the loan to Transnet, to expand the main Durban harbour. But BRICS NDB Compliance Officer Srinivas Yanamandra is in corruption-denial, as you see from correspondence which ended yesterday. He convicingly shows that the BRICS NDB cannot be reasoned with.

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Professor Patrick Bond teaches political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Even though we now know there is zero evidence Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, neocon talking heads are still babbling about the discredited conspiracy theory and working it into facile monologues. 

For instance, Samatha Vinograd, a “national security” analyst at Propaganda One, CNN. Ms. Vinograd is a former Obama NSC member and a former senior advisor to the president, a David E. Rockefeller Fellow at the Trilateral Commission, a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council where the Russian collusion nonsense is kept alive, and also a facilitator of fascist relationships—public-private (see “Economic Fascism” by DiLorenzo)—in service to the vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, Goldman Sachs. 

Former Goldman Sachs banker & Obama official turned pro-war CNN mouthpiece @sam_vinograd chides Trump for not forcing (directly attacking) Russia to leave Syria and Venezuela while neo-colonist host @vausecnn bemoans he doesn't enforce the Monroe Doctrine pic.twitter.com/OJvXiODnw6

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) March 29, 2019

There is very little the US can do about Russia in its “backyard”—and it has no internationally recognized right to do so unless Russia directly threatens the United States, which it has not (unless we consider delivering humanitarian aid to starving Venezuelans an act of war, as the neocons do). 

Vinograd is not simply another attractive young talking head selling the establishment line on foreign policy. As noted above, she is a Trilateralist and a member of The Atlantic Council. This means what she tells us during this interview will more than likely be adopted in some form or other by the Trump administration, now fully neo-conized at the highest levels. 

It is important to note Vinograd’s opening remark combines a criticism of the president’s performance and also the debunked and discredited Russian election collusion op engineered by a petulant Hillary Clinton and the DNC to take down the duly elected president of the United States. 

It’s not that Vinograd doesn’t know about the Mueller investigation summary admitting the special inquisitor doesn’t have a case against Trump. Rather it is an attempt to move away from that reality and continue to target the New Hitler, Vladimir Putin. This is the new meal ticket for the military-industrial-surveillance complex now that the artificially manufactured Islamic State is almost “defeated” in Syria. The government long ago stopped promoting peace dividends. 

Now we have the ever-pugnacious John Bolton, neocon foreign policy demagogue and special national security adviser to the president. Bolton told Russia the US government and its owners lay claim to the Western Hemisphere. 

“We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela,” said Bolton, “or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or expanding military operations… We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace and security in the region.”

Neocon John can only get away with saying this due to the lamentable fact most Americans are almost entirely clueless on the history of US intervention in Central and South America. If they knew anything about the coups, election rigging, paramilitary death squads, and and massive corruption they might think twice about what Bolton said. 

Bolton’s threat came two days after Trump said, “all options are on the table” in regard to Russia’s presence in Venezuela. In typical Trumpian fashion—somewhere between a mob boss and a festooned carnival barker—the president demanded Russia “get out” of Caracas. He made the remark in Washington during a meeting with Fabiana Rosales, the wife of Juan Guaido. 

Putin checkmated Trump and his neocons—for now. On March 25 Venezuela said, “self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido and other opposition leaders were involved in a plot to carry out acts of terrorism employing foreign paramilitaries trained in Colombia,” according to sources at Venezuelananlysis.com. 

According to [Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez], Venezuelan intelligence services uncovered plans to contract mercenaries from Colombia and Central America and bring them into Venezuela to execute targeted killings and acts of sabotage, adding that “at least half” of the armed groups managed to make their way into Venezuelan territory and are currently being sought.

If Venezuela’s intelligence is accurate, one the largest private banks in the country served as a paymaster for these mercenary terrorists. 

The [Whatsapp] screen captures [on the phone of Guaido’s arrested chief of staff, Roberto Marrero] also revealed details of alleged bank accounts through which payments to the paramilitary groups were supposed to be made. One of them was in Banesco’s Panama branch. Banesco is Venezuela’s largest private bank, and Rodriguez called on Banesco owner Ricardo Escotet to inform security services whether this account exists and what movements have been made.

President Trump is known for his impatience. He wants to do something now about Venezuela and its massive oil reserve, the largest in the world. Russia is in Caracas to foil any attempt to outright invade the country and provide assistance to track down mercenaries plotting to stage violence and terror attacks. 

The neoliberal masterminds with their neocon collaborators behind US foreign policy know going to war with Russia is not doable. They believe a “democratic revolution” in Venezuela from below—using the usual NED and subversion NGO partners—or short of that a violent coup attempt, are not possible if Russia stands in the way, as it did in Syria. 

For now, we will continue to hear neocons like Bolton and globalist insiders like Vinograd declaring Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine are still in force and represent the will of the American people, which is of course a wagonload of manure. 

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Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from South China Morning Post

That the “final stronghold” of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) resides in US occupied territory in Syria says it all.

From US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memos dating back to 2012 noting efforts to create a “Salafist” [Islamic] “principality” [State] in eastern Syria precisely where ISIS rose and now clings to its “final stronghold,” to the obvious fact that ISIS’ fighting capacity was only possible through extensive state sponsorship – it was already clear that the US and its partners in regime change against Syria had been using terrorists including ISIS as proxy ground forces.

Now the US claims it has cornered and is on the verge of defeating ISIS – despite the terrorist group having been cleared out of virtually every other corner of the nation by Syrian, Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces long ago.

In reality, the US is merely liquidating assets it had harbored, protected, armed, and funded throughout the 8 year proxy war until no longer politically feasible.

CNN in its article, “Thousands of ISIS troops surrender amid attack on final stronghold in Syria,” uncritically claims:

At its height, ISIS controlled huge swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. The US-led coalition has been working for years to oust the group from cities and towns.

CNN omits entirely any mention of the source of ISIS’ fighting capacity and the fact that its supply lines led directly out of NATO-member Turkey and was overseen by US special forces and intelligence agencies.

CNN also omits that it wasn’t until the 2015 Russian military intervention when Russian air power attacked and cut ISIS supply lines that ISIS began suffering defeat across Syrian territory – first and foremost in territory being retaken by Syrian forces and its allies.

In territory illegally-occupied by the US, it appears that ISIS militants and other extremists were simply being shuffled around. In other cases, US forces attacked the Syrian military and their allies when attempting to cross into US-occupied territory in pursuit of ISIS forces. This game has carried on to the point of absurdity with the largest and most powerful military in the world only now creeping in last across the finish line of its own supposed battle against ISIS.

What Becomes of Surrendering and Fleeing ISIS Militants? 

CNN also claims:

More than 3,000 ISIS fighters have surrendered amid a pitched battle by US-backed forces to retake the last ISIS stronghold in Syria.   

The article also notes that many more may attempt to flee. The US has not made it clear what will happen with these fighters, or others “fleeing” from the supposed US-backed offensive. In certain cases, it seems Washington has singled interest in sending foreign fighters back to their countries of origin – which means many will simply be reintegrated into society where local intelligence agencies will keep tabs on them, use them for domestic distractions, or redeploy them to Washington’s next proxy war when required.

A recent Iraqi military deployment near the Syrian-Iraqi border consisting of Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) amid the ongoing US offensive in Syria indicates that at least Baghdad believes Washington’s “defeat” of ISIS is more likely another attempt to shuffle valuable proxy fighters around on the battlefield – and this time – back into Iraq and in particular, into Al Anbar governorate where the US still maintains a military presence and where they will continue receiving defacto US protection.

Al-Masdar News in an article titled, “Iraqi reinforcements deploy to Syrian border as ISIS terrorists attempt to escape Syria,” would note:

The Iraqi Armed Forces deployed a large number of military personnel to the Syrian border this week to block any Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) from fleeing into Iraq.

 According to a new report, the Iraqi Army and Hashd Al-Sha’abi deployed these reinforcements to the Anbar-Deir Ezzor border after some Islamic State terrorists were suspected of sneaking into Iraq from eastern Syria.

It was the rise of ISIS inside Iraq and its crossing over into Syrian territory that set the pretext for the now ongoing US occupation of Syrian territory. The threat of ISIS “resurging” in Iraq also serves as an ongoing pretext for US forces still based there.

The rise of Iranian-backed militias throughout Iraq has become a potent counterweight to US-backed proxies attempting to take root there once again, and will make it infinitely more difficult for the US to repeat the scale and duration of the ISIS scourge the US visited upon the region.

The term “liquidate” in this context doesn’t necessarily mean destroying ISIS formations entirely – but instead simply moving them where they can be protected in Al Anbar and reconstituted to either continue serving as a pretext for US troops to remain in the region, or to fight in future proxies wars the US is planning in the wake of its current defeat in Syria.

While the Western media is attempting to hail this “final battle” as a victory for US forces – it is in actuality an indictment of America’s complicity in ISIS’ creation, proliferation across the region, and its longevity on the battlefield – suspiciously where US forces are operating.

The real story isn’t that the US is finally moving in on ISIS’ “last stronghold,” it’s that the US presided over the “last stronghold” for so long.

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Tony Cartalucci is Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Let’s not be too churlish about this; but then again, let us not be ignorant.  The singer once known as Cat Stevens (in pre-conversion state), and known as Yusuf Islam to others, made a considerable impression on the stage in Christchurch.  The slaughter of fifty at two mosques in the New Zealand city had made enough of an impression to lure the singer. 

Yusuf had worshipped at the Masjid Al Noor in December 2017, a pit stop as part of his 50^th anniversary Peace Train tour.  On Friday, he performed at the National Remembrance Service in Hagley Park.  Assisted by double-bassist Bruce Lynch, he wowed the crowd.  To various New Zealand press outlets, he was in a mood to reflect, recalling a city “peaceful” and “orderly” with “nice people”.  Then came the trigger happy “monster”.  The response to the killings impressed him.  There was “this incredible backlash of kindness and love and unity which is obviously so powerful that it changes the whole picture from dark to light.”

The Ardern government had furnished him an exemplary case of emotional management and response. They had shone the light. 

“Things like [the reaction] don’t happen in many other places in the world.  Things happen but it stays dark.  The government rarely does anything of any importance in the aftermath.  Here the story is different.” 

He reflected on ignorance being the enemy; freedom of speech was to be valued “but truth, peace and harmony are kind of more valuable.” 

Tolerance, inclusiveness, love.  These words are often bandied about as part of a stage set but not always practiced.  Yusuf Islam supplies us a troubling example, and his dig at freedom of speech as being of secondary order of importance is important. His selection as part of the mourning and commemoration process might have been an oversight on the part of the organisers; if so, it was a grave one, suggesting that ignorance and grief are often two parts of the same distorting lenses.   

In 1989, on British television, the singer was posed a hypothetical by international lawyer and pundit Geoffrey Robertson QC.  A state sanctioned edict, or fatwa, had been issued by Iran’s supreme leader the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.  All Muslims were to be encouraged in the endeavour; publishers were also be targets.  Even a novel, with an exploratory theme suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed might have stemmed from pagan tradition, was too much to stomach.  Rushdie was intentionally naughty, deploying terms long seen as taboo: Jahilia, alluding to Jahiliyyah, or “state of ignorance from guidance of God”; a brothel named Hijab; and Mahound, a pejorative variant of Mohammed.   

Did Rushdie deserve to die?  “Yes, yes,” came the unequivocal response from Yusuf.  Would you be his executioner?  “Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps yes.”  Would you attend an effigy-burning protest against the author? “I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.”  Should Rushdie turn up at his doorstep, he “might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.”

Hard to forget, and Rushdie would grimly muse in 2010 on the appearance of Yusuf at Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity. “I have always liked Stewart and Colbert but what on earth was Cat Yusuf Stevens Islam doing on that stage?  If he’s a ‘good Muslim’ like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I’m the Great Pumpkin.  Happy Halloween.” 

People can mellow, and, with age, even shift their positions.  Defects can be revised; mistakes revisited.  Andrew Anthony of the Observer failed to note much in the way of change a decade or so after the singer expressed his faithful bloodlust.  “He told me in 1997, eight years after saying on TV that Rushdie should be lynched, that he was in favour of stoning women to death for adultery.  He also reconfirmed his position on Rushdie.”   

Yusuf had also dedicated himself to that unhealthy tendency latent in many monotheistic religions: proselytization.  The Islamia school in Brent, Anthony notes, was dedicated to “bring about the submission of the individual, the community and the world at large to Islam.”  Women were also to abide by their fair share of subjugation and heed submission in the enterprise.  Such is the way of that type of tolerance. 

In 2017 on News24, Yusuf continued what has been a systematic process of aversion and denial. (The faithful fanatic can wobble when needed.)  “I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini – and still don’t.”  Instead, he was happy to blame Rushdie, a sure sign about where guilt should lie. “The book [The Satanic Verses] itself destroyed the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis.” 

The Robertson episode is ignored; instead, Yusuf finds fault with “a loaded question posed by a journalist, after a harmless biographical lecture I gave to students in Kingston University in 1989”.  The tendency to erase in the name of faith is all too evident here.

The lasting truth about those solemn, and for the most part heartfelt proceedings in Hagley Park, is that they were marked by a person who has little in the way of any problem with theocratic-sanctioned murder for the use of language.  By an author, a wordsmith, a thinker.  For an occasion supposedly staged to rebuke extremism, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern effectively shared the same stage with one of the more extreme creatures of fanaticism, one who embraces assassination as one of the more effective means of censorship.  As Rushdie himself would pen in a letter to the Telegraph in 2007, “Let’s have no more rubbish about how ‘green’ and innocent this man was.”

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

The Houthis captured 100 positions in the central Yemeni province of Dhale from the Saudi-led coalition and its proxies during a recent large-scale operation, Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari, a spokesman of the pro-Houthis wing of the Yemeni Armed Forces, announced in the late hours of March 28.

“Our forces succeed in a special military operation on the front of Dhale … As a result, more than 100 military positions were secured, more than 250 enemy personnel were injured and killed, while dozens others surrendered themselves,” Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari said.

The Nasah mount was among the positions, which were captured by the Houthis in the course of the attack that lasted for five days

The Houthis media wing released a short video of the attack showing two T-55 main battle tanks of Saudi-backed forces, which were destroyed by Houthi tank hunters. According to Brig. Gen. Yahya, the Yemeni group’s fighters destroyed dozens of other vehicles.

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Concerns are growing across this country about the disturbing tilt in Canadian foreign policy toward increasing militarization and aggression – about our participation in foreign wars and US-led ‘regime change’ operations abroad, and about burgeoning defence budgets and rearmament programs, while funding for vital services like education, healthcare and environmental protection are frozen and even cutback.

At the same time however, there is little or no debate at all about Canada’s continuing membership in the NATO military alliance. Neither the parties in parliament nor the mainstream media are prepared to seriously question our NATO status. And yet it is precisely our NATO membership – and the ‘obligations’ that entails – which is the mechanism driving increased military spending and preparations for more aggression and war.

As the NATO generals and their governments prepare to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of this aggressive military alliance, it is high time that the peace forces across Canada, and their allies in the labour and people’s movements, put this issue back on the front burner, and begin to build up a grassroots campaign across the country to demand Canada’s withdrawal, and the dissolution of this dangerous military pact as a whole.

NATO’s long and sordid history

Ever since its founding in April 1949, NATO has served as the vehicle to spur the arms race in the name of ‘peace through strength’. In that very same year, the Truman Administration in the United States secretly developed “Operation Dropshot’ to launch a devastating ‘first-strike’ against the former Soviet Union to completely obliterate that country. Throughout the ‘cold war’ years, the U.S. and its NATO allies always maintained an overwhelming military superiority over the USSR and the Warsaw Pact – a fact that they cynically concealed from public view at the time, but now readily admit.

Following the 1991 dissolution of the USSR, NATO – which always professed itself as a ‘defensive shield’ – has instead expanded its military reach right up to the borders of the Russian Federation, throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East, and elsewhere around the globe. It led an illegal 78-day assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 which killed thousands and caused over $100 billion in damages. The imperialist war and occupation of Afghanistan, began in 2001, was undertaken under a NATO mandate. And the 2011 war on Libya – which was once again justified under the pretext of “humanitarian interventionism” – was likewise under the flag of NATO.

Canadian air and ground forces were directly involved in all of these acts of aggression, as part of our ‘commitment’ as a NATO member. And Canadian troops are also stationed in NATO base in Eastern Europe and are helping the pro-fascist regime in Ukraine.

In fact, NATO has now emerged as the primary military instrument of U.S. imperialist domination around the world. It recently recruited Colombia, and has invited Brazil – two of the most right-wing governments in Latin America – to be ‘global partners’, no doubt to increase pressures on the besieged Maduro government in Venezuela.

NATO’s Price Tag

The 2017 announcement  by the Trudeau government to raise the annual military budget to $32.7 billion – an increase of over 70% – by 2026, and to commit over $150 billion for the purchase of new warships and fighter jets, is directly connected to our NATO ‘commitment’ to increase annual defence spending to 2% of GDP.  U.S. President Trump has called on its NATO partners to further increase defence expenditure to 4% of national GDP, which would mean a staggering annual military expenditure of well over $80 billion for Canada.

Such vast allocations can only be met through massive increase in taxes, or debilitating cuts to social programs for Canadians, or a combination of both. Is this a price working people should be expected to pay – not for defending our shores, but rather to wage aggressive wars abroad?

NATO & Canadian Sovereignty

Every time peace activists raise demands to cut military spending, or to get Canda to sign the UN Treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, or to oppose Canadian arms deals with Saudi Arabia or support other peace initiatives, we are told the same thing by Ottawa and the military-corporate-complex it serves – that this would violate our ‘obligations’ under NATO.

That is why withdrawing from this aggressive military alliance is such a central and pressing priority if we are ever to win a truly sovereign and independent foreign policy based on peace and disarmament, not militarism and war. Of course, withdrawal would be only the first step in winning a fundamentally new program for Canada, but it is a necessary and vital step in that direction.

Canada’s membership in NATO is the ‘pink elephant in the room’ that everyone knows is there but no one wants to acknowledge. It’s time to change that!

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The complex Sino-American trade negotiation is going through a period that is not turbulent but is nevertheless marked by objective difficulties: too much distance separates the American warnings from the concessions that China is willing to make without penalizing its development and it becomes too difficult to contain the impact of the war on 5G (which is part of the negotiation but which also concerns other strategic aspects) in the United States and Europe. However difficult it may be, it cannot be excluded that an agreement is still possible. But there are many economists who observe how the “great deal” would put Europe in check, tightened in an alliance between the two superpowers and unable to carve out a role in international trade.

It is with this premise that the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Italy and China during the State visit of the Chinese President must be judged, which will officially begin on 22 p.v. with the meeting with the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Because faced with the real risk of failure of the negotiations there is an absolute need to build a sovereign foreign policy for the country and capable of protecting its economic and geo-strategic interests.

To do this, a framework agreement with China and the emerging economies is essential, otherwise the country will be subject to blackmail, which would further aggravate the already precarious condition of the Italian economy and the eurozone itself. In fact, faced with the possibility of Italy joining the club of the countries of the Belt and Road Initiative (BIS), the United States has set up a very strong strategy of blackmail. If Italy were to sign, it would expose itself, according to American sources, to commercial, economic and military cooperation and intelligence retaliation; if, on the other hand, it were to decide to withdraw the agreement with Beijing, the alternative would be, in any case, to maintain a framework of subordination with Washington, to be paid at a high price. The example of the war on the 5G is, from this point of view, paradigmatic: Italy is pushed to renounce the technological modernization through the Chinese infrastructures available today on the market, waiting for an American technology which does not yet exist and which, in the future, will certainly be more expensive than the Chinese one. The choice is clear: if you make the agreement you expose yourself to retaliation, if you delete the agreement you get nothing in return, if not the maintenance of the status quo based on unfair agreements and a relationship of absolute subordination. Tertium non datur.

For these reasons, the government’s decision to confirm the signing of the Memorandum certainly does not represent an exit strategy from the framework of Atlantic and NATO conditioning, but it does outline at least one way to create the conditions to attract the Chinese surplus in terms of direct investment in the short term and lay the foundations for a foreign policy that breaks with the blackmail that Washington and, for various reasons, Brussels are trying to impose on our country.

It is interesting to note that the “party against the memorandum”, which has enjoyed great media coverage and the political backing of the League in government and the Pd and Forza Italia for the opposition, has used almost exclusively the argument of the need not to cooperate with Beijing because it promotes a hegemonic project. They then argued that in any case we could not sign the memorandum, without first asking permission from our “landlord”, the U.S. (on the subject of hegemony …).

Who knows how they will comment today, after reading the letter that Xi Jinping has entrusted to the pages of the Corriere della Sera and which provides the key to interpretation of Chinese diplomacy and regions for his strong investment in our country. It is a text written from a very clear perspective: Italy and China are not called to agree on a series of economic and trade dossiers. Not only that, at least. The two countries are called upon to respect their long thousand-year history which, in the words of Xi Jinping, places them as “emblems of eastern and western civilization”, given that “they have written some of the most important and significant chapters in the history of human civilization”. Their relationship, even the Silk Road itself, is therefore not born today, but has its roots in the times of the Roman Empire, to then live special occasions that have made the history of relations between the two countries. Marco Polo arrived at the court of the Khan before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, Matteo Ricci became mandarin to win the trust of the Ming and Prospero Intorcetta translated Confucius into Latin and opened an important window of knowledge on Eastern philosophy throughout the West. It is to this story that the Chinese president refers when he speaks of the relations between his country and Italy, drawing heavily on the great history of Italy and citing, among others, Dante, Virgil, Moravia and Italian synology.

But the key passage of the Chinese President’s speech is probably the following: “Faced with the evolutions and challenges of the contemporary world, the two countries appeal to their precious and long experience and together imagine the interesting scenarios capable of creating a new model of international relations based on mutual respect, equality and justice and cooperation of mutual benefit, building a shared future of humanity”. The story of the “new world order with Chinese characteristics”, as it has been contemptuously defined by the opponents of the Italo-Chinese agreement, or the rhetoric of Beijing’s hegemony is shattered on the rocks of the strategic pact that China offers Italy, of building a new model of international relations that definitively closes the unilateralism in vogue after the collapse of the USSR and lays the foundations for cooperation between equals among the nations of the world. Equality, justice and cooperation are universal values that have their roots in the ideals of the French Revolution and that we certainly cannot ignore.

At the same time, those who continue to see China as their main enemy and write it in their own strategic documents (US and EU) and with the peace of their Italian representatives who would like the country to adopt an aggressive policy towards Beijing or in a privileged inter-European relationship (which does not exist, given the divergent interests that exist in the eurozone), or in a framework of Euro-Atlantic cooperation whose objective is the rupture of the Russian-Chinese axis and the co-optation of Moscow in a new iron curtain hostile to Beijing.

Italian politics has a crossroads before it: either it accepts the “devil’s alternative” and binds itself to the decline of this strategic vision, or it overturns the table and affirms the need for a policy based on cooperation and equal dignity among nations. The signing of the Memorandum is the first step to take the second road, but we are still at the initial skirmishes of an arm wrestling that will mark the near future.

Turkish-US relations have deteriorated in recent weeks, with Washington threatening reprisals if Ankara goes ahead with the purchase of the Russian-made S-400 air defence system.

Relations between the two countries have been in a downward spiral for some time—especially since Washington made the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara considers a “terrorist organization” and threat to the Turkish state, its main proxy army in its regime-change war in Syria, then supported a failed July 2016 coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Differences have since expanded to include an array of Mideast and even global issues. Washington is particularly alarmed by Ankara’s attempts to offset pressure from its traditional western allies by forging closer ties with Russia and Iran.

Washington is adamant Turkey not finalize the purchase of the S-400, a long-range air and missile defence system, for $2.5 billion, claiming that its deployment would disrupt US-Turkish and Turkish-NATO military-security cooperation.

In testimony before a congressional committee Tuesday, the acting US defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, signalled that if Ankara proceeds with the S-400 purchase, Washington will block further shipments of F-35 fighter jets to Ankara and cut Turkish companies out of the F-35 project.

Asked if the Pentagon wants Turkey as an F-35 partner, Shanahan said,

“We absolutely do,” then added, “We need Turkey to buy the Patriot.” This was a reference to Washington’s offer to sell US-made Patriot missile batteries to Ankara for $3.5 billion in lieu of the S-400.

If Turkey deploys the S-400 it will run afoul of US sanctions against Russia. The 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act empowers the president to impose sweeping sanctions on any individual, organization or state that enters into a “significant transaction” with the defence or intelligence sectors of the Russian Federation. Washington could also seek to intensify pressure on Ankara by refusing to grant Turkey an extension of the “waiver” exempting it from the unilateral and patently illegal US embargo on Iranian energy exports. Turkey is heavily reliant on Iranian natural gas.

Senior Trump administration officials have raised the prospect of Turkey being excluded from NATO activities, citing interoperability concerns with the Russian-made missile system.

Erdogan has, nonetheless, repeatedly vowed that Turkey will buy and deploy the S-400. In his latest comments on the subject, made in an interview last Sunday with television broadcaster TGRT Haber, Erdogan declared that no matter what the United States says, Turkey will not reverse its position on the deal.

Erdogan’s rebuke to Washington came just two days after he issued a critical statement protesting the Trump administration’s decision to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. A Foreign Ministry statement subsequently declared, “This unfortunate decision… demonstrates that the US administration continues its approach to be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution in the Middle East.”

The dispute over the S-400 is a flashpoint for deeper conflicts bound up with Turkey’s geopolitical and military-strategic orientation. A member of NATO since 1952 and a key Western ally during the Cold War, Turkey has been severely destabilised by American imperialism’s more than quarter-century of uninterrupted war. Bordering Syria and Iraq to the south and with significant economic and political interests in the nearby regions of the Balkans and North Africa, Ankara was directly impacted by the first Gulf War, the Western-backed carve-up of Yugoslavia and NATO’s bombardment of Serbia, the 2003 Iraq invasion, the 2011 air onslaught on Libya to topple Gaddafi, and the ongoing bloodbath in Syria.

The Turkish ruling elite, including under Erdogan and his AKP during their first decade in power, supported the succession of US wars and tried to advance its own interests through them. But the many shifts in US policy frequently cut across their interests and ambitions.

With Syria matters came to a head. Initially Erdogan enthusiastically supported the US fomented regime-change war in Syria and Ankara was a major co-sponsor of the Islamist militias that spearheaded the drive to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and his Baathist regime. But Turkey was incensed when, once those militias had been pushed back, the US forged an alliance with the YPG, a Syrian offshoot of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), against which Ankara has waged a brutal counter-insurgency war for over three decades. It was within this context that Turkey orchestrated a rapprochement with Russia and intensified cooperation with Iran.

For Turkey, rolling back the proto-state that the YPG has established in northern Syria remains the overriding goal of its Syria policy. Toward this end it has repeatedly sent forces into Syria, while maintaining a shaky alliance of convenience with Moscow and Tehran and cooperating with them in the so-called Astana Syrian “peace process.”

The Pentagon meanwhile continues to rely on the YPG to provide a base for its predatory operations in Syria, including by denying the Assad regime access to the country’s most important oil fields.

The American national security establishment has increasingly come to view Turkey as an obstacle to its goal of securing unbridled hegemony over the energy-rich and strategically critical Middle East. In a recent analysis published by the Arab Gulf States Institute, a Washington-based think tank, the authors argued that the Middle East is increasingly divided into three blocs: the Sunni Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia, an Iran-led alliance that includes Hezbollah, and a Turkish-led bloc. “Turkey’s role at the epicenter of a new Middle East alliance was consolidated by the 2017 boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt. Qatar has relied on Turkey, which maintains a military base in that country, for support against the boycott,” they add.

Within this context, Turkey’s decision on the S-400 missile defence system is seen as having far-reaching consequences. In an editorial published earlier this month, the Financial Times, one of the principal mouthpieces of the US and European financial elites, argued, “Turkey can still reset its relations with the West.” After noting that Erdogan “took power in Turkey in 2003, offering stable civilian leadership, a new drive for EU membership and a business-friendly approach,” the Financial Times went on to complain: “In recent years, Mr. Erdogan has moved towards authoritarianism, alienating western allies and adopting questionable stewardship of the economy. Choosing to purchase Russian military hardware has raised further concerns.”

Erdogan has used the dispute with Washington over the S-400 to capitalise on popular hostility to US imperialism ahead of Turkey’s March 31 nationwide municipal elections. However, he has given little indication he plans to alter his stance towards Washington after the elections. On April 8, the Turkish president is due to travel to Moscow for one-on-one talks with Vladimir Putin.

At the same time, and clearly with a view to exploiting the growing rift between Europe and America, Erdogan has announced that Turkey will renew its bid to join the European Union next month.

Commentary in pro-government Turkish media indicate the anger within elite circles over Washington’s failure to accommodate what they perceive as their vital interests, and their fears that the country that has been Ankara’s principal military-security partner for decades can no longer be trusted. A common refrain is that if Turkey abandons the purchase of the S-400 and accepts Washington’s offer of the Patriot missiles, it could soon face additional US conditions, including making accommodations on Israel or Syria.

Turkish ruling circles also responded angrily to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s attendance at an energy summit involving Israel, Greece and Cyprus in Jerusalem March 20. Long-standing territorial disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean bound up with the Cyprus conflict, which pits a Turkish-recognised regime in the north of the island against the internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia, have been compounded with the discovery of large natural gas resources under the sea floor.

That being said, Washington will undoubtedly bring tremendous pressure to bear on Ankara, including on the economic front. Just before Erdogan visits Moscow, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will travel to a NATO foreign ministers meeting, where he is due to meet with Pompeo.

Any attempt by Turkey to move closer to Russia or China, which has invested heavily in Turkey over recent years and sought to win Ankara over to its Belt and Road Initiative, would be fraught with conflicts. Ankara’s disputes with the Western powers notwithstanding, the Turkish bourgeoisie still relies overwhelmingly on capital from Europe to invest in domestic projects, and the European Union remains far and away Turkey’s most important export destination.

As shown by last Friday’s 5 percent depreciation of the Turkish lira after Erdogan denounced Trump’s Golan decision and the crashing of the Turkish currency last August after the Trump administration doubled its tariffs on Turkey’s steel and aluminium exports, Turkey’s ruling elite is extremely vulnerable to pressure from the major imperialist powers.

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Less than two years ago Montenegro became the 29th state to join NATO, an American-led military alliance that has become a far-reaching intervention force since the USSR’s demise. The accession of mighty Montenegro to NATO must have set hearts fluttering across the Atlantic in Washington.

One can guess that some within the Donald Trump administration would have taken due care in pinpointing Montenegro on their European maps, with its population of 600,000 people. The Montenegrin landmass, situated in south-eastern Europe and for decades part of Yugoslavia, is a fraction the size of neighbouring Bosnia.

In July 2018, president Trump complained live on air regarding the Balkan country’s membership of NATO, saying the Montenegrins are “very aggressive people. They may get aggressive and, congratulations, you’re in World War III”. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General, had insisted that Montenegro “would have an equal voice in shaping our alliance, and its independence guaranteed”.

Indeed, Montenegro will hold as equal a voice as America herself in formulating NATO’s foreign policy actions. It is safe to presume the Montenegrin government – having pushed through in militarizing its state – will have no scruples in participating with future NATO engagements, to add to the past illegal attacks on Afghanistan, Libya, etc.

The expected arrival of newly-named “North Macedonia”, which will bring the number of NATO states to 30, is a further upcoming event that must have the Trump cabinet clamouring in anticipation. As with Montenegro, North Macedonia is a tiny country located in the Balkans, and is less than a third the size of Ireland.

Yet the New York Times is pleased with the prospect of North Macedonia’s addition to NATO, expressing last month that it “plugs another gap in what was once the former Soviet Union’s backyard”.

One can imagine the New York Times’ reaction would have been rather different, had the Soviet Union persuaded Nicaragua to join the Warsaw Pact. Russia, we are told, has no right to be concerned about the unremitting expansion of NATO, which has almost doubled in size over the past generation.

Trump’s analysis pertaining to the possibility of “World War III” is not without foundation. NATO’s march eastwards, in violation of verbal promises expounded following the USSR’s capitulation, has undoubtedly increased the likelihood of World War III unfolding. A third world war, which would entail a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia or China, is a scenario that spells the end for entire humanity.

One of NATO’s broadly reported maxims is “an attack against one ally is considered an attack against all allies”. Such mottos put into perspective the mindset of an organization geared towards military combat, with much of its focus on a nuclear superpower in Russia.

There are further plans by Washington to incorporate the Ukraine and Georgia (Stalin’s birth country) into NATO, two states situated directly on Russia’s western and southern borders respectively; should either nation accede, it would represent an enormous provocation of Russia and could conceivably trigger a nuclear war.

Despite the fact that NATO enlargement, along with various interventions of the alliance, poses a clear threat to mankind, Western political figures have long championed these policies, as have commercial media. Powerful institutions are, therefore, openly supporting the increased possibility of humanity’s annihilation.

A New York Times editorial from 26 January 2019 pronounced that NATO “has been the foundation of trans-Atlantic stability and prosperity for seven decades” while it “continues to keep a predatory Russia at bay”. There is no mention in the Times’ evaluation of NATO’s rapid advance towards this “predatory” Russia.

An experienced Guardian columnist outlined his belief that,

“The greatest achievement of NATO is that it has helped to keep the peace in Europe – with occasional exceptions – for more than 60 years… this is an epochal achievement on the grand historic scale”.

One of the “occasional exceptions” was NATO’s flagrantly illegitimate invasion of Yugoslavia 20 years ago, which killed thousands of people, and included such depredations as the deliberate bombardment of Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) headquarters, along with the Chinese embassy’s destruction in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital. Attacks like this constituted outrageous war crimes in which no one was charged, as the victors in conflict seldom are.

The US-led assault on Yugoslavia even provoked criticism from Israel’s Ariel Sharon, who described it as an act of “brutal interventionism”.

The continuing issue of NATO’s existence and eastward spread has been highlighted over successive years by scientists running the Doomsday Clock – whose hand is currently at two minutes to midnight (apocalypse). In the atomic scientists’ 2019 review they assess that, “The United States and Russia should discuss and adopt measures to prevent peacetime military incidents along the borders of NATO”, which are placed at Russia’s very horizons.

In a New York Times opinion editorial from January this year Ursula von der Leyen, the German defence minister, writes that NATO “represents a special, even emotional bond between the American and the European continents… Maybe the most basic benefit of NATO is that it provides reliability in an unreliable world”.

Indeed, “reliability in an unreliable world” with strategies leading to the growing threat of a planetary nuclear holocaust. Von der Leyen has for months been tipped to succeed Stoltenberg as NATO’s Secretary General, so one can expect business as usual in the time ahead.

Von der Leyen is simply reiterating what her leader Angela Merkel has been remarking for years. Since Trump entered office in January 2017, Merkel has openly complained that America no longer “protects us”. It is incredible to witness the willing subservience that the Germans, with their long history of bloody militarism, are placing upon the armed forces of another country thousands of miles to the west.

Comments like those, as expressed by Merkel and Von der Leyen, would have horrified Germany’s old soldiers from bygone eras, such as Helmuth von Moltke, Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg. One may assume that these vaunted military figures have been turning over in their graves somewhat.

Germany today is compromised in both action and thought. In all of the elapsing decades, the German state has never fully recovered from Hitler’s assumption to power in January 1933. Much of the blame for Hitler gaining the Chancellorship can be laid at the door of 53-year-old Franz von Papen – the conservative politician, nobleman and staff officer, who felt he could control the Nazi leader once he became head of state. Von Papen misjudged Hitler to a grave degree.

The aspiring dictator possessed a terribly brutal and crazy streak, as later borne out by his organized genocide and merciless invasion on the Eastern front. However, to portray Hitler as a complete raving lunatic is not only inaccurate but serves history no purpose whatever.

Albert Speer, former German architect and war minister, who achieved a well above average IQ score at Nuremberg, knew Hitler intimately for over a decade – and Speer noted in his postwar writings that the Führer was no carpet-chewing madman, but someone containing a variety of character traits, including that of being “genial” before later becoming “a forbidding despot”. After the war, Speer had come to despise Hitler, so in his books he was hardly defending the dictator out of admiration or loyalty.

In his split personality, Hitler was also an extremely cunning individual and skilled politician who, once with power in his grasp, would isolate and eliminate any rivals while strengthening his grip on the state. Von Papen, with a new role in 1933 as “Vice-Chancellor”, was by the following year marginalized through Hitler’s ruthless maneuvering – forcing his second-in-command to resign in July 1934 and proposing him to take up an ambassadorial position in Austria, which Von Papen meekly accepted.

Hindenburg himself, for much of the early 20th century a national icon in Germany, has shipped much criticism down the years for apparently overseeing Hitler’s rise to power.

Yet in January 1933, the 85-year-old Hindenburg was in poor health and entering the final 18 months of his life. Hindenburg was, more than anything else, a military man whose service dated all the way to the mid-1860s, and he was unavoidably lacking in political guile. Hindenburg was in many ways steeped in the lost years of his past which he reminisced on with some regret; and he continued ruing the Germans’ failed Spring Offensive of 1918 on the Western front, which signalled the beginning of the end of World War I.

Hindenburg was noted for his modesty and distaste of the limelight, while allowing his long-time colleague Ludendorff to enjoy much of the acclaim. Rather than comprising a political sort, Hindenburg was most comfortable overseeing the field of battle, analyzing maps in his methodical Prussian manner, handing out orders to young and precocious officers.

Though no angel, Hindenburg did not believe in anything like the Nazi vision, which was too extreme for his tastes. He was an old-fashioned conservative and monarchist, brought up in a family of minor nobility in the Kingdom of Prussia. He met Hitler for the first time during October 1931, at a crowded room in Berlin; those present observed Hindenburg’s disdainful attitude towards Hitler and the cool body language between the pair.

The following August, in 1932, Hindenburg said after another conference with Hitler, “That man for a Chancellor? I’ll make him a postmaster and he can lick the stamps with my head on them”.

The aristocratic old soldier was not to be seen mingling with the riff-raff amidst beer halls, and he disparagingly referred to Hitler as “the Austrian corporal”. Like Von Papen, Hindenburg was underestimating Hitler, but the former had in addition assured Hindenburg that, in the new government, he could ably restrain Hitler.

During Hindenburg and Hitler’s more frequent personal meetings in 1933 and 1934, the Field Marshal would before long prove no match for the Corporal – with the latter even partially winning over the “old gentleman” with his psychological games and political tactics.

Once Hitler was allowed control over Germany, the only means to remove him was through firm actions early in his rule when he was still vulnerable or, failing that, assassination. With Hitler running Germany, that country inevitably became a tyrannical dictatorship which plunged into a major European war that, at first, it seemed like winning with one triumph secured after another.

By mid-December 1941, as Operation Barbarossa was beaten back by Soviet armies in the East – allied to Hitler’s decision in declaring war on the USA that month – Germany was thereafter in opposition to three of earth’s strongest countries: The USSR, Britain and America. The writing of defeat was engraven on the wall.

Had Hitler been thwarted nine years before in his bid to grasp power, a second global conflict may well have materialized regardless; again most likely due to the severity of measures implemented against Germany at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles by the Western states. Nevertheless, those crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hitler’s Reich would surely not have occurred under any other German leader.

In that case, Germany would likely have emerged from a second world war, defeated or otherwise, in a position where it was not dissected for over 40 years between the planet’s dominant nations.

Since reunification in October 1990, a diminished German state has been a virtual US client entity belonging to NATO, and further influenced by American financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Germany may have regained some strength at the head of the European Union, but her foreign policy initiatives are usually dictated by Washington, with German troops as part of NATO present in Afghanistan, Iraq and across eastern Europe.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from http://nousnatobases.org

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

According to United States government documents, since 1998, the Office of the Inspector General has reported $21 Trillion in unaccounted for money.

As unbelievable and absurd as that sounds, the actual total of unaccounted for money at the Pentagon is most likely significantly more than $21 trillion.

Researchers are unable to get data for every year of military spending, many Pentagon agencies do not have any publicly available records, hundreds of thousands of transactions have been erased, and an estimated millions of transactions do not have any traceable record.

As you will see in detail throughout this series of reports, not only have trillions of taxpayer dollars been knowingly dumped into a shockingly unaccountable black hole, Congress is not even sure how much money has been appropriated and given out in the first place.

United States government officials who work for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have been reporting on this stunning issue for years.

The fact that this mind-blowing amount of missing tax money has not been a lightning rod for mainstream media coverage, congressional investigations, and a lead issue for all political representatives, particularly those who claim to care about our skyrocketing national debt, calls into serious question the integrity and legitimacy of all leadership and responsible parties.

Beyond the outright disregard for the rule of law and lack of consequences for ignoring an annual audit legal requirement, the Pentagon is also flagrantly in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 specifically states:

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”

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Israeli warplanes launched 82 missiles at 38 targets across the Gaza Strip. Several houses and civil facilities sustained material damage and dozens of civilians became homeless. Israeli forces continued to use excessive force against the peaceful protestors in the Gaza Strip. Two Palestinian civilians were killed in eastern Gaza City and al-Buriej camp. 195 civilians, including 56 children, 4 women, 3 journalists, and a paramedic, were wounded. The injury of two of them was reported as serious.

Shooting:

• In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces continued to use lethal force against the participants in the peaceful protests organized along the Gaza Strip borders, which witnessed the peaceful protests for the 51^st week along the eastern and northern border area of the Gaza Strip. They also continued to use force as well during the incursions into the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces killed 2 Palestinian civilians and wounded 205 others, including 57 children, 4 women, 3 journalists, and a paramedic. The injury of two of them was reported serious. Seven of the total number of injuries were wounded during airstrikes carried out by the Israeli warplanes at targets across the Gaza Strip as two fishermen were wounded in the Gaza Sea and a child was wounded after targeting the border areas. Meanwhile, the rest injuries occurred during the Return and Breaking Siege March. In the West Bank, Israeli forces killed a volunteer paramedic (17) and wounded 3 civilians in al-Dahisha refugee camp south of the West Bank.
• In the Gaza Strip, during the 51^st Friday of the Return and Breaking Siege March, Israeli forces killed 2 Palestinian civilians. The first one, Jehad Hararah (23), from al-Shuja’iyia neighborhood, east of Gaza City, died after being hit with a live bullet to the chest while participating in the demonstrations in Malaka square, east of Gaza City. The second one, Nidal Shatat (29), from al-Moghraqah village, south of Gaza City, died after being hit with a live bullet to the chest while participating in the demonstrations in eastern al-Buriej camp and present around 50 meters away from the border fence with Israel. These new violations come only hours after the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on accountability brought by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The vote had 23 states voting in favor, 8 against and with 15 abstentions, condemning Israel’s “apparent intentional use of unlawful lethal and other excessive force” against civilian protesters in Gaza.  Thus, these incidents emphasize that the Israeli forces persist in its violation of the international humanitarian law and international human rights law.
• In excessive use of lethal force against the peaceful protesters in eastern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces wounded 195 civilians, including 56 children, 4 women, 3 journalists, and a paramedic. The injury of two of them was reported serious.

Injuries in the Gaza Strip from 20 to 27 March 2019 According to the Governorate

• As part of airstrikes, Israeli forces carried out dozens of airstrikes on various targets across the Gaza Strip. These airstrikes have been the most violent in recent months that have not spared civilians and displaced dozens of them. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lived in a state of terror and fear due to the continuous Israeli airstrikes that targeted various locations; some were in densely-populated areas throughout the Gaza Strip. According to the documentation by PCHR’s fieldworkers, the Israeli warplanes launched 82 missiles at 38 targets across the Gaza Strip, including residential buildings and civil facilities, under the pretext of having security service offices underneath or near them.  As a result, 7 Palestinian civilians sustained minor wounds due to the scattering glass and bricks following those airstrikes. During and after the airstrikes, dozens of civilians were forced to evacuate from their houses dreadfully in the cold weather at night, rendering 13 families comprised of 70 members, including 44 children and 14 women, homeless. In addition to the destruction caused by the airstrikes against the targeted locations and the damage caused to nearby houses and facilities, the resulting explosions caused panic and fear among civilians, especially women and children, as the explosions reminded them of the traumatic experiences they lived in the three offensives of 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014.
• As part of targeting the Palestinian fishermen in the sea, the Israeli forces continued to escalate their attacks against the Palestinian fishermen, indicating the on-going Israeli policy to target their livelihoods. During the reporting period, PCHR documented 4 incidents were as follows: 2 incidents off Rafah Shore; one incident off Khan Yunis Shore, south of the Gaza Strip; and one incident off al-Waha resort shore, north of the Gaza Strip. These incidents resulting in the injury of a fisherman and his son, in addition to damaging their fishing boat.
• As part of targeting the border areas, on 24 March 2019, Israeli forces stationed along the border fence with Israel, east of al-Shawka, east of Rafah, opened fire at a number of Palestinian civilians, who were collecting aggregates. As a result, Mahmoud Fouad Salman al-‘Arja (14) was hit with shrapnel to the face.
• On 26 March 2019, Israeli forces stationed along the border fence with Israel, east of al-Buriej refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, opened fire at Palestinian shepherds and no injuries were reported. The shepherds were forced to leave the area for fear of their lives.
• In the West Bank, in new crime of targeting medical personnel, Israeli forces moved into al-Walijah neighbourhood in al-Dheisheh refugee camp, south of the West Bank, and killed a volunteer paramedic, Sajed Mizher (17) while treating injured protesters in the camp. The Israeli forces also wounded 3 other civilians.

Israeli authorities continued to create a Jewish majority in occupied East Jerusalem

• As part of the Israeli house demolitions and notices, on Tuesday morning, 26 March 2019, Ahmed Moussa al-‘Abassy (48) started to demolish his house in order to implement the Israeli Municipality decision. Ahmed said that the municipality issued a demolition decision in the middle of the past February under the pretext of non-licensing. Moreover, on Monday, 25 March 2019, the municipality staff raided Ahmed’s house in Ra’ss al-‘Amoud neighborhood in Silwan village, south of the old city, and ordered him to self-demolish his house within two weeks. As a result, Ahmed was forced to self-demolish his house to avoid paying the demolition costs. It should be noted that Ahmed started to build his 100-square-meter an under-construction house in October 2018.
• As part of targeting social activities in the city, on Thursday, 21 March 2019, Israeli authorities prevented the holding of a Palestinian activity for Mother’s Day in the French Cultural Center in Jerusalem on Salah al-Deen Street in central occupied East Jerusalem. Eyewitnesses said that Israeli Intelligence officers accompanied with boarder guard officers raided the French Cultural Center, locked it down and prevented the invitees to enter to Jerusalem Girls Association’s activity in the center, under the pretext that it is funded and supervised by the Palestinian Authority (PA). Moreover, the eyewitnesses said that the Israeli forces fixed an order on the center’s gate to prevent holding the activity in the center or in any different place in Jerusalem. It should be mentioned that, over the past years, the Israeli authorities prevented several social and national activities under the pretext that they were funded by the PA.

Israeli Forces continued their settlement activities, and the settlers continued their attacks against Palestinian civilians and their property

• As part of Israeli settlers’ attacks against Palestinian civilians and their property, PCHR’s fieldworkers documented 3 direct attacks were as follows:
• On 21 March 2019, Hundreds of the Israeli settlers organized a demonstration starting from the closed Shuhadah Street and then heading to Tal al-Ramidah neighborhood, where they performed their religious rituals at al-Ibrahimi Mosque and chanted racist slogans against the Arabs.
• On 25 March 2019, Israeli settlers wrote racist slogans and punctured the tires of 28 vehicles in the French Hill neighborhood, north of occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City. The vehicles belong to Abu Lail, Shanak, ‘Oda and ‘Obaidi.
• On 26 March 2019, Israeli settlers attacked al-Khansa Primary Mixed School in Taqou’a village, southeast of Bethlehem.

Use of Force against Demonstrations in Protest against the U.S. President’s Decision to Recognize Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel

Israeli forces continued its excessive use of lethal force against peaceful demonstration organized by Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it was named as “The Great March of Return and Breaking Siege.” The demonstration was in protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump’s declaration to move the U.S. Embassy to it. According to PCHR fieldworkers’ observations, the border area witnessed large participation by Palestinian civilians as the Israeli forces continued to use upon highest military and political echelons excessive force against the peaceful demonstrators, though the demonstration were fully peaceful. The demonstration was as follows during the reporting period:

Gaza Strip

• At approximately 15:30 on Thursday, 21 March 2019, Israeli forces stationed on sand berms along the border fence with Israeli, opened fire and fired tear gas canisters at a group of Palestinian young men and boys gathered near the Return Camp, east of al-Buraij. As a result, a child was hit to the lower limbs and his injury was reported moderate.

During the 51^st week of the March of Return and Breaking Siege activities, Israeli forces killed two Palestinian civilians and wounded 190 others, including 54 children, four women, three journalists and a paramedic. The incidents were as follows

• Gaza City: The Israeli shooting at Palestinian demonstrators, which continued from 15:00 until 18:00, resulted in the killing of Jehad Munir Khaled Harara (23), from al-Shuja’ya neighborhood, east of Gaza City. At approximately 16:50, Jehad was hit with a live bullet to the chest and at approximately 17:30, the medical sources announced his death. Moreover, 98 civilians, including 28 children and a journalist, were wounded. Seventy-one of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel, 20 were directly hit with tear gas canisters and seven were hit with rubber bullets. The wounded journalist, ‘Ali Jadallah (27), who works as a photographer for Anadolu Agency, was hit with a live bullet shrapnel to the left hand.
• Northern Gaza Strip: the Israeli shooting at Palestinian demonstrators resulted in the injury of 23 civilians, including five children, a woman, a journalist, and a paramedic. Seven of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel and 16 were directly hit with tear gas canisters.  The injury of two of them was reported serious. The wounded journalist, Mohammed Isma’il ‘Abdullah al-‘Athamna (20), who works as a freelance journalist, was hit with a live bullet to the left leg. The wounded paramedic, Youssof Ra’ed Youssof Abu Baid (22), who works as a volunteer paramedic for PRCS, was hit with a tear gas canister to the right hand.

• Central Gaza Strip: The Israeli shooting at Palestinian demonstrators, which continued until 18:00, resulted in the killing of Nedal ‘Abd al-Karim Ahmed Shatat (29), from al-Moghraqa village, south of Gaza City. At approximately 17:20, Nedal was hit with a live bullet entered his left side of chest and exited the right side, while he was around 50 meters away from the border fence with Israel, east of al-Buriej Camp. At approximately 17:40, Nedal arrived as a dead body at al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Moreover, the shooting resulted in the injury of 32 civilians, including 15 children and two women. Fourteen of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel and 18 were directly hit with tear gas canisters. The Israeli soldiers targeted in the vicinity of a field medical point and ambulances with tear gas canisters. As a result, a number of medical personnel sustained tear gas inhalation.
• Khan Younis: The Israeli shooting at Palestinian demonstrators, which continued from 15:00 until 18:00, resulted in the injury of 28 civilians, including six children, a woman and a paramedic. Ten of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel, 17 were directly hit with tear gas canisters and one was hit with a rubber bullet.  The wounded journalist, Isma’il Farid Mohammed Abu ‘Amer (36), who works as a reporter at al-Aqsa Voice Radio, was hit with a tear gas canister to the left leg.
• Rafah: The Israeli shooting at the demonstrators, which continued from 15:00 until 17:30, resulted in the injury of nine demonstrators. Three of them were hit with live bullets and shrapnel and six were directly hit with tear gas canisters.
• At approximately 16:30 on Saturday, 23 March 2019, an Israeli drone fired two missiles at a group of Palestinian young men, who were around 400 meters away from the border fence with Israel, east of al-Buraij Camp in the Central Gaza Strip. As a result, three civilians were hit with shrapnel. It should be noted that two journalists sustained bruises. The wounded journalists were identified as Mahmoud Omar Mahmoud al-Loh (29), who works as a reporter for al-Sha’b Voice Radio, and Ahmed Bakr Mahmoud al-Loh (34), who works as a reporter for al-Rebat Voice Radio.
• At approximately 16:40 on Tuesday, 26 March 2019, Israeli forces stationed on sand berms along the border fence with Israel opened fire and fired tear gas canisters at a group of Palestinian young men and boys, who were near the Return Camp, east of al-Buraij. As a result, a 17-year-old child was hit to the lower limbs and his injury was reported moderate.

Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip

On Monday and Tuesday, 25 and 26 March 2019, Israeli forces carried out dozens of airstrikes on various targets across the Gaza Strip.  These airstrikes have been the most violent in recent months that have not spared civilians and displaced dozens of them after 10 days of a similar aggression. For 12 hours, two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lived in a state of terror and fear due to the continuous Israeli airstrikes that targeted various locations; some were in densely-populated areas throughout the Gaza Strip.  Moreover, on Wednesday, 27 March 2019, Israeli warplanes fired missiles at other targets. According to the documentation of PCHR, the Israeli warplanes fired 82 missiles at 38 targets across the Gaza Strip, including residential buildings and civil facilities, under the pretext of having security service offices underneath or near them.  As a result, seven Palestinian civilians were wounded due to the scattering glass and bricks following those airstrikes and reported minor.  During and after the airstrikes, dozens of civilians were forced to evacuate from their houses dreadfully in the cold weather at night, rendering 13 families comprised of 70 members, including 44 children and 14 women, homeless. In addition to the destruction caused by the airstrikes against the targeted locations and the damage caused to nearby houses and facilities, the resulting explosions caused panic and fear among civilians, especially women and children, as the explosions reminded them of the traumatic experiences they lived in the three offensives of 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014. With this wide-scale tide of escalation, Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip found themselves again under disproportionate airstrikes, which fall under the Israeli collective punishment policy, after Israel had declared that two rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip over northern Tel Aviv, wounding seven Israel.

The most prominent civilian facilities that were targeted were as follows

– Targeting al-Multazem Insurance Company located in the ground floor of al-Ghazali Building.  Al-Ghazali was comprised of 2 buildings on an area of 662 square meters and included 10 residential apartments next to the Municipality Park in Gaza City.  The Israeli drones and warplanes targeted the building with 5 missiles after the Israeli Intelligence called the building’s owner and ordered him to evacuate.  As a result, the nearby buildings sustained severe damage and four families of 29 members, including 19 children and women, were displaced.

– Targeting Hassounah 4-storey building, which include 8 residential apartments and whose warehouses were rented by the Internal Security Service, in western Gaza City.  The Israeli warplanes targeted the building with 8 consecutive missiles after calling the residents and ordering them to evacuate.  As a result, the building was completely destroyed, and nearby buildings sustained severe damage.  Moreover, 9 families of 41 members, including 25 children and 9 women, were displaced.

– Targeting the office of Head of Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyah, in al-Naser neighborhood in Gaza City and completely destroying it with 4 missiles in addition to causing extensive damage to the nearby houses and facilities, including the Palestinian Association for Development and Reconstruction (PADR).

– Targeting the Khan Younis Seaport and so destroying 2 boats belonging to the Marine Police and causing severe damage to 6 fishing boats and nets.

• Destroying Omar Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Mosque, adjacent to a military training site belonging to al-Qassam Brigades on Khalil al-Wazir Street in the center of Beit Hanoun, which was targeted with seven missiles in successive airstrikes. Moreover, Etihad Beit Hanoun Sport Club’s facilities, adjacent to the site from the west, sustained damage. It should be noted that the mosque was built of tin plates and steel frames after targeting it several times by Israeli warplanes during the 2012 and 2014 offensives.

The rest of the targets varied between agricultural lands and sites belonging to the military wings of the Palestinian factions, causing damage to the nearby residential buildings.

Israeli settlers’ attacks against Palestinian civilians’ property

• At dawn hours on Monday, 25 March 2019, Israeli settlers wrote racist slogans and damaged dozens of vehicles in the French Hill neighborhood known as al- Samar land, north of occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City. The residents of the French Hill said that, on Monday, while they were going to their work, they were surprised that their vehicles’ tires were punctured, in addition to writing racist slogans on one of the neighborhood’s walls and a house gate. Some of these slogans was “Revenge… We will not give up the Israeli blood”. They also said that the vehicles belong to Abu Lail, Shanak, ‘Oda and ‘Obaidi. Moreover, Israeli police took photos of the vehicles and erased the slogans, but the residents held the Israeli police responsible for the recurrent of similar attacks in the area as they do not punish the settlers and reveal them. It should be noted that this is the third attack in the area over the past five years.

Notices and House Demolitions:

• On Tuesday morning, 26 March 2019, Ahmed Moussa al-‘Abassy (48) started to demolish his house in order to implement the Israeli Municipality decision. Ahmed said that the municipality issued a demolition decision in the middle of the past February under the pretext of non-licensing. Moreover, on Monday, 25 March 2019, the municipality staff raided Ahmed’s house in Ra’ss al-‘Amoud neighborhood in Silwan village, south of the old city, and ordered him to self-demolish his house within two weeks. As a result, Ahmed was forced to self-demolish his house to avoid paying the demolition costs. It should be noted that Ahmed started to build his 100-square-meter an under-construction house in October 2018.

Settlement activities and attacks by settlers against Palestinian civilians and property

Israeli forces’ attacks:

• At approximately 10:00, on Monday, 25 March 2019, Israeli forces backed by several military vehicles and a vehicle of the Israeli Civil Administration moved into al-Ras area, west of Ethna village, west of Hebron. An Israeli Civil Administration officer handed the houses’ owners two notices to stop construction work under the pretext of non-licensing. The first 100-sqaure-meter house belongs to Shehada Wajeeh al-Jeiawy (30) and the second 80-square-meter house belong to his brother Mahmoud.
• On Thursday morning, 21 March 2019, Israeli forces locked down several neighborhoods in Hebron’s Old City and prevented Palestinian civilians from entering or exiting the neighborhoods in order to protect Israeli settlers’ Purim celebrations. Hundreds of the Israeli settlers organized a demonstration starting from the closed Shuhadah Street and then heading to Tal al-Ramidah neighborhood, where they performed their religious rituals at al-Ibrahimi Mosque and chanted racist slogans against the Arabs. The demonstration, which continued until 13:00, was under the Israeli forces’ protection.

Israeli settlers’ attacks:

• At approximately 12:00, on Tuesday, 26 March 2019, Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian school in Taqou’a village, east of Bethlehem. Residents of the village said that dozens of settlers backed by Israeli forces organized a march near al-Khansa Primary Mixed School in Taqou’a. They gathered on the village’s main street and raised Israel’s flags, hindering the traffic. The village’s residents said that the Israeli settlers attempted to raid the school and attack students and teachers, but Palestinian young men and parents gathered and prevented the Israeli settlers from getting in the school.

Recommendations to the International Community

PCHR warns of the escalating settlement construction in the West Bank, the attempts to legitimize settlement outposts established on Palestinian lands in the West Bank and the continued summary executions of Palestinian civilians under the pretext that they pose a security threat to the Israeli forces. PCHR reminds the international community that thousands of Palestinian civilians have been rendered homeless and lived in caravans under tragic circumstances due to the latest Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip that has been under a tight closure for almost 11 years. PCHR welcomes the UN Security Council’s Resolution No. 2334, which states that settlements are a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions and calls upon Israel to stop them and not to recognize any demographic change in the oPt since 1967.  PCHR hopes this resolution will pave the way for eliminating the settlement crime and bring to justice those responsible for it. PCHR further reiterates that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are still under Israeli occupation in spite of Israel’s unilateral disengagement plan of 2005.  PCHR emphasizes that there is international recognition of Israel’s obligation to respect international human rights instruments and international humanitarian law.  Israel is bound to apply international human rights law and the law of war, sometimes reciprocally and other times in parallel, in a way that achieves the best protection for civilians and remedy for the victims.

1. PCHR calls upon the international community to respect the Security Council’s Resolution No. 2334 and to ensure that Israel respects it as well, in particular point 5 which obliges Israel not to deal with settlements as if they were part of Israel.
2. PCHR calls upon the ICC this year to open an investigation into Israeli crimes committed in the oPt, particularly the settlement crimes and the 2014 offensive on the Gaza Strip.
3. PCHR Calls upon the European Union (EU) and all international bodies to boycott settlements and ban working and investing in them in application of their obligations according to international human rights law and international humanitarian law considering settlements as a war crime.
4. PCHR calls upon the international community to use all available means to allow the Palestinian people to enjoy their right to self-determination through the establishment of the Palestinian State, which was recognized by the UN General Assembly with a vast majority, using all international legal mechanisms, including sanctions to end the occupation of the State of Palestine.
5. PCHR calls upon the international community and United Nations to take all necessary measures to stop Israeli policies aimed at creating a Jewish demographic majority in Jerusalem and at voiding Palestine from its original inhabitants through deportations and house demolitions as a collective punishment, which violates international humanitarian law, amounting to a crime against humanity.
6. PCHR calls upon the international community to condemn summary executions carried out by Israeli forces against Palestinians and to pressurize Israel to stop them.
7. PCHR calls upon the States Parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC to work hard to hold Israeli war criminals accountable.
8. PCHR calls upon the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions to fulfill their obligations under article (1) of the Convention to ensure respect for the Conventions under all circumstances, and under articles (146) and (147) to search for and prosecute those responsible for committing grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions to ensure justice and remedy for Palestinian victims, especially in light of the almost complete denial of justice for them before the Israeli judiciary.
9. PCHR calls upon the international community to speed up the reconstruction process necessary because of the destruction inflicted by the Israeli offensive on Gaza.
10. PCHR calls for a prompt intervention to compel the Israeli authorities to lift the closure that obstructs the freedom of movement of goods and 1.8 million civilians that experience unprecedented economic, social, political and cultural hardships due to collective punishment policies and retaliatory action against civilians.
11. PCHR calls upon the European Union to apply human rights standards embedded in the EU-Israel Association Agreement and to respect its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights when dealing with Israel.
12. PCHR calls upon the international community, especially states that import Israeli weapons and military services, to meet their moral and legal responsibility not to allow Israel to use the offensive in Gaza to test new weapons and not accept training services based on the field experience in Gaza in order to avoid turning Palestinian civilians in Gaza into testing objects for Israeli weapons and military tactics.
13. PCHR calls upon the parties to international human rights instruments, especially the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), to pressurize Israel to comply with its provisions in the oPt and to compel it to incorporate the human rights situation in the oPt in its reports submitted to the relevant committees.
14. PCHR calls upon the EU and international human rights bodies to pressurize the Israeli forces to stop their attacks against Palestinian fishermen and farmers, mainly in the border area.

Fully detailed document available at the official website of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR).

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Featured image is from IMEMC

On the first anniversary of the beginning of the #GreatReturnMarch protests by Palestinians in Gaza to mark #LandDay on March 30, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition stands in solidarity with our Palestinian friends who are demanding full freedom of movement, including the right to return to their homes in historic Palestine.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition joins the Palestinian Human Rights Institutions Association and demands that:

1. the international community fulfill its responsibilities, condemn the aggression and actively intervene to compel the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to stop their ongoing and escalating aggression on the Gaza Strip and to respect International Humanitarian Law.
2. all parties to the Geneva Convention IV uphold their legal responsibilities under Article 1 of the Convention which states that these parties are committed to respect the Convention and to ensure that the Convention is respected in all circumstances, in addition to its obligation to prosecute those accused of committing serious violations of the provisions of the Convention under Article 146.
3. the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court open an official investigation into the killings committed by the IOF against the population of the Gaza Strip to ensure that the IOF are held accountable.
4. the European Union and other world bodies suspend their Association Agreements with the Israeli Occupation for failing to respect human rights, and that they cease all forms of cooperation with the Israeli Occupation.

We urge supporters to participate in solidarity protests wherever possible, to write to the media demanding they report the truth about what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza (see these talking points from the American Friends Service Committee) and to contact their governments. Our friends at Code Pink offer more resources here, including a petition we all can sign to the US Congress.

We join the Israeli NGO Gisha and many others in calling for an end to blockade and full freedom of movement for all Palestinians, including access to the sea. In the spirit of the historic 2008 call from the Free Gaza movement, we pledge to continue sailing against the blockade until Palestine is free.

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Since last weekend, Israeli warplanes preemptively terror-bombed Gaza and Aleppo’s Sheikh Najar region overnight, causing material damage, according to Syria’s Defense Ministry.

For Netanyahu, it’s all about wanting his resume as a warrior burnished ahead of upcoming April 9 elections – wanting bragging rights for deaths, injuries and destruction.

What further aggression does he have in mind through early April? According to the Palestinian Prisoners Society, his regime abducted 19 Palestinians on Thursday, invading dozens homes across the West Bank, ransacking them, terrorizing families, traumatizing young children.

On Wednesday, seven Hebron Palestinians were kidnapped by Israeli forces. Soldiers attacked peaceful protesters near Ramallah, marching in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners, eight shot with live fire and rubber-coated steel bullets.

An uneasy Gaza truce is holding, Strip residents fearful of further IDF terror-bombing and possible cross-border attacks by Israeli combat troops – mobilized ready to invade if ordered.

Overnight Wednesday and Thursday, hundreds of Gazans protested against Israeli aggression and suffocating blockade. Soldiers attacked them with live fire and toxic tear gas.

Saturday March 30 is Land Day, commemorated annually since 1976. At the time, Israeli General Yisrael Koenig prepared a secret plan, encouraging greater Jewish occupation of the Galilee and Negev, wanting Arabs displaced to accommodate them.

Demonstrations against confiscation of over 5,000 acres of Palestinian land were declared illegal. Security forces attacked nonviolent Palestinians, killing six, injuring dozens, arresting hundreds.

For Palestinians, Land Day is all about resistance against Israeli theft of their land, displacing Arab residents for exclusive Jewish development and occupancy.

The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel explained why Great March of Return demonstrations in Gaza began on March 30, 2018, continuing weekly, saying:

“…Palestinians in Gaza launched (weekly marches) to reclaim their right to return to their homeland. This is why the demonstrations began on 30 March – Land Day – which marks Palestinians’ resistance to the state’s expropriation of mass tracts of their land in Galilee in 1976.”

What began 43 years ago remains an endless struggle for Palestinian rights to their land and freedom from repressive Israeli occupation.

“…Palestinians’ rights to their lands, their livelihoods and their lives are under greater threat than ever,” said Adalah.

Ahead of this year’s commemoration, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) said Israel occupies more than 85% of historic Palestine, about 27,000 square km.

At end of 2017, there were 150 illegal Israeli settlements and 116 outposts. Last year, the Netanyahu regime sharply increased construction of around another 9,400 housing units, approving nine new settlement outposts.

Settler population was around 654,000 at yearend 2017, numbers increasing daily at the expense of displaced Palestinians.

Physician, activist, Palestinian Legislative Council and PLO member, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) Mustafa Barghouti earlier said:

“Every day is Land Day for our people.” It reflects “our battle with the occupation that steals our land and our future. The only way to respond is by escalating popular resistance” – continuing until Palestine is liberated from illegal Israeli occupation.

The  BDS Movement for Freedom, Justice and Equality earlier headlined “Land Day: Celebrate Resistance and Intensify BDS.”

“Land Day presents opportunity to develop campaigns for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, particularly campaigns targeting the Jewish National Fund, Israeli agribusinesses and companies operating in illegal Israeli settlements, all of which play a vital role in the continued theft of Palestinian land.”

“The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) invites people of conscience across the world to join us in marking land day by highlighting BDS as an effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.”

“At a time when Israel is facing unprecedented levels of pressure over its continued colonization of Palestinian land and quickly losing the international support upon which it depends, let us work together to intensify our collective efforts to hold Israel and its supporters accountable.”

Annual Land Day commemorations are to resist and remember, Palestinians expected to turn out en masse this Saturday throughout the Occupied Territories – Israeli violence virtually certain to confront them.

As long as illegal brutalizing occupation continues, on Land Day and every day, supporters of peace, equity and justice everywhere are all Palestinians.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Brexit has ceased to be the “will of the people”, analysis of British Social Attitudes Survey respondents has suggested.

National Centre for Social Research data found 55 per cent of Brits would vote Remain in a second referendum, with just six per cent of respondents saying they now think the UK will secure a good Brexit deal – a massive reduction from the 33 per cent who were optimistic about the outcome of negotiations when the Article 50 process was triggered in March 2017.

The findings have prompted the centre’s senior research fellow Sir John Curtice to warn MPs discussing Brexit in Parliament that:

“There is seemingly room for debate about whether leaving the EU is still the ‘will’ of a majority of voters in the UK.

“Perhaps the key message for the politicians as they decide what to do is that those on all sides of the argument might be best advised to show a degree of humility when claiming to know what voters really want.”

Of the 70 polls conducted since the 2017 General Election only two have given Leave the edge (+1), with five ties and 63 Remain leads.

Recent averages for Remain have been between seven and eight points.

There also hasn’t been a single poll in almost a year now with Leave lead.

hasn’t been a single poll in almost a year now with Leave lead. 70 polls since GE17 show only two (+1) leads, 5 Ties, 63 Remain leads, recent avg plus 7/8 remain.

Hypothesis: General Election 2017 was a structural break in polled support for Remain/Leave

Via @britainelects pic.twitter.com/gLnSCpi5nW

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) March 26, 2019

But Sir John issued a note of caution by saying:

“The Remain lead in our data is not sufficiently large for anyone to be sure what the outcome of any second ballot would be, especially as any such ballot would occur after a campaign that might result in a shift of opinion in one direction or the other.”

He also warned:

“There must be a question mark about whether those who did not vote first time around would necessarily do so second time around.”

But he concluded the new data clearly showed a “potential frailty of arguments that leaving the EU is necessarily the ‘will’ of a majority of the British public.

“It is enough to raise doubts about whether, two and half years after the original ballot, leaving the EU necessarily continues to represent the view of a majority of the British public”

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Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to The Sunday Telegraph, BBC News and writes for The Big Issue on a weekly basis. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Featured image: Sir John Curtice (Source: The London Economic)

Contrary to the high hopes that many in the Alt-Media Community had for a Russian base in Venezuela after false reports and “analytical” innuendo were spread about this possibility, Moscow officially denied that it’s planning to permanently base its military forces in the South American country.

The Faux Challenge

Another day, another fake news scandal, except this time it could have epic international consequences after none other than the US government seems to have fallen for Alt-Media’s false reports and “analytical” innuendo about a supposed Russian base in Venezuela. Trump threatened that “all options” are on the table to prevent this from happening after Moscow’s latest dispatch of military aid to the South American country saw it sending roughly 100 troops to train their Venezuelan counterparts on how to operate their new unspecified equipment. That highly publicized and grossly misreported development sent alarm bells ringing after Mainstream Media and Alt-Media alike interpreted it as representing a Syrian-like challenge to the US’ regime change efforts there, with these two diametrically opposed information forces curiously seeming to agree on this false narrative for their own separate reasons.

The Rumor Mill

While it can’t be known exactly why they entered into tacit agreement to promote this narrative, one plausible explanation could be that both Mainstream and Alternative Media were influenced by the reports late last year about a possible Russian base in Venezuela, with the former seeing this as something deviously destabilizing while the latter appeared to regard it as a stabilizing godsend. Neither of them, it must be said, appeared to doubt the veracity of the unconfirmed report from Nezavisimaya Gazeta that RT catapulted to global attention at the time. The public at large seems to have had the attitude that if both the Mainstream and Alternative Medias actually agree on something, then there must be at least a kernel of truth to it, naively ignoring the fact that Russia couldn’t realistically maintain such a speculated facility halfway across the world in the face of Trump’s vigorous neo-“Monroe Doctrine” implementation of his “Fortress America” grand strategy for restoring the US’ unipolar hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

Rubbishing The False Reports

Nevertheless, this “inconvenient fact” didn’t stop those in the Mainstream and Alternative Medias from imagining that Russia was “standing up” to the US in Venezuela when all that it actually was doing was simply fulfilling a profitable military contract irrespective of the dramatic optics that would ultimately surround it. The “chattering classes” – each for their own reasons – pretended that there was “something else going on”, wanting to believe that there’s “more to it than it seems”, but none other than Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman just quashed all that speculation when she unambiguously announced on Thursday that “It’s the first time that I hear about bases in Venezuela… Where have you seen such discussions? On the Telegram messenger? I have never seen any discussions on the topic of our bases.”

Self-Interested Skepticism

Russia’s official rubbishing of this false narrative probably won’t be believed by either the Mainstream or the Alternative Medias, and again, each of their own reasons. The first-mentioned never trusts anything that Russia says no matter what it is, while the latter is usually conspiratorially convinced that Russia denies certain things like this “just because it has to” (ridiculously assuming that only they can understand its “subtle messaging” while the US’ many intelligence agencies are apparently stupidly unaware of “what’s really going on”). It would be extremely troublesome, however, if purportedly “friendly” Alt-Media outlets, personalities, and commentators don’t open their eyes to the fact that there really aren’t any plans to build a Russian base in Venezuela and that continuing to advance this narrative actually plays into the US’ hands by “justifying” any potentially forthcoming forcible measures to “drive the Russians out”. The US is likely planning a conventional attack or outright invasion there anyhow, but feeding into its fake anti-Russian pretext for doing so is counterproductive.

Reality Check

In fact, it can even be argued that Trump is preparing to masterfully exploit the “fortuitous opportunity” of Russia’s training mission in Venezuela in order to inflict a crushing blow to its international soft power by destroying the Alt-Media myth that Moscow is “saving” the South American country and therefore disappointing the countless people who were misled into thinking that this is so. Nobody should have believed this anyhow when considering that the US still regularly bombs Syria despite Russia having rotated tens of thousands of its troops through the two bases that it currently has in the Mideast country that’s much closer to its borders than the South American one halfway across the world in which only around 100 of its trainers are deployed in a non-combat capacity.

Lesson Learned?

Acknowledging these “inconvenient facts” doesn’t mean that Russia has no right to enter into military cooperation with Venezuela at the request of the host government’s democratically elected and legitimate authorities, nor that it should withdraw in response to Trump’s threats (even if it does have the “face-saving” possibility of doing so if Caracas publicly declares that their mission is complete), but just that the international audience shouldn’t have any false expectations about the strategic impact of Moscow’s latest low-level but highly publicized military deployment there. Trump is clearly taking advantage of the obviously false reports about an impending Russian base in Venezuela in order to concoct a “strawman” argument for “plausibly” intensifying his regime change operations there to the possible point of a conventional military intervention, but the wisdom of hindsight should make many people in Alt-Media realize how they inadvertently played into the US’ evolving infowar narrative over the past few months by hyping up such speculative reports and therefore cause them to think twice about doing so next time.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In blatant violation of international law, Donald Trump has recognized Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The order came in the midst of a renewed wave of violence in the Gaza Strip, with Israel responding to rocket attacks with a characteristically disproportionate slew of airstrikes. Tensions are still high in Gaza, which is becoming increasingly uninhabitable.

The lives and homes that continue to be lost in both Gaza and Israel only underscore the importance of negotiating a good-faith solution to one of the Middle East’s most central and devastating conflicts. Trump’s latest move, however, appears designed to bolster Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s elections on April 9 and entrench a ruling party whose policies aggravate the situation on the ground and work in direct opposition to long-held U.S. positions. This support of Netanyahu and capitulation to the Israeli far right comes at the expense of thousands of Syrian and millions of Palestinian lives.

Israel displaced tens of thousands of Syrians when it seized the Golan during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and prohibited them from returning to their homes. Later, the United Nations unequivocally condemned Israel’s 1981 unilateral annexation of the Golan, with the Security Council asserting in Resolution 497 that Israel’s “decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.” Seizing and annexing a territory through military force is prohibited under international law. The United States relied on this principle to condemn Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, so Trump’s decision also gives Putin cause to celebrate.

Thousands of Druze still live in the Golan and retain their Syrian identity, even as Israel’s settlements have expanded beyond the “defensive” security installations that justified the Golan’s occupation in the first place. As Human Rights Watch has noted, the Trump administration’s decision works to undercut the protections afforded to these Syrians under the law of occupation, which includes “the prohibition against building settlements and extracting natural resources for the benefit of the occupier.” Israel, of course, continues to engage in both prohibited activities with little protest from the United States. With Trump’s order, however, the United States will no longer recognize these protections.

Denying the reality of the Golan’s occupation adds to Trump’s already long repertoire of policies that hurt the Syrian people. In addition to exploiting the current situation in Syria to justify this shift in U.S. policy, Trump’s Muslim Ban bars Syrian nationals from entering the country, and his FY2020 budget request seeks to eliminate all U.S. stabilization funding for Syria—despite the U.S. role in destroying vital infrastructure in cities like Raqqa. By gifting the Golan to Netanyahu, Trump also enshrines an occupation that effectively assigns Muslims in the Golan second-class citizenship under Israel’s racist nation-state law.

Trump’s decision to change the Golan’s status under U.S. policy also has troubling consequences for Palestinians. Rather than sanction Netanyahu for his election deal with far-right parties that promote hate and for his advancement of settlement policies that violate international law, Trump is encouraging and empowering the re-election of a prime minister who would undoubtedly continue the erosion of Arab Israeli and Palestinian rights. Netanyahu is already claiming that the decision sets a precedent for annexation that could justify a similar designation for large swathes of the West Bank.

While encouraging Netanyahu, Trump has stripped aid funding to Palestinians and continued to perpetuate the status quo in Israel, even as the United Nations accuses Israel of potential war crimes in Gaza for murdering unarmed protesters, including children. In October, he also signed into law the 2018 Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), which “stipulates that foreign governments which accept aid from the U.S. government will be eligible for prosecution in U.S. courts for damages as a result of terrorism.” Since that provision could make the Palestinian Authority (PA) financially liable in U.S. courts, the PA said it could no longer accept U.S. aid, forcing USAID and U.S. NGOs to leave Gaza and the West Bank.

Trump’s recent order does not change the reality of the ground. The Golan Heights is occupied Syrian land, recognized as such under international law. But Trump’s designation degrades the already tattered U.S. legitimacy in the region, providing further proof that Jared Kushner is wasting a lot of jet fuel and taxpayer dollars pointlessly flitting about the Middle East with his “peace plan.”

But beyond U.S. credibility and the Israeli elections, the Golan Heights is home to thousands of people who will be directly hurt by this decision. Palestinians will also bear the brunt of an emboldened Israeli far-right wing, making peace in the region seem less and less achievable. As the 2020 elections inch closer, the crowded field of Democratic candidates must be prepared to present a robust Middle East policy and a clearly delineated path forward to undo the damage Trump has caused.

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Laila Ujayli is a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow at Win Without War specializing in the human impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. She graduated from The Ohio State University with a double B.S. in International Relations and English, focusing on the intersection of narrative and policy. Her screenplays on history and conflict in the Middle East have won multiple awards.

Featured image is an official White House photo

One of, if not the most, powerful international issue lobby is that of the pro-Israel crowd. Well-financed and politically powerful, the pro-Israel lobby is a major force on American foreign affairs that looks to continue America’s military and fiscal support of the Jewish nation-state. The lobby has had recent policy success with the Trump administration moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from the internationally-recognized capital of Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move long advocated by some in the pro-Israel lobby. Notably however, JStreet, one of the larger pro-Israel groups opposed the move. The administration is very friendly with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has taken a hard line on Israel peace talks, barely talking to the Palestinians and ending all foreign aid to the West Bank and Gaza.

Even with the policy victories coming under a Republican president, the lobby still remained staunch Democratic contributors, giving more than $14.8 million in the 2018 midterms to mostly Democrats. This marked their third-biggest cycle ever and their biggest non-presidential cycle.

The largest group which contributed was JStreetPAC which gave more than $4 million to candidates in 2018. Only one other pro-Israel group spent over $1 million on the cycle – NorPAC with more than $1.1 million.

The top recipient of pro-Israel funds in the 2018 midterms was Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) with $546,507. Menendez is the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) received the second-most with $349,437.

2018 was an all-time high for money spent on lobbying for pro-Israel issues with more than $5 million. The robust lobbying force was led by the face of the pro-Israel movement the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC spent more than $3.5 million on lobbying in 2018, making up the vast majority the entire lobby spent. A distant second was the Israeli-American Coalition for Action which dropped $550,000.

The pro-Israel lobby is not entirely unified on policy decisions. JStreet, the group with the biggest campaign contributions, differs from AIPAC which led the lobbying effort. JStreet is a more liberal organization and is often critical of the Netanyahu and Trump administrations. AIPAC on the other hand has a policy of not publicly criticizing the Israeli government and has been more supportive of Trump.

– Raymond Arke, February 2019

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Top Contributors, 2017-2018

Contributions to:
Democrats
Republicans
Liberal Groups
Conservative Groups
Nonpartisan

Contribution Trends, 1990-2018

Top Lobbying Clients, 2018

Lobbying Totals, 1998-2018

Party Split, 1990-2018

Top Recipients, 2017-2018

Average Contributions to Members of Congress, 1990-2018

All lobbying expenditures on this page come from the Senate Office of Public Records. Data for the most recent year was downloaded on January 24, 2019.

Data for the current election cycle were released by the Federal Election Commission on Friday, February 01, 2019

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Featured image is from American Free Press

On Wednesday, the London Guardian headlined: “MPs to vote on alternative (Brexit) plans as speculation mounts May could announce decision to quit,” adding: She’s “under intense pressure to set out a timetable for her departure from Downing Street…”

Theresa May resembles a “dead man walking,” increasingly a prime minster in name only – her wings clipped, her power ebbing.

Her epitaph as PM alone remains to be written. It won’t be kind about a more wrecking ball figure than leader, a humiliating example of ineptitude.

Straightaway after the June 2016 Brexit vote to leave the EU, she botched discussions with Brussels, dragging them out endlessly, agreeing to a no-Brexit/Brexit deal, displeasing Tories, opposition parties, most Brits and European officials – achieving nothing but overwhelming revulsion over how she handled things.

On Monday, MPs took control of the Brexit process, adopting an amendment for them to hold so-called “indicative votes” this week. They, not May, will decide where Brexit goes from here.

Three more of her ministers resigned, voting for the amendment she opposed, powerless to stop its adoption.

Though non-binding, “indicative votes” will determine Brexit options going forward, abandoning it altogether, remaining in the EU, the most likely one.

After nearly three years of toing and froing, achieving nothing, ending up at square one, Brexit appears zombie-like, its corpse awaiting burial.

MPs defeated May’s no-deal/deal twice. They oppose another vote to defeat it a third time. Chances of Britain crashing out of the EU with no deal are virtually nil.

Options are either May’s no-deal/deal, another referendum likely to kill Brexit if held, or MPs conducting the burial themselves.

Brussels rejects Brexit other than on its terms – Britain leaving the bloc in name only, in reality remaining a member – indicative voting unlikely to change the impasse.

There’s no new approach acceptable to all sides. No matter how many parliamentary votes are taken, a majority for one option agreeable to Brussels is highly unlikely.

For nearly three years, no breakthroughs were achieved, none likely coming. Other than a second referendum, the options are like being pregnant or not at all. There’s no in between.

Monday was significant, a big step toward ending May’s tenure as prime minister, MPs taking control of the Brexit process, her power slipping away.

Responding to Monday events in parliament, her Brexit spokesman said adoption of the amendment for indicative voting “upends the balance between our democratic institutions and sets a dangerous, unpredictable precedent for the future,” adding:

“While it is now up to parliament to set out next steps in respect of this amendment, the government will continue to call for realism. Any options considered must be deliverable in negotiations with the EU.”

“Parliament should take account of how long these negotiations would take, and if they’d require a longer extension, which would mean holding European parliamentary elections.”

While May isn’t bound to accept indicative voting results, her only acceptable option is stepping down – other than hanging on to be voted out of office, where things are heading, maybe in days.

As things now stand with Brussels, the March 29 deadline was pushed back to May 22 – provided UK parliamentarians accept the twice rejected deal by end of this week, or make significant movement toward acceptance.

If not, May was given an April 12 deadline to leave the bloc, what won’t happen without a deal approved by UK MPs and Brussels.

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn was right, saying May’s approach to Brexit “has now become a national embarrassment. Every step of the way along this process the government has refused to reach out, refused to listen and refused to find a consensus that can represent the views of the whole of the country, not just her own party.”

Brexit is dead, May’s tenure as prime minister on life support. Admitting reality and leaving is her only option – voluntarily or being shoved.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Genocide is among the worst possible crimes. Victims of genocide and crimes against humanity deserve to see the perpetrators prosecuted and punished. However, the innocent must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, despite the seriousness of the alleged crime.

No U.S. citizen, neither president nor military officer, has ever been accused or tried for genocide crime in a U.S. court, but Rwandan immigrants have been tried here many times for participating in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and lying about it on their immigration papers. Former Rwandan medical student Jean Leonard Teganya has been facing such charges in Massachusetts Federal District Court, and his case will be decided in coming weeks, most likely by mid-April.

No U.S. citizen, neither president nor military officer, has ever been accused or tried for genocide crime in a U.S. court, but Rwandan immigrants have been tried here many times for participating in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and lying about it on their immigration papers.

Teganya is accused of identifying and helping Hutu militants capture and kill Tutsis in the hospital where he was training in 1994.

In order to convict Teganya of the crime of perjury in the U.S., the jury must conclude that he is indeed guilty of alleged crimes in Rwanda or that he lied about being a member of the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), the ruling party before Gen. Paul Kagame and his army seized power in July 1994. The court must presume his innocence until conclusive evidence of his guilt is presented.

Rwanda’s military dictator Paul Kagame commonly accuses innocent Rwandans living abroad of genocide crime because they differ politically, because they challenge the government’s account of who killed whom and how during the genocide, and because they are of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic group, which is commonly believed to have committed genocide against the Tutsi.

Rwanda’s military dictator Paul Kagame commonly accuses innocent Rwandans living abroad of genocide crime.

Imagine a group of people who have been coerced by threat of death or imprisonment in an African jail and then told that to escape that fate, they need simply go on a trip to the United States to testify against some stranger, with the flight, hotel, meals etc. all paid for by American taxpayers. Imagine those people being coached by an African prosecutor about what to say in the U.S. courtroom.

Imagine that, after the defense team cross-examines them and manages to prove obvious lies in their testimony, these people simply leave their hotel and fly home to Rwanda, avoiding perjury charges unless the prosecutor later decides to indict them in a U.S. court and demand their extradition. It’s so unlikely that a U.S. prosecutor would do such a thing that it deserves mention only as a legal technicality. In fact, prosecution witnesses testify without penalty of perjury.

Many observers present at the trial of Jean Leonard Teganya in Boston, Massachusetts, have observed all this happening.

The U.S. federal court system is normally biased against the defendant. In 1972, the conviction rate in that system was approximately 75 percent and by 2012 it had climbed to 93 percent. Today, some say that rate is as high as 95 percent. It does not take a genius to realize that at least some of these convictions are wrong and the Innocence Project has exonerated many people years after they were convicted.

Prosecution collaborates with Rwandan military dictator Paul Kagame

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts made the odds even worse for Mr. Teganya by collaborating with the government of Rwandan military dictator Paul Kagame to produce “witnesses,” who have nothing to lose because they will leave this country before they can be charged with perjury, and who have everything to gain back home in Rwanda by falsely accusing Mr. Teganya.

The witnesses that the Kagame regime has offered to the prosecution are a defense team’s worst nightmare and an abuse of the U.S. legal system because they testify essentially without penalty of perjury.

What’s more, the human rights crimes of Kagame himself and his military forces have been widely documented in annual reports from the State Department as well as various reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He and his forces could be convicted of genocide if charges were brought in a criminal court and honestly investigated.

This was explained in the BBC documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story” and in the United Nations’ Mapping Report. Gen. Kagame’s plots to assassinate Rwandans abroad have been exposed in the United Kingdom, Belgium and South Africa.

His use of false witnesses to go after real or perceived enemies has been documented by many, including Alexander Zahar in “The Problem of False Testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.” Nevertheless, federal prosecutors in Massachusetts have chosen to partner with this regime to increase their chances of convicting Mr. Teganya.

The mainstream media in Boston, particularly the Boston Globe’s Maria Cramer and the Boston Herald’s Laurel J. Sweet, aided the prosecution by publishing, upon the trial’s opening, accusations with no countervailing account of events. As these accusations now fall apart in court, these reporters are failing to correct the public record. This is not only media malpractice, but also a disservice to their audiences.

One of these Rwandan witnesses claimed that Mr. Teganya sexually assaulted her during the 1994 genocide. This same witness had previously testified about her 1994 ordeals in several proceedings in Rwanda and at the United Nations Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania. Some defendants were convicted on the basis of her testimony in those proceedings in Africa.

However, at no time in multiple proceedings did she ever mention Mr. Teganya’s name. In the Massachusetts federal district court, she was unable to explain why, 25 years later, she is accusing Mr. Teganya for the first time ever.

Her current testimony does not match all her previous testimonies. Was she lying multiple times in African courts or is she lying now, assuming that the American court would never know what she told the African courts?

Another Rwandan witness claimed that he was on the janitorial staff at the school where Mr. Teganya was studying medicine in 1994, and that the two of them would go to town every week to get militia weapons-training in preparation for the genocide. However, in response to defense questioning, this witness was unable to name any other medical students known to him or to Mr. Teganya. The jury was expected to believe that this janitorial staffer made friends with just one medical student, Mr. Teganya, without knowing any of his other friends among the hospital’s medical students. American taxpayer dollars are being used to fly these kinds of witnesses to Boston.

Despite all this worthless testimony, the Massachusetts prosecutors who charged Mr. Teganya have failed to demonstrate why he, at the time a high-achieving, 22-year-old medical student with a passion for medicine and no prior record – not even a parking ticket – would suddenly commit murder and rape women.

Americans should oppose the use of their taxes to bring such pathetic witnesses to U.S. courts. They should oppose the federal government prosecutor’s collaboration with an infamous military dictator hunting his enemies down abroad.

And they should oppose mainstream media that tarnishes defendants’ names and then fails to correct the record when new information comes out. They should watch the U.S. District Court in the State of Massachusetts in the case of Jean Leonard Teganya.

Genocide victims deserve to see real perpetrators punished, not to see the innocent framed.

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Rwandan Canadian and human rights activist Aimable Mugara lives in Toronto. 

The Russian military leadership continues employing its maritime doctrine, an important part of which is the strengthening of the surface fleet.

As was recently revealed, Moscow is planning to build two units of project 23560 (i.e. Lider-class nuclear-powered destroyers) by the end of the 2020s.  Preliminary design of the project is complete and was accomplished by the Severnoye Design Bureau. Research and development work and planning for the construction phase are ongoing.

In accordance with the state rearmament program for 2018-2027, the structural design work on Lider-class destroyers must begin in 2021. According to prior assessments, construction of one ship would require approximately seven years.

It is planned to float off the lead ship of the class and a first serial destroyer by the end of the 2020s. Every destroyer will reportedly cost about RUB100 billion (about USD1.5 billion).

Lider is an ocean-going guided missile destroyer. It is smaller than Russian Kirov-class battlecruisers, but larger than US Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers.

Supposed technical specifications are as follows:

• Displacement – up to 20,000 t.
• Approximate length – 230 m.
• Beam – 20 m.
• Draught – 6.6m.
• Speed – about 32 knots.
• Crew – 300 persons.

The ship will be capable of carrying over 100 missiles of the type Zircon, Onix, Kalibr, or a combination of these three. Experts say that Lider also may be armed with an upgraded version of the current missile being used in the Kinzhal hypersonic complex.

Air and missile defense of the ship will be provided by naval versions of the S-500, S-300, and Pantsir systems as well as the Poliment-Redut medium-range surface-to-air system, developed by Almaz Antey especially for new generation ships.

The air group will consist of 2 helicopters – most likely Ka-29 or Ka-52K.

Anti-submarine warfare and anti-torpedo defense will be provided by the Paket-NK torpedo system. Paket-NK torpedoes are designed to destroy both submarines and torpedoes in the near field of the ship.

Some of the weapon and counter-measure systems of Lider are already being tested in active ships of the Russian Navy.

Operational range and life of the ship will drastically increase due to the included atomic energy power plant. It is expected that the destroyer will be fully designed for use of stealth technology, to include employment of composite materials in the main deck, superstructure, and outline of the ship.

Military sources say that Lider will be a combined guided missile destroyer, large anti-submarine warship, and guided missile cruiser, able to complete tasks of Project 1155 anti-submarine destroyers, Project 956 anti-surface destroyers and Project 1164 cruisers. Lider-class destroyers will become the most capable ships of the Russian Navy, excluding battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy and other ships of the same class.

It should be noted that since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has yet to build such large ships. Nonetheless, it has the experience of successful modernization of large ships built in the Soviet period. This experience will be employed in the design and development of new destroyers.

Estimating the supposed technical specifications of Lider, some experts say that they include common elements of the arms race. This project is a yet another attempt to catch up technical capabilities of the leading Western navies. Nonetheless, the decision to build Lider-class destroyers is determined by the modern course of development of the international relations and Russia’s growing need to strengthen its ocean-going component of the surface fleet.

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