This is the long overdue study of the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxist philosophy which now controls Western intellectualism, politics, and culture. It was by design; it was created by an internationalist intelligentsia to eradicate Western values, social systems, and European racial groups in a pre-emptive attempt to spark global, communist (think liberal) revolution. Andrew Breitbart’s historical notes are taken into the narrative.
“Our Western governments tell us that they’re at war with “Islamic terror”. Yet in the geopolitics of the Middle East our governments align themselves with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the kingdoms which sponsor “Islamic terror”. Everyone with half a brain knows that Saudi Wahhabism is the mother of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.”
Source: The Politics of Terror Mirrors the Politics of Heroin
With permission from
June 19, 2017
“The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq…..It’s doubling the bet across the region [and the world]. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.”
— Martin Indyk (former US ambassador to Israel) 2007
The West’s policies in the Middle East are coming home. Remember the “Vietnamese” heroin that showed up in the body bags at home? Well there’s a lot of body bags at home right now that are full of “Islamic” terrorism. And remember the army that invaded Basra? The British one! Well it’s now on the streets of Britain. And the army that destroyed Libya? The French one! It’s now on the streets of France. Meanwhile in America the US President is fighting the FBI and the US media are begging for a coup. And everywhere in the trans-Atlantic sewer the populists are freaking out the elitists. The Empire of chaos is a structural mess.
It is a case of one contradiction too many. On top of the West’s never ending class wars and imperial wars, the West’s latest “forever and ever war on terror” is a fiasco that has tipped the balance in favour disbelief and dissent. The illegitimacy of this “war on terrorism” points to the illegitimacy of all the structural wars the West is fighting across the planet. It is the domino theory in reverse. One imperial war stops making sense and so all the wars stop making sense (if they ever did). The Western establishment has tied itself in a knot in an attempt to prolong itself. Watch it fall.
Our Western governments tell us that they’re at war with “Islamic terror”. Yet in the geopolitics of the Middle East our governments align themselves with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – the kingdoms which sponsor “Islamic terror”. Everyone with half a brain knows that Saudi Wahhabism is the mother of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. And a half of that half a brain can connect the dots between Western Interests in Arabia and “Islamic terror”. It’s obvious that the West have used and still are using “Islamic terrorism” as a proxy in places like Syria, Libya and Iraq. So when these same “terrorists” pop up in the West and cause mayhem: what the fuck?
Could it be that the West’s terrorists in the Middle East are still working for the West when they bomb and shoot in the West? Could our Western governments be targeting the West?
The House of Saud and the House of Commons as well as the White House (you can add the Houses of Rothschild and Rockefeller to this list of elite Houses) do nothing without each other. So if a Saudi linked death squad attacks the West: the Western establishment is complicit.
Why? To begin with the House of Saud was a British intelligence asset during World War I – long before Saudi Arabia was born in 1932. The British paid for Saudi head chopping back in the 1920s. And nothing has changed since then. For example, since the Saudi invasion of Yemen in 2015 the UK has sold £3.3 billion worth of military equipment to the Saudis.
The USA joined the Saudi bloodbath in the interwar period. The California -Arabian Standard Oil Company institutionalised this nefarious relationship in the 1930s. And Henry Kissinger cemented it in the 1970s. Oil and petrodollars therefore were the parents of Al-Qaeda. And any jihad since the 1980s has been a happy meeting of CIA and Saudi minds.
This includes ISIS. Seymour Hersh explains the latest US/Saudi cooperation explicitly in his 2007 New Yorker article ‘The Redirection’. After the US lost control of Iraq, Washington DC allowed the Saudis to ‘redirect’ US foreign policy in the region – in an effort to “contain” Iran. The end result was Sunni extremism in Iraq and eventually ISIS. And a US/Saudi 2017 military deal worth $110 billion.
This fundamental link between the Western establishment and Saudi Arabia’s overt and covert terror networks doesn’t categorically connect the West’s governments to the bullets and bombs of ISIS that explode in the West. It doesn’t suggest anything else other than blowback. But a more sinister connection than ‘guilt by association’ comes to the surface if we analyse Western elite behaviour elsewhere. If we widen our perspective and look at the war on drugs and compare it to the war on terror, then what the Western elite are capable of within the West is alarming.
It isn’t just blowback – it’s by design. That’s the lesson of the “war on drugs”. Richard Nixon started this war in 1971. However in 2015, according to RT, the illegal drug market was “bigger than the automotive industry and it’s volume is approaching that of the oil and gas sector“. In his book The CIA As Organised Crime, Douglas Valentine answers the following question:
Ken McCarthy: A member of the Sinaloa cartel, Vicente Zambada-Niebla, is currently in prison in the US “on charges of trafficking more than a billion dollars in cocaine and heroin.” Zambada’s attorney is saying that since the late 1990s, the Sinaloa cartel has provided various US law enforcement agencies with information about the other cartels. They help the US eliminate their rivals and in exchange they’re allowed to import limitless quantities of drugs into the US. Chicago is one of their main drop-off points.
So, Doug, has there ever been a case when the US government through its various law enforcement agencies gave a pass to drug dealers in exchange for something else? How often does it happen and how far back does it go?
Valentine: An old FBN [Federal Bureau of Narcotics] agent, Lenny Schrier, once told me: “The only way you can make cases is if your informant sells dope.” So, yes; not only has it happened, and not only does it still happen, but giving dealers a free pass to deal drugs is the foundation stone upon which federal drug law enforcement is based. Once you realise that, you have to look beyond, at the political and economic context that makes such an extra-legal practice possible…
The point here, is that the “war on drugs” is a contradiction. The official Western attempt to stop the trafficking of drugs is responsible for the proliferation of drugs in the West. Valentine’s point is that politics and economics trumps the law in the “war on drugs”. For political and economic reasons the West and its intelligence agencies (primarily the CIA) allows drug trafficking to flourish.
Maybe the reason is that drug money is a good way to fund a secret war (the Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, for example). Maybe drug money maintains Third World CIA assets (landlords, 
generals, right-wing politicians, organised criminals – the usual anti-communists). Maybe drugs destabilise and therefore controls a strategic country (Mexico) or a strategic class (the working class and underclass). Or maybe drug money fuels a key part of the economy (the Western banks and corporations). Whatever the political or economic reasons the world’s illegal hard drugs are secretly tolerated and encouraged by the West despite the law.
If this is the reality of the war on drugs: can the same contradiction be found in the war on terror? If we superimpose the war on terror onto Valentine’s description of the war on drugs: will the patterns of one fit into the patterns of the other? In the war on terror does politics and economics trump the law? Is terrorism secretly tolerated and encouraged by the Western powers? According to the UK’s Independent newspaper in November 2016:
“A 650 per cent increase in deaths from terrorism in OECD countries and a marked rise in transnational terrorist attacks means the world is now a yet-more dangerous place in terms of terrorism, according to the IEP [Institute for Economics and Peace].”
Is the war on terror therefore like the war on drugs: does it actually promote what it allegedly is fighting against? The facts suggest that this is the case. Why?
As Valentine argues in relation to the war on drugs: the reasons concern politics and economics. The war on terror which George W. Bush began in the 2000s and which Donald Trump continues today is in fact similar to the war on terror which Ronald Reagan initiated in the 1980s. In short, it’s a hoax. It’s deceitful because to paraphrase Martin Luther King: the USA and the West back in the 1980s was, as it is today in the 2010s, the greatest purveyor of terror in the world. And it is so for political and economic reasons.
Like drugs, terrorism facilitates Western power. If no non-Western military force can compete with the military power of the West, then what scares the West? Why is the West panicking if it dominates the air, sea and land when it comes to conventional warfare? Why? Because that which makes the West nervous is the world’s civilian population. Cue unconventional warfare!
When the US war on drugs began in 1971, the US and it’s allies were producing heroin and killing civilians on a massive scale in South East Asia. A postmodern (anti-modern) partnership was born. A postmodern (two faced) pattern was set. Under the cover of Western self righteousness – drugs and terror became tools of the West. And they’ve been dovetailing each other ever since – targeting civilians all the way.
The template for the West’s postmodern terror onslaught, according to Douglas Valentine, was the Phoenix Program that shaped the underbelly of America’s war in Vietnam. Realising that the civilian population of South Vietnam was it’s real enemy the US – using it’s secret CIA “warriors” – in a very conscious, bureaucratic and bloody way covertly attacked it.
Secret detention centres, torture and executions terrorised the south Vietnamese population in the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. Up to 40,000 civilians were killed. And the rest were psyched out with propaganda – if they were not killed by a straightforward bombing raid. In this darkly coordinated approach to disobedient civilians the Western state-mafia found a formula that could be systematically used elsewhere. Like heroin, programmatic terrorism could be exported in a clandestine fashion. And in a massive scale it was.
The Phoenix Program was exported to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. It was called the ‘Salvador Option’ up north and ‘Operation Condor’ down south. And it ripped the guts out of civilian life in Central America and the Southern Cone.
A few hundred thousand executed civilians here and a few hundred thousand butchered civilians there. And, it’s fair to say, every one of the Latin American state terrorists responsible for this systematic killing of civilians passed through the US [Terror] School of the Americas which was located in Panama and now, under the name the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”, is based in Fort Benning, Georgia. And, significantly, all of these terrorists had the political support of Latin America’s Cocaine kings and that ultimate king of war: Henry Kissinger.
At about the same time the CIA was training the mujahideen in the arts of terror and letting them blow secular civilian life in Afghanistan to bits. And so the Phoenix Program slowly made its way back to Asia and the heroin business.
This Western attempt to contain modern civilian life around the world, by throwing hardcore drugs and organised terrorism in the way of social progress, doubled it’s bet – in the 21st century – in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
If the Western 1% or 5% or 10% were to remain sure of their social position in global society, then they needed a countervailing primitive force or forces in the face of modern secular trends. Neoliberal capitalism and all it’s talk of competitive market forces became the primitive mainstream ideology of the 1% – the myth of free market individualism. And as it turned out hardcore drugs and hardcore terrorism covered the social and political backs of this 1% as they globalised themselves.
The catch for the Western 1% was that globalisation implied universalism. In capitalist terms, globalisation weirdly implied global equality or at least a level playing field. The BRICS took advantage of this. And the West hit back with a plethora of excuses to maintain inequality and it’s own privileged access to resources. Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations was one excuse. And 911 and the subsequent “war on terror” was another excuse. The bet was that chaos in the heart of the Eurasian continent (think Zbigniew Brzezinski) would divert globalisation back into the familiar ways of Western domination.
However universalism, or the 21st century global civilian, had already bolted from Western parochialism. It was too late to slam the doors of history shut. Hence the need to double the bet against the progressive secular tendencies of the 21st century – the global dimensions of science and technology (reason), and as a result the global (non-Western) dimensions of human society. Feeling unsure of itself the parochial 1% backtracked away from globalisation and doubled it’s belief in the “Phoenix Program”.
The 1% and it’s allies and tools – NATO, Israel, the Saudis and all their secret services – combined in an attempt to divide and rule the world’s citizens one more time. Strategic cultural and political fractures were exploited in order to engineer social chaos and social reaction. The reason was Western power. And no price was too much for that.
Since World War II, at least, Western governments (the US leading the pack) have had no qualms about working with drug dealers so as to promote their interests. Likewise, since at least the Vietnam War, the West has systematically used for it’s own benefit terrorism and terrorists freely. From Vietnam to the Middle East – via Latin America – even the names of the Western teachers of terror are the same. For example, US colonel James Steele and US diplomat John Negroponte. And hovering above the likes of these are the gods of terror – the CIA, MI6, Mossad, etc. (figures like the ghostly Ted Shackley).
Which brings us back to Saudi Arabia and it’s “free pass” to commit acts of terrorism in what Seymour Hersh calls “The Redirection”. The importance of Saudi Arabia to the financial and petroleum heights of the Western establishment are beyond doubt. So the question now is whether that Saudi free pass extends to Western cities? Are policies like the Salvador Option on the elite table when dealing with Western countries?
If the war on drugs is any guide then Western society is as much a target for a “Phoenix type Program” as any other Third World society. Indeed Douglas Valentine believes that The United States Department of Homeland Security is a direct descendant of the Phoenix Program.
And the bombs and bullets in the streets of Europe? If the black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles could be flooded with drugs with the discreet blessing of a US government which was allegedly fighting a war against drugs: then the working class streets of Europe can be flooded with terrorism with the surreptitious blessing of the Western governments which are allegedly fighting a war against terror.
Source: UN Last Hurdle Before Israel Can Rid Itself of the Palestinians
With permission from
ww.counterpunch.org
June 15, 2017
Photo by zeevveez | CC BY 2.0
Nazareth.
Israeli and US officials are in the process of jointly pre-empting Donald Trump’s supposed “ultimate deal” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They hope to demote the Palestinian issue to a footnote in international diplomacy.
The conspiracy – a real one – was much in evidence last week during a visit to the region by Nikki Haley, Washington’s envoy to the United Nations. Her escort was Danny Danon, her Israeli counterpart and a fervent opponent of Palestinian statehood.
Danon makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu look moderate. He has backed Israel annexing the West Bank and ruling over Palestinians apatheid-style. Haley appears unperturbed. During a meeting with Netanyahu, she told him that the UN was “a bully to Israel”. She has warned the powerful Security Council to focus on Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbollah, instead of Israel.
To protect its tiny ally, Washington is threatening to cut billions in US funding to the world body, plunging it into crisis and jeopardising peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.
On the way to Israel, Haley stopped at the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva, demanding it end its “pathological” opposition to Israel’s decades of occupation and human rights violations – or the US would pull out of the agency.
Washington has long pampered Israel, giving it millions of dollars each year to buy weapons to oppress Palestinians, and using its veto to block UN resolutions enforcing international law. Expert UN reports such as a recent one on Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians have been buried.
But worse is to come. Now the framework of international laws and institutions established after the Second World War is at risk of being dismembered.
That danger was highlighted on Sunday, when it emerged that Netanyahu had urged Haley to dismantle another UN agency much loathed by Israel. UNRWA cares for more than five million Palestinian refugees across the region.
Since the 1948 war, Israel has refused to allow these refugees to return to their lands, now in Israel, forcing them to live in miserable and overcrowded camps awaiting a peace deal that never arrives. These dispossessed Palestinians still depend on UNRWA for education, health care and social services.
UNRWA, Netanyahu says, “perpetuates” rather than solves their problems. He prefers that they become the responsibility of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which looks after all other refugee populations.
His demand is a monumental U-turn, 70 years in the making. In fact, it was Israel that in 1948 insisted on a separate UN refugee agency for the Palestinians.
UNRWA was created to prevent the Palestinians falling under the charge of UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. Israel was afraid that the IRO, formed in the immediate wake of the Second World War, would give Palestinian refugees the same prominence as European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases compared, especially as they were so intimately connected. It was the rise of Nazism that bolstered the Zionist case for a Jewish state in Palestine and Jewish refugees who were settled on lands from which Palestinians had just been expelled by Israel.
Also, Israel was concerned that the IRO’s commitment to the principle of repatriation might force it to accept back the Palestinian refugees.
Israel’s hope then was precisely that UNRWA would not solve the Palestinian refugee problem; rather, it would resolve itself. The idea was encapsulated in a Zionist adage: “The old will die and the young forget.”
But millions of Palestinian descendants still clamour for a right of return. If they cannot forget, Netanyahu prefers that the world forget them.
As bloody wars grip the Middle East, the best way to achieve that aim is to submerge the Palestinians among the world’s 65 million other refugees. Why worry about the Palestinian case when there are millions of Syrians newly displaced by war?
But UNRWA poses a challenge, because it is so deeply entrenched in the region and insists on a just solution for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA’s huge staff includes 32,000 Palestinian administrators, teachers and doctors, many living in camps in the West Bank – Palestinian territory Netanyahu and Danon hunger for. The UN’s presence there is an impediment to annexation.
On Monday Netanyahu announced his determination to block Europe from funding Israeli human rights organisations, the main watchdogs in the West Bank and a key data source for UN agencies. He now refuses to meet any world leader who talks to these rights groups.
With Trump in the White House, a crisis-plagued Europe ever-more toothless and the Arab world in disarray, Netanyahu wants to seize this chance to clear the UN out of the way too.
Global institutions such as the UN and the international law it upholds were created after the Second World War to protect the weakest and prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust’s horrors.
Today, Netanyahu is prepared to risk it all, tearing down the post-war international order, if this act of colossal vandalism will finally rid him of the Palestinians.
“The NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 used between 10 and 15 tons of depleted uranium, which caused a major environmental disaster,” said Srdjan Aleksic, a Serbian lawyer who leads the legal team, which includes lawyers from the EU, Russia, China and India.
“In Serbia, 33,000 people fall sick because of this every year. That is one child every day,” he claimed.
NATO’s press office says it’s now aware of Serbia’s allegations, but gave no further comment.
When asked as of why Serbia has decided to sue NATO 19 years after the attacks, the lawyer said “considering the horrific consequences for our population… it is never too late to sue someone who has caused an environmental catastrophe, someone [who] bombed Serbia with a quasi-nuclear weapon, i.e. depleted uranium.”
The Serbian lawyer says 19 countries that were part of NATO at the time need to pay compensation for “for the financial and non-financial damages… to all the citizens who died or fell sick as a proven result of the NATO bombing.”
“We expect the members of NATO to provide treatment to our citizens who are suffering from cancer,” Aleksic said, adding that the bloc “must also provide the necessary technology and equipment to remove all traces of the depleted uranium” from Serbia.
“The use of banned weapons” by the US-led military alliance in the Balkans “was a violation of all the international conventions and rules that protect people” from such kind of weapons, the lawyer claimed, adding that NATO also used depleted uranium in Iraq in 1991.
“The alliance has not been put on trial for this act, but the consequences are disastrous,” he said.
In its 2000 report on depleted uranium, NATO confirmed the use of the munitions both in Iraq and in the Balkans.
“In Iraq, about 300 metric tons of DU [depleted uranium] ammunition were fired by American and British troops. Recently, NATO confirmed the use of DU ammunition in Kosovo battlefields, where approximately 10 metric tons of DU were used,” the report says.
The UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has also admitted“there is evidence of use of depleted uranium (DU) projectiles by NATO aircraft during the bombing campaign.” However, the UN tribunal has pointed out that “there is no specific treaty ban on the use of DU projectiles.”
Reporting on the consequences of the use of such munitions for civil population and the environment, a NATO report said that “in the vicinity of the impact point of DU ammunitions, it is not excluded that individuals unaware of the contamination… could have accumulated radiation doses and/or could have incorporated uranium quantities exceeding the internationally recognized limits.”
In May, Balkan Insight reported that around 50 people from the Serbian city of Nis, who have been suffering from cancer and have “seemingly relevant medical documentation” have asked the legal team of 26 lawyers and professors to represent them in the case against NATO.
NATO launched airstrikes in what was then Yugoslavia in March 1999, having interfered in a sectarian conflict between Serbians and Kosovan Albanians. As clashes between the local population turned violent, the US-led military alliance made a decision to respond to what the it said was ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population of Kosovo, without the backing of the UN Security Council.
With no UN mandate, NATO bombing of Serbia lasted for three months, having resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths.
Source: We Have Met the Evil Empire and It is Us | New Eastern Outlook
journal-neo.org
June 7, 2017
When I told my father, back in 1968, that I was joining the United States Marine Corps he responded: “I hope you aren’t going to claim you are doing this to defend your country. Nobody attacked us, look around, no Viet Cong here, this is Wall Street’s war like the last one and the one before it and the one before that.”
Everything my father predicted has come to pass, America as a deindustrialized police state with a clown in the White House, nothing new there. Anyone unware that Eisenhower was a useless puppet as was Ford and Reagan and Bush 43 and the monstrosity we have now, deserves the America we have earned. His generation, those who grew up before the First World War, those who experienced the Great Depression with eyes open, they knew it was coming.
Life in America was pure injustice, the lash and the iron boot, despite the version of history we have been given by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations who “re-invented” America and its history through taking control of public education in the late 1940s. You see, the multi-generational ignorance we bask in today is not unplanned. The threat represented by advances in communications and other technology was recognized and dealt with, utterly quashed at birth.
I recommend just a look at the Constitution itself. Why the “electoral college?” Few Americans know that the Senate was chosen, not elected, until the 20th century. Why two senators for states with no people? Why a Supreme Court? Those unaware that these unique aspects of America’s governmental organization need to read Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (Columbia University Press, 1935).
There is nothing “democratic” about America and its government, the whole thing is a con. Election after election, every time Americans think they are voting to “drain the sewer” that Washington represents, only find themselves deeper in it. That was planned from the first also but we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
Today Americans are “defending democracy” in 6 dozen nations and, as predicted, invariably siding with tyrants, pushing a colonial agenda, there as bullies and thugs in uniform and doing so hiding behind the flag and the “honored dead.” I know this well because I was part of it.
When I served in Vietnam, there was no pretense that we were defending anything. Even in the elite combat unit I was in, the war itself was universally opposed as comic and absurd, it was impossible to miss. The Saigon government was beneath consideration, evil and corrupt, their military a useless pack of rabble compared to “the enemy,” the Viet Cong and NVA, relentless and highly motivated.
We were clearly fighting people who were defending their country from foreign invaders, the real enemy, “us.” Nations around the world are now doing the exact same thing and, under Trump, seemingly more each day.
The title statement is an amended quote from a 1960s-comic strip by Walt Kelly, called Pogo. It was famous once, used continually in one form or another. However, when American lost its sense of humor and began taking itself seriously, most likely sometime in the 1980s, all history, all balance, and certainly all real humor was forgotten. This is a boorish place. Let me explain.
For those of us who were born during the “post war baby boom,” the absurdity of patriotic rhetoric in response to the “red menace” poisoned our lives, polluted our educational experience, sickened our souls.
Even then, the reality of a government controlled by Wall Street was there to be seen. Higher education was unaffordable for all but the few, cities were dung heaps of filth and crime and America’s South was a land of starvation and poverty. Nearly half of all Americans lived in poverty while the industrial workers of the North worked under conditions that made survival to retirement a pipe dream.
Every day my father would return from the Ford factory, describing 120-degree heat and air steeped in carcinogenic solvents. His friends and coworkers died in their 50s. By age 55, he had suffered half a dozen heart attacks and was on disability of $60 a month to support a family of 4. This is a common story, not an exception, this is how my generation grew up, mowing lawns, shoveling snow for money for shoes, working to support a family as early as 10. This is the American generation that went to Vietnam and it was the generation that taught the Pentagon that their games would not continue unopposed.
Today it’s different. The public questions little, those in the military question nothing. When America’s invading armies in Iraq and Afghanistan, under bush never found WMDs or the massive underground terrorist fortresses Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke of, what was the downside? Thousands of American military were killed over not just nothing but abject lies.
When billions in cash was stolen in both Iraq and Afghanistan, when 250,000 AK 47’s purchased by the US government for the Iraqi military simply disappeared, nobody saw it. When Haliburton Corporation furnished the US Army with drinking water taken unfiltered from the Euphrates River, one of the most polluted bodies of water on Earth, hundreds infected with Hepatitis and other diseases, nothing was said, certainly no congressional investigation but the Pentagon was silent as well. Also silent were the troops in the field, silent then and still silent.
This is a huge change from Vietnam when those who returned home told everything.
Then again, back in 1969, I was a Marine, not a “war fighter” or a “warrior.” I made $100 a month, not $8000, I was fed 400 calories a day, not 7000, I had no PlayStation, no $400 boots and didn’t buy my combat gear from online outfitters. The life expectancy in a line unit was 3 months and nobody did year after year in a rifle squad as part of the “professional army.”
You know, with all that expensive gear and all that war fighter rhetoric, we still are beaten just as easily by poor people with broken weapons, poor people defending themselves against a foreign invader.
That part hasn’t changed but back in 1969 we knew we had it coming. We still fought to survive but we never fought to win. Win what? Nobody asks that anymore. Nobody every asks “why?”
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
Not a single American president over the past seven decades since the Second World War can be counted as innocent when it comes to gross violation of international law in the pursuit of US power.
Piling on the invective against Donald Trump, an op-ed in the New York Times this week castigated him as a «lawless president». The business tycoon-turned politician has already been roundly condemned in the US media as a traitor, stooge, buffoon and much more. Now the Times has marked him down as «lawless».
Source: Trump’s Lawless Presidency?
http://www.strategic-culture.org
June 12, 2017
Piling on the invective against Donald Trump, an op-ed in the New York Times this week castigated him as a «lawless president». The business tycoon-turned politician has already been roundly condemned in the US media as a traitor, stooge, buffoon and much more. Now the Times has marked him down as «lawless».
What is particularly galling about this latest anti-Trump tirade is the conceited notion that Trump is somehow singularly lawless as an American president. The cited op-ed piece by David Leonhardt laments that the principles of law and order have largely been respected by both Republican and Democrat occupants of the White House – but Trump is now bringing the office into disrepute with his alleged lawlessness.
It would no doubt come as a shock to the New York Times and its readers to consider that almost every American president – certainly every one since the Second World War – could be prosecuted as a war criminal owing to gross violation of international law.
Trump’s bullying personality and feckless ego are indeed grating. His clumsy self-aggrandizing boasting are doubly cringe-making. But the accusations thrown at him of lawlessness seem overblown. The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN are among the main US media outlets that have been running a non-stop campaign to discredit Trump since his surprise election last November against their favored candidate Hillary Clinton.
This president is accused of breaching the US constitution by undermining the judiciary and over-extending his executive power over other branches of government. True, this president has made plenty of uncouth remarks against judges and the judicial system. And he has pilloried the media and intelligence community with scathing language, referring to them as «enemy of the people» or likening them to «using Nazi practices».
Trump is also accused of obstructing justice by allegedly pressuring the former head of the FBI, James Comey, into dropping investigations into claims that his election team colluded with Russian state intelligence or cyber hackers to win the presidency. Trump has dismissed the Russian collusion claims in characteristically brusque fashion as «fake news» and a «total hoax».
The Russian government has also separately rejected the collusion claims as absurd speculation for which no credible evidence has ever been presented. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently remarked that US politicians and media seem to have «lost their minds» in persisting with making such outlandish claims.
There are also ethical concerns – probably valid – that Trump is abusing the office of the presidency to advance his family’s business empire. His daughter Ivanka is an unelected «special adviser» while also owning an international fashion conglomerate. Her husband Jared is too among Trump’s White House coterie of special advisers. Like Trump’s own sons, Jared has ongoing real estate business interests. When Trump is dealing with China and other foreign nations, there are plausible concerns of «conflict of interests».
However distasteful and potentially unethical all of this is it is nevertheless so far unproven to be lawless. For the New York Times to lambast Trump as a lawless president is a leap of hyperbole.
In the list of alleged lawlessness presented by the Times the one issue where a case of criminality could be solidly made is glaringly omitted. On April 7, Trump ordered the bombardment of Syria with over 50 cruise missiles. The attack was an act of aggression against a sovereign country. Trump’s claim of «retaliating» for an alleged chemical weapons massacre by the Syrian army of President Bashar al Assad are besides the point. The US has no legal mandate for any military action in Syria. And at any rate, no verifiable evidence has ever been presented to support the allegation of chemical weapons use.
As Russia pointed out the cruise missile barrage ordered by Trump was an illegal act of aggression. Trump should be prosecuted for war crimes on that instance alone. Moreover, the ongoing US air strikes on Syria, which have resulted in dozens of civilian deaths, are further grounds for Trump to be prosecuted for crimes against peace.
Other international issues where Trump stands accused of gross criminality is his support of Saudi aggression in Yemen and towards Iran. His reckless saber-rattling against North Korea is another prosecutable case of this president engaging in warmongering.
But none of this provable lawlessness in international relations warrants a mention in the New York Times’ condemnation of Trump. The so-called «newspaper of record» confines itself to delving into Trump’s alleged abuses of power in the realm of domestic politics, much of which seems exaggerated in order to serve the Times’ own dubious agenda of discrediting Trump.
This oversight of Trump’s provable international violations is hardly surprising (albeit unacceptable). For on that score, he is simply carrying on the ignoble tradition of all American presidents who have used aggression and war as an instrument of power against other nations.
His predecessors Obama, Bush Junior, Clinton, Bush Senior, Reagan and all the way back to Eisenhower and Truman have abused military power, invasion, subversion, proxy wars and assassination as a prerogative for American subjugation of other nations. Even Jimmy Carter and John F Kennedy, considered to be two of the more enlightened presidents, oversaw criminal programs to pursue regime change in Cuba and other Latin American states.
Not a single American president over the past seven decades since the Second World War can be counted as innocent when it comes to gross violation of international law in the pursuit of US power. All told, it is estimated that American state-sponsored criminality under the orders of any given president has been responsible for over 20 million deaths from wars and aggressions in myriad forms against dozens of nations.
Donald J Trump is just the latest name in this sordid pantheon of lawless American leaders.
For the New York Times to single out Trump as somehow uniquely lawless is testimony to how much in denial the US media are about the truly rogue, criminal nature of their government.
Trump a lawless president? Yes, sure he is. Just like all the rest of them.
The strike in Iran once again exposes the centuries’-old sectarian Shia-Sunni divide. What is at the heart of this schism?
Source: What is the Shia-Sunni divide?
theconversation.com
Ph.D. Student, Religion in the Americas, Global Islam, University of Florida
June 11, 2017
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for two attacks that claimed at least 12 lives in Iran on Wednesday. With this, the flaring tensions between Sunnis and Shias are once again in the news.
Iran is a Shia Muslim majority state often in tension with Sunni states and extremist groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. These attacks are the latest chapter in the story of the centuries-long strained relationship between Sunnis and Shias.
As a scholar of Islam and a public educator, I often field questions about Sunnis, Shias and the sects of Islam. What exactly is the Shia-Sunni divide? And what is its history?
Both Sunnis and Shias – drawing their faith and practice from the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet Muhammad – agree on most of the fundamentals of Islam. The differences are related more to historical events, ideological heritage and issues of leadership.
The first and central difference emerged after the death of Prophet Muhammad in A.D. 632. The issue was who would be the caliph – the “deputy of God” – in the absence of the prophet. While the majority sided with Abu Bakr, one of the prophet’s closest companions, a minority opted for his son-in-law and cousin – Ali. This group held that Ali was appointed by the prophet to be the political and spiritual leader of the fledgling Muslim community.
Subsequently, those Muslims who put their faith in Abu Bakr came to be called Sunni (“those who follow the Sunna,” the sayings, deeds and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) and those who trusted in Ali came to be known as Shia (a contraction of “Shiat Ali,” meaning “partisans of Ali”).
Abu Bakr became the first caliph and Ali became the fourth caliph. However, Ali’s leadership was challenged by Aisha, the prophet’s wife and daughter of Abu Bakr. Aisha and Ali went to battle against each other near Basra, Iraq in the Battle of the Camel in A.D. 656. Aisha was defeated, but the roots of division were deepened. Subsequently, Mu’awiya, the Muslim governor of Damascus, also went to battle against Ali, further exacerbating the divisions in the community.
In the years that followed, Mu’awiya assumed the caliphate and founded the Ummayad Dynasty (A.D 670-750). Ali’s youngest son, Hussein – born of Fatima, the prophet’s daughter – led a group of partisans in Kufa, Iraq against Mu’awiya’s son Yazid. For the Shias, this battle, known as the Battle of Karbala, holds enormous historical and religious significance.
Hussein was killed and his forces defeated. For the Shia community, Hussein became a martyr. The day of the battle is commemorated every year on the Day of Ashura. Held on the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic lunar calendar, scores of pilgrims visit Hussein’s shrine in Karbala and many Shia communities participate in symbolic acts of flagellation and suffering.
Over time, Islam continued to expand and develop into evermore complex and overlapping societies that spanned from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa to Asia. This development demanded more codified forms of religious and political leadership.
Sunnis and Shias adopted different approaches to these issues.
Sunni Muslims trusted the secular leadership of the caliphs during the Ummayad (based in Damascus from A.D. 660-750) and Abbasid (based in Iraq from 750-1258 and in Cairo from 1261-1517) periods. Their theological foundations came from the four religious schools of Islamic jurisprudence that emerged over the seventh and eighth centuries.
To this day, these schools help Sunni Muslims decide on issues such as worship, criminal law, gender and family, banking and finance, and even bioethical and environmental concerns. Today, Sunnis comprise about 80-90 percent of the global Muslim population.
On the other hand, Shias relied on Imams as their spiritual leaders, whom they believed to be divinely appointed leaders from among the prophet’s family. Shia Muslims continue to maintain that the prophet’s family are the sole genuine leaders. In the absence of the leadership of direct descendants, Shias appoint representatives to rule in their place (often called ayatollahs). Shias are a minority of the global Muslim population, although they have strong communities in Iraq, Pakistan, Albania, Yemen, Lebanon and Iran. There are also different sects within Shia Islam.
Other disputes that continue to exacerbate the divide include issues of theology, practice and geopolitics.
For example, when it comes to theology Sunnis and Shias draw from different “Hadith” traditions. Hadith are the reports of the words and deeds of the prophet and considered an authoritative source of revelation, second only to the Quran. They provide a biographical sketch of the prophet, context to Quranic verses, and are used by Muslims in the application of Islamic law to daily life. Shias favor those that come from the prophet’s family and closest associates, while Sunnis cast a broader net for Hadith that includes a wide array of the prophet’s companions.
Shias and Sunnis differ over prayer as well. All Sunni Muslims believe they are required to pray five times a day, but Shias can condense those into three.
During the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca, held annually and obligatory for all Muslims once in a lifetime – it may seem that these differences are masked, as both Sunnis and Shias gather in the holy city for rituals that reenact the holiest narratives of their faith. And yet, with Saudi authorities overseeing the Hajj, there have been tensions with Shia governments such as Iran over claims of discrimination.
And when it comes to leadership, the Shia have a more hierarchical structure of political and religious authority invested in formally trained clergy whose religious authority is transnational. There is no such structure in Sunni Islam.
The greatest splits today, however, come down to politics. Although the majority of Sunni and Shia are able to live peacefully together, the current global political landscape has brought polarization and sectarianism to new levels. Shia-Sunni conflicts are raging in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan and the divide is growing deeper across the Muslim world.
This historical schism continues to permeate the daily lives of Muslims around the world.
