EMPIRE TARGETS BURUNDI: “Humanitarian” NGOs Escalate Momentum in Beating the Drums of War

Wrong Kind of Green

February 1, 2016

 

“The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies is a key NGO within the Network and it is also a member of the International Federation of Human Rights.  It was founded in 1993 by Bahey El Din Hassan who was elected member of the Executive Committee of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network at its second meeting in 1997.  In December 2011, he participated in a meeting of the Atlantic Council co-organised by the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East dealing with Egypt which is his country or origin. That meeting discussed the arrest of members of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the National Endowment for Democracy who were accused of interference in Egyptian internal affairs.” — Centre for the Study of Interventionism

 

As Empire targets Burundi, force multipliers at the helm of the non-profit industrial complex such as Avaaz, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch beat the drums of war. NGOs, perhaps now the most instrumental tools in the West’s war chest, are financed by (and in many cases created by) the world’s most powerful oligarchs and institutions. The latest signatories demanding “humanitarian intervention” in the sovereign country of Burundi, come in the form of an open letter (article follows) signed by: Dr Mohamed (Mo) Ibrahim – Founder and Chair (Mo Ibrahim Foundation), Mr Jay Naidoo (Chair of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition), Mr Victor Ochen (Director, African Youth Initiative Network), Dr Chidi Odinkalu (Chairperson, Governing Council of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission), Judge Navi Pillay (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008-2014 and President of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda from 1996-2003) and Mr Ashish J. Thakkar (Founder, Mara Group and Mara Foundation).

This is a rinse lather and repeat method as witnessed prior to the illegal war on Libya, based on manufactured lies by the West. [Further reading: Libya and the Big Lie: Using Human Rights Organizations to Launch Wars, September 24, 2011] [From Libyan sources: 500,000 dead, 30,000 in terrorist-run prisons, 2.5 million exiled, tens of thousands of refugees]

As the tiny East African nation of Burundi and its president Pierre Nkurunziza refuse to bow down to foreign interests, despite the increasing pressure, Empire accelerates all destabilization tactics. Evidence of manufactured atrocities strategically disseminated by Empire’s force multipliers in order to flood both the infosphere and human psyche – is not required.

 

This interview (January 23, 2016, screenshots above) demonstrates how media (as another force multiplier) kowtows to imperialism. Note the body language of Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza in reaction to U.S. ambassador Samantha Power’s patronizing language under the guise of white superiority. Power states: “there is a cri de coeur from many, many people in Burundi for outside help and for urgent, urgent mediation…” It is at this point (3:10) Nkurunziza closes his eyes. (Imagine having to bear words choreographed to incite destabilization by Power, on behalf of the most violent, hypocritical and racist country in the world – to a media serving as an foreign policy echo chamber.) The media hones in on Power, hanging on her every word, as though the position by the Burundian Government,  as represented by it’s president, is of secondary importance with little significance. In five minutes of coverage on Burundi, Nkurunziza’s comments amount to a total of approx. 9 seconds. In this way, the media demonstrates racism, bias and subservience to the West. Indeed the task at hand is to frame the crisis to better advance foreign interests. [“UN Security Council Meets with Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza to Push for Peace Talks” | “The 15 council members were greeted on arrival Thursday by pro-government demonstrators telling them to stop meddling. Hundreds lined the road leading from the airport to greet the envoys with signs that read ‘genocide will not happen’ and ‘stop interfering in Burundian affairs'”. Source]

“No one more adamantly challenged the Western consensus than Pan Africanist scholar Dr. Randy Short, speaking to Press TV. Dr. Short said that the Burundian crisis is really all about the resources that Western powers are taking out of Burundi’s neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

“Burundi is a conduit into Congo. Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world. They don’t have anything. They (U.S. policy makers) care as much about Burundians as they do about the people in Baltimore who were rioting a few weeks ago. This is a sham. It’s a shibboleth… an effort to do is to steal from sovereign nations in Africa and to compete with the Chinese and the BRICs countries to hold onto Africa as a treasure house for the benefit of white Western powers.” — Challenging the Western consensus on Burundi June 5, 2015

Video: Pan-African Analysis of Burundi Destabilization with Dr Randy Short (Video published May 31, 2015):

 

 

May 17, 2015: The President of Burundi: Pierre Nkurunziza travels back home to Bujumbura (from Tanzania) on May 15, 2015, after failed coup attempt:

 

 

Excerpt from the article “Human Rights Want AU to intervene in Burundi, South Sudan Wrangles” (The Star, January 31, 2016):

Former US President Bill Clinton, Christine Lagarde IMF Managing Director, and Mo Ibrahim Founder and Chairman, Mo Ibrahim Foundation attend the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) on September 24, 2013 in New York. AFP PHOTO/Mehdi Taamallah

“The group consisting of eminent Africa personalities including Mo Ibrahim Foundation founder Mo Ibrahim want the AU to address the issues of political violence in the continent.

“In South Sudan, which should be reaping the benefits of the August 2015 peace agreement and seeking accountability for past crimes, distrust and animosity is running high between former foes and the return to war is a possibility,” states the letter.

The group says violence has been spreading to previously unaffected parts of the country and nearly 200,000 civilians remain under UN protection in crowded camps and the threat of famine is looming.

The AU and its leaders, have the opportunity and a responsibility to respond to these crises, before they get any worse.

In December last year, the AU Peace and Security Council resolved to send an AU force into Burundi to prevent a further escalation of violence.

Similarly, in response to the peace deal in South Sudan, the AU Commission pledged to set up a hybrid court to prosecute those who had masterminded the civil war.

Unfortunately, neither of these decisions has yet been fulfilled and the contexts in both countries have worsened and Nkurunziza vowed to block entry of 5000 AU peace forces.”

+++

The “Open letter to AU Peace and Security Council Heads of State” can be found here.

Signatories:

• Dr Mohamed (Mo) Ibrahim – Founder and Chair, Mo Ibrahim Foundation
• Mr Jay Naidoo – Chair of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Partnership Council of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)
• Mr Victor Ochen – Director, African Youth Initiative Network
• Dr Chidi Odinkalu – Chairperson, Governing Council of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission
• Judge Navi Pillay – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014) Judge and President of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) (1996-2003)
• Mr Ashish J. Thakkar – Founder, Mara Group and Mara Foundation

 

Further reading on the Mo Ibrahim Foundation: The Imperialist NGOs Recolonizing Africa and the African Leaders Who Serve Them | Emasculation of the African with Awards, Grants and Prizes

 

The U.S. and EU Sponsoring are Terrorism in Burundi: Interview with political analyst Gearóid Ó Colmáin, May 25, 2015:

 

 

Burundi: Nkurunziza Refuses to Bow to Samantha Power’s Demands

The San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper

January 26, 2016

By Ann Garrison

At a press conference held Jan. 22 by Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, center, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power stands to his left, Angolan Ambassador to the U.N. Ismael A. Gaspar Martins to his right. – Photo: Reuters

The tiny East African nation of Burundi and its president remain unbowed despite pressure from Western officials.

Transcript (to listen, click above radio icon)

KPFA Weekend News Anchor Sharon Sobotta: Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza, speaking to the press yesterday, remained firm in his rejection of a proposed African Union peacekeeping force in his country. KPFA’s Ann Garrison has more.

KPFA/Ann Garrison: Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza told a visiting delegation of the U.N. Security Council that the African Union “must respect Burundi as a member state, and we must be consulted.” In mid-December last year, the African Union Peace and Security Council voted to deploy 5,000 peacekeeping forces in Burundi without the government’s consent.

Burundi borders Rwanda to the north, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west and Tanzania to the east. U.N. officials and the NGO Refugees International have documented Rwanda’s recruitment of Burundian refugees into a new rebel army.

However, international law prohibits the deployment without a two-thirds vote of African Union member states, and the approval of the U.N. Security Council, whose five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S., have veto power. The Burundian government was no doubt encouraged by remarks of the Russian and Chinese ambassadors on the importance of protecting Burundi’s national sovereignty.

U.N. Ambassador to the U.S. Samantha Power expressed her disappointment.

In Berkeley, for Pacifica, KPFA and AfrobeatRadio, I’m Ann Garrison.

 

WKOG UPDATE JANUARY 30, 2016: The African Union has voted against military intervention in Burundi. The intervention in Burundi continues to rightfully oppose.

 

 

[Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting.]

Western Aggression: The Highest Form of Terrorism

Dissident Voice

January 31st, 2016

by Edward S. Herman

FLASHBACK: The Responsibility of the Intellectuals: Cuba, the U.S. and Human Rights

The James Petras Website

April 18, 2003

by James Petras

Cuba 1959. In all of Cuba’s armed forces, women play an important role.

Isn’t it time that we, in the United States, with our illustrious and prestigious progressive intellectuals with all our majestic moral sensibilities recognize that there is a vital, heroic revolution struggling to defend itself against the U.S. juggernaut and that we modestly set aside our self-important declarations, support that revolution and join the one million Cubans celebrating May Day with their leader Fidel Castro?

Rebelion

Once again the intellectuals have entered into the center of a debate – this time over the issues of U.S. imperialism and human rights in Cuba.

“How important is the role of the intellectuals?”, I asked myself as we walked past the Puerto del Sol in Madrid on a sunny Saturday afternoon ( April 26, 2003 ) and heard the anti-Castro slogans of a few hundred protestors echoing through the near empty plaza. Despite a dozen articles and opinion columns by well known intellectuals in the leading Madrid newspapers, and hours of television and radio propaganda and endorsements by the major trade union bureaucrats and party bosses, only 700-800, mostly Cuban exiles turned up to attack Cuba. “Clearly,” I thought, “the anti-‘Cuban intellectuals have little or no power of convocation, at least in Spain.” But the political impotence of the anti-Castro writers does not mean that intellectuals in general do not play an important role; nor does the lack of a popular audience mean that they are without resources, especially if they do have the backing of the U.S. war and propaganda machine, amplifying and disseminating their word throughout the world. In order to come to reason about the debate raging between intellectuals on the issues of human rights in Cuba and U.S. imperialism it is important to step back and consider the role of the intellectuals, the context and major issues that frame the U.S.-Cuba conflict.

The Role of the Intellectuals

The role of the intellectuals is to clarify the major issues and define the major threats to peace, social justice, national independence and freedom in each historical period as well as to identify and support the principal defenders of the same principles. Intellectuals have a responsibility to distinguish between the defensive measures taken by countries and peoples under imperial attack and the offensive methods of imperial powers bent on conquest. It is the height of cant and hypocrisy to engage in moral equivalences between the violence and repression of imperial countries bent on conquest with that of Third World countries under military and terrorist attacks. Responsible intellectuals critically examine the political context and analyze the relationships between imperial power and their paid local functionaries who they describe as “dissidents” – they do not issue moral fiats according to their dim lights and their political imperatives. Committed intellectuals who claim to speak with moral authority, especially those who lay claim to being critics of imperialism, have a political responsibility to demystify power and state and media manipulation particularly in relation to imperial rhetoric of human rights violations by independent Third World states. We have in recent times seen too many self-styled “progressive” Western intellectuals supporting or silent on the U.S. destruction of Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing of over 250,000 Serbs, gypsies and others in Kosovo, buying into the U.S. propaganda of a “humanitarian intervention”.

All the U.S. intellectuals (Chomsky, Zinn, Wallerstein etc…) supported the U.S.-financed violent fundamentalist uprising in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed secular government in Afghanistan – under the pretext that the Soviet Union “invaded” Afghanistan and the fundamentalist fanatics entering the country from all over the world were the “dissidents” defending “self-determination” – an admitted propaganda ploy successfully executed by the boastful former National Security Adviser, Zbig Bryzinski. Then and now prestigious intellectuals brandish their past credentials as “critics” of U.S. foreign policy to give credibility to their uninformed denunciation of alleged Cuban moral transgressions, equating Cuba’s arrest of paid functionaries of the U.S. State Department and the execution of three terrorist kidnapers with the genocidal war crimes of U.S. imperialism. The practitioners of moral equivalents apply a microscope to Cuba and a telescope to U.S. – which gives them a certain acceptability among the liberal sectors of the empire.

Moral Imperatives and Cuban Realities: Morality as Dishonesty Intellectuals are divided on the U.S.-Cuba conflict: Benedetti, Sastre, Petras, Sanchez-Vazquez and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova and scores of others defend Cuba; right-wing intellectuals including Vargas Llosa, Savater, and Carlos Fuentes have predictably issued their usual diatribes against Cuba; and a small army of otherwise progressive intellectuals – Chomsky, Galeano, Saramago, Sontag, Zinn and Wallerstein – have joined the chorus condemning Cuba, waving their past critical postures in an effort to distinguish themselves from the right-wing/State Department Cuban opponents. It is the latter “progressive” group which has caused the greatest harm among the burgeoning anti-imperialist movement and it is to them that these critical remarks are directed. Morality based on propaganda is a deadly mix – particularly when the moral judgments come from prestigious leftist intellectuals and the propaganda emanates from the far-right Bush administration.

Many of the “progressive” critics of Cuba acknowledge, in passing and in a general way, that the U.S. has been a hostile aggressor against Cuba, and they “generously” grant Cuba the right to self-determination – and then launch into a series of unsubstantiated charges and misrepresentations devoid of any special context that might serve to clarify the issues and provide a reasoned basis for …”moral imperatives”. It is best to begin with the most fundamental facts.

The left critics, based on U.S. State Department labeling, denounce the Cuban government’s repression of individuals, dissidents, including journalists, owners of private libraries and members of political parties engaged in non-violent political activity trying to exercise their democratic rights.

What the “progressives” fail to recognize or are unwilling to acknowledge is that those arrested were paid functionaries of the U.S. government. According to the Agency of International Development (AID), the principal U.S. federal agency implementing U.S. grants and loans in pursuit of U.S. foreign policy, under USAID’s Cuba Program ( resulting from the Helms-Burton Act of 1996) AID has channeled over $8.5 million dollars to Cuban opponents of the Castro regime since 1997 to publish, meet, propagandize in favor of the overthrow of the Cuban government in co-ordination with a variety of U.S. NGO’s, universities, foundations and other front groups. (Profile of the USAID Cuba Program – on the AID web site ). The U.S.AID program, unlike its usual practice, does not channel payments to the Cuban government but directly to its Cuban “dissident” clients. The criteria for funding are clearly stated – the recipients of payments and grants must have demonstrated a clear commitment to U.S. directed “regime change” toward “free markets” and “democracy” – no doubt similar to the U.S. colonial dictatorship in Iraq. The Helms-Burton legislation, the U.S.AID Cuba Program and their paid Cuban functionaries, like the U.S. progressive manifesto, “ condemn Cuba’s lack of freedom, jailing of innocent dissidents, and call for a democratic change of regime in Cuba”. Strange coincidences that require some analyses.

Cuban journalists who have received $280,000 from a Cuba Free Press -AID front- are not dissidents they are paid functionaries. Cuban “Human Rights” groups who receive $775,000 from CIA front “Freedom House” are not dissidents – particularly when their mission is to promote a “transition” (overthrow) of the Cuban regime. The list of grants and funding to Cuban “dissidents” (functionaries) by the U.S. government in pursuit of the U.S. policy is long and detailed and accessible to all the progressive moral critics. The point is that the jailed opponents of the Cuban government were paid functionaries of the U.S. government, paid to implement the goals of the Helms-Burton Act in accordance with the criteria of the U.S.AID and under the guidance and direction of the head of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana. Between September 2, 2002 and March 2003 James Cason, head of the US Interest Section, held dozens of meetings with his Cuban “dissidents” at his home and office, providing them with instructions and guidelines on what to write, how to recruit, while publicly haranging against the Cuban government in the most undiplomatic manner.

Washington’s Cuban functionaries were supplied with electronic and other communication equipment by USAID, books and other propaganda and money to fund pro-U.S. “trade unions” via the U.S. front, the “American Center for International Labor Solidarity”. These are not well-meaning “dissidents” unaware of their paymaster and their role as U.S. agents, since the USAID report states ( under the section entitled “The US Institutional Context”), “The Cuba Program is funded through Economic Support Fund, which is designed to support the economic and political foreign policy interests of the US by providing financial assistance to allies (sic) and countries in transition to democracy”. No country in the world tolerates or labels domestic citizens paid by and working for a foreign power to act for its imperial interests as “dissidents”. This is especially true of the U.S. where under Title 18 ,Section 951 of the U.S. Code , “anyone who agrees to operate within the United States subject to the direction or control of a foreign government or official would be subjected to criminal prosecution and a 10 year prison sentence”. Unless , of course, they register as a paid foreign agent or are working for the Israeli government. The U.S. “progressive” intellectuals abdicate their responsibilities as analysts and critics and accept at face value the State Department characterization of the U.S. paid functionaries as dissidents striving for “freedom”. Some defenders of the U.S. agent-dissidents claim that the functionaries received “scandalously long sentences”.

Once again empirical myopia compounds mendacious moralizing. Cuba is on a war footing. The Bush government has declared that Cuba is on the list of military targets subject to mass destruction and war. And in case our moralistic intellectuals don’t know it : What Bush, Rumsfeld and the war-mongering Zionists in the Administration say — they do. The total lack of seriousness in Chomsky, Zinn, Sontag, Wallerstein’s moral dictates is that they fail to acknowledge the imminent and massive threat of a U.S. war with weapons of mass destruction, announced in advance. This is particularly onerous given the fact that many of Cuba’s detractors live in the U.S., read the U.S. press and are aware of how quickly militaristic pronouncements are followed by genocidal actions. But our moralists are not bothered by context, by U.S. threats to Cuba immediate or proximate, they are eager to ignore it all to demonstrate to the State Department that they not only oppose U.S. foreign policy but also condemn every independent country, system and leader who opposes the U.S. In other words, Mr. Ashcroft, when you crack down on the “apologists” for Cuban “terror”, remember that we are different, we too condemned Cuba, we too called for a change of regime. The critics of Cuba ignore the fact that the U.S. has a two-pronged military-political strategy to take over Cuba that is already operative. Washington provides asylum for terrorist air pirates, encouraging efforts to destabilize Cuba’s tourist-based economy; it works closely with the terrorist Cuban American Foundation engaging in attempts to assassinate Cuban leaders.

New U.S. military bases have been established in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, El Salvador and there is an expanding concentration camp in Guantanomo – all to facilitate an invasion. The U.S. embargo is in the process of being tightened with the support of the right-wing Berlusconi and Aznar regimes in Italy and Spain. The aggressive and openly political activity of James Cason of the Interest Section in line with his Cuban followers among the paid functionaries/ “dissidents” is part of the inside strategy designed to undermine Cuban loyalties to the regime and the revolution. The inter-connection between the two tactics and their strategic convergence is ignored by our prestigious intellectual critics who prefer the luxury of issuing moral imperatives about freedom everywhere for everyone, even when a psychotic Washington puts the knife to Cuba’s throat. No thanks, Chomsky, Sontag, Wallerstein – Cuba is justified in giving its attackers a kick in the balls and sending them to cut sugar cane to earn an honest living. The death penalty for three ferry boat terrorists is harsh treatment – but so was the threat to the lives of forty Cuban passengers who faced death at the hands of the hijackers. Again our moralists forgot to discuss the rash acts of air piracy and the plots of others uncovered in time. The moralists failed to understand why these terrorists desperadoes are seeking illegal means to leave Cuba. Bush’s Administration has practically eliminated the visa program for Cuban emigrants wishing to leave.

Visa grants have declined from 9000 for the first four months of 2002 to 700 in 2003. This is a clever tactic to encourage terrorist acts in Cuba and then denounce the harsh sentences, evoking the chorus of ‘yea’ sayers in the ‘Amen’ corner of the progressive U.S. and European intellectual establishment. Is it simply ignorance which informs these moral pronouncements against Cuba or is it something else besides – moral blackmail? , to force their Cuban counterparts to turn against their regime, their people or face the opprobrium of the prestigious intellectuals – to become further isolated and stigmatized as “apologists of Castro”. Explicit threats by Saramago to abandon his Cuban friends and embrace the cause of U.S. paid functionaries. Implicit threats of no longer visiting Cuba and to boycott conferences. Is it moral cowardice to pick up the cudgels for the empire and pick on Cuba when it faces the threat of mass destruction over the freedom of paid agents, subject to prosecution by any country in the world? What is eminently dishonest is to totally ignore the vast accomplishments of the revolution in employment, education, health, equality, and Cuba’s heroic and principled opposition to imperial wars – the only country to so declare – and its capacity to resist almost 50 years of invasions.

That counts for nothing for the U.S. intellectuals – that is scandalous!! That is a disgrace, a retreat in search of respectability after “daring” to oppose the U.S. war along with 30 million other people in the world. It is not time to “balance” things out – by condemning Cuba, by calling for a regime change, by supporting the cause of the “market oriented” Cuban functionary-dissidents. Let us remember the same progressive intellectuals supported “dissidents” in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union who were bankrolled by Soros and the U.S. State Department. The “dissidents” turned the country over to the Russian mafia, life expectancy declined five years ( over 10 million Russians died prematurely with the sacking of the national health system), while in Eastern Europe “dissidents” closed the shipyards of Gdansk , enrolled in NATO and provided mercenaries for the U.S. conquest of Iraq. And never among these current supporters of Cuban “dissidents” is there any critical reflection on the catastrophic outcomes resulting from their anti-communist diatribes and their manifestos in favor of the ‘dissidents’ who have become the soldiers of the U.S. Middle Eastern and Central European empire. Our U.S. moralists never, I repeat, never, ever reflected critically on their moral failures, past or present because, you see, they are for “freedom everywhere”, even when the “wrong” people get into power and the “other” empire takes over, and the millions die from curable diseases and white slavery rings expand. The reply is always the same: “That’s not what we wanted – we were for an independent, free and just society – it just happened that in calling for regime change, support for dissidents, we never suspected that the Empire would ‘take it all’, would become the only superpower, and engage in colonizing the world.”

The moral intellectuals must accept political responsibility for the consequences and not hide behind abstract moral platitudes, neither for their past complicity with empire building nor their present scandalous pronouncements against Cuba. They cannot claim they don’t know the repercussions of what they are saying and doing. They cannot pretend innocence after all they we have seen and read and heard about U.S. war plans against Cuba. The principal author and promoter of the anti-Cuban declaration in the United States (signed by Chomsky, Zinn and Wallerstein) was Joanne Landy, a self-declared “democratic socialist”, and lifelong advocate of the violent overthrow of the Cuban government – for the past 40 years. She is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the major institutions advising the U.S. government on imperial policies for over a half century.

Landy supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and the Albanian terrorist group, the KLA – calling publicly for overt military support – responsible for the murder of 2000 Serbs and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and others in Kosova. It is no surprise that the statement authored by this chameleon right-wing extremist contained no mention of Cuba’s social accomplishments and opposition to imperialism. For the record, it should be noted, that Landy was a visceral opponent of the Chinese, Vietnamese and other social revolutions in her climb to positions of influence in the CFR. For all their vaunted critical intellect, the “progressive” intellectuals overlooked the unsavory politics of the author who promoted the anti-Cuba diatribe.

 The Role of the Intellectual Today

Many critics of Cuba speak of “principles” as if there were only one set of principles applicable to all situations independent of who is involved and what are the consequences. Asserting “principles” like “freedom” for those involved in plotting the overthrow of the Cuban government in complicity with the State Department would turn Cuba into another Chile – where Allende was overthrown by Pinochet – and lead to a reversal of the popular gains of the revolution. There are principles that are more basic than freedom for U.S. Cuban functionaries , that is , national security and popular sovereignty. There is, particularly among the U.S. progressive left, a certain attraction to Third World victims, those who suffer defeats ,and an aversion for successful revolutionaries. It seems that the U.S. progressive intellectuals always find an alibi to avoid a commitment to a revolution.

For some it is the old refrain “Stalinism” – if the state plays a major role in the economy; or it can be mass mobilizations – that they dub “plebicitary dictatorships”, or it can be security agencies which successfully prevent terrorist activity which they call a “repressive police state”. Living in the least politicized nation in the world with one of the most servile and corrupt trade union apparatus in the West, with virtually no practical political influence outside a few university towns, the practical intellectuals in the U.S. have no practical knowledge or experience of the everyday threats and violence which hangs over revolutionary governments and activists in Latin America. Their political conceptions, the yardsticks they pull out to condemn or approve of any political activity, exists nowhere except in their heads, in their congenial, progressive, university settings where they enjoy all the privileges of capitalist freedom and none of the risks which Third World revolutionaries have to defend themselves against.

A little modesty, dear prestigious, critical, freedom preaching intellectuals.

Look deep inside and ask yourself if you would like to be pirated by a Miami-based terrorist organization. Ask yourself if you would enjoy sitting in a café in a major tourist hotel in Havana when a deadly bomb goes off – greetings from the terrorists taking a beer with the President’s brother, Jeb. Think about living in a country which is on the top of the hit list of the most violent imperial regime since Nazi Germany – and then perhaps your moral sensibilities might awaken to the need to temper your condemnations of Cuban security policies and contextualize your moral fiats. I want to conclude by establishing my own “moral imperatives” – for the critical intellectuals.

The first duty of Euro-U.S. intellectuals is to oppose their own imperial rulers set on conquering the world. The second duty is to clarify the moral issues involved in the struggle between imperial militarists and popular/national resistance and reject the hypocritical posture that equates the mass terror of one with the justified if at times excessive security constraints of the other. To establish standards of political and personal integrity with regards to the facts and issues before making moral judgments. Resist the temptation to become a “moral hero of the empire” by refusing to support victorious popular struggles and revolutionary regimes which are not perfect which lack all the freedoms available to impotent intellectuals unable to threaten power and therefore tolerated to meet, discuss and criticize.

Refuse to set themselves as Judge, Prosecutor and Jury condemning progressives who have the courage to defend revolutionaries. The most appalling instance is Susan Sontag’s scurrilous attack on Colombian Nobel Prize winning novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who she accused of lacking integrity and being an apologist of Cuban terror (sic). Sontag made her blood libelous accusations in Bogata, Colombia. The Colombian death squads working with the regime and the military kill more trade unionists and journalists than any place in the world, and do so , for far less than being an “apologist” of the Castro regime. This is the same Sontag who was an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. imperial invasion and bombing of Yugoslavia, apologist for the fundamentalist Bosnian regime and who was a silent witness to the killing and ethnic cleansing of Serbs and others in Kosova. Moral integrity indeed! The precious sense of moral superiority found among New York intellectuals allow Sontag to finger Marquez for the death squads and feel that she has made a great moral statement. U.S.-European intellectuals should not confuse their own political futility and inconsequential position with that of their counterparts among committed Latin American intellectuals. There is a place for constructive dialogue and debate but never personal assaults that demean individuals facing daily threats to their lives.

It is easy for critical intellectuals to be a “friend of Cuba” in good times at celebrations and invited conferences in times of lesser threats. It is much harder to be a “friend of Cuba” when a totalitarian empire threatens the heroic island and puts heavy hands on its defenders. It is in times like this – of permanent wars, genocide and military aggression, when Cuba needs the solidarity of critical intellectuals, which they are receiving from all over Europe and particularly Latin America. Isn’t it time that we, in the United States, with our illustrious and prestigious progressive intellectuals with all our majestic moral sensibilities recognize that there is a vital, heroic revolution struggling to defend itself against the U.S. juggernaut and that we modestly set aside our self-important declarations, support that revolution and join the one million Cubans celebrating May Day with their leader Fidel Castro?

 

[James Petras has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.]

Don’t Lose Your Head

A Culture of Imbeciles

January 27, 2016

 

 

Saudi Arabia heading the UN Human Rights Council is the greatest mindfuck since Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, then in July 2010 lifted the U.S. funding ban for Kopassus, the notorious Indonesian death squads.

 

Further reading: Who Shapes the United Nations Agenda?

WATCH: Edward S. Herman on “Humanitarian Imperialism”

The Real News

Video published July 1, 2012

Excerpt:

TRN: Which it’s all geopolitics: when it’s in your interest, you bring up that card, and when it’s not, you don’t.

HERMAN: No, absolutely. And the lack of principle involved, the lack of as you say, there is a principle, a UN principle, that’s been overridden by this allegedly higher principle of the responsibility to protect civilians who are victimized by their government, so that we have to go in. And we did this in Libya. And a good chunk of the left fell for this, too, that we have the responsibility. We raised the question, I have raised the question, in the case of Libya, well, do you want to leave this in the hands of the United States, who’s engaging in drone warfare all over the world, has declared the whole world a free-fire zone, engaged in the most monstrous aggression in Iraq, and it’s got away with it. You want this imperial power to do the job in Libya on this incredibly selective basis? Isn’t that a bad principle in itself, to do it and to then let them do it, and to have faith that they’re going to do it, not engage in regime change, which they’ve been obviously pursuing? I mean, the naivete behind supporting that is again, it’s breathtaking.

 

 

[Edward S. Herman is an American economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also the author of several books, namely “Manufacturing Consent” which he wrote with Noam Chomsky and “The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context and Politics”.]

WATCH: Edward S. Herman: “Where the Hell Was the Left?”

The Real News

Video published June 30, 2012

“So, anyway, we criticized them. And Noam Chomsky hates ad hominem, or he doesn’t like fighting on the left. But I believe in it. I think it’s very important to criticize the left. I think a very important part of the problem of the world is the extent to which the conservative forces struggling allegedly for human rights have neutralized or even captured some of the left.”

Excerpt:

TRN: But in terms of your personal arc, you had a bit of a disagreement with Noam Chomsky on Iran.

HERMAN: Well, I think what he was objecting to was that when Peterson and I were writing on the Iran election, we were taking a heavy crack at the people, the liberals and and left-wingers in the West who were going after Iran very vigorously in this election. In fact, I think we showed very, very well that that election while very imperfect, it wasn’t a stolen election. And I think there was pretty reasonable evidence that Ahmadinejad really won an election and would have won under any kind of conditions. And what we did was feature how the liberals and left in the United States got on that bandwagon just when the United States and Israel were engaged in attempting regime change and were demonizing Iran at every level. So when they had an election, they oh, we got very upset about that election, whereas Saudi Arabia, they don’t have an election and they don’t get very upset about that.But right at that moment when they had that election in Iran, they had a coup in Honduras, a right-wing coup, and then they had a really phony election. And in this series that Peterson and I put up, we thought, where the hell was the left on Honduras? Why were they focusing so heavily on Iran, which was out of our orbit of control, but where we were trying to destabilize and overthrow a regime? You would think the left would get on that. But here’s Honduras right in our sphere of influence and where we could possibly have, we definitely could have real influence if we wanted to, and the left was not yelling and raging and saying, oh, look, dude, this is where you ought to be.

TRN: Some of the left was.

HERMAN: Yeah, some of the left. But a remarkable, a very significant fraction of the left had gotten on the Iran bandwagon. You absolutely have to put it in.

TRN: But certainly people have and the workers of Iran have a right to fight for their rights in Iran.

HERMAN: Oh, of course. Yes. Yes. Yes. I would support them all the time. But that’s largely their business. And, in fact, some of them would even argue that the scene was compromised by the external intervention and the fact that they were tied in with people who were really trying to overthrow the government and engage in serious regime. Some activists in Iran.

TRN: Most of them say that. Most of them say the pressure coming from United States and Israel actually weakens the democracy movement in Iran.

HERMAN: So, in any case, getting back to the Chomsky question, I don’t think he/ I ever had an exchange with him on this, but indirectly we were attacking some of the left-wing groups, like the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which had never mentioned Honduras in this period but would spend a lot of time on Iran and the election. And, in fact, some of them made statements about the Iran election that we considered to be untrue. So, anyway, we criticized them. And Noam Chomsky hates ad hominem, or he doesn’t like fighting on the left. But I believe in it. I think it’s very important to criticize the left. I think a very important part of the problem of the world is the extent to which the conservative forces struggling allegedly for human rights have neutralized or even captured some of the left.”

 

 

[Edward S. Herman is an American economist and media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy and the media. He’s a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also the author of several books, namely “Manufacturing Consent” which he wrote with Noam Chomsky and “The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context and Politics”.]

Rwanda, the Enduring Lies: A Project Censored Interview with Professor Ed Herman

Project Censored | Global Research

January 1, 2016

Meet the Two Brothers Making Millions Off the Refugee Crisis in Scandinavia

It’s a scene that could possibly warm even the two-sizes-too-small heart of the Grinch. Here in a little village in Norway, as dusky midday light filters in through the forest outside a classroom, a half-dozen Afghan teenagers hunch over a long wooden table, assiduously scissoring colored sheets of construction paper. These are 15- to 18-year-old boys who’ve endured miseries no child deserves—gunfire, explosions, the killing of a parent by Islamic State—and they’ve traveled here from their homeland on foot and in suffocatingly crowded vans. They sneaked through the woods on the Turkey-Bulgaria border, and they’ve been chased and bitten by police dogs and beaten by their smugglers. Now they’re celebrating Christmas and inscribing cards with some of the very first Norwegian words they’ve learned: God Jul. Merry Christmas.

Are they happy to be here?

“It is calm and peaceful,” says Bilal, 15, in Pashto.

“It is nice,” says Ahmad, also 15, “but why isn’t there a cricket pitch?”

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Their middle-aged teachers—a Syrian and an Eritrean, both onetime refugees themselves—hover over them, benevolent, smiling, as a commuter train rattles in the distance. This, arguably, is the Scandinavia that the self-proclaimed socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was referring to in October when he suggested that Americans “should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished”—particularly when it comes to government programs that assist those in need.

Except there’s this other guy in the room, standing off to the side, almost invisible as he handles incoming e-mail on his smartphone. Kristian Adolfsen, 55, wears a V-neck sweater, a striped button-down, and glasses. This is his first visit to this refugee center in Hvalstad, but he owns the operation with his brother, Roger, 51, and they run 90 such centers in Norway and 10 more in Sweden. Refugees represent a huge opportunity for them; the Adolfsens’ Oslo-based company, Hero Norway, is the leader of a burgeoning Scandinavian industry that charges the Norwegian and Swedish governments a fixed fee—$31 to $75 per person per night in Norway—to house and feed refugees.

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

In Norway, Hero operates several different kinds of refugee lodging, among them short-stay dormitories where asylum seekers sleep a few nights, waiting to be screened by police after crossing the border; a second phalanx of facilities where refugees wait a couple of weeks to be interviewed by immigration officials, taking their meals in a cafeteria; and longer-term camps where they live more independently, in detached houses, cooking their own meals, as they wait, often for years, to be settled in Norway with protected refugee status.

For 2015, Hero Norway expects revenue of $63 million, with profits of 3.5 percent. In the rest of Europe, where asylum seekers typically are cared for by nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross, only one for-profit is larger than the Adolfsens’ operation, ORS Services, a Swiss company that in 2014 generated $99 million in profit caring for refugees in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. (ORS won’t disclose its 2015 profits.)

The Adolfsens have succeeded in part because they have a background in hospitality. In the three decades since they founded Adolfsen Group, Kristian and Roger have built an $800 million-a-year network of businesses that includes preschools and nursing homes, as well as hotels, apartment buildings, cruise lines, and ski resorts. The two entered the refugee sector in May 2014, when they paid a Danish company, ISS Facility Services, $22 million for Hero Norway, a 27-year-old company that ran 32 refugee centers.

At first the Adolfsens set their sights on Sweden. Almost immediately, though, refugee arrivals in Norway exploded, and they’ve kept arriving since. A country of 5 million people—a relatively sleepy, snow-clad, 1,600-mile-long, lutefish-eating kingdom that had never seen more than 17,000 refugees in a single year—received more than 31,500 asylum seekers in 2015 as Syria continued to fall apart and wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea drove refugees to Europe. The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) can’t cope with the influx, so it’s turning to entrepreneurs, desperately, lest more refugees sleep in the streets. “UDI calls for capitalists,” blared a recent headline in Oslo’s Aftenposten newspaper.

For-profits now care for about 90 percent of Norway’s refugees. A gold rush has commenced, and it’s also a bit of a circus. Just outside Oslo, a savvy entrepreneur named Ola Moe recently rented a vacant hospital for $10,000 a month, did minimal upgrades, and began charging the government $460,000 a month to house and feed 200 refugees. At a refugee center in Southern Norway, 50 resident asylum seekers went on a two-hour march in November to protest the poor food, prompting one politician, an Iranian Norwegian named Mazyar Keshvari, to proclaim, “These ungrateful people should immediately leave the country.”

Amid such controversy, the Adolfsens appear like poised professionals. In press photographs, they flash can-do smiles as they sit before gleaming conference tables in airy office towers. One Oslo paper, Dagens Naeringsliv, has called them “Norway’s least known billionaires.” Yet concerns remain. In their monetization of the refugee crisis, will the Adolfsens provide superior, more efficient havens, or will they cut corners and skimp on services to improve profits? And does their bottom-line approach threaten a depth of caring that transcends hard cash?

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Kristian and Roger grew up in Northern Norway, a sparsely peopled region imbued with a provincial, gloomy, Southern Rock vibe. Moonshine is popular there, along with fishing and hunting, and the Adolfsen brothers pride themselves on speaking a northern dialect, which Kristian says “is filled with swear words—not bad ones, but you know, stuff like ‘devil hell.’?” Their hometown of Andenes, population 3,500, situated on Andoya Island, is so windy there are almost no trees. Their father, Kolbjorn, an engineer, worked days at the Andoya Space Center, launching rockets to study the northern lights. In the evening, he ran a TV sales and repair shop. Eventually he built a hotel. “A lot of people in Norway have cabins,” says Kristian. “Our second home was the TV shop. That’s where we saw our father.”

When Kristian was 5, he began selling the local newspaper, the Andoya Avis. At 7, he got involved with the production of a Northern Norway ocean delicacy, cod tongue. It was his job each winter afternoon to jab hundreds of cod down onto a metal spike, one by one, before lopping off the fish’s tongues with a knife. “As soon as the last bell rang at school,” he says, “I began sprinting. You had to be the first on the pier. There were only so many fish.” He cut quickly, running behind his wheelbarrow in the 10F to 15F air to fetch loads of fish. After three hours, he’d spend three more selling cod tongues door to door. “But that wasn’t so bad,” he says, “because then you could wear gloves.”

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Roger stayed out of the cod tongue industry (by the time he came of age, his mother was weary of living in a household smelling of fish), but he soon followed his brother into competitive running and cross-country skiing. The brothers served as delivery boys, Kristian carrying groceries on his sled and Roger baked goods. Both worked as salesmen in the TV shop, and during the late 1970s—as Norwegian conservative Kare Willoch rose to power, eventually becoming prime minister in 1981—the brothers grew infectiously excited over his staunch opposition to the social democratic state that took root in Norway after World War II.

Kristian and Roger ran for the Andenes City Council as teenagers. Both won seats and fought for the privatization of road services and garbage pickup in Andenes. “My first speech was about privatizing the road grading,” Kristian says. “I spent hours writing and correcting many times what I would say. I tried to memorize every word.”

When the Adolfsens made their first major business move in 1991, purchasing the 44-room Andrikken Hotel in Andenes, the gesture had an almost holy resonance: They were buying the very hotel their father had built. In 1981, Kolbjorn had lost the business to bankruptcy. But he kept its giant sign in his basement. It depicted a long-necked duck flying into the midnight sun. The brothers rehung it—then staffed the hotel with old friends from Andenes, establishing a tone. “We have a coast culture in our companies,” Kristian says. “We are professional but informal, and we base everything on trust. When you grow up in a small place, you can’t do anything wrong. You get a bad reputation.”

Over the next decade, the Adolfsens built Norlandia Hotel Group, which now manages about 30 establishments, many of them Best Westerns, throughout Norway and Sweden. As the Norwegian government started allowing private companies to make money on social welfare work, they ventured into nursing homes, then preschools. “We are like sportsmen,” Kristian says calmly and clinically, explaining his and Roger’s drive. “We set goals, and then we reach our goals, and then we have to set new goals. It is not about the money. It is about the excitement.”

Europe’s refugee crisis has been bubbling since the Arab Spring of 2011. When it boiled over last summer, many Norwegians traveled to Lesbos, Greece, on the edge of the Aegean Sea to help refugees land their boats in Europe. They set up tents, served food, and offered trauma counseling. Back in Norway, groups such as Refugees Welcome to Norway supplied the newcomers with clothes and toys as other volunteers taught them to knit. The Adolfsens, meanwhile, enlisted an aide to cast about Norway’s hinterlands for abandoned or little-used properties: defunct boarding schools, onetime rehab centers, hospitals, mountain hotels that go dead in autumn—any and all structures where refugees could be housed temporarily or permanently at a profit. As Roger tended to other aspects of the Adolfsens’ business, Kristian expanded the refugee services. “We see it as a niche in the health and care industry,” he says.

On Norway’s political left, the Adolfsens are regarded as distasteful and greedy, especially by Linn Herning, deputy director of Norway’s Campaign for the Welfare State and the author of a 2015 book, Velferdsprofitorene (The Welfare Profiteers), which traces the gradual expansion since the late 1990s of entrepreneurs in Norway’s preschools and nursing homes. The cover features detailed, anatomically correct drawings of creepy insects—parasites—and Herning devotes several pages to the Adolfsens, who, she says, are “the biggest players, the only welfare profiteers in every sector.” In early December, she helped Norway’s Socialist Party and Social Democratic Party call in Parliament for a study looking into the feasibility of banning profiteering in refugee care.

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Still, Herning could point to only one specific example of the Adolfsens’ supposed treachery. In the small Norwegian city of Moss, an hour south of Oslo, Orkerod, a respected, publicly owned, 88-bed nursing home for dementia patients, went into tumult after the Adolfsens’ Norlandia Care Group began managing it in 2014. “The focus on specialized dementia care disappeared,” says Lorentz Nitter, the clinic’s lead doctor until he quit in June. “Such care is very expensive,” about $125,000 annually per person, he says, “and Norlandia didn’t want to pay for it.” When highly paid nurses trained in dementia work quit, Norlandia replaced them with cheaper nonspecialists. “They began treating all patients the same way,” Nitter says, and this was dangerous. About 30 percent of all dementia patients are “aggressive,” he says, “and they walk around causing many problems.”

In Orkerod’s first 12 months under Norlandia’s guidance, 19 nurses quit. In a recent op-ed in Moss Avis, Nitter joined two other Orkerod doctors in complaining that the clinic’s excellence, built over its first 13 years of operation, had been “torn down in a single year.”

Kristian denies that the quality of the service at Orkerod declined and argues that departed staffers were disgruntled simply because Norlandia shook them from long-standing work habits. “These were people who’d been there for many years,” he says. “They were used to doing things their way, and then we made changes. It’s a lot more demanding to work for a private company because we focus on providing better quality at lower prices.”

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Could Norwegian refugee centers suffer similar changes? It’s apparently already happened. From 2006 to 2014, as reported in the Oslo paper Ny Tid, one of Norway’s largest for-profit refugee care providers, Link, habitually broke binding budget promises to the Norwegian government. In 2014, Link, which operates 14 refugee centers, signed on to a budget that would cap its profits at $230,000. By skimping on promised services—child care, for instance, homework help, and the supervision of people with disabilities—it ended up $1.15 million in the black.

Ny Tid’s figures came from an anonymous source within UDI, a 20-year veteran at the agency. When I met with this man, he said of Link, “Every year they overestimate what services will cost them. That is how the game is played, and if new operators don’t understand that, they’re going down.” Hallstein Saunes, the leader for Link’s refugee centers, disputes the figures presented by Ny Tid, calling the paper’s interpretation of them “misleading” and saying that Link didn’t skimp on social services. Rather, he says, it saved elsewhere—on utilities, for instance. “Our aim,” he says, “is to operate good reception centers within the financial framework of our agreements as we develop the company and contribute towards solving an important task in our society.”

UDI’s monitoring of corruption is minimal, according to the UDI source. “We can only concentrate on opening new refugee centers,” he said. He had no special knowledge on Hero Norway, but in discussing the company, he was uncharacteristically sunny. “They’ve been a good partner for UDI,” he said. “They’re very flexible. When we need them to expand, they do. It’s easy.”

Brad Henderson of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees notes that in recent months NGO care providers have frequently collaborated with for-profits to meet the needs of asylum seekers, stepping in to provide phone and Internet service, as well as to charter flights from Syria and elsewhere. He’s carefully optimistic about the profiteers. They can “create a long-lasting, mutually beneficial partnership with UNHCR if they can be aligned to shared goals and values,” says Henderson, who is UNHCR’s European lead on fostering relations with for-profits. “They can bring new ideas and vital energy to the refugee cause.”

It’s not clear whether others will embrace or reject the Adolfsens’ refugee riches, but several insiders predict that Norway’s Parliament will allow refugee entrepreneurs to continue but will cap their earnings. “I wish we could operate with only NGOs and municipalities running refugee centers,” says Marte Gerhardsen, the director of Oslo-based Tankesmien Agenda, a think tank closely aligned with Norway’s Labor Party, “but right now, right here, we need Hero, and it’s totally illogical to say they can’t make profits. That would be like Prohibition in America—it won’t work.” She adds, “we do need to regulate them, though.” Gerhardsen argues that private operators be limited to a 3 percent profit margin. The Adolfsens claim that theirs is 3.5 percent, but Herning calls that figure “highly unlikely. All the other refugee companies that I’ve looked at have a much higher profit margin.” She says that in handling revenue from nursery schools and nursing homes, the Adolfsens have played a shell game, shifting profits from one business within their conglomerate to another. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing that for Hero as well,” she says.

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

It’s 2 p.m. on another Norwegian afternoon, and Kristian and I are driving south out of Oslo in his Porsche SUV. The car is new, with only 2,800 miles on it, but Kristian is fast to point out that he got a huge tax credit; the car is a hybrid.

“We live like normal people,” he says. “I have a regular house and a mountain apartment and cabin, but for all these I paid less than 10 million kroner,” about $1.1 million. “I have never hired a nanny. My brother and me, we just take small salaries”—about $230,000 a year. “We work too hard to spend the money.”

Rich people always say things like this, of course, but coming from Kristian, the humble talk is somewhat believable. For a man who could reasonably cast himself as the Donald of Norway, he’s a remarkably bland and polite presence, even by taciturn Norwegian standards. When we confer with the heads of three refugee centers, he scarcely speaks. He doesn’t harry anyone, and he asks very few questions. His focus seems far away, ensconced in a netherworld of ledgers and spreadsheets.

He and Roger are almost monklike in their devotion to business. Both work about 70 hours a week, following achingly methodical routines. “Monday to Thursday,” Kristian says, “I work in my office at home until 1 a.m. I leave for work between 7:20 and 7:25. When I am on vacation, I work for an hour in the morning and an hour at night.”

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Neither brother has smoked a cigarette or tasted alcohol, and in 2011, when Kristian crumpled to the ground while running a half-marathon, stricken by a heart attack that stilled his pulse for 10 minutes, he didn’t resolve to slow down. Rather, as he lay recovering in a public hospital, he stewed over its inefficiencies. “The building was very old, and the highly paid nurses spent hours walking the corridors, serving food,” he says. “I thought, You could sell the building for apartments and use the money to build a new hospital with better logistics.”

Right now, we’re driving to Hero Norway’s biggest refugee center, in Rade near the Swedish border. In recent weeks up to 1,200 new arrivals have crowded into a vacated supermarket, living in indoor tents as they wait for interviews with the Norwegian border police. I feel like I’m descending into the maw of history. I’m aware now of all the wars, the bloodshed, the human struggle that have brought so many to remote Rade, which is little more than a scattering of ugly chain stores by the highway. Kristian’s remarks drift toward the international only once, however: when he thrills over a new app, SayHi, which translates spoken words into more than 100 languages. “It will save so much money,” he says.

Next year, Hero Norway hopes to open 5 to 10 refugee centers in Sweden. The campaign could be spotted with difficulties. In Sweden, arsonists have torched more than 40 centers since July, in part because in 2015 Sweden accepted about 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other European nation. Still, the prospects for Hero Norway’s continued success are high. Neither Sweden nor Norway has plans to stanch the flow of newcomers, and the Swedish government has said it will spend up to 30 percent of its 2016 foreign aid budget on resettling refugees.

Photographer: Espen Rasmussen for Bloomberg Businessweek

Kristian stands back, aloof, chatting only with administrators, conferring about their plans to build a health clinic here to screen refugees for tuberculosis and other diseases.

In time, we’re given a tour by the camp’s director. Helge Ekelund is a large, hulking fellow with a tight ponytail, and he’s a no-nonsense guy who’s well aware that the great migration to Norway can continue only if there are functioning toilets. “Here are the tents we got free from the army,” he says. “Here is where we take away everyone’s clothes. We put the clothes in these freezers here, to kill off the bedbugs.” The freezer is set at -30F, he says. The clothes stay in there for 48 hours, while the asylum seekers wear borrowed garments.

When Kristian and I step back into the rain, I ask him what about the refugee center intrigued him the most. “The freezers,” he says. “I thought those were interesting.”

We begin driving north. It’s 3 p.m. There are still 10 hours to go before his workday is over.

George Soros: Anti -Syria Campaign Impresario

The Wall Will Fall

January 21, 2016

by Vanessa Beeley

 

“They [the media] are news-as-entertainment professionals – packaging glossy corporate content for maximum distribution and big bucks. The goal is not objective reportage. Their targets are quantifiable and highlighted in a business plan somewhere. Success is based on a simple formula: stay within parameters “understandable” to a wide audience that devours sound bites and familiar storylines on the hour, every hour. Like trained seals whose every desire, instinct and buying pattern has been measured by corporate media’s marketing department for the consumption of its advertisers, the audience demands satisfaction – and western media delivers it.” ~ Sharmine Narwani

THE BBC BAMBOOZLE

The Madaya media circus lumbers on regardless of the multitude of proven anomalies and outright deceit of the mainstream narrative.  Deaf to either public opinion or investigation, institutions like the BBC consider they are above accountability to those who pay for their existence, the British public.  They consider it perfectly acceptable to release footage from Yarmouk 2014 and represent it as Madaya 2016..and when questioned, to remove the offending footage without explanation or responsibility for their obscurantism and misinformation tactics.

Thankfully, Robert Stuart, ardent campaigner against the BBC’s long running, hostile, anti Syria propaganda offensive did raise an official complaint and demanded answers that the BBC has, for too long, been allowed to avoid answering.

Al Mayadeen, Al Manar, Al Masirah TV channels and many others, representing the voices of the oppressed in the Middle East are being systematically excluded from Saudi funded Satellite channels and Israeli biased social media.  Press TV, headquarters in Tehran,  had its licence revoked by Ofcom in 2012

RT has come under relentless attack by the BBC since the “Kremlin launched its international media operation”.  The BBC lexicon never fails to maintain and celebrate the “cold war” terminology or to keep fear of the Russian “indoctrination”  stewing in peoples minds.

“But it [RT] is also coming under increased scrutiny over its lack of editorial balance and accusations that it is deliberately using disinformation to counter and divide the West.” ~ Russia’s Global Media Operation Under the Spotlight

This astounding display of projectionism can only be matched by the Zionist ability to turn their own crimes against Humanity into a neatly packaged accusation that those they are oppressing, the Palestinians, on whose broken bones Israel has built its settlements, are the guilty and that Israel is exempt from judgement for its crimes which are committed in “self defence”.

Is the BBC embellishing the truth in “self-defence” or is it being creative with the truth in defence of our Government’s appalling neo-colonialist foreign policy which is ensuring the fomenting of sectarian divide in the Middle East to facilitate desired “regime change” in Syria & the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Yemen,  obliterated by  made-in-UK missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

These are just two examples of the BBC collusion in global de-stabilization and reduction of sovereign nations to perpetual conflict  or “failed state” status, ripe for economic and pseudo “humanitarian” NGO complex, stealth invasion and occupation and of course the bolstering of the Military Industrial Complex profitability index.

WILL THE BBC BE SOROS-IZED

The following extraordinary statement is taken from a paper produced by the Wilson Center.org. in the section titled “The Role of NGOs in Building Civil Society”

“In some countries, local NGOs also have been funded to mount “people power” campaigns. As in the recent “color revolutions,” these campaigns are aimed at opening up political regimes to opposition parties and ousting leaders who were holding onto power through irregular methods. Viewed more broadly, all these programs supporting NGO activities and capacity-building are seen as ways to foster the progressive emergence of a broad civil society, one that both supplements the state in providing for public needs and makes governments more responsive to their populations.” 

The gloves appear to be off.  Here, the Wilson Centre is blithely exposing the NGO’s trojan horse policy with regards to its role as outreach agents for Imperialism in any resource rich or strategically important, prey nation.

It explains perfectly the funding of the people power, time for change campaigns that run in synch with any regional or national schisms that are then piggybacked by imported or locally fostered opposition movements to propel the Imperialist friendly movements towards regime change.

Of course there is never any intention from the behind- the- scenes- string- pullers of allowing the much acclaimed people power.  The goal is the now familiar power vacuum to be filled by an Imperialist compatible ruling entity that will ensure the completion of Empire’s hostile corporate take over bid.

You may be asking why is this relevant to the BBC truth distortion.  As explanation, please consider the inclusion of the BEEB in the Open Democracy website.  Then have a look at the Open Democracy impressive list of funders and donors.  No surprise for many of you that  George Soros, Open Society Foundation is on that list.  In fact, the only “philanthropic” mogul missing is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Then, let us consider who holds the purse strings of the majority of the primary propaganda rings and regime change facilitating NGO elements in Syria.

The yellow brick road of Neocon ambitions and imperialist missions- impossible in Syria leads unerringly to the global chaos strategist,   George Soros, pedalling furiously behind his NGO Humanitarian shield.

First a reminder from The Wrong Kind of Green’s NGO myth shattering article, Syria, Avaaz, Purpose, the art of selling hate for Empire. 

“It should not be considered a coincidence that at the same time, a polished, sophisticated and highly financed “Save Syria” campaign is being created in the board rooms of the Empire’s favourite Harvard boys.

 

Where, under the organization Avaaz, the public hasn’t acquiesced to an air strike on Syria, the New York public relations firm Purpose Inc. has stepped in.”

 

[Purpose’s partnership with Soros, Open Society Foundation is highlighted in same article]

SYRIA CAMPAIGN ~ Latest Campaign: Break the Sieges

This campaign has been launched in conjunction with the #OperationMadaya propaganda storm, itself,  perfectly timed to coincide with the lawless & characteristically brutal execution of Saudi Arabia’s primary campaigner for Democracy, unity and freedom from the despotic House of Saud rule and subjugation, Sheikh Nimr al Nimr.

In true Manhattan corporate branding style, the Break the Siege high profile publicity campaign hit the streets running, just as public outrage was peaking and the Western media, inspired by Qatari governed Al Jazeera,  was rolling out repeat fake photographs. The familiar “Assad is the root of all evil” headlines served very nicely as backdrop for the dramatic, slick,  advertising campaign.  One might also be forgiven for thinking it had been prepared in advance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New York public relations firm Purpose has created at least four anti-Assad NGOs/campaigns: The White Helmets, Free Syrian Voices [3], The Syria Campaign [4] and March Campaign #withSyria. [The Wrong Kind of Green]

Dr Al Jaafari, permanent Syrian representative at the UN reduced such exploitative drama to the succinct truth with little histrionics & a great deal of dignity despite the ongoing media hostility against the Syrian Government.  This distinguished calm is now a familiar component of the Syrian, Iranian or Russian rebuff of Western hysteria.

Included under the Syria Campaign heading are Free Syrian Voices, March Campaign#WithSyria & Medics Under Fire all of whom are creations of Purpose.inc.

AVAAZ

 

Yet another polished and unashamedly biased petition from Avaaz with very little relation to the reality on the ground in Madaya.  Click here for What the Media is not telling you About Madaya produced by SyriaGirl.

“Avaaz who, hand in hand with the Rockefellers, George Soros, Bill Gates and other powerful elites, are meticulously shaping global society by utilizing and building upon strategic psychological marketing, soft power, technology and social media – shaping public consensus…” ~ Cory Morningstar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAMI JARRAH ~ ANA PRESS

Ah now here we have a really fascinating can of worms, one that will be investigated in far greater depth in the follow up article with a few shock supporting actors..watch this space.

However, for now, a very brief overview of Mr Rami Jarrah.  Previously known as Alexander Page in his heady BBC, CNN days as Avaaz sponsored “citizen journalist”, foreign correspondent smuggler and all round fixer on the regime change battle front in Syria. He and Danny Abdul Dayem, that well known CNN bombs and rockets studio actor were co-conspirators on the Avaaz Democracy band wagon.

Of course ANA Press makes all the usual laudable claims.

“We are an independent organization that will not stand for any political affiliation, as this would affect our neutralism and honesty. We have not and will not accept funding from any political groups.” ~ Rami Jarrah

Interestingly when we take a peep behind that integrity curtain we find all these claims of neutrality are compromised by the Government agency and Corporatocratic investment into these multiple crowd funding and influencing neocon proxies.

With very little effort we can trace ANA Press to HIVOS and SIDA and of course to SOROS.

SIDA: Development Aid agency affiliated to the Swedish Government, the EU, the UN & the World Bank.  George Soros figures most prominently in yet another vehicle for change programme in their portfolio “Making all Voices Count“.

Making All Voices Count’s unique Research, Evidence and Learning component is working to better understand what works – and what doesn’t – in projects using technology to promote transparent, accountable governance.

The fund is financed jointly by Sida, USAID, DFID, the Open Society Foundation and Omidyar Network.

“Hivos has worked with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), an initiative of philanthropist George Soros, since 2005. The OSF work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. That mission is a perfect fit with Hivos’s policies.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Jarrah’s mission – to ensure that the voices of Syrians are heard around the world – embodies not only the spirit of CJFE’s International Press Freedom Award, but also that of the Alternative & Independent Media area of Hivos’ Expression & Engagement programme”

Vibrant and tolerant democracies….

Moving on..or should that be Move On?

“Avaaz was created in part by MoveOn, a Democratic Party associated Political Action Committee (or PAC), formed in response to the impeachment of President Clinton. Avaaz and MoveOn are funded in part by convicted inside-trader and billionaire hedge fund mogul, George Soros.” ~ SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the art of selling hate for Empire. 

WISSAM TARIF ~ AVAAZ CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Wissam Tarif was another one of the original poster boys for the regime change marketing campaign in Syria, launched almost exclusively by public opinion changers,  Avaaz in 2011 with a little help from their friends in CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera.  Again this will be explored in greater detail in a subsequent article.

This is one of Tarif’s early democratization of Syria pitches to the Oxford Research Group in 2011.

Wissam Tarif has since been promoted to senior campaign manager for Avaaz & remains a persistent advocate of global Open Democracy and the NATO US GCC, Israeli,  democratization of Syria.

“WT ~ “Unless the people of Madaya and other besieged towns in Syria get freedom as well as food, children will continue to starve to death. The United Nations has already brokered agreements for these sieges to be lifted, and now Ban Ki Moon must urgently ensure they are implemented to save thousands of lives and build confidence ahead of Syria peace talks later this month.”  ~ Operation Madaya, Avaaz calling.

Wissam Tarif, in the early days of the war on Syria, was a member of the Avaaz fifth column,  with Rami Jarrah/Alexander Page and Danny Abdul Dayem among thousands more, financed by over $ 1.2 million public money raised by the Avaaz petitions.

In 2011 Tarif was described euphemistically as an Avaaz campaign manager but he was also associated with a Spanish based NGO called INSAN, meaning human, in Arabic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curiously,  when I delved into his connections I had difficulty locating INSAN which was rumoured to be based in Spain yet no such NGO came up with a Spanish address.  Eventually scanning Wassim’s contact page, I noticed his email address was directed to Insan International. wissamtarif@insanintl.com.  The website was listed as Insanassociation.org. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the time of my initial investigation, INSAN had listed its partners on its website. Luckily I took a screenshot because when I went back to the website tonight to get the link, the partner link had been altered to patner and threw up an error 404 message.

Also, coincidentally, INSAN now has a brand new web page InsanIntl.com that even more coincidentally no longer displays information on its funding partners.

However, George Soros and the Open Society Foundation are obviously in the frame once more.

THE WHITE HELMETS

The White Helmets have perhaps the most diverse array of backers and donors.  The Majority of which have been covered in previous in- depth investigations, but naturally still following the yellow brick road back to Soros.

For a full analysis of the White Helmet’s funding ~ Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception Part 1 & 2

 

 

 

 

 

Impartial and neutral saviours of ALL Syrian people regardless of their allegiances..displaying banners calling for the burning and destruction of Kafarya and Foua, two Idlib Shia villages under partial siege from Ahrar al Sham and Jabhat Al Nusra since 2011, full siege since March 2015. An “unbiased” display of naked Wahhabi sectarianism by the Humanitarian heroes, idolised by Western governments, Media and audiences worldwide.

For further insight into the terrifying Ahrar al Sham and Al Nusra siege of Kafarya and Foua, please read Eva Bartlett’s series in Counterpunch:  Untold Suffering in Kafarya & Foua.

SNHR

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The SN4HR website has no information on who funds the group, and its website ownership information is hidden from public view but shows that it is hosted in the US. The organisation identifies itself as an outgrowth of “the revolution in Syria” (clearly a partisan organization, see at the very bottom of their home page) claims to be ‘a trusted source’ that supplies information about the Syria Conflict to all leading human rights organisations, charities and government departments including the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the US State Department. “The network’s database and archives are considered as a reliable source and reference for international and local media outlets, and international organizations and agencies working in the field of human rights.”

Taken from:  Madaya: West Engineer another Humanitarian Media Hoax in Syria. by 21st Century Wire.

..and in the same article we follow the route markers once more back to Soros..”there is no place like home”

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

“Soros-financed Human Rights Watch has played a major role in falsely portraying ISIS and Al Qaeda civilian bombings and other atrocities as the work of the Assad regime, building support for military action from the US and EU.”  ~ William Engdahl  Syria Plays Both Ends in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Well hello Mr Soros.

“Dr. Denis Mukwege and George Soros devote their lives to working on behalf of others and readily tackling the most difficult issues – advocating for the women of the Congo and improving the lives and advancing the human rights of oppressed people around the world,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director. “Their tireless efforts and leadership inspire human rights defenders worldwide and build vital resistance to human rights violators.”

 

Soros, whose philanthropic leadership and dedication to the cause of human rights was honored with the 2015 Physicians for Human Rights Lifetime Achievement Award, has been a PHR supporter since its inception in 1985. “George Soros grasped, early on, that doctors play a vital role in preserving human dignity, a core human rights principle,” said McKay. “His faith in our cause paved the way for other supporters and helped to ensure that health professionals have the opportunity to use their skills as a means towards justice.” ~  PHR Press Release

MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES & MEDECINS DU MONDE [DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS & DOCTORS OF THE WORLD]

MSF have made concerted efforts to distance themselves from their Interventionist advocate,  Co-Founder, Bernard Kouchner, to little avail, as Kouchner was still invited to comment on the US bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015.

Once more the sole purpose of this article is to show how the NGOs having greatest impact on the ground in Syria, & in our media,  are connected to George Soros [among a myriad of undeniably biased and very partial-to-a-slice-of -Syria western governmental agencies.]

The Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a membership of over 2,500 organizations worldwide advocating for a fair, effective and independent International Criminal Court

 

The CICC is a project of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and has secretariats in New York City, near the United Nations (UN), and in The Hague, The Netherlands. 

Taken from Wikipedia

The CICC steering committee includes Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The World Federalist Movement is funded in part by George Soros.

Medecins sans Frontieres and Medecins du Monde are both listed as members of the CICC, certainly in France.

NGO Partners

 

Another form of partnership is also of enormous importance to the Soros foundations: the relationships with grantees that over the years have developed into alliances in pursuing crucial parts of the open society agenda. These partners include, but are not limited to the following:

 

Médecins Sans Frontières, AIDS Foundation East-West, Doctors of the World, and Partners in Health for their efforts in addressing crucial public health emergencies that are often connected to abuses of human rights

 

Taken from an Open Society Foundation list of Partners.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

“Another Soros-financed NGO active demonizing the Assad government as cause of all atrocities in Syria and helping build public support for a war in Syria from the US and EU is Amnesty International. Suzanne Nossel, until 2013 the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, came to the job from the US State Department where she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, not exactly an unbiased agency in regard to Syria”

William Engdahl for New Eastern Outlook

SYRIA: THE BILLIONAIRES REVOLUTION

Infographic created by Professor Tim Anderson whose book The Dirty War on Syria is now on sale in E Book format at Global Research.

IS THE BBC ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD?

OurBeeb. Has the BBC gone into partnership with Soros’ Open Democracy.net?

Certainly when we view the webpage, its hard not to assume there is at least some degree of mutual back scratching going on.

“Funded by 95% of British homes via the licence fee, the BBC belongs to the people, not the government. OurBeeb is independent, non-partisan, and aims to ensure that the discussion about the future of British Broadcasting Corporation is in the hands of the British people.” ~ OurBeeb

Did the British people have a say in the choice of Mr Soros as mentor and campaign manager for their publicly owned media broadcasting flagship whose power to alter public perception is legendary.

How to ensure that the BBC itself is felt to be ‘ours’ by the public who fund it and whose many voices it claims to represent? At a time of cuts in public revenues and rapid technological change, the role of the BBC as overwhelmingly the main source of news towers over traditional party politics. It is time to reshape the debate on the future of the UK’s most important cultural institution.

Then let us consider one of the fall outs from Operation Madaya.  The Open Democracy headline reads..

How is Citizen Journalism transforming the BBC’s Newsroom practices?

“User-generated content offers new ways of covering ‘black hole’ stories such as the Syrian conflict. But how do journalists make sense of what is happening on the ground?” 

How indeed?  There then follows a series of apologies for why the BBC journalists such as Lyse Doucet are not always able to be on the ground in Syria. Various spurious arguments are brought into play. The death of Marie Colvin Sunday Times correspondent in Homs 2012.  No mention that Colvin was smuggled in without permission from the Syrian Government by, among others, Rami Jarrah. The beheading of suspected fifth columnist James Foley.  Not to mention, the danger of “foreign airstrikes” & Islamic State.

And why, might you ask, can the BBC not find the voices in Syria that decry foreign intervention or support their elected Government? Strangely, they are “unwilling to speak”.  Nothing to do with the fact that the BBC are known as anti Syrian propagandists by those people who would not trust them to report the truth as told from the Syrian people’s perspective.

Sharmine Narwani fiercely challenged the Western Media neutral observer status in her article:  Western Journalist: Visa Denied

Because, right now, I honestly cannot think of a group of people less capable of verifying things in Syria than western journalists. And it is not because they aren’t physically there or can’t string together more than two words in Arabic. It is largely because they feast at the trough of their own governments’ narratives on All Things. Western journalists are heady with a sense of righteousness leached from the oxymoronic “western values” shoved down our collective throats. Those same western values that demand “accountability” and “transparency” from all nations – while offering cover for western governments to hack their way through Muslim and Arab bodies in endless “national security” wars.

In hindsight, would we be deemed conspiracy theorists to consider that perhaps all these events have adroitly navigated us to this point of  utter news blackout but for that which serves our government’s globalist objectives?

Are we seeing the placing of the cherry on the regime change cake? Soros has apparently officialised the co-opting of the BBC into the Soros owned and orchestrated Syria propaganda ring and is funnelling their news source outreach operation into his perfectly constructed network of lies and multi headed anti Assad narrative generators.

The yellow brick road leads to Soros and the BBC is off to see the Wizard.  If only they were on a quest for heart, courage and brains.

END.

 

[Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.]