Oh Canada, stop meddling in foreign countries affairs and fix your own potholes. Better yet, fix the conditions in our First Nations’ reserves, and fix the housing crisis.
This Canadian supports the BDS movement until Israel stops its genocidal efforts towards Palestine.
On June 25, Canada’s Minister of Canadian Heritage and Multiculturalism announced that the Trudeau government’s new anti-racism strategy would include the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The Co-Chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) proudly noted that
“the IHRA definition also explicitly recognizes that anti-Zionism – that is the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state – is a clear and unequivocal expression of antisemitism.”
While the adoption of this definition is as yet only ‘symbolic and declaratory,’ it can form the basis for attacks on Palestinian solidarity at various levels. The funding of NGOs that are critical of Israel may be threatened. Public institutions will be pressured to deny meeting facilities for events that take the Palestinian side. It is also quite possible that this initiative could be taken further and the expression of anti-Zionist views actually be treated as a form of hate crime.
Misuse of Antisemitism
This latest move is part of the Canadian component of a concerted international drive to weaponise the false allegation of antisemitism in the service of Israel. In 2009, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA) was formed, comprised of former and sitting MPs from each party. It issued its report in 2011 and the focus was on combating the so called ‘new antisemitism’ of those who challenge Israel. Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) described the whole initiative as an ‘attempt to attack free speech and silence criticism of the Israeli government’s oppressive and illegal policies’ and ‘to label criticism of Israel and its behaviour, as well as organized efforts to change them, as anti-Semitic and to criminalize both.’
The BDS Movement has also been attacked by governments in Canada, with resolutions condemning the boycott effort coming from both the federal parliament and the provincial legislature in Ontario. The Al Quds Day Rally in Toronto has faced concerted efforts to undermine it, with the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, asserting last year that
“Our government will take action to ensure that events like Al Quds Day… are no longer part of the landscape in Ontario.”
Toronto’s Mayor, John Tory, took a similar position and Liberal MP, Michael Levitt, Chair of the Canada-Israel Parliamentary Group, urged the City and Province
Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) has produced an excellent report that shows how the IHRA definition is being used to further the attack on Palestinian solidarity, insufficient attention is paid to very real forms of antisemitic hate crime. The Israeli government and its supporters are aggressively using this document as a key tool in their efforts to ‘suppress – and even criminalize – criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights.’
If the effort to intimidate and suppress support for the Palestinians, especially when it is expressed as clear and forthright anti-Zionism, is being challenged with such escalating ferocity, this largely reflects a certain note of desperation on the part of Israel’s apologists. The BDS Movement has made gains and the general mood has shifted against the Zionist state. At the same time, Israel’s political leadership is racing to the right with the support of the Trump Administration and dispensing with polite fictions about a peace process, as they move to brutally complete the colonial project. The pretense of a liberal democracy seeking a just resolution is no longer viable. The accusation of antisemitism against international supporters of a free Palestine is really all that’s left in the toolbox. So, while fascists in Eastern Europe pose a real threat to Jewish communities and US nazis march through the streets chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ fire is focused on the left and life long anti-racists, like Jeremy Corbyn, are labeled as hatemongers. Moreover, the goal of the attack is no longer merely character assassination. The IHRA definition is being put forward as one that should inform the work of police and prosecutors. They prepare the ground to arrest those they can’t intimidate into silence.
Labour and the IHRA Definition
The Labour Party’s acceptance last year of the IHRA definition, with all of the examples included, was desperately unfortunate. As an effort by some on the left to appease the right and achieve peace, it was a predictable failure and only emboldened the attackers to go further with their cynical misuse of antisemitism. However, it also had the most serious implications for international Palestinian solidarity. Precisely because the prestige of the Corbyn leadership is so considerable and it is looked to with such hope in many other countries, the retreat had a damaging effect. We can expect the Liberal Party of Canada, fully complicit in the oppression of the Palestinians, to readily accept the IHRA definition but, for Labour to do this, even as the document is being used to attack solidarity movements in country after country, was massively unhelpful.
For obvious historical reasons, the position that a left-led party in Britain takes on an anti-colonial struggle is a decisive question. Leftists in the country from which the Balfour Declaration was issued have a particular responsibility to the Palestinians.
Though he was not the first Zionist politician to make this gesture, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, stood before the Security Council in April of this year and waved a bible in his hand as he declared that “this is our deed to our land.” That anyone can suggest that an ancient religious text should be used to decide affairs of state and international relations in the 21st Century is quite astounding yet no Western leader would even consider questioning these theatrics. If, however, Danon’s bible promised, not a part of the Middle East, but a portion of Western Europe, the Zionist claim to self-determination would have gone nowhere. When Zionism emerged in the 19th Century, as an adjunct of European colonialism, no one spoke in code. Everyone understood that the plan was for a settler colony that would serve as a garrison of Western interests. It would be, as Theodor Herzl put it,
Herzl’s wall is standing today. It was erected by ethnically cleansing the bulk of the Palestinian population, creating vast numbers of refugees and establishing an Apartheid regime for those who could not be removed. Last month, Netanyahu ventured the opinion that,
“If Israel wasn’t here, the Middle East would collapse.”
By that, of course, he means that the US-led domination of the entire region would be called into question and he is far from wrong.
The nature and role of the State of Israel is such that we can’t be content to be critical of its excesses and worst aspects. The seventh of the ‘contemporary examples of antisemitism’ listed in the IHRA definition speaks of ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.’ The dispossession of the Palestinians can’t possibly be considered the exercise of a right to self-determination and Israel, a colonial settler state, is a fundamentally racist endeavour. Zionism is not a religion or an ethnicity but a political ideology and its propositions are questioned or rejected by many Jews, while they are supported by leaders of Western powers who are, for the most part, not Jewish.
As Israel seeks to crush Palestinian resistance, complete the colonial project and become an impregnable fortress of Western interests in the Middle East, a frank and clear anti-Zionism is at a premium. When Palestinians join the Great March of Return to the Gaza fence, it is not enough to accuse the IDF of using excessive force. We must declare that the Palestinians do, indeed, have a right of return and to live in a free, democratic and secular Palestine. If they can show such courage and pay such a price, surely we can face down and refute the lies and slanders and show our solidarity and support for the Palestinians is non-negotiable.
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John Clarke became an organiser with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty when it was formed in 1990 and has been involved in mobilising poor communities under attack ever since.
Featured image: Free Palestine protest at Parliament Hill, Ottawa, July 2014. Photo: Flickr/Tony Webster
The original source of this article is Counterfire
“I understand I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder.”
Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected:
I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete walls intended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets. I see monstrous environmental devastation in places such as Indonesian Borneo, Peruvian gold mining towns, or the by now almost uninhabitable atoll island-nations of Oceania: Tuvalu, Kiribati or Marshall Islands.
I see slums, a lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, where the boots of Western empires have been smashing local cultures, enslaving people and looting natural resources.
I work on all the continents. I never stop, even when exhaustion tries to smash me against the wall, even when there are hardly any reserves left. I cannot stop; I have no right to stop, because I can finally see the pattern; the way this world operates, the way the West has been managing to usurp it, indoctrinate, and enslave most of the countries of the world. I combine my knowledge, and publish it as a ‘warning to the world’.
I write books about this ‘pattern’. My most complete, so far, being the 1,000 pages long “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.
Then, I see the West itself.
I come to ‘speak’, to Canada and the United States, as well as Europe. Once in a while I am invited to address Australian audiences, too.
The West is so outrageously rich, compared to the ruined and plundered continents, that it often appears that it does not belong to the Planet Earth.
A lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in Villa Borghese in Rome, and a horror walkthrough Mathare slum in Nairobi could easily exist in two distinct realities, or in two different galaxies.
Even now, after I slightly misspelled “Villa Borghese”, my Mac immediately offered a correction. It is because Villa Borghese does exist. On the other hand, “Mathare”, which I spelled correctly, was underlined red. Mathare ‘is an error’. Because it does not exist. It does not exist, despite the fact that around one million men, women and children live there. It is not recognized by my MacBook Pro, nor by the great majority of my relatively well-educated readers in the West.
In fact, almost the entire world appears to be one big error, non-entity, if observed from New York, Berlin or Paris.
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I come and speak in front of the Western public. Yes, I do it from time to time, although with decreasing frequency.
Frankly, to face European or North American crowds feels depressing, even humiliating.
It goes like this: you are invited to ‘tell the truth’; to present what you are witnessing all over the world.
You stand there, facing men and women who have just arrived in their comfortable cars, after having good dinners in their well-heated or air-conditioned homes. You may be a famous writer and a filmmaker, but somehow, they make you feel like a beggar. Because you came to speak on behalf of “beggars”.
Everything is well-polished and choreographed. It is expected that you do not show any ‘gore’. That you do not call your public ‘names’. That you do not swear, do not get drunk on the stage, do not start insulting everyone in sight.
What you usually face is quite a hard, or at least ‘hardened’, crowd.
Recently, in Southern California, when I was asked, by a fellow philosopher and a friend of mine, to address a small gathering of his colleagues, some people were banging on their mobile phones, as I was describing the situation at the Syrian frontline, near Idlib. I felt that my account was nothing more than a ‘background, an elevator music’ to most of them. At least when I am addressing millions through my television interviews, I do not have to see the public.
When you ‘speak’ in the West, you are actually addressing men and women who are responsible, at least partially, for the mass murders and genocides that are being committed by their countries. Men and women whose standards of living are outrageously high, because The Others are being robbed, humiliated, and often raped. But their eyes are not humble; they are drilling them into you, waiting for some mistake that you might make, so they can conclude: “He is fake news”. For them, you are not a bridge between those who ‘exist’ and those who don’t. For them, you are an entertainer, a showman, or more often than not: a nuisance.
To learn about war, about the terror that the West is spreading, is, for many in my audience yet another type of luxury, high-level entertainment, not unlike an opera performance or a symphony concert. If necessary, they can even pay, although mostly they’d rather not. After a titillating experience, it is back to the routine, back to a sheltered, elegant life. While you, the next day, are often catching a plane back to the reality of the others; to the frontline, to dust and misery.
They, your public (but face it, also most of your readers) came to show how ‘open-minded’ they are. They came ‘to learn’ from you, ‘to get educated’, while keeping their lifestyles intact. Most of them think that they know it all, even without your first-hand experience, they are benevolently doing you a favor by inviting you, and by dragging themselves all the way to some university or a theatre or wherever the hell you are standing in front of them. They did not come to offer any support to your struggle. They are not part of any struggle. They are good, peace-loving, hardworking people; that’s all.
You know, like those Germans, in the late 1930’s; self-righteous, hard-working folks. Most of them love their pets and recycle their garbage. And clean after themselves at Starbucks.
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A few days ago, we stopped the coup in Venezuela. I say we, because, although deep in devastated Borneo Island, I had been giving interviews to RT, Press TV, addressing millions. Even here, I never stopped writing, tweeting, always ready to drop everything just fly to Caracas, if I were to be needed there.
To defend Venezuela, to defend the Revolution there, is essential. As it is essential to defend Syria, Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Bolivia, South Africa and other revolutionary and brave nations that are refusing to surrender to the Western diktat.
While the ideological battle for Caracas was raging, I was thinking: is there anything that could still move the Western public into action?
Have they – Europeans and North Americans – become totally indifferent to their own crimes? Have they developed some sort of emotional immunity? Is their condition ideological, or simply clinical?
Here we were, in the middle of a totally open coup; an attempt by the West to overthrow one of the most democratic countries on our planet. And they did almost nothing to stop the terrorism performed by their regimes in Washington or Madrid! At least in Indonesia in 1965 or in Chile in 1973, the Western regime tried to hide behind thin fig leaves. At least, while destroying socialist Afghanistan and the Communist Soviet Union by creating the Mujahedin, the West used Pakistan as a proxy, trying to conceal, at least partially, its true role. At least, while killing more than 1 million people in Iraq, there was this charade and bunch of lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. At least, at least…
Now, it is all transparent. In Syria, Venezuela; and against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia.
As if propaganda was not even needed, anymore, it as if the Western public has become totally obedient, posing no threat to the plans of the Western regime.
Or more precisely, the once elaborate Western propaganda has become extremely simple: it now repeats lies, and the great majority of Western citizens do not even bother to question what their governments are doing to the world. The only thing that matters are ‘domestic issues’; meaning – the wages and benefits for the Westerners.
There are no riots like during the Vietnam War. Now riots are only for the better welfare of European workers. No one in the West is fighting in order to stop the plunder abroad, or the terrorist attacks unleashed by NATO against non-Western countries, or against those countless NATO military bases, against the invasions and orchestrated coups.
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How much more can the Western public really stomach?
Or can it stomach absolutely everything?
Would it accept the direct invasion of Venezuela or Cuba or both? It has already accepted the direct intervention and destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to name just a few terrorist actions committed by the West in recent history.
So, how much more? Would an attack against Iran be acceptable? Let’s say, 2-3 million deaths?
North Korea, perhaps? A few more millions, a new mountain of corpses?
I am asking; it is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. I believe that the world has to know.
Has the Western public reached the level of the ISIS (or call them IS or Deash)? Is it so self-righteous, so fanatic, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, that it cannot think, clearly, analyze and judge, anymore?
Would provoking Russia or China or both into WWIII be acceptable to people living in Bavaria or South Carolina, or Ontario?
And if yes, are they all really out of their minds?
And if they are, should the world try to stop them, and how?
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I want to know the boundaries of Western madness.
That there is madness is indisputable, but how massive is it?
I understand I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder.
But what about the survival of our planet, and the survival of humankind?
I imagine the eyes of those people who come to my ‘combat presentations’. I tell them the truth. I say it all. I am never holding back; never compromise. I show them images of the wars they have unleashed. Yes, they; because the citizens are responsible for their own governments, and because there is, clearly, something called collective guilt and collective responsibility!
Those eyes, faces… I will tell you what I read in them: they will never act. They will never try to overthrow their regime. As long as they live their privileged lives. As long as they think that the system in which they are the elites, at least has some chance of surviving in its present form. They play it both ways, some of them do: verbally, they are outraged by NATO, by Western imperialism and savage capitalism. Practically, they do nothing tangible to fight the system.
What is the conclusion then? If they do not act, then others have to. And I am convinced: they will.
For more than 500 years the entire world has been in flames, plundered and murdered by a small group of extremely aggressive Western nations. This has been going on virtually uninterruptedly.
Nobody finds it amusing, anymore. Where I work, in places that I care about, nobody wants this kind of world.
Look at those countries that are now trying to destroy Venezuela. Look closely! They consist of the United States, Canada, majority of Europe, and mostly those South American states where the descendants of European colonialists are forming majority!
Do we want another 500 years of this?
North Americans and Europeans have to wake up, soon. Even in Nazi Germany, there were soldiers who were so disgusted with Hitler, that they wanted to send him to the dogs. Today, in the West, there is not one powerful political party which believes that 500 years of Western colonialist plunder is more than enough; that torturing the world should stop, and stop immediately.
If Western imperialism, which is the greatest and perhaps the only major threat our planet is now facing, is not decisively and soon dismantled by its own citizens, it will have to be fought and deterred by external forces. That is: by its former and present victims.
Never mind the slow but steady dismantling in the fabled West of the “welfare state”, that temporary horror the elites grudgingly used to tolerate. But that was only as a means of pacifying their subjects and winning over-credulous hearts and minds in the competing socialist camp, while it still existed. To be fair, concern for public wellbeing never was an ideological item in the Western “value” system to begin with. It was dissimulated for a while merely as a tactical measure to confuse the masses. But one assumes that at least the various personal “freedoms” that Western countries used to be famous for indeed were an integral element of their political institutions, values deeply ingrained in their culture.
Canada is the latest champion of Western, trans-Atlantic values that is sending a clear message to the world that such assumptions are poppycock.
A major scrupulously legal assault on freedom of speech and conscience as well as scholarly research (and we are not talking here about the rampaging of informal terror squads such as Antifa) is in the works in Canada. A Srebrenica genocide denial law is coming up soon for a parliamentary vote in Ottawa. It is being sponsored by MP Brian Masse (brian.masse@parl.gc.ca). The pending bill is the result of a petition filed by a Bosniak lobby group in Canada, “Institute for genocide research.” The “institute” is not known to have published a single serious and academically viable book or scholarly paper on any subject whatsoever, including Srebrenica. It is a comically misnamed ethnic pressure group financed, as usual, by mysterious patrons. But given the manufactured climate of opinion, unless this bill is strongly and competently opposed, there is little doubt about the outcome.
Here is some basic information about this parliamentary project, now known as Petition No. 421-03975, presented to the House of Commons on May 29, 2019.
And here is the maudlin nonsense the measure’s sponsor, Brian Masse, spouted in Canada’s House of Commons as he put the matter before his colleagues:
“Madam Speaker … the House unanimously declared April as ‘Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Awareness Month’ and named genocides, which have been recognized by Canada’s House of Commons, including the Srebrenica genocide.
“It is time for the government to extend resources to commemorate the victims and survivors of genocide, educate the public and to take specific action to counteract genocide denial, a pernicious form of hate which reopens wounds and reinvigorates division. Truth is justice; honesty is the path to reconciliation and peace.”
Just so that no one is taken in by this fine rhetoric, the geopolitical significance of Srebrenica (forget about truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace) should briefly be recalled. The alleged failure in July of 1995 of the collective West to come to the rescue of 8,000 “men and boys” in Srebrenica was transfigured into the pretext for the “Right to protect” (R2P) doctrine. That fraudulent rationale was used for subsequent “humanitarian interventions” which wrecked and plundered at least half a dozen countries and cost about two million mostly Muslim lives.
But contrary to interventionist propaganda and the simplistic cant of politicians, always campaigning to attract a few more ethnic votes and to impress the political correctness brigade with their loyalty to the right causes, in the real world there exist complex issues not given to simplistic reductionism. Srebrenica is one of them. (Also here, here, and here.) To paraphrase Polonius, there are indeed “more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of by politicians,” eager to please special interests.
One of the major pertinent issues here, of course, is the factual question of what actually happened in Srebrenica. A staggering amount of research has been done on that subject that one supposes busy politicians, long out of school, may be excusably ignorant of. Canadian politicians, in particular, may be generously excused for not keeping up with Srebrenica developments because their hands are presumably full sorting out genocides closer to home.
A fundamental issue that comes to mind straight away, and voters anxious to protect their liberties might want to bring it to the attention of their parliamentary deputies, has to do with freedom of speech and conscience, not whether or not genocide occurred in Srebrenica. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms rather unambiguously guarantees “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” as fundamental rights. May the supreme law of the land be taken at face value? Or is it a flexible document, like the Stalin Constitution of 1936? How do MP Masse and colleagues who are contemplating to vote for his “genocide denial” bill propose to reconcile its language with the liberties which are constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens of Canada (and presumably also to foreign nationals on Canadian territory)? Or with the fact that Canada is also party to international agreements which guarantee freedom of conscience and expression, such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration, which deal with freedoms of thought, opinion, and expression should, in particular, be pondered by Canada’s lawmakers.
The ghastly thing about this is that the Srebrenica genocide denial law would not even change anybody’s mind about Srebrenica. But it would suppress (have a “chilling effect,” as they aptly put it in neighboring America) public discourse on the subject and would therefore constitute a serious infringement of Canadian citizens’ human rights. That is the issue of principle. All but zealous Balkan combatants should manage easily to agree on this much, and it ought to be gently stressed to befuddled Canadian legislators. A member of parliament is free to think whatever he or she wants about Srebrenica, with or without adequate information on the subject, including that it was genocide. But for Canadian citizens of all stripes and backgrounds, including those who happen to be legislators, their fellow-citizens’ freedom of expression should take absolute priority over the agenda of a Balkan lobby. A legislator who sincerely thinks that Srebrenica was genocide can and should still vote against Petition no. 421-03975 on freedom of speech and conscience grounds alone. Assuming that those values matter in countries that boastfully claim to have copyrighted them.
It so happens that the aforementioned bogus “Institute for genocide research” has a record of attempts at free speech suppression, targeting those who think differently about its pet projects. In 2011 the “institute” made an unsuccessful attempt to steer a Srebrenica genocide denial law through the Canadian parliament. “Institute” scholars then took their revenge on American-Serbian professor Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, preventing his entry into Canada to deliver a lecture in Vancouver by falsely alleging to immigration authorities that he was a dangerous hatemonger, or something to that effect. The incident at the time was amply covered by Global Research. Prof. Trifkovic fought the spurious allegation against him energetically in Canadian courts and won. The upshot of it was that Canadian taxpayers lost considerable treasure in a wasteful judicial confrontation instigated by agenda-driven lobbyists.
The proposed law, be it mentioned in passing, is also manifestly discriminatory in relation to the Canadian-Serbian community. Considering the cultural role of spitefulness (inat is the native word) in the region that the lobbyists come from, that may well be its true and ultimate inspiration. Is there a single Canadian Serb who thinks that what occurred in Srebrenica was genocide? The proposed law would nevertheless have a discriminatory effect on the ability of members of the Canadian Serbian community, as such, to enjoy the freedom of expression guaranteed to them and to all Canadians by Canada’s constitution. As Canadian Serbs, they would be obliged to either maintain public silence about an issue they regard as being of vital interest to their nation and community or, were they to speak up in accordance with the dictates of their conscience, to face criminal prosecution. So much for all the “Atlantic Charters” and their associated “freedoms.”
Canadian legislators should ponder the fact that Canada does not have a Holocaust denial law protecting the dignity of six million victims, yet its parliament is contemplating a massive curtailment of its citizens’ civil rights in a matter involving 8,000 unverified deaths. That is a degradation and in-the-face mockery of the pain of the Jewish community. But it gets even worse, or tragicomic if one prefers. In its Tolimir judgment in 2012, the vaunted Hague Tribunal ruled that the killing of three individuals in the nearby enclave of Zepa (which is part of the same conceptual package with Srebrenica) constituted genocide (Trial Judgment, Par. 1147 – 1154). That was allegedly because those individuals were endowed with such extraordinary importance within the community of Zepa that, as a result of their demise, the community was rendered unviable, hence subjected to genocide. The point is that denying this absurd and tortuously reasoned finding of the Hague Tribunal concerning Zepa (a place that assuredly no member of the Canadian parliament had ever even heard of) by operation of the projected genocide denial law would also subject the careless speaker who took his rights seriously to criminal liability. That is the absurd level to which the “genocide denial” rhetoric has degenerated.
As an American citizen, this writer is quite prepared to stand in any public square in Canada and to proclaim that Srebrenica was not genocide. It would in fact be a pleasure to be detained by Her Majesty’s authorities in order to accomplish a lofty civic purpose that should benefit all Canadians. The resulting proceedings would ultimately enhance Canada’s judicial culture by testing the constitutionality of this legal travesty before the Canadian supreme court.
The massacre of hundreds became a symbol of colonial cruelty and for decades India has demanded an apology from Britain.
Hundreds of people, carrying the national flag, attended a candlelight march on Friday in memory of the victims [Munish Sharma/Reuters]
As India marks the 100th anniversary of the Amritsar massacre – one of the worst atrocities of colonial rule – on Saturday, the British envoy to India says his country regrets the killing but offered no apology.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, as it is known in India, saw British troops fire on thousands of unarmed people in Amritsar on April 13, 1919.
In a tweet on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the tragedy “horrific” and that the memory of those killed “inspires us to work even harder to build an India they would be proud of”.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, inAmritsar on Saturday, on Twitter called themassacre“a day of infamy that stunned the entire world and changed the course of the Indian freedom struggle”.
At least 379 Indians were killed in the massacre, according to the official colonial-era record, although local residents have said in the past the toll is close to 1,000.
The massacre took place in the walled enclosure of Jallianwala Bagh, which is still pockmarked with bullet holes.
The incident became a symbol of colonial cruelty and for decades Indians have demanded an apology from the United Kingdom, including during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Amritsar in 1997.
Hundreds of people, carrying the national flag, attended a candlelight march on Friday in memory of the victims before a commemoration ceremony later on Saturday.
‘Lessons of history’
The UK has made no official apology and Dominic Asquith, the high commissioner to India, on Saturday followed suit as he laid a wreath at the massacre site on Saturday.
“You might want to rewrite history, as the Queen said, but you can’t,” Asquith said.
“What you can do, as the Queen said, is to learn the lessons of history. I believe strongly we are. There is no question that we will always remember this. We will never forget what happened here.”
He said his country regrets “the suffering caused” and “the revulsion that we felt at the time is still strong today.”
Former British Prime Minister David Cameron described the killings as “deeply shameful” in a visit to the northern Indian city in 2013 but stopped short of an apology.
In 1997, Queen Elizabeth II laid a wreath at the site but her gaffe-prone husband Prince Philip stole the headlines by reportedly saying that Indian estimates for the death count were “vastly exaggerated”.
Earlier this week, British Prime Minister Theresa May told parliament that “the tragedy of Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 is a shameful scar on British Indian history”, but she also did not issue a formal apology.
UK’s opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said the country should apologise.
Jeremy Corbyn
✔@jeremycorbyn
There must be an unequivocal apology for the Amritsar massacre. #JallianwalaBagh
Amarinder Singh, the chief minister of India’s Punjab state where the massacre site is located, said on Friday that May’s words were not enough.
He said “an unequivocal official apology” is needed for the “monumental barbarity”.
Rahul Gandhi, president of India’s main opposition Congress party on Twitter called themassacre ‘a day of infamy that stunned the entire world’ [Munish Sharma/Reuters]
The massacre
Thousands of unarmed men, women and children had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled public garden in Amritsar, on the afternoon of April 13, 1919.
Many were angry about the recent extension of repressive measures and the arrest of two local leaders that had sparked violent protests three days before.
The 13th of April was also a big spring festival, and the crowd – estimated by some at 20,000 – included the pilgrims visiting the nearby Golden Temple sacred to Sikhs.
Brigadier General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer arrived with dozens of troops, sealed off the exit and without warning ordered the soldiers to open fire.
Many tried to escape by scaling the high walls surrounding the area. Others jumped into an open well at the site as the troops fired.
One of several witness accounts compiled by two historians in a new book with excerpts published in the Indian Express newspaper this week described the horror.
“Heaps of dead bodies lay there, some on their backs and some with their faces upturned. A number of them were poor innocent children. I shall never forget the sight,” said Ratan Devi, whose husband was killed.
“I was all alone the whole night in that solitary jungle. Nothing but the barking of dogs, or the braying of donkeys was audible. Amidst hundreds of corpses, I passed my night, crying and watching,” she said.
Dyer, dubbed “the butcher of Amritsar”, reportedly said later it was a necessary measure, and that the firing was “not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience”.
The massacre is a symbol of colonial cruelty and for decades Indians have demanded an apology from Britain [Munish Sharma/Reuters]
Rep. Ilhan Omar has been applauded for grilling Elliott Abrams over his role in the US-backed genocide and death squads in Latin America.
“In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” Omar accurately stated. “I fail to understand why members of this committee, or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”
Wipe up that stupid grin ye pathetic war criminal!
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar Smacks Down Elliott Abrams in Front of Everybody
(CJ Opinion) — Days after being smashed with a vicious establishment smear campaign to paint her as an antisemite for accurately criticizing AIPAC, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is already back on the horse aggressively disrupting the establishment narrative matrix that our rulers have worked so hard to construct for us.
Elliott Abrams is a monster. The atrocities that he has facilitated, covered up and whitewashed in Panama, El Salvador, Gaza, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Iraq are utterly unforgivable, and the fact that he has been appointed as special envoy to Venezuela by the Trump administration completely invalidates the US government’s Venezuela narrative all by itself. Even without the blatant lies, the known oil agendas, the CIA ops, the mounting evidence of US arms smuggling to right-wing militias, and America’s extensive history of utterly disastrous regime change interventionism, the fact that this administration would appoint such a ghoulish individual to spearhead its Venezuela interventionism alone is enough to show you that the US government has nothing but malevolent intentions for that nation.
So it was nice to see someone in that government calling him what he is right to his face in front of everybody.
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on US Venezuela policy, Abrams was presented with the only line of questioning that is appropriate for such a beast by the very congresswoman the Democrats threw to the wolves just two days ago. Someone had to do it, and they left it to Ilhan Omar.
“In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush,” Omar accurately stated. “I fail to understand why members of this committee, or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.”
“If I could respond to that-” Abrams began.
“That wasn’t a question,” Omar responded, cutting him off.
“It was an attack! It was an attack!” Abrams exclaimed, visibly upset.
“I reserve the right to my time,” said Omar.
“It is not right that members of this Committee can attack a witness who is not permitted to reply,” Abrams said, talking over Omar.
“That was not a question; thank you for your participation,” Omar continued. “On February 8th, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US foreign policy in El Salvador. In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda a report about the massacre of El Mozote of which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as two years old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops. During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping 12 year-old girls before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a ‘fabulous achievement.’ Yes or no, do you still think so?”
“From the day that President Duarte was elected in a free election, to this day, El Salvador has been a democracy,” Abrams said angrily. “That’s a fabulous achievement.”
“Yes or no, do you think that massacre was a fabulous achievement that happened under our watch?” Omar asked.
“That is a ridiculous question and I will not respond to it,” Abrams replied. “I’m sorry Mr. Chairman, I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack which is not a question.”
“I will take that as a yes,” Omar said. “Yes or no, would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide if you believe they were serving US interests as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua?”
“I’m not going to respond to that question,” Abrams again answered. “I’m sorry, I don’t think this entire line of questioning is meant to be real questions, and so I will not reply.”
“Whether under your watch a genocide will take place, and you will look the other way because American interests were being upheld is a fair question,” Omar said. “Because the American people want to know that any time we engage a country that we think about what our actions could be and how we believe our values are being furthered. That is my question: Will you make sure that human rights are not violated and that we uphold international and human rights?”
“I suppose there is a question in there, and the answer is that the entire thrust of American policy in Venezuela is to support the Venezuelan people’s effort to restore democracy to their country,” Abrams responded. “That’s our policy.”
“I don’t think anybody disputes that,” Omar said. “The question I had for you is that does the interests of the United States include protecting human rights and include protecting people against genocide?”
“That is always the position of the United States,” Abrams lied.
“Thank you,” concluded Omar. “I yield back the rest of my time.”
There is no legitimate reason for Elliott Abrams to ever find himself before a group of people who are ostensibly concerned with accountability and responsibility without being asked such questions. But that didn’t stop all the world’s worst people from crawling out of the woodwork to his defense.
“Disgraceful ad hominem attacks by @IlhanMN on my @CFR_org colleague Elliott Abrams,” tweeted Iraq-raping neocon Max Boot. “She doesn’t seem to realize he is a leading advocate of human rights and democracy — not a promoter of genocide! More evidence of the loony left I caution Democrats about.”
“I worked for Elliott Abrams as a civil servant,” tweeted Kelly Magsamen, Vice President of National Security for the plutocrat-backed liberal think tank Center for American Progress. “He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We all have a lot of work to do together in Venezuela. We share goals.”
“I am not greatly sympathetic to Rep. Omar (surprise surprise),” tweetedNational Review senior editor and former George W Bush speech writer Jay Nordlinger. “But really, someone ought to have given her a clue who Elliott Abrams is. The guy has been championing freedom and human rights his entire life (and taking unholy sh** for it from the illiberal Left and Right).”
Conservative pundit Michael Knowles tossed his two cents into the campaign to purge the concept of antisemitism of any meaning by tweeting, “One wonders why @IlhanMN seems to harbor such particular contempt for Elliott¹ Abrams² (¹ from the Hebrew ‘Elijah,’ meaning ‘My God is Yahweh’ ² the father of the Jewish people).”
This is the bipartisan establishment orthodoxy that is guiding your foreign policy, America. One which claims Elliott Abrams is a saint, which claims criticism of US warmongering is antisemitic, and which throws a bold Somali-American woman under the bus for speaking the truth after years of paying lip service to the need to get more women of color elected to the leadership of the Democratic Party. This whole Abrams incident happened, by the way, at the same time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deleted a tweet in which he accidentally acknowledged the agenda to start a war with Iran, but you probably won’t see Omar commenting on this because she knows she’ll be smeared as an antisemite for it.
US warmongering is the most aggressively protected part of the establishment narrative matrix, because US warmongering is the glue that holds the unipolar empire together. Without it, our rulers cannot rule, so you’ll see imperial lackeys fiercely attacking anyone who draws attention to America’s bloodbaths around the world, even if they are good servants of the empire in other areas.
The difficulty for our rulers, though, is that warmongering is a very difficult thing to paint a pretty picture of, especially with our newfound ability to quickly share ideas and information around the globe. I mean, look at Elliott Abrams. Seriously, just watch him talk. That demonic grimace is the prettiest face they could find to put on their Venezuela agenda. I find that very encouraging.
The reason they work so hard to manufacture our consent for warmongering agendas is because they need that consent. They wouldn’t propagandize us so aggressively if they didn’t need us all trusting them and believing their stories, so the best way to fight establishment warmongering is to circulate disbelief in their stories. Whenever you see someone like Ilhan Omar drawing attention to the gaping plot holes in agendas like regime change interventionism in Venezuela, go ahead and help draw attention to it.
Things are only shitty because a few extremely powerful people do very shitty things. The only reason powerful people get away with doing very shitty things is because the majority allows them to. The majority only allows them to because they’ve been propagandized to. The weakest link in this chain is the propaganda. Attack there.
In the first installment of this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin debunks the notion that Trump is an anti-interventionist president, outlining his first two years of aggressive foreign policy that has expanded US wars and occupations.From the biggest military budget in history to removing its restrictions to “bomb the hell out of” Iraq and Syria, to ramping-up brutal economic sanctions, to becoming America’s ‘Arms Salesman-In-Chief.’
Transcript and links:
“Welcome to Empire Files. I’m your host, Abby Martin. We started this show in 2015. And since then, we’ve maintained the premise that the US empire is not only a huge expanse, but is constantly expanding. Contrary to those who say the US empire is in decline, the war machine has been on a continuous march forward to swallow up new regions and markets, no matter the president.
Two years, into Donald Trump’s reign as CEO of the empire, we wanted to see if the trajectory has continued. At the beginning, I admit I thought Trump was a wild card. I considered the fact that Trump is an extreme narcissist that only cares about himself, not his fellow billionaires. I considered there might be a reason why none of the CEOs the top 100 largest companies in the nation backed Trump for president.
And true to the dizzying effects of having Donald Trump as president, anything was possible––he could go against the grain and start belligerent, major new wars; he could capitulate and be a loyal servant as long as they made him look good; or he could buck the establishment bourgeoisie and pander to a sector of right-wing isolationists and anti-interventionists, who support refocusing US wars on the border, against immigrants, rather than waste resources for so called nation building abroad.
After all, Trump did posture himself as the anti-intervention candidate in the 2016 election. It was a strategy that made sense. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans do not support endless wars abroad. The last 17 years of military conflicts have tainted any candidate who advocates more war.
Right-wing online forums were ablaze with theories that Trump was an isolationist who would fight the “deep state” on wasteful wars. But it was obvious to anyone watching that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. Trump also campaigned on war, most notably threatening a major war with Iran, which would make Iraq look like child’s play. Not only that, but one of his main campaign promises was a major escalation of war and brutality in the Middle East.
His threats exceeded carpet bombing though, he even evoked the genocide of Muslims in the Philippines as a model, and the legend that General Pershing executed civilians with bullets dipped in pigs blood and buried their bodies with pig carcasses.
He essentially campaigned on a massive expansion of the bogus “War On Terror”. Far from “isolationist,” Trump presented himself as more of heartless warmonger who thought human rights law was a barrier that needed to be smashed––that the violence of the war machine was too soft, too restrained.
Candidate Trump didn’t just lament the restraint on American war crimes around the world, but also financial restraints on the military machine. Somehow, Trump argued that the country with the biggest military budget in the history of the world, was actually too small.
Candidate Trump has turned out to be a pretty good predictor of a president Trump. And it should’ve been clear to everyone what kind of President he would be when he hand picked his cabinet, stacking it with the craziest neocon outliers––ones too insane even for the Bush Administration––and more generals than any cabinet since World War 2, who are literal war criminals.
He even bragged about giving the Pentagon maximum power to act, free from annoying checks and balances. And true to his word, he also shattered all records for our already obscene military budget.
Before Trump came in, it was already larger than all these countries combined. But apparently that wasn’t enough, so within his first year Trump kicked in the biggest defense budget in history––close to one trillion dollars.
The increase in military spending alone equates to more than Russia’s entire annual military budget. The new $750 billion war toy chest included another $705 million for Israel, $100 million to deter “Russian aggression” in the Baltics, and another $500 million to arm Ukraine, equipment that seems to keep getting into the hands of neo-nazi militias.
But the most interesting part of the budget is the spending increase for what’s called Overseas Contingency Operations, which includes maintaining troop deployments and US bases, as well as new and expanding outposts. Since 2011, this spending has been capped by a federal statute. But Trump blew the caps off by $80 billion dollars!
This couldn’t have happened without Congress––or the full endorsement of the Democratic Party establishment. There is a bipartisan consensus in Washington to maintain the US empire, along with its 800 military bases.
And it’s not just gifting the military industrial complex with an open faucet of taxpayer dollars, but using US dominance to get them huge weapons contracts with foreign proxies.
Obama oversaw some of the biggest arms deals in US history, selling more than $115 Billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia alone, the most of any US administration.
But Trump has taken the role of CEO of the US empire to new heights, becoming the de facto arms salesman-in-chief.
Trump made it a priority to lift Obama-era restrictions on selling weapons to countries committing human rights abuses, like Bahrain. US diplomats were also instructed to become literal conduits for weapons manufacturers and push arms sales as part of their jobs.
In Trump’s first year, the State Department approved more than $75 billion in overseas weapons sales, topping the previous record of $68 billion in 2012.
It’s only ramped up since. In the first 6 months of 2018, the DOD brokered weapons deals to foreign proxies alone worth $46 billion, more than the $41 billion worth of deals made during all of 2017.
By pumping obscene amounts of cash into the war machine, while gleefully endorsing bombing and torture, Trump makes it clear to his friends that business will be booming for a long time.
Richard Aboulafia of the military think tank ‘Teal Group’ said of the policy shift: “diplomacy is out; air strikes are in…in this sort of environment, it’s tough to keep a lid on costs.”
It’s paid off for America’s five biggest defense contractors, whose stocks have more than tripled in the last couple years.
We’re told it “costs too much” to have medicare for all, yet money was no object when Trump ordered the DOD to establish a “Space Force” as a sixth branch of the military, projected to cost at least $13 billion dollars in the first five years.
The idea to militarize space was first proposed by the Bush administration, in their PNAC blueprint for the War on Terror. Trump is just another neocon puppet, eager to fulfill their Stormtrooper fantasy.
Not to mention the fact that alongside passing this record military budget, it was paid for with budget cuts to society’s most vulnerable, in particular, hungry children.
But Trump isn’t just making sure kids in the United States go hungry, but children in every country it deems our enemies. Because the US dollar drives the global economy, the empire frequently wields sanctions to bend countries to its will.
Anyone claiming to be anti-war, or even just anti-intervention, must oppose any and all economic sanctions. Make no mistake: sanctions are war. And not in a hyperbolic sense. They are real attacks, that kill real people.
The impact of sanctions is never discussed in the US media. They’re always treated as a kind of “soft” solution, with the assumption that they only affect a society’s corrupt elites. These are assumption nowhere close to the reality.
Sanctions hurt the most vulnerable––and by design. That’s why they intentionally target medicine, clean water, and access to food. The logic of sanctions is, if you kill and starve enough innocent civilians, they will blame their own government, rise up and overthrow them so American force don’t have to waste any blood overthrowing them.
Their genocidal impact cannot be overstated. Looking at Iraq alone, US sanctions in the 90’s, that blockaded medicine from the country, killed 500,000 Iraqi babies. That is the true face of sanctions.
They are not an “alternative to war,” sanctions ARE war in every way. So what has Trump done with the daggers of US sanctions? He’s shown the true face of his foreign policy. Obama implemented hundreds of sanctions during his tenure. But Trump is ramping them up in nearly every region, adding hundreds more in his first two years.
The most destructive application of sanctions has been on Iran, where Trump upended Obama’s historic nuclear deal and added 143 sanctions that have since debilitated their economy.
Then there’s North Korea, where people give Trump credit for peace between the North and South. Amazingly, despite the media’s rhetoric of Trump bowing down for dictators, he has installed 80 new sanctions on the DPRK, compared to the 74 applied by Obama.
In Syria, Trump has authorized a stunning 287 new sanctions, almost double the amount applied under Obama. He’s administered 43 sanctions on Libya so far.
In Russia and Ukraine, Trump has defied the notion he is a puppet of Putin by sanctioning the region 105 times so far, for everything from annexing Crimea, to the alleged meddling in the 2016 election, to the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Not to mention the 43 “cyber sanctions” put on the figures alleged to have hacked into the DNC.
Next is Venezuela. Even though Obama added 7 sanctions in his term, Trump’s laser focus is set on destroying the country once-and-for-all. He’s already employed 63 new sanctions to strangle Venezuela and undermine any chance for economic recovery.
He imposed many more sanctions on independent, progressive countries like Cuba and Nicaragua.
What do all those countries have in common? It’s not some standard of democracy or human rights––it’s that they are all independent of US domination. They chart their own path and decide what’s done with the wealth of their own country. The biggest thing they have in common, is that none of them pose any threat to us!
It would be bad enough if the Trump administration was only expanding economic warfare on these countries. But they’re taking it much further.
Any corner of the globe we look to, we see that he is indeed expanding the US empire’s influence and operations––he has ratcheted up, with new fire and veracity, covert and overt regime change operations; expansion of military bases, massive increases in bombings and civilian casualties, and belligerent escalations that put us on the brink of catastrophic war on multiple fronts.
As we’ll show in this multi-part series, Trump Expanding the Empire, that whether or not Trump pisses off, offends or even destabilizes powerful sectors of the imperialist state, he has only put war and militarism on the march.
It may be confusing how Trump is still making proclamations about stopping endless wars, but we have to look at his actions, not his rhetoric.
And yes, there is growing opposition to Trump within the halls of power. But not because they think Trump is going to reign back the Empire––but because he’s simply self-absorbed and unpredictable.
With all the praise about the most diverse Congress in history, you can’t find any diversity in opinion when it comes to continuing US imperialism. We can’t let the democrats steer the resistance away from where it needs to be––in the streets, linking our struggles, fighting the expansive US empire.”
Part Two: Trump’s Syria Deception
In Part II of our series Trump Expanding the Empire, Abby Martin addresses the surprise order from Trump that he was “ending the war” in Syria.
Having drastically escalated the war in Syria and Iraq, find out what’s behind the supposed troop withdrawal and the hidden facts in the policies.
Transcript and Links:
“As we continue our series “How Trump is Expanding the US Empire,” Trump has jolted the establishment by announcing the removal of US troops in Syria.
The US military has 800 bases around the world, with soldiers in 70% of the world’s nations. Obviously, reigning back the US empire anywhere, and removing troops anywhere is a good thing.
So it’s been really atrocious to see the Democratic Party establishment working with most of the GOP and Pentagon to attack this decision from the right, decrying any troop withdrawal as dangerous for so-called national interests.
It’s amplified the claim by liberal pundits, journalists, and Democratic Party leaders like Hillary Clinton, that Trump is some kind of “isolationist” who wants to reign back America’s expansive military machine.
So, what is going on? Is Trump really curtailing the US empire and pushing back against the military industrial complex that has dominated US foreign policy since Eisenhower? No, in fact this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Like in Afghanistan, Trump is simply removing the troops he himself added in Syria since taking office.
While Trump railed against Obama for putting US troops in Syria, he left office with less than 300 US troops there––but through 2017, that number grew to around 2,200 today, approaching 10 times the number under Obama.
But it’s hard to know the true number, since Trump broke with Pentagon policy andactually stopped disclosing troops deployments to Syria and Iraq––how democratic!
And just as Trump started hiding from the public his large troop deployments, he broke with Obama’s policy of only sending Special Operations to Syria, but started sending large units of conventional forces.
And while I was the first to call Obama the drone king, Trump has drastically ramped up US bombing in every region of the world, along with a massive amount of civilian casualties. Not too surprising, considering he campaigned on a new major war to not only “bomb the shit” out of alleged “terrorists,” but their families too.
Trump definitely kept that horrific promise. In 2017, the number of US-led airstrikes in Iraq and Syria increased 50%. But they became far more deadly for non combatants. While his airstrikes were a 50% increase from Obama, he increased civilian casualtiesby 215%, killing an estimated 6,000 civilians in a year.
Trump himself takes credit for that spike, bragging about giving the generals more freedoms to unleash their weapons of mass destruction.
And let’s just get this out of the way. The US military is not fighting a war in Syria to “defeat ISIS” just like it’s not fighting an endless war in Afghanistan to “fight terrorism,” just like it’s never fought a war anywhere for “human rights” or “democracy.”
The reasons they say at press conferences are never the reasons they talk about behind closed doors.
In reality, all these wars are about expanding US control. Syria has been a target ever since the won independence from British and French colonialism in 1963––and along with other Pan-Arab victories in the region like Libya, Iraq, Egypt and beyond, they were all on the chopping block for American capitalism.
And let us not forget that Trump’s first foreign policy act was crossing another line Obama was too scared to do, when he launched strikes against the Syrian state from the dining room of Mar-A-Lago. It’s the type of escalation that could lead to a new world war, but was flippantly carried out over chocolate cake.
The US Empire’s proxy in the Middle East, Israel, carried out even more bombing. Trump ushered in a new phase where Israel began targeting Syrian forces––bombing them at least 10 times in the last two years! These airstrikes would likely never happen without approval, assistance or orders from the Pentagon.
Remember, Trump didn’t announce an end to the US operation in Syria. He simply said he’s removing 2,000 troops. Nothing about the continued bombing, which he dramatically escalated in his first year. And even though bombings dropped in intensity in 2018, after there was basically nothing left to bomb, large numbers of airstrikes continue, contradicting the claim the war is over. In the last two weeks of 2018 alone, the Pentagon says they carried out over 1,000 “engagements” in Syria and nearly 500 airstrikes.
Nothing about supporting it’s foreign surrogates, like Turkey, to do all the dying in place of US troops. Trump has been pushing his far-right collaborator Erdogan to purchase vast amounts of US anti-aircraft weapons, no-doubt for proxy aggression against Iran, Russia and Syria.
Not to mention there are over 5,000 private mercenaries in Iraq and Syria already working for the US; Trump has said nothing about removing them.
And even the withdrawal timetable keeps changing. On December 19 Trump ordered a “rapid withdrawal” of US troops from Syria, to be carried out within 30 days. But four days later, he tweeted that the “rapid withdrawal” is now a “slow pull out.” Sarah Sanders also reassured the war-hungry press that US forces would be “ready to re-engage” “at a moment’s notice in Syria.”
He even sent his cretin John Bolton on an apology tour to assure Israel that the US could leave some troops in Syria indefinitely, while building up forces in Jordan, Iraq and Turkey to fight Iran.
Trump bizarrely diverted questions about the changing timeline by criticizing Obama for not bombing Assad. And in one of the most brazen imperialist statements ever made by a US president, Trump admitted that there was nothing for big business tosteal in Syria’s deserts.
It seems like Trump and his friends are only interested in what resources they can pillage and what markets they can open and plunder as a consequence of US invasions. The thing is, Trump isn’t talking at all about withdrawing any troops from Iraq, where he wants to pillage the oil.
If you look at a map of where US troops actually were set up in Syria, it is literally just a few miles from the border of Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, where the US military has bases and large numbers of troops already stationed. So it’s really just a repositioning of US forces.
And when you see that Syria is actually completely surrounded on all sides by hostile US lapdogs, most hosting large US military installations and American troops, the ability for the Empire to withdraw troops but continue aggression is pretty clear.
While Trump’s Syria troop withdrawal got all the attention, what went totally under the radar is that he simultaneously announced the indefinite extension of the criminal occupation of Iraq.
Trump campaigned on opposing the Iraq war “from the beginning”. But the reality is he was actually just for the war being done “the right way.”
But it doesn’t so much matter what Trump said about Iraq before he had any political power. Now that he’s Commander in Chief, what he’s done is all we can go by.
By the 2008 election, public opinion was deafening: the people wanted troops out now. It’s a central reason Obama was elected.
Under Obama, the number of troops precipitously dropped from around 180,000 to just 5,000through the last years of his administration. While Obama did start adding larger troop deployments in 2016 to “fight ISIS”, Trump came in and hit the gas.
By the end of his first year in office, Trump had nearly doubled the number of US troops in Iraq. And they were doing much less “advising and assisting” and much more “killing and dying” on the front lines.
So much so that more US troops have been killed there during two years of Trump, than in the previous 4 years combined. 37 soldiers have lost their lives for Trump’s ISIS mission, but you would never know it by watching the news, as if the war is long over.
Trump essentially cemented a new Iraq war, and doing so means that at any moment it could escalate in size and violence.
US presence there is a powder keg ready to blow. And remember, he coupled this with a ruthless bombing escalation that caused civilian casualties to skyrocket.
In a single series of US airstrikes in 2017, possibly over 500 civilians were killed at once in what became known as the Mosul massacre. It was the single largest death toll inflicted since the war began in 2003. That blood is on Trump’s hands.
Of course, this airstrike was not the only one like it. It’s likely thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by US bombs ordered by Trump’s cabinet, but they’re not really concerned. Over the summer, the Pentagon stated that “we’ll never know” how many civilians the US killed under Trump’s leadership. And I guess they’ll never care.
For those of us who care about ending the crimes of the Empire, we have to look at these actions in a larger context; that a scale-down of military operations in one area also means a pivot to build-up operations elsewhere.
In Syria and Iraq, all US troops, airpower and mercenaries should be brought home immediately. Not these minor reductions in favor of more bombing and sanctions that Trump is giving us.
While nobody should oppose the fact Trump is removing these troops, we shouldn’t give him credit either; he is the one who ramped up bombing, ramped up troop numbers and ramped up death and destruction in the region.
Trump is a war criminal, and that’s what he will always be, for the death and destruction his aggressive policies have caused, where millions more are now suffering under the boot of US domination.
A real end to these criminal wars will not come from any president, or member of either ruling class party. It will come from the only force in history that has won progressive change: a grassroots movement of millions of people demanding it.“
Part Three: Democrats Praise War Criminal Mattis
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While most Americans languish in their very own exceedingly self-important version of active denial as to the disturbing state of affairs coming at light speed upon the earth, very soon no amount of alcohol, Facebook, prescription drugs or shopping will be able to hide the Rothschild banksters long-planned extermination plan for humanity.
Their TV mind control tool is full of tales of “nice dragons”, unicorns, vampires, zombies, and cannibalism. Their social engineering DARPA-net platforms continue to encourage separatism, narcissism, and identity politics division among the human race.
Steve Quayle tells us that the anti-diluvian giants of the Book of Enoch –the original cannibals – are awakening under the Antarctic ice. The Vatican has set up a powerful south-facing telescope in Arizona which it calls Lucifer, at a time when even NASA is admitting the possibility that Planet X (Nibiru) may be approaching the South Pole. The City of London Freemasons, ever-beholden to their fallen angel Lucifer, continue to concentrate wealth, fine-tune time-tested mind control methods and progress towards a trans-human future.
Amidst a smog of geoengineered barium (BA) and aluminum (AL) (=BAAL), 5G is being slowly rolled out in Europe and the US, often hidden in street lamps and powered by Crown Agent General Electric’s LED lighting. The psychopath Rothschild tool Elon Musk continues to launch 5G-enabling satellites via his Space X monopoly. From the current 2,000 in orbit, the plan is to put 20,000 up by 2021. Once these satellites are deployed there will be no escaping the 5G grid.
Simultaneously, his Neuralink firm works to hook the human brain to the DARPA-net for the coming “Internet of everything”, which includes you. Another Musk tentacle tunnels under cities like Los Angeles & Chicago under the guise of building high-speed rail, though to many it looks more like a frenzy to build underground infrastructure for the elite for when Nibiru comes calling and those the elite call “zombies” (the rest of us) are forced to stay above ground to endure the consequences of what these conjurers of darkness are about to attract to the earth with their fear-driven neurosis.
Meanwhile, the Rothschild military and police force, cloaked in the uniforms of the Stars & Stripes to ensure prostration by the zombies, nears its wet dream of full-spectrum dominance via the “savior” Trump’s new Space Defense force and it’s mastery of electromagnetic frequencies as weapons.
Their own version of Active Denial is operational and involves directed millimeter waves that will burn the skin of protestors in three seconds. These are the same waves used in the 5G system which will use your increasingly BAAL-conductive body as an antenna, so it doesn’t take much imagination to see how Active Denial (positive/negative duality as a friend pointed out) could take on a much broader meaning involving the withholding of food, shelter, and livelihood to those who refuse the accept… well, let’s just spit it out… the microchip Mark of the Beast.
Few will refuse since the 5G grid will be capable of putting emotions and thoughts into the minds of humans. Docility will be at the forefront of these according to the operational plans.
Only those with a strong faith and an even stronger frontal lobe will survive this onslaught. We will find ourselves in a sea of active denial borderline evil sheeple. Learn to go against the flow. Resist conformity. Swim against the tide. Salvage those closest to you, though they may resist your attempts to protect them.
This ain’t gonna’ be pretty, but those who make it through will constitute a new culture emerging from the ashes based on the ancient natural law values of faith, love, wisdom, and compassion.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
While most Americans languish in their very own exceedingly self-important version of active denial as to the disturbing state of affairs coming at light speed upon the earth, very soon no amount of alcohol, Facebook, prescription drugs or shopping will be able to hide the Rothschild banksters long-planned extermination plan for humanity.
