‘Can you imagine our troops coming to France without invitation?’ Bashar Assad blasts French ‘occupation’ of Syria

Source

http://www.rt.com
28 Nov, 2019

FILE PHOTO © REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

There’s no major difference between supporting terrorism on Syrian soil and sending troops there without formal approval from its government, Bashar Assad said as he lambasted France’s role in Syria’s civil war.
Syria has “come a long way” toward defeating much of the terrorist insurgency on its soil, but pockets of resistance still remain as jihadists are receiving support from Turkey and Western countries, Bashar Assad told Paris Match magazine, singling out the US, the UK and “especially France.”

France has joined the US-led anti-Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) coalition, providing air support and deploying special forces to Syria. But for Assad, the French intervention amounted to an “occupation,” as Paris – like its major NATO ally Washington – failed to secure Damascus’ authorization of the mission.

Do you frankly think that we can send Syrian forces to fight terrorism in France without being invited by the French government? International law governs the behavior of states in the world, not [their] intentions.

Now, when foreign forces came to Syria without being invited by the legitimate government, “it is [called] occupation,” the Syrian president insisted, adding, “there is not a big difference between supporting terrorism and deploying the military to occupy a country.”

Dubbed Operation Chammal, the French deployment was, officially, to carry out reconnaissance flights and aid Kurdish and Arab fighters in Syria. At peak times, France’s assets in the Middle East included a Charles de Gaulle carrier strike group, a fighter jet squadron as well as several marine units on the ground.

The interview came on the back of the Syrian army’s advances in the northern province of Idlib. The troops are now trying to fight their way toward the last militant-held towns along the strategic Damascus-Aleppo highway.

As the fighting continues, Assad said Syria can handle the war without any backing from the West. “We can manage our own business … But we want to come back to a world order that is no longer respected, because chaos reigns,” he concluded.

The Middle East and the Rest of the World Are United in Struggle

Source

theantimedia.com

Written by Middle East Eye

By Oscar Rickett

November 10, 2019

(MEE Op-Ed) — Across the Middle East, people are protesting. They are tired and angry. They want to see something change.

“All of them means all of them,” protesters chant in Lebanon, calling for the removal of the political and economic elite. Central Beirut, an area that had been taken over by luxury stores, has been reclaimed by the people.

In Algeria, the power brokers known as “le pouvoir” are being resisted, even after the removal of longtime autocrat Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Sudan’s revolution, which began in the northern city of Atbara, a cradle of labour activism, also continues, as the end of Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule was not enough. Protesters want to see the dismantling of a violent and ruthless elite, now spearheaded by the militia leader and accused war criminal Hemeti.

Brink of Collapse

In Iraq, as oil production hits record levels, citizens are out on the streets risking their lives, with more than 100 killed and 6,000 wounded as the army cracked down on demonstrations in early October.

The money from the oil goes nowhere near them, of course: according to the UN, seven million Iraqis live below the poverty line, and one-fifth of Iraqi youth are unemployed, in a country whose majority is under the age of 24. Protesters in Iraq are described as being mostly young and unemployed, calling for jobs, electricity and water.

Elsewhere, young people who have grown up in the shadow of the financial crisis of 2007-8 have also come to the fore, often with the same demands: better public services, employment, housing, and some semblance of dignity and democracy.

The similarities between these protests are striking, despite national variations. The conditions driving protests in the Middle East are the same not just throughout the region, but across the world, where people are rising up against decades of neoliberalism, from Chile to Haiti to France.

Their demands are universal – employment, housing, democracy, freedom from poverty – and are driven by a political and economic system that has brought this world to the brink of political and environmental collapse.

This is important because of how the Middle East is so often viewed in the western media. It is a place apart, a benighted territory riven by sectarian conflict, barely comprehensible to outsiders without the help of well-paid analysts sitting in offices in Washington and London.

A game of divide-and-conquer can be played, in which the universal interests of the global majority can be twisted by the powerful few into a bewildering set of local grievances, relayed by analysts as if they were talking about a group of primates deep in the jungle or a school of fish in the outer reaches of the ocean.

Neoliberal Consensus

This kind of reasoning has often been deployed in the name of getting the peoples of the Middle East to accept the neoliberal consensus of the past four decades.

“You don’t understand,” they are told. “The market will set you free, these IMF-backed austerity measures are for your own good, the arrival of this large company paying subsistence wages is actually a great honour to your community. What do you mean, you don’t love the West? You love football, don’t you? You want to leave the ruined place you come from to arrive in the glittering towers of Europe and the US, surely?”

Migrants seeking a better life are often propelled to do so by neoliberalism, by the collaboration of international and local elites, which keeps them far from anything that could be called a good life.

The seductive facade of today’s capitalism – the flashing images of wealth, sex and fulfillment that fill the media – adds to this, providing the carrot, where the destruction of local economies is the stick. Yet, when migrants leave for Europe or North America, they encounter barbed-wire fences, hostile politicians and a climate of racism and exclusion.

This facade might finally be crumbling.

In Chile, a slogan has begun to define the protests: “Neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile.” Just as in Iraq, neoliberalism came to Chileans at the barrel of a gun, arriving with the CIA-backed coup that removed Salvador Allende from power in 1973. “The miracle of Chile” was the term used by Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberalism, to describe what dictator Augusto Pinochet did to his country’s economy.

Stark Choices Ahead

The Middle East, particularly Iraq, knows this kind of story all too well. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq came with the expressed blessing of a raft of multinational companies. Iraq and its oil were there to be taken, and its people would be collateral. People are always collateral.

These global protests have the same root causes. Thus far, sectarianism is being resisted, as the people hold to their common set of grievances. In the West, in Britain and the US, crucial elections are on the horizon.

The choices people face are stark as politics becomes more polarised. “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads; either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism,” Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1916. The phrase “socialism or barbarism” has come back into use as a way to describe the choice we face, not just as citizens of one particular nation but as people across a world facing political and environmental collapse.

A great deal of time, money and effort will be spent fighting this, but as resistance grows across the Middle East, we should know that this is not just the region’s fight – it is the world’s fight.

France Rejects Edward Snowden’s Asylum Request, Fearing “Major Fallout” With US

So, France is telling the world that it is scared of the big bully USA. It’s a shame, as France once stood for Liberty, Fraternity, and some other nonsense that it doesn’t adhere to anymore.

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Fri, 09/20/2019

France’s foreign minister has indicated the country has dismissed former US National Security Agency contractor and leaker Edward Snowden’s asylum request because “it is not the time”. 

Snowden called on French President and former Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron to grant him political asylum from the United States, after he’s been living in Russia since the 2013 bombshell leaks were released, having first fled from Hong Kong. 

“He asked for asylum in France, but also elsewhere, in 2013. At that time, France thought that it was not appropriate, I do not see anything that has changed Thursday, either from a political or a legal point of view,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told French TV station CNews on Thursday.

Paris is skittish over the whole issue due to US pressure and what such a move would do to its close relationship with Washington. 

“An adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron hinted earlier this week that welcoming Snowden to France would lead to a major diplomatic fallout with the U.S.,” Politico Europe reported.

The whistleblower, who this week published his memoir, has escaped US prosecution as a guest of Putin’s Russia. He previously said he would “love to see” Macron allow him to live in France. Snowden made a first asylum appeal to France in 2013, which was rejected, and another last week.

“I am not asking for a parade. I’m not asking for a pardon,” he said in a recent interview. “What I’m asking for is a fair trial.” 

Speaking with France’s Inter radio on Monday as part of a press junket to promote his new memoir, the former NSA contractor said “Protecting whistleblowers is not a hostile act,” adding “Welcoming someone like me is not an attack on the United States.” 

“I would like to return to the United States. That is the ultimate goal. But if I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in prison, the one bottom line demand that we have to agree to is that at least I get a fair trial. And that is the one thing the government has refused to guarantee because they won’t provide access to what’s called a public interest defense,” Snowden told CBS This Morning. 

No doubt Snowden has to be dismayed over prospects of leaving Russia given Julian Assange’s treatment, who is currently held in reported solitary confinement, often cut off from his own defense lawyers and from regular mail, awaiting a US extradition trial in UK court.

French MPs call for boycott of address by environmentalist ‘apocalyptic guru’ Greta Thunberg

Source

http://www.rt.com

22 Jul, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Greta Thunberg speaking at a climate protest in Berlin © Reuters / Fabrizio Bensch

With 16-year old Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg set to address the French parliament, a group of MPs have vowed to boycott the doomsday speech by the person they called an “apocalyptic guru” and “prophetess in shorts.”

Invited to the session by an environmental caucus called Accellerons – formed to fight what its members call “the climate emergency” – Thunberg will speak before French lawmakers on Tuesday.

However, some MPs from the conservative Republicans and National Rally parties are unimpressed.

“We don’t need apocalyptic gurus to fight climate change intelligently, we need scientific progress and political courage,” Republican Guillaume Larrivé tweeted, calling on his colleagues to give the session a miss.

 Guillaume Larrivé

✔@GLarrive

J’appelle mes collègues députés à boycotter @GretaThunberg à l’Assemblée nationale. Pour lutter intelligemment contre le réchauffement climatique, nous n’avons pas besoin de gourous apocalyptiques, mais de progrès scientifique & de courage politique.https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1152590233000714247?s=20 …

LCP

✔@LCP

[ÉVÈNEMENT] La jeune militante pour le #climat @GretaThunberg sera à l’Assemblée nationale, le mardi 23 juillet.

Suivez son allocution sur les comptes Twitter et Facebook de LCP. #DirectAN Cc @amisdelaterre @PrFeuillage @EncoreTemps_ @Alternatiba_ @RACFrance @Reporterre

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Calling Thunberg the “winner of the Nobel fear prize,” Republican Julien Aubert announced that he wouldn’t show up to “applaud a prophetess in shorts.”

ALSO ON RT.COM‘F**k you Greta’ bumper stickers appear on German roads, taking aim at youth climate activist

Thunberg has been referred to in similar terms before. Rising to fame for organizing school strikes against climate change last year, Thunberg has since switched her rhetoric from demanding action to welcoming the apocalypse with religious fervor.

“We probably don’t even have a future anymore,” she told British lawmakers in April, in a likely preview of her upcoming address in France.

“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told the power-brokers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, several months earlier.

Against the dying of the earth, Thunberg offers only one solution: the immediate lowering of carbon emissions to net zero, a move that would see modern civilization – including car and plane travel, electricity, and affordable food for the masses – essentially wiped out.

ALSO ON RT.COMTeen climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg to take year off school for US trip

While European politicians have yet to put any of her radical proposals into policy, they have still applauded her speeches and lined up for photo opportunities with her.

“If I say that I do not want to prostrate myself before Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old child invited to the Assembly in front of the national representation, am I (still?) Politically correct?” asked National Rally MP Sébastien Chenu.

Criticism came from the political center too. Echoing criticism of Thunberg’s messianic worldview, Lawmaker Benedicte Peyrol of President Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! Party asked why France couldn’t “honor its own scientists who’ve been active for years in trying to save the planet,” albeit with less theatrical flair.

France passes law taxing tech giants despite US anger

Taxation can be seen as a form of sanction. As such, the USA is being an arrogant and hypocritical tyrant that applies sanctions willy nilly, as long as it fits its dinosaurian ideology. Look at how it reacts to a foreign country trying to manage its own affairs. Hypocrites. Yo, USA, shove your anger where the Sun doesn’t shine!

Source

http://www.rt.com

11 July, 2019

Google’s logo at the Google cultural hub in Paris © AFP / Joël Saget

The French parliament on Thursday passed a law taxing digital firms like Google and Facebook, which have been accused of exploiting global tax loopholes. The decision comes after Washington launched a probe into the tax.

The three-percent tax will be levied on sales generated in France by multinational firms. Any digital company with revenue of more than €750 million ($850 million) – of which at least €25 million is generated in France – would be subject to the levy.

Defending the new tax, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the country was “sovereign and decided its own tax rules.”

ALSO ON RT.COMUS threatens France over proposed ‘unfair’ tax on Silicon Valley tech giants

“I want to tell our American friends that this should be an incentive for them to accelerate even more our work to find an agreement on the international taxation of digital services,” he said.

The law, which has been already dubbed the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) tax, has angered Washington, which had raised concerns that the tax would “unfairly target American companies.”

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered an investigation into the French tax to “investigate the effects of this legislation and determine whether it is discriminatory or unreasonable and burdens or restricts United States commerce.”

ALSO ON RT.COMAustria wants to impose tax on internet giants’ advertising revenues

The new tax will be based on sales generated in France, rather than on profits. It will be paid by all global multinationals – around 30 companies, mostly American – but also firms from China, Germany, Spain and Britain.

The tech giants argue that they are complying with national and international tax laws.

France: French President Macron Suffers Huge Blow With Defeat to Le Pen

Source

themindunleashed.com/ Republished with permission / Zero Hedge

Tyler Durden

May 26, 2019

In what may be the biggest shock from today’s European parliamentary elections, President Emmanuel Macron suffered a major blow with French voters set to hand a victory to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, picking the vocal Eurosceptic and nationalist over the former Rothschild banker.Macron’s En Marche (Republic on The Move) will have just 22.5% of the vote compared with 24% for Le Pen, according to pollsters Ifop. With Macron and Le Pen neck and neck ahead of the elections, the outcome will be a humiliation for the liberal politician who said before the elections that everything less than 1st place would be a defeat.

Rounding out the The Greens were third with 13%, the conservative Republicans got 8%, while the implosion of the Socialists continues, coming in dead last with just 6.5% of the vote.

Macron’s default took place even as turnout was up around 10% points from 2014, however the increase was particularly marked in regions where Le Pen’s party has gained ground in the past years. In other words, as establishment apathy gets entrenched, the populist vote is increasingly demanding to be heard.

It gets worse: to the shock of globalists and statists everywhere, this is Le Pen’s second straight victory in the EU vote. In 2014 she beat the conservatives by 4 percentage points with Macron’s Socialist predecessor Francois Hollande trailing in third.

As Bloomberg notes, the result is a setback for the 41-year-old Macron who played a more prominent role in the campaign than any other European leader as he sought to mobilize voters.

The president is fighting for legitimacy as he tries to persuade the rest of the European Union to pursue tighter integration. Polls in Germany showed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats came first, although with fewer seats than last time.

“For Macron this was a defining election and it’s him who made it like that,” said Bernard Sananes, president of Elabe polling institute. “Finishing second would mean a sense of isolation in Europe.”

Today’s vote followed months of relentless protests which have seen looting and vandalism in Paris. Macron responded with a raft of new spending plans and tax cuts to appease the Yellow Vest movement but the measures failed to convince voters.

Meanwhile, Eurosceptic, anti-establishment and hard-right parties were also expected to top polls in the UK, Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Nigel Farage’s Brexit party was in contention to be the biggest single national party in the parliament, potentially beating both Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and Matteo Salvini’s rightwing League.

Germany’s left-right grand coalition faced a potentially significant electoral shock, with estimates indicating the Green party had made a historic breakthrough, taking 20.9 per cent of the vote. Philippe Lamberts, leader of the Green group, said: “To make a stable majority in this parliament the Greens are now indispensable.”

This pushed the center-left Social Democratic party into third place for the first time in nationwide elections, raising pressure on party leaders to rethink their federal alliance with the centre-right CDU and the CSU, its Bavarian sister party.

While the EPP remains the biggest group in the parliament, its diminished size may hamper Manfred Weber, its lead candidate, in making a claim to the presidency of the European Commission.

EPP parties were in first place in Germany, but Merkel’s CDU secured 28%, seven points down on its vote share in 2014. Finally, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz said he was “speechless” after a crushing victory, securing a third of all votes in spite of a corruption scandal that has brought down his coalition government with the far-right Freedom party.

---

 

New Zealand PM leads global Internet censorship campaign

Source

http://www.wsws.org

By Tom Peters
18 May 2019

The so-called “ Christchurch Call ” summit in Paris on Wednesday, led by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron, marked a significant escalation of the drive by governments throughout the world to censor the Internet.

Ardern and her Labour Party-led government, along with the Australian and French governments, are taking a leading role in exploiting the March 15 Christchurch terrorist attacks by Australian fascist Brenton Tarrant to justify sweeping attacks on freedom of expression. Tarrant live-streamed a video of the shootings, which killed 51 people, on Facebook.

The “summit” issued a statement signed by 17 governments, including the UK, France, Australia, India, Indonesia, Canada and Germany, along with Facebook, Twitter, Google and other tech giants. The statement agreed to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content” on social media platforms and other websites, and to steer people toward officially-sanctioned “positive” alternatives or “counter-narratives.” The US government did not sign, but a White House statement expressed agreement with the statement’s “overarching message.”

No one should be fooled by worthless assurances that these governments and corporate giants will protect “freedom of expression.” What constitutes “terrorist” or “extremist” material will be decided by the state agencies.

For the past two years, corporations such as Google and Facebook have collaborated with the US and other governments to severely restrict access to left-wing, socialist and anti-war websites, particularly to the WSWS. Their algorithms have been modified to reduce traffic to these sources, while promoting supposedly “authoritative” websites, i.e., the corporate media, in search results and news feeds. These measures, justified with lies about combating “fake news” and Russian and Chinese “interference,” are now being escalated under the guise of fighting “extremism.”

The New Zealand prime minister, having been glorified in the media internationally for showing “kindness” and “compassion” following the Christchurch shootings, has become one of the chief propagandists for censorship internationally.

An article by Ardern in the May 11 New York Times, with the misleading headline “How to Stop the Next Christchurch Massacre,” blamed the attack on social media and lax gun controls, while covering up its political roots. She made no mention of the fascist, anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology that motivated the gunman, apart from a hypocritical sentence about the need to “tackle racism and discrimination.”

Far from opposing racism, Ardern’s Labour Party-led coalition government includes the racist and xenophobic New Zealand First Party, whose leader Winston Peters has made numerous anti-Muslim statements. Labour and Ardern herself have vowed to cut immigration. They have echoed NZ First’s nationalist demagogy and adopted many of its anti-immigrant policies. After the 2017 election, Ardern made Peters foreign minister and deputy prime minister, giving his right-wing nationalist party significant power in the government, despite the fact that it received just over 7 percent of the votes.

Ardern wrote that the Paris agreement “is not about undermining or limiting freedom of speech.” In her “Christchurch Call” speech, she again rejected concerns “that this action plan we are endorsing today is about curbing freedom of expression.”

Such assurances are belied by the actions of the Labour government since the Christchurch attacks. It has worked with the corporate media to suppress public discussion about the causes of the atrocity. Tarrant’s manifesto, which reveals the similarity of his anti-immigrant, nationalist views to those of NZ First, US President Donald Trump and other political parties in Australia and across Europe, has been banned. Anyone caught with the document could face a lengthy prison sentence.

Likewise, media organisations have agreed to self-censor their coverage of Tarrant’s upcoming trial, so as not to report on his fascistic statements, precisely in order to obscure the connection to the foul right-wing politics of all the establishment parties.

This unprecedented censorship is also aimed at preventing discussion about Tarrant’s sympathy for the military and police, and why the intelligence agencies and police failed to prevent the Christchurch attack, despite repeated warnings. A royal commission of inquiry, which began this week ostensibly to look into these questions, is so far being held in secret.

More sweeping and permanent censorship mechanisms are being planned. A foundation established by former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark has recommended a new regulatory body specifically to police social media. It would have the power to take websites like Facebook completely offline, as happened in Sri Lanka following the terrorist attacks in April. The Helen Clark Foundation’s report, “Anti-Social Media: Reducing the spread of harmful content on social networks,” also calls for restrictions on the ability to live-stream videos.

Already, the Australian government has seized on the Christchurch attacks to rush legislation through parliament that will impose severe fines and prison sentences on social media executives who fail to remove material that the government deems “abhorrent” and “violent.” This could include videos, photos and articles that expose police brutality, war crimes and fascistic assaults on immigrants.

Such laws have nothing to do with fighting racism, terrorism or “fake news.” They will be used against the working class and its ability to organise against war and social inequality. It is no accident that the “Christchurch Call” was hosted by Macron. His right-wing government and the French media have slandered the anti-austerity “yellow vest” protests, involving hundreds of thousands of workers, as violent and anti-Semitic, in order to justify brutal police crackdowns and the arrest of protesters.

New Zealand’s ruling class has also been shaken by protests and strikes over the past year, including by teachers and healthcare workers. The corporatist trade union bureaucracy has expressed hostility and nervousness over workers organising independently and sharing information on social media.

The contempt for freedom of speech shared by all the governments that signed the “Christchurch Call” is most starkly revealed in their support for the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. They face lengthy imprisonment or even the death penalty for exposing US-led war crimes and other government-corporate abuses. The New Zealand parliament last year refused to even discuss a petition presented by Assange’s supporters calling for Ardern to offer him asylum.

As the crisis of capitalism deepens, with escalating social inequality, trade war and US threats of war against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia, the ruling elites are returning to the methods of the 1930s and 1940s. Governments are whipping up racism and xenophobia to divide workers, while desperately seeking to censor information, in order to prevent the emergence of a mass anti-war and anti-capitalist movement.

The author also recommends:

Australian fascist group tried to recruit Christchurch terrorist

[8 May 2019]

The Christchurch terror attack and the promotion of fascism by the ruling elite

[8 May 2019]