WHY ARE PRO-REGIME CHANGE LEFTIES IN THE LEADERSHIP OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT?

7 February 2012

Introduction by Sukant Chandan, Sons of Malcolm

This is a good article from ‘Socialist Action’ which outlines the latest developments with Syria in relation to the Arab League, the west and the UN.  Importantly it also focuses on a small group of people presenting themselves as leftists in the anti-war movement around a group – Counterfire – who were expelled/left the organisation called the ‘Socialist Workers Party’.

 The SWP heralded the lynching of Gadafi – which was facilitated by two nato air-strikes on Gadafi’s convoy – as something to be welcomed comparable to the killing of Italian fascist leader Mussolini. Obviously these people cannot get their heads around this, but to compare the death of the most important anti-imperialist leader of Africa and of the Global South of recent times with the leader of Italian colonialism, who colonised Libya wiping out a massive part of the Libyan population, just shows one how far from any understanding of the people of the Global South organisations like the swp are. →

Hall of Fame & Hall of Shame on Syria Reporting

MSM Propaganda on Syria: Now Comes the Silent Treatment

Wednesday, 4. January 2012

Boiling Frogs Post

Have you noticed how it’s been all quiet on the Western MSM War Propaganda front? As more and more alternative news outlets are increasing their reporting on the real situation in Syria, as even the puppet Arab League is issuing observations contradicting previously reported ‘un-sourced and undocumented’ atrocities and a made-up huge death-toll caused by Assad’s regime, the mainstream media and corporate-funded NGO news fronts have been decreasing their Syria coverage. It is almost as if they’ve gotten ‘a black-eye’ and gone in hiding. Rest assured, there won’t be any retraction on previously publicized, that is, intensely, un-sourced, un-confirmed, un-documented, fictional death toll numbers and imaginary scenarios.

Let’s take a look at a few recent reports starting with an excellent piece at Asia Times today [All Emphasis Mine]:

Mistaken Case for Syrian Regime Change

What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime “more compatible” with US interests in the region. The blueprint for this project is essentially a report produced by the neo-conservative Brookings Institute for regime change in Iran in 2009. The report – “Which Path to Persia?” [3] – continues to be the generic strategic approach for US-led regime change in the region.

A rereading of it, together with the more recent “Towards a Post-Assad Syria” [4] (which adopts the same language and perspective, but focuses on Syria, and was recently produced by two US neo-conservative think-tanks) illustrates how developments in Syria have been shaped according to the step-by-step approach detailed in the “Paths to Persia” report with the same key objective: regime change.

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Arguably, the most important component in this struggle for the “strategic prize” has been the deliberate construction of a largely false narrative that pits unarmed democracy demonstrators being killed in their hundreds and thousands as they protest peacefully against an oppressive, violent regime, a “killing machine” [7] led by the “monster” [8] Assad.

Whereas in Libya, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) claimed it had “no confirmed reports of civilian casualties” because, as the New York Times wrote recently, “the alliance had created its own definition for ‘confirmed’: only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed”. “But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations,” the Times wrote, “its casualty tally by definition could not budge – from zero”. [9]

In Syria, we see the exact opposite: the majority of Western mainstream media outlets, along with the media of the US’s allies in the region, particularly al-Jazeera and the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV channels, are effectively collaborating with the “regime change” narrative and agenda with a near-complete lack of questioning or investigation of statistics and information put out by organizations and media outlets that are either funded or owned by the US/European/Gulf alliance – the very same countries instigating the regime change project in the first place.

Then, the article sets about analyzing and exposing dubious MSM and Western-Funded dirty NGOs (You may want to see my previous report on how for months ‘AntiWar.Com,’ despite all appeals, disseminated and marketed the misinformation and propaganda by these exact same dirty sources here):

Claims of “massacres”, “campaigns of rape targeting women and girls in predominantly Sunni towns” [10] “torture” and even “child-rape” [11] are reported by the international press based largely on two sources – the British-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights and the Local Co-ordination Committees (LCCs) – with minimal additional checking or verification.

Hiding behind the rubric – “we are not able to verify these statistics” – the lack of integrity in reporting by the Western mainstream media has been starkly apparent since the onset of events in Syria. A decade after the Iraq war, it would seem that no lessons from 2003 – from the demonization of Saddam Hussein and his purported weapons of mass destruction – have been learnt.

Of the three main sources for all data on numbers of protesters killed and numbers of people attending demonstrations – the pillars of the narrative – all are part of the “regime change” alliance. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in particular, is reportedly funded through a Dubai-based fund with pooled (and therefore deniable) Western-Gulf money (Saudi Arabia alone has, according to Elliot Abrams [12] allocated US$130 billion to “palliate the masses” of the Arab Spring).

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Please go read this stellar analysis by Aisling Byrne here at Asia Times. Bravo.

Russia Today has been reporting both sides and doing so with a fair balance. Here is the latest from RT:

Syrians Being Killed by Gangs & defectors

As Syrian forces reportedly continue to kill civilian protesters, armed rebels have threatened to step up their own attacks. Middle East expert Dr. Jeremy Salt says there is tunnel vision when it comes to deciding just who is doing the killing.

“In its report, the Human Rights Council said 4,000 [people have been killed in Syria to date]…but there was no information about where they got that figure from,” he said. “A few days later, Navi Pillay, who is the UN Human Rights Commissioner, stood up in the Security Council and said 5,000 – and the figure echoes around the world,” he told RT.
“I think it lodges in the popular imagination as 5,000 people being killed by the Syrian government – by the security forces, by the military – whatever. Whereas in fact, I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that a large number of military, of civilians have been killed by armed gangs and by defectors,” Salt explained.

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Look, even the filthy-owned, puppet in disguise, Al Jazeera, who has been beating the War on Syria drums loudly for months, has begun backpedaling:

The case against military intervention in Syria

In this, the SNC repeated earlier appeals by the Free Syrian Army for a no-fly zone, as well as a few scattered calls in the street. The plight suffered by civilian protesters has indeed reached an unbearable level. This raises questions about how to achieve lasting change in Syria.

Foreign intervention paves the way for a dangerous strategic choice that opposition movements within and outside Syria should carefully weigh. It will be argued here that the struggle for change needs to be fought from within and transition to democracy peacefully implemented. This implies that foreign military intervention should, under all circumstances, be ruled out; domestically, resistance to the regime should also remain unarmed.

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Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask our readers to waste their time and read this Arab branch of our MSM propaganda machine, but I am going to invite you to go and read the above piece and compare it to all their previous reporting on Syria in the last few months; including ‘filming a border city at 5:00 a.m. in order to claim town desertion by protesters!.’

I mean, come on people, even our puppets couldn’t find atrocity and genocidal acts to report back and appease their Western masters! And yet, the black-eyed MSM and corporate-funded and government-backed quasi alternatives are shameless enough to not retract their months-long BS reporting, statistics, and all that heavily promoted fiction.

Now, there are way too many solid and reliable real alternative news outlets to credit with excellent and critical reporting. I won’t be able to list them all, and I am sure many of you already know who they are. So I am going to list less than a handful and congratulate them on their relentless and vigilant reporting and editorials:

Asia Times (Especially Pepe Escobar)

Center for Research on Globalization

Tony Cartalucci’s Land Destroyer

Russia Today

Again, there are many others and they all deserve credit for fair and balanced, and most importantly, independent reporting on Syria. Thank you all!

Hmmmm. For the hall of shame, if I were to list all, I’d take several long web pages. I don’t believe you need that long list of reminders. Think NY Times, Washington Post, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, News Week, Times …and keep going, and going, and going …

On the other hand, I am going to list one major hall of shame member, my one major disappointment:

Antiwar.com

With the exception of Raimondo, Giraldi and a couple of other stellar writers there, their new additions, Ditz & Keaton, have been filling up their front page with all the culprit MSM headlines beating the war drums on Syria, and have been doing so for months. As I’ve said before, a few independent journalists and authors will be writing a series and providing astonishing statistics on AntiWar.Com’s recent troubling changes. Meanwhile I want to go on record and reveal that the new management has been refusing to publish any articles submitted to them on all documented contradictory, factual, reports on Syria. In fact, I have been banned and censored from even posting comments on their site (several respectful but critical comments were taken out, deleted and censored by their new managers).

You see, what really gets my blood boiling on AntiWar.Com is their name, title: Anti War, for Pete’s sake! And what these dubious new additions have been doing lately is the exact opposite. So I hope the good guys there would either kick out these infiltrators, or, just change their name to ProWar.Com. They made it to the top of our list of hall of shame contenders on Syria, Libya and beyond.

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2012/01/04/msm-propaganda-on-syria-now-comes-the-silent-treatment/

U.S. Funded ‘Activist’ Becomes President of Tunisia | From A-Z, the Arab Spring is Fake

“It is a necessity to research the backgrounds and affiliations of all political groups and NGOs, and assess both their funding and their affiliations. The National Endowment for Democracy is indisputably disingenuous in both their stated cause and their actions. Their board of directors alone betrays their motto of “Supporting freedom around the world,” as it is almost entirely made up of corporate-fascists, Neo-Conservative warmongers, and corporate lobbyists. The organizations, opposition groups, media outlets, and NGOs, they support seek to destabilize and destroy the nations they infest.”

Dec 13, 2011

From A-Z, the Arab Spring is Fake.

Cross posted from LIBYA 360°

Tony Cartalucci

December 13, 2011 – The BBC hails Tunisia’s assembly and their election of a new president in their article, “Tunisian activist, Moncef Marzouki, named president.” What the BBC predictably fails to mention is that Marzouki’s organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization.

Photo: Tunisia’s new “president,” Moncef Marzouki, a veteran Western collaborator whose last two decades of political activity have been supported and subsidized by the US government and US corporate-financier funded foundations.

It was earlier reported in “Soros Celebrates the Fall of Tunisia,” that Marzouki was named “interim-president” of Tunisia and that the myriad of NGOs and opposition organizations that worked with him to overthrow the government of Tunisia were fully subsidized and backed by the US government and US corporate-funded foundations.
Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

Marzouki, along with his Libyan counterpart Abdurrahim el-Keib, formally of the Petroleum Institute, sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, makes for the second Western proxy installed into power either by covert sedition or overt military aggression, during the US-engineered “Arab Spring.” Western proxies in Egypt including Mohamed ElBaradei and Mamdouh Hamza are also vying for power in the wake of similar foreign-fomented unrest, while NATO backed militants harbored in Turkey are attempting to overthrow the government of Syria by force.

The Arab Spring is Fake

Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution penned the book “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” originally designated for the destabilization and recolonization of Myanmar, still called “Burma” throughout much of the West. Sharp’s book would be utilized by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout Eastern Europe, throughout Asia, and eventually, in 2011, for the US-engineered “Arab Spring.”
According to Sharp’s own Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) 2000-2004 annual report, AEI had been sponsored by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its funded subsidiary International Republican Institute (IRI) to train activists in Serbia (page 18) Zimbabwe (page 23) and Myanmar (page 26) to help overthrow their respective sovereign governments.

Australia’s Southern Cross University’s “Activating Human Rights & Peace (AHRP)” conference had put out a revealing account of their 2008 proceedings illustrating that all of Gene Sharp’s work, beyond what was even mentioned in his own institution’s annual report, had been fully funded and in support of the US government and its global domineering agenda. Beginning on page 26, Sharp’s affiliations, in particular with the National Endowment for Democracy, which is described as carrying out “a lot of work that was formerly undertaken by the CIA,” as well as the Ford Foundation, and billionaire Wall Street patriarch George Soros’ Open Society Institute are fleshed out in immense detail.

The “Arab Spring” itself was not spontaneous, nor was it indigenous. Rather it was a was a premeditated geopolitical plot engineered by US corporate-financier interests years in advance. The New York Times in its article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” clearly stated as much when it reported, “a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

Further confirming this were public statements made by the US State Department-sponsored “Alliance for Youth Movements” (AYM) counting Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement among its above mentioned inaugural AYM summit attendees in New York City as far back as 2008. Foreign Policy magazine admited that April 6 received further training from CANVAS in Serbia, before fomenting unrest in Egypt. FP magazine would also report that “CANVAS has worked with dissidents from almost every country in the Middle East; the region contains one of CANVAS’s biggest successes, Lebanon, and one of its most disappointing failures, Iran.”

The destabilization in Iran, of course, was drawn up by corporate-funded Brookings Institution, as articulated in its “Which Path to Persia?” report, with the actual mechanics of organizing the foreign-funded revolution subcontracted to organizations like US-funded CANVAS, NED and its subsidiaries.

In an April 2011 AFP report, Michael Posner, the assistant US Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US (emphasis added) “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” The ripple effect Posner is talking about is of course the “spontaneous” “Arab Spring” and bears a striking resemblance to the campaign of destabilization Gene Sharp and AEI perpetuated throughout Eastern Europe as described in detail in the above mentioned AHRP report.

Conclusion

With a similar gambit now playing out in Russia, fueled by the exact same Western organizations and foundations, not only is it obvious that Tunisia was overthrown, not by spontaneous, indigenous protests, but rather premeditated foreign-funded sedition carried out by the likes of Moncef Marzouki and his US-funded opposition group, it is also obvious that Tunisia was just one of many nations destabilized in the largest concerted geopolitical reordering since World War II. With Russia now targeted by foreign-fomented color revolutions, the US’ declaration of a new “American Pacific Century” aiming to contain China, and Western proxies beginning to climb into positions of power throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East, it is clear that the campaign of encirclement and destabilization of both Russia and China by the forces of global corporate fascism described in February 2011?s “The Middle East & then the World” is indeed an unfolding reality.

It is a necessity to research the backgrounds and affiliations of all political groups and NGOs, and assess both their funding and their affiliations. The National Endowment for Democracy is indisputably disingenuous in both their stated cause and their actions. Their board of directors alone betrays their motto of “Supporting freedom around the world,” as it is almost entirely made up of corporate-fascists, Neo-Conservative warmongers, and corporate lobbyists. The organizations, opposition groups, media outlets, and NGOs, they support seek to destabilize and destroy the nations they infest.

Exposing and fighting this disingenuous enterprise is important. Equally important is to identify the corporate-financier interests driving its true agenda and the global elites’ overarching plan of achieving global hegemony. Boycott these interests entirely out of business, and replace them with business models, institutions, and bodies of governance that truly serve “we the people.”

http://libya360.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/u-s-funded-activist-becomes-president-of-tunisia/

HUMANITARIAN WAR IN LIBYA? THERE IS NO EVIDENCE!
LIBYA AND THE BIG LIE: USING HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS TO LAUNCH WARS

http://youtu.be/2D0LEW6vGF8

http://youtu.be/4B-BKWf9G4M

© Copyright 2011 by Libya 360°

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THE BRUTAL MURDER OF MUAMMAR AND MU’TASSIM GADDAFI

Justifying a “Humanitarian War” against Syria? The Sinister Role of the NGOs

Invasion of Libya

Julien Teil | Thursday, November 17, 2011

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The National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, is an organization that presents itself as an NGO officially dedicated to “the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world”. But in reality it gets 95% of its budget from the United States Congress. It was officially created by the Reagan administration in 1982.

The nature of the NED has led many contemporary intellectuals and researchers to describe it as an agency enabling the secret services of the US to overthrow governments that the US State Department dislikes.

This description was supported by the testimony of Oliviet Guilmain, a researcher at the CECE (Centre for the Comparative Study of Elections), during an information session at the French Senate concerning financing of the electoral process. It is known that the NED finances opposition parties in numerous countries and provides special aid to exiles and opponents of regimes targeted by the US State Department.

In the case of Syria, NED’s main organization is the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. It is also a partner of the International Human Rights Federation (FIDH) which received $140,000 following a meeting in December 2009 between Carl Gershman and self-styled French human rights organizations. NED’s French contact was François Zimeray, who was former Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s Ambassador for Human Rights. Those present during that meeting included the Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD), the African section of AEDH (Act Together for Human Rights), Reporters Without Borders, SOS Racisme and the FIDH.

The International Federation of Human Rights is thus an official partner of the NED, as is also shown by its support for the allegations made by the ex-secretary general of the Libyan Human Rights League – also attached to the FIDH – against the government of Moammer Kadhafi. Those allegations, also supported by the NGO “U.N Watch”, were what set off the diplomatic procedures against the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.

In the case of Syria, Dr. Radwan Ziadeh is the director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies. His highly impressive biography makes clear his engagement is in favor of US foreign policy in the Middle East. In particular, he is a member of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Washington. He was present alongside Aly Abuzakuuk – one of the NED representatives in Libya – for the Round Table of the Democracy Awards, which is an event that honors so-called “human rights activists” by the NED.

Moreover, there are strong similarities between the process that created the Humanitarian War in Libya and what is being elaborated in regard to Syria. For example, UN Watch, an organization that coordinates the operations of the NED and the FIDH in Geneva, has already launched several petitions against the Syrian regime and Bachar Al-Assad. These petitions against Syria make the same allegations of massacres as those put forth by the ex-secretary of the Libyan Human Rights League, Sliman Bouchuiguir, at the UN Human Rights Council against Libya.

It is therefore an urgent matter to denounce these procedures. It is all the more important since recent history shows us that these allegations were not verified in the case of Libya. Nor was there any proof based on any solid evidence about the allegations made against Tripoli, contrary to the claims of the International Criminal Court.

Julien Teil is a videographer and investigative documentary film maker from France.

From Global Research

http://en.m4.cn/2011/11/17/justifying-a-humanitarian-war-against-syria-the-sinister-role-of-the-ngos/

Whose Side Is the United Nations On?