The Bloody Legacy of American Exceptionalism

American Herald Tribune

February 9, 2016

by Vanessa Beeley

 

 

Exceptionalism: the condition of being different from the norm; also:  a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region.

There are many theories surrounding the origin of American exceptionalism. The most popular in US folklore, being that it describes America’s unique character as a “free” nation founded on democratic ideals and civil liberties. The Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule is the foundation of this theory and has persevered throughout the often violent history of the US since its birth as a free nation.

Over time, exceptionalism has come to represent superiority in the minds and hearts of Americans. Belief in their economic, military and ideological supremacy is what has motivated successive US governments to invest in shaping the world in their superior image with little or no regard for the destruction left in the wake of their exceptional hegemony.

In considering itself, exceptional, the US has extricated itself from any legal obligation to adhere to either International law or even the common moral laws that should govern Humanity.  The US has become exceptionally lawless and authoritarian particularly in its intolerant neo-colonialist foreign policy.  The colonized have become the colonialists, concealing their brutal savagery behind a veneer of missionary zeal that they are converting the world to their form of exceptionalist Utopia.

Such is the media & marketing apparatus that supports this superiority complex, the majority of US congress exist within its echo chamber and are willing victims of its indoctrination. The power of the propaganda vortex pulls them in and then radiates outwards, infecting all in its path.  Self-extraction from this oligarchical perspective is perceived as a revolutionary act that challenges the core of US security so exceptionalism becomes the modus vivendi.

Above: US military propaganda and Superbowl 50 [Source]

Just as Israel considers itself the chosen people from a religious perspective, the US considers itself the chosen nation to impose its version of Democratic reform and capitalist hegemony the world over. One can see why Israel and the US make such symbiotic bedfellows.

“The fatal war for humanity is the war with Russia and China toward which Washington is driving the US and Washington’s NATO and Asian puppet states.  The bigotry of the US power elite is rooted in its self-righteous doctrine that stipulates America as the “indispensable country” ~ Paul Craig Roberts: Washington Drives the World Towards War.

So why do the American people accept US criminal hegemony, domestic and foreign brutal tyranny & neo-colonialist blood-letting with scant protest? Why do the European vassal states not rise up against this authoritarian regime that flaunts international law and drags its NATO allies down the path to complete lawlessness and diplomatic ignominy?

The psychological term “Gaslighting” comes from a 1944 Hollywood classic movie called Gaslight.  Gaslighting describes the abuse employed by a narcissist to instil in their victim’s mind, an extreme anxiety and confusion to the extent where they no longer have faith in their own powers of logic, reason and judgement. These gaslighting techniques were adopted by central intelligence agencies in the US and Europe as part of their psychological warfare methods, used primarily during torture or interrogation.

Gaslighting as an abuser’s modus operandi, involves, specifically, the withholding of factual information and its replacement with false or fictional information designed to confuse and disorientate. This subtle and Machiavellian process eventually undermines the mental stability of its victims reducing them to such a depth of insecurity and identity crisis that they become entirely dependent upon their abuser for their sense of reality and even identity.

Gaslighting involves a step by step psychological process to manipulate and destabilize its victim.  It is built up over time and consists of repetitive information feeds that enter the victim’s subconscious over a period of time, until it is fully registered on the subconscious “hard disk” and cannot be overridden by the conscious floppy disk.  Put more simply, it is brainwashing.

“Overall, the main reason for gaslighting is to create a dynamic where the abuser has complete control over their victim so that they are so weak that they are very easy to manipulate.” ~ Alex Myles

Victims of Gaslighting go through 3 stages, disbelief, defence and depression.

The first stage depends upon trust in the integrity and unimpeachable intentions of the abuser, a state of reliance that has been engendered by the abuser’s artful self-promotion and ingratiating propaganda.  Once this trust is gained, the abuser will begin to subtly undermine it, creating situations and environments where the victim will begin to doubt their own judgement.  Eventually the victim will rely entirely upon the abuser to alleviate their uncertainty and to restore their sense of reality which is in fact that of the abuser.

The second stage, defence, is a process by which the abuser isolates the victim, not only from their own sense of identity but from the validation of their peers.  They are made to feel that their opinion is worthless, discredited, down-right weird.  In political circles they would be labelled a conspiracy theorist, a dissident, a terror apologist.  As a consequence, the victim will withdraw from society and cease to express themselves for fear of ridicule, judgement or punishment.

This stage can also be compared to Stockholm Syndrome where a hostage or captive is reduced,by psychological mind games, back to infantile dependency upon their captor.  Narcissistic abuse bonds the victim to the aggressor via trauma.  Stockholm Syndrome bonds the victim to the aggressor via regression to an infantile state where the abuser/aggressor becomes the “parent” who will rescue the victim from imminent annihilation.  Both methods tap into the victim’s survival mechanisms to gain and maintain control.

The final stage is depression.  A life under the tyrannical rule of a narcissist drives the victim into a state of extreme confusion.  They are stripped of dignity & self-reliance.  They, ultimately exist in an information vacuum which is only filled by that which the abuser deems suitable or relevant.  This can eventually invoke symptoms of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Flashbacks, constant apprehension, hyper vigilance, mind paralysis, rage and even violence.  The process is complete and the victim has been reduced to a willing accomplice in the abusers creation of a very distorted reality.

We are currently seeing the transformation of US exceptionalism into an abusive Narcissism.  The gargantuan apparatus of mind bending and controlling is being put into hyper drive by the ruling elite.  We are inundated with propaganda that challenges our sense of reality but only after being “tenderized” by the fear factor.  Fear of “terror”, fear of war, fear of financial insecurity, fear of gun violence, fear of our own shadow.  Once we are suitably quaking in our boots, in comes the rendition of reality that relieves our anxiety.  If we challenge this version of events we are labelled a conspiracy theorist, a threat to security. We are hounded, discredited, slandered and ridiculed.  We are isolated and threatened.

Wars are started in the same way.  Despite the hindsight that should enable us to see it coming, the process swings into motion with resounding success. The ubiquitous dictator, the oligarch who threatens to destroy all that the US and her allies represent which of course is, freedom, equality & civil liberty all wrapped up in the Democracy shiny paper and tied with the exceptionalist ribbon.

Next the false flag to engender fear, terror and to foment sectarian strife. The support of a “legitimate” organic, indigenous “revolution” conveniently emerging in tandem with US ambitions for imposing their model of governance upon a target nation. The arming of “freedom fighters”, the securing of mercenary additions to these manufactured proxy forces.  All this is sold in the name of freedom and democracy to a public that is already in a state of anxiety and insecurity, lacking in judgement or insight into any other reality but that of their “abuser”.

They don’t realise that NGOs are an integral part of their abuser’s apparatus, operating on the leash of neo-colonialist financing and influence.Then in addition, the Humanitarians are deployed.  The forces for “good”, the vanguard of integrity and ethical intervention.  The power that offers all lost souls a stake-holding in the salvation of sovereign nations that have lost their way and need rescuing.  A balm for a damaged soul, to know they can leave their doubts and fears in such trustworthy hands as HRW, Amnesty International, they can assuage their deep sense of guilt at the suffering being endured by the people of far flung nations because they can depend upon the NGOs to provide absolution with minimal effort on their part.  They don’t realise that NGOs are an integral part of their abuser’s apparatus, operating on the leash of neo-colonialist financing and influence.  NGOs provide the optic through which the abuser will allow the victim to perceive their world and once absorbed into this flawed prism the victim’s own cognitive dissonance will ensure they do not attempt a jail break.

In this state of oppressed consciousness the victim accepts what they are told.  They accept that the US can sell cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia that obliterate human beings and lay waste to essential civilian infrastructure in Yemen.  They accept that the US financially, ideologically & militarily supports the illegal state of Israel and provides the arsenal of experimental weapons that maim and mutilate children and civilians on a scale that is unimaginable.  They accept that a crippling blockade of the already impoverished and starving nation of Yemen is “necessary” to resolve the issues of sectarian divisions that only exist in the minds of their Congressional abusers.

The majority of Americans accept mass murder under the pretext of the right to protect, because their ability to form rational and reasoned opinions has been engineered out of them.  This is now the definition of US exceptionalism.  It is their ability to manipulate the world into accepting their lawlessness and global hegemony agenda.  In seeking to impose its own image upon our world the US has drifted so far from its founding principles, one wonders how they will ever return to them.  They have employed a recognised form of torture to ensure capitulation to their mission of world domination which entails the mental, physical and spiritual torture of target civilian populations.

In conclusion, the US has indeed achieved exceptionalism.  The US has become an exceptional global executioner and persecutor of Humanity.  Imperialism is a euphemism for the depths of abuse the US is inflicting upon the people of this world.

Our only hope is to break the cycle of abuse with empathy for the victim and with appreciation for the years of brainwashing that precedes their agonizing passive-aggressive apathy towards crimes being committed in “their name”.

This was an email I received recently from one courageous young American girl whose epiphany is testament to the resilience and survival instinct of the human spirit.

“My name is Caroline and I am a 22 year old US citizen. I only fairly recently discovered the truth about Empire/NATO’s activities in Syria and Libya and so many other countries (thanks to writers like Andre Vltchek, Cory Morningstar, Forrest Palmer). I am sickened when I remember that I signed some of those Avaaz petitions and I feel horrified at knowing that I have Syrian and Libyan blood on my hands. I want to believe that I’m not “really” guilty because I really thought (as I had been told) that I was not doing something bad at the time, but still, what I did contributed to the suffering of those people and I want to do something to atone in at least some small way, even though I probably can’t “make up” for what I did or erase my crime.

If it’s not too much trouble, could you please tell me what you think I should do, if there is anything?”

She deserves an answer…

 

 

[Vanessa Beeley is a photographer, writer, peace activist and volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. She was recently invited to be on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement.]

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.]

MADAYA: TIMES OF LONDON LIGHTS MATCH TO PROPAGANDA FIRE?

The Wall Will Fall

January 12, 2016

by Vanessa Beeley

 

 

It seems we are seeing the reappearance of the kitten campaigns in Madaya over the last 10 days.

When is a terrorist not a terrorist ~ The Kitten Campaign.

The heart wringing laments describing feline throat cutting and accompanying photos  have been circulating in both main stream media and social media with comparable intensity.

People have responded, quite naturally, with horror but lets examine the possible origin of this concept and why it might just be another in the long line of publicity ploys used to maintain public support for an illegal proxy military intervention in Syria.

The creator of #Madaya_is_starving, one of the first and most potent of the twitter hashtags to flood twitter feeds was none other than Raed Bourhan, who describes himself as a fixer & “researcher” for the London Times, allegedly based in Zabadani.

On the 5th January he offered his services to journalists wanting to cover the Madaya story.

He later disseminated the now iconic image of the cat with a knife being held to its throat about to be sacrificed to feed the starving of Madaya.  This, despite the universally accepted reports of UN deliveries of food in October 2015  that should have sufficed for a minimum of two months & the entry of the UN on the 28th of December to evacuate 126 injured “moderate rebel militants”.

 

The London Times appeared to be sufficiently persuaded of Raed Bourhan’s credibility to produce the following headline:

Snowbound and starving Syrians forced to eat cats ~ Times Article

The question that not one main stream media journalist has asked, is why the UN would have left starving children behind on December 28th or not made more of a fuss when confronted with starvation and mass kitten culling. 

In fact, at least one main stream media outlet showed its nervousness over yet another suspect image relating to Madaya after a collective, valiant effort by genuine analysts, researchers and independent journalists successfully exposed the majority as fake, within hours of the propaganda storm breaking.

The Daily Mail accompanied the photo with:

“This picture posted by an activist on Twitter purportedly shows a cat about to be slaughtered for food by a starving Syrian in Madaya. However, MailOnline has not yet been able to verify the image which may simply have been used for illustration purposes”

What also became clear, relatively quickly, was the actual dearth of Western journalists on the ground in Madaya.  This was highlighted by Murad Gazdiev, RT reporter on the ground in Madaya.

“About two dozen journalists here. Can’t see any Western press. Strange, given how worried they were about ” ~ Link to tweet here. 

One cannot help but ask, how on earth the media managed to produce quite so much information about the situation in Madaya without having anyone on the ground in the area and seemingly without being able to verify their extraordinary claims that logic alone should have rendered spurious.

One of the VICE editors, when questioned on why they had run with fake photos, explained:

“Yes, sorry about that but residents in Madaya had sent the photos saying they had seen them on Al Jazeera and had assumed them to be of Madaya”

 

Am I the only one to find it a little peculiar that Madaya residents were recycling photos that they had seen on Al Jazeera and could not verify if they were of Madaya or not..or would it not have been simpler to have taken actual photos of the starving people in Madaya? This has puzzled me immensely.  Perhaps I am being a little too logical?

Or perhaps this entire situation has been nothing more than a clumsy attempt to destabilise the area and give Ahrar al Sham and associates time to further attack Israel’s arch enemy in Syria, the Hezbollah brigades situated in the mountains around Zabadani?

Should VICE have published photos from an unverified source?

Madaya is raising many questions that have been raised since the inception of the illegal war on Syria but still remain unanswered. Many excellent articles [I will include them at the end of this short piece]  have been written highlighting aspects of the propaganda fog, smoke and mirrors and astounding outright lies that have driven this narrative at warp speed into the annals of Western deception tactics used to justify illegal and destructive direct or proxy intervention onto Sovereign nation soil.

Should we be surprised, for instance, that an “activist” researching for The London Times was one of the first to create the hash tag #Madaya_is_starving  and to run with the extreme images and information?

Throwback to the Marie Colvin affair 2012, which I will be writing more about shortly in an article highlighting the Avaaz role in creating an agitprop shop of “citizen journalists” in 2011, funded by public donation totalling over $ 1 million to provide mobile phones, cameras and networking equipment to ensure a flow of propaganda that would sweep the world into yet another “regime change” operation, this time in Syria.

This is taken from an article by Tony Cartalucci written shortly after the death of Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, in Homs February 2012.

“Reading any report out of the corporate-media, we find Syria’s campaign against admittedly armed rebels paradoxically referred to as a “massacre,” and an almost palpable fervor to justify circumventing the latest UNSC resolution veto. As news comes out of the death of two foreign journalists in Homs, Remi Ochlik and Marie Colvin who sneaked into Syria and were operating there illegally to begin with, Western leaders are unanimously calling this the “breaking point.” France’s Nicolas Sarkozy even stated, “that’s enough now, this regime must go and there is no reason that Syrians don’t have the right to live their lives and choose their destiny freely.”

Or another example of the Sunday Times [London Times] duplicity can be found here:

The US Is Openly Sending Heavy Weapons From Libya To Syrian Rebels

“The Lies of London’s  Sunday Times regarding Obama’s counter-terrorism campaign against the ISIS is refuted by an earlier Sunday Times report. The Sunday Times report quoted below confirms that Obama has been arming the terrorists for the last three years, since 2012.”

When we look back at the propaganda casualties during its war on Syria, we see a graveyard littered with the corpses of BBC, Al Jazeera, Telegraph, Times, CNN fake narratives [among many others]. The death of Marie Colvin was another such casus belli, thwarted once more by Syria’s steadfast and dignified public reaction, the nobility of the Syrian Arab Army on the battlefield and the concerted efforts of anti NeoColonialist researchers and analysts.

It is exhausting for us, on the sidelines of the war on Syria to contend with the relentless stream of hostile journalism but we cannot even begin to imagine the toll it is taking on the Syrian people battling it on the ground while also grappling with the terror hordes introduced into their homeland by our “change” hungry governments. Change at any cost, no matter the bloodshed, the rape, the massacres, the imprisonment, the true starvation, the daily horror that Syrian people must live through.

Siege: any prolonged or persistent effort to overcome resistance

The ignominy of our Governments role in this siege of Syria and their guilt of multiple crimes against Humanity & against the Syrian people must be mercilessly exposed & the monster unmasked.  The lies and hypocrisy that are its oxygen must be snuffed out.

We owe, at least that, to the beleaguered people of Syria.

END

 

Thanks to Cory Morningstar for your research.

The Wrong Kind of Green

 

[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.]

 

LINKS TO MADAYA ARTICLES 

http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/01/12/avaaz-the-wests-online-pro-war-propaganda-and-color-revolution-ngo/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hayesbrown/a-twitter-account-that-denies-people-are-starving-in-syria-i#.otKk0BE3N

Propaganda alert: Madaya media fabrications; recycled photos

https://www.rt.com/news/328503-syria-madaya-fake-photos/

http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/01/12/avaaz-the-wests-online-pro-war-propaganda-and-color-revolution-ngo/

Madaya: My interview with UK Column

 

The Dallaire Fairy Tale

Rabble

January 1, 2016

by Yves Engler

(L) Romeo Dallaire, (R) Paul Kagame, 2013

Like children’s fairy tales, foreign policy myths are created, told and retold for a purpose. The Boy Who Cried Wolf imparts a life lesson while entertaining your five-year-old niece. Unfortunately foreign policy myths are seldom so benign. The tale told about Romeo Dallaire illustrates the problem. While the former Canadian General rose to prominence after participating in a failed (assuming the purpose was as stated) international military mission, he’s widely considered a great humanitarian. But, the former Senator’s public persona is based on an extremely one-sided media account of his role in the complex tragedy that engulfed Rwanda and Burundi two decades ago.

In a particularly egregious example of media bias, criticism of Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda have been almost entirely ignored even though his commander published a book criticizing the Canadian general’s bias. According to numerous accounts, including his civilian commander on the UN mission, Dallaire aided the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda with decisive Ugandan support and quiet US backing. Gilbert Ngijo, political assistant to the civilian commander of United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), summarizes the criticism: “He [Dallaire] let the RPF get arms. He allowed UNAMIR troops to train RPF soldiers. United Nations troops provided the logistics for the RPF. They even fed them.”

In his 2005 book Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks), Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of UNAMIR, claims Dallaire had little interest in the violence unleashed by the RPF despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them. RPF soldiers were regularly seen in Dallaire’s office, with the Canadian commander describing the Rwandan army’s position in Kigali. This prompted Booh Booh to wonder if Dallaire “also shared UNAMIR military secrets with the RPF when he invited them to work in his offices.” Finally, Booh Booh says Dallaire turned a blind eye to RPF weapons coming across the border from Uganda and he believes the UN forces may have even transported weapons directly to the RPF. Dallaire, Booh Booh concludes, “abandoned his role as head of the military to play a political role. He violated the neutrality principle of UNAMIR by becoming an objective ally of one of the parties in the conflict.”

Dallaire doesn’t deny his admiration for RPF leader Paul Kagame who was likely responsible for shooting down the plane carrying both Rwandan Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994. (That event triggered mass killing and an environment of deep instability that facilitated the RPF’s rise to power in Kigali.) In Shake Hands with the Devil, published several years after Kagame unleashed terror in the Congo that’s left millions dead, Dallaire wrote: “My guys and the RPF soldiers had a good time together” at a small cantina. Dallaire then explained: “It had been amazing to see Kagame with his guard down for a couple of hours, to glimpse the passion that drove this extraordinary man.”

Dallaire’s interaction with the RPF was certainly not in the spirit of UN guidelines that called on staff to avoid close ties to individuals, organizations, parties or factions of a conflict. A witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) actually accused Dallaire of complicity in a massacre. A Rwandan national testifying under the pseudonym T04, reported Tanzania’s Arusha Times, “alleged that in April 1994, Gen. Dallaire allowed members of the rebel Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF, now in power in Kigali), to enter the national stadium and organize massacres of Hutus. Several people, including the witness, took refuge there following the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana.”

But, criticisms of Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda have been almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media. Le Patron de Dallaire Parle went largely unnoticed, or at least not commented upon. A Canadian newswire search found three mentions of the book (a National Post review headlined “Allegations called ‘ridiculous’: UN boss attacks general,” an Ottawa Citizen piece headlined “There are many sides to the Rwanda saga” and a letter by an associate of Dallaire). Other critical assessments of Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda have fared no better including Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa and Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later in which Edward Herman and David Peterson “suggest that Dallaire should be regarded as a war criminal for positively facilitating the actual mass killings of April-July, rather than taken as a hero for giving allegedly disregarded warnings that might have stopped them.”

On the other hand, a Canadian newswire search of “Romeo Dallaire Rwanda” elicited over 6,000 articles that generally provide a positive portrayal of Dallaire. Similarly, a search for mention of Dallaire’s 2003 book Shake Hands with the Devil elicited 1,700 articles. The complex interplay of ethnic, class and regional politics, as well as international pressures, which spurred the “Rwandan Genocide” has been decontextualized. Instead of discussing Uganda’s aggression against its much smaller neighbour, the flight of Hutus into Rwanda after the violent 1993 Tutsi coup in Burundi and economic reforms imposed on the country from abroad, the media focuses on a simplistic narrative of vengeful Hutus killing Tutsis. In this media fairy tale, Dallaire plays the great Canadian who attempted to save Africans.

While two decades old, the distortion of the Rwandan tragedy continues to have political impacts today. It has given ideological cover to dictator Paul Kagame’s repeated invasions of the Congo and domestic repression. In addition, this foreign policy myth has been used to justify foreign military intervention as is the case with the current political crisis in Burundi. The myth of Dallaire in Rwanda is also cited to rationalize the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, when in fact the true story illustrates the inevitable duplicitousness of foreign interventions.

Unlike in bedtime stories, in foreign policy making things up is usually harmful.

 
[Yves Engler has been described as “Canada’s version of Noam Chomsky” (Georgia Straight), “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch), “in the mould of I. F. Stone” (Globe and Mail), “ever-insightful” (rabble.ca) and a “Leftist gadfly” (Ottawa Citizen). His latest book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s foreign policy.]

WATCH: The Utilization of Western NGOs for the Theft of Africa’s Vast Resources

Nigeria: The Persecution of Heroes and the Patent on Terror

Boko Haram: Just another US terrorist brand to suppress Islamic movement in Nigeria

The Wall Will Fall

December 17, 2015

by Vanessa Beeley

We live in a world where those who are honoured are the sowers of discord and the reapers of mayhem, the state sponsored agents of chaos.  We no longer honour the true heroes, we honour an illusion called power and greed.  The state media apparatuses serve only to keep historic Fitna (sedition) wounds festering and the “NGO complex” pied piper plays the tune of stake-holding in human suffering, created in advance by the Empire’s composers of death.

According to the Nigerian Government forces, a traffic infringement justifies the massacre of over 1000 Muslims who were performing the religious ceremony of ushering in the new month of Maulud, honouring  the birth of the Prophet Mohammed of Islam [pbuh].

In a statement on Sunday the army said: “The Nigerian Constitution guarantees the rights of any group of persons and Sheikh El Zakzaky’s followers to hold a peaceful march or procession unhindered, but it also guarantees other people’s rights of way on public highways.”

Claims of an attempted assassination of the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Tukur Buratai or even of the alleged attacks by the Islamic sect on the military convoy are rendered questionable by the sheer lack of reported casualties on the military side and the shockingly disproportionate loss of life and bloodshed among the Islamic Sect supporters and leaders.

If indeed, this were a simple fracas over “right of way on a public highway” which resulted in the shooting of unarmed Muslims, why then did the same Nigerian government armed forces attack Hussainiyah, the sect’s headquarters later the same evening, hours after the initial clashes?   Why did they deliberately target high ranking members of the Shi’ite Islamic movement and execute Hamad Zakaky, son of the movement leader Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky.  Why did they attack and wound the Sheikh’s wife, Zeenat?  Why did they shoot the Sheikh himself, four times in his hands, publicly humiliate and arrest him? Why, if this was not a premediated act of aggression and suppression, had the Army ensured the presence of camera teams at both attacks and why were women and children not spared the murderous hail of bullets?

These are all questions that the mainstream media should be asking, yet this massacre has been swept under the carpet of indifference by Western media.

Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky is a man of peace, unity and vision. These qualities alone represent a threat to the hegemony and neo-colonialist strategy of the Axis of Empire in Africa and would justify the repeated attempts to suppress and inhibit the growth of his Shia Muslim movement and his popular, unifying influence that transcended the borders of Nigeria and was taking root in many countries on the continent.

To more fully understand this violent targeting of the Sheikh and the Islamic Movement, we must take into consideration, both the historical and more recent influences upon Nigeria.

China has been an evolving partnership in Nigeria, investing heavily in the development of infrastructure and fixed assets, refineries and factories.  In a role diametrically opposed to the traditional plundering partnerships of the US and other neo-colonialists with sovereign nations, China contrarily seems to have a genuinely vested interest in the stability of Nigeria to support a mutually beneficial economic and trade relationship reliant upon the growth and profitability of Nigeria itself.

This concept adopted by China of a symbiotic expansion & growth, is an anathema to the US neo-colonialism in the region, and particularly in Nigeria.  The presence of China in a country so abundant in oil, uranium, diamond, mineral & timber resources is an acute thorn in the side of the US carpetbaggers who have perceived the Continent’s largest economy & oil producer to be their bread basket and theirs alone.

President Buhari is the US man in Nigeria, brought to power by the familiar US think tanks and “Change” promoters, channelling well researched “public” opinion through slick marketing campaigns and endorsed by the most elite of the US political “casting” directors, the New York Times who raised Buhari to the dizzy heights of a “born-again Democrat!” and deemed his ascent to power a “a turning point in Nigeria’s democratic evolution”.

The democratic suit worn by Buhari has been designed, cut and sewn into place by the corporate & financial elite tailors in Washington to ensure that Buhari remains firmly stitched to the coat tails of their agenda in Nigeria and never extends the threads of true democracy to the people who elected him on empty promises of “change”.

It is logical, rational and reasonable to speculate that Boko Haram is effectively another terrorist trade name, brought into existence, to destabilize a region that is daring to jailbreak from US colonialism and to explore alternative bi-lateral trade pathways that deviate from the US regional “road maps”.

Boko Haram’s presence, has a threefold purpose:

1. It successfully elevates the Nigerian army to defender of the “meek” against the “terror” threat and provides cover for any violent opposition suppression.
2. It gives the US justification for “boots on the ground”, military support for anti Boko Haram aka pro US factions,  and the ubiquitous drone strikes against the alleged “terror” strongholds,  a devastating strategy already observed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to name a few.
3. It ensures the fragmentation, sectarian division, and fracturing of unity and a state of perpetual chaos which will seismically derail China’s investment in Nigeria’s physical and economic infrastructure essential to their US exclusive growth.

Sheikh Zakzaky had alluded to this very terror “patent” in his reaction to the suicide bomb attack on the Shia Arba’een procession in Kano on the 27th November 2015.  Over 24 died and many were injured in further violent targeting of the minority Shia community in Nigeria.

“We know the names of the contractors and those contracted to commit the massacre, their identity is not hidden from us. Therefore we cannot be cowed by an imaginary Boko Haram tale, let them tell it to the fools and ignorant. They should know that they are dealing with those with foresight, wisdom and intelligence, and above all with the real religion”.

This statement struck at the very heart of the US/NATO, Israeli and GCC strategy in Nigeria and threatened to undermine their architecture of “terror” foundations.  The Sheikh made it clear that Boko Haram were none other than gangs of mercenaries, hired contractual killers, being unleashed to foment sectarian violence and an atmosphere of fear and division where only US appointed, backed and controlled “saviours” would emerge victorious.

When we consider the sheer numbers of gangs and rival gangs, extremist factions and sects emerging inorganically and globally, we can begin to connect the dots. All have as their purpose, the sowing and reaping of rapacious violence, the construct of division, the provocation of turmoil, the incitement of hatred and fear. All are posing as the enemies of Imperialism whilst serving Imperialist agendas.  All fulfil roles of humanity- averse abomination and simultaneous US alliance proxy forces percolating from one target region to the next.

Grey Wolves, FSA, ISIS, DAESH, Al Qaeda, Khorasan, AQAP, Jabhat al Nusra and Boko Haram [to name a few], are they all nothing more than trade names, successfully managed brand images, logos and IDs all emanating from the US/NATO, Israel and Gulf State holders of the patent on terror and their associated marketing agents and concept creators?

Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky also challenges another malevolent bastion of Nigeria’s landscape, the powerful pro- Israel lobby whose growth and expansion in Nigeria had been hugely facilitated by former President and Christian Zionist, Goodluck Johnathan.  Nigeria is now home to Africa’s largest Israeli Jewish community [15, 000 in 2014].

The Sheikh is a steadfast and vociferous opponent of the illegal state of Israel and an uncompromising defender of freedom for Palestine, and the right to return for Palestinians living in Diaspora since the 1948 Nakba. His son Hamad, who was reportedly murdered during the 12/12 attacks had been with us at the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine 3rd Annual Conference being held in Beirut and had only left us on the 11th December, one day before he was to be targeted by the pro-Israel Government forces.

Hamad’s final recorded speech before his untimely death had been one that supported and celebrated the Al Quds Day rallies and protests particularly in Nigeria and Pakistan where lives have been routinely lost in the battle to honour and protect the core identity of the Palestinian struggle, Al Quds. Hamad had, himself, lost his three brothers, Ahmed, Hamid and Mahmood during one such rally in 2014 when hundreds of the Islamic Movement supporters were also mown down during another Nigerian army attack on unarmed solidarity demonstrators for the Palestinian cause.

“I would like to give a message to Pakistan’s brave nation, especially to those families who have sacrificed the lives of their loved ones and to those whose loved ones were martyred in Quetta during Al-Quds’ rally. I am proud that my brothers were martyred in Al-Quds’ rally and they gave their lives for supporting Palestinians”.

These were Hamad’s last words to the world before the 12/12 bloodbath in Nigeria stripped one more son from the family of Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky, Hamad gave his young life in the service of peace & freedom.  A life that was unrecognised by Western or even Palestinian media on the day he died.

Paul Larudee of Free Palestine had this to say about a young man who impressed all who met him at the Beirut conference with his quiet humility and unassuming humanity:

“Such a sweet and intelligent young man, very quiet and unassuming.  Made me want to know him better.  

 

According to him Boko Haram is just another group of terrorist thugs, thriving like ISIS through infusions of money and arms from both outside and inside Nigeria.  Our tax dollars at work.  Why does the greatest evil always seem to rise to the top of our societies, while the poor and the meek are always ready to help others?  Is evil the only way to rise to a position of strength?”

 

Hamad Zakzaky with us all at the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine Conference.

Into this maelstrom of lawless and Machiavellian meddling in Nigeria we can add one final component without which the neo-colonialist frontlines would not be complete: the Saudi Wahhabi agents of Islamic “change” who are the subterranean source of Muslim extremism and religious fanaticism;  the funders and suppliers of the brand name proxy forces, deployed to whip up the “terror” frenzy wherever it is required to destabilize or unhinge unity that may jeopardize Empire’s intent.

With ultimate irony, it is Riyadh that is self- appointed to combat the terrorism created in its image, by forming a coalition of 34 predominantly Muslim nations, Nigeria included, with the predictable exclusion of Iran, Syria and Iraq all of whom are involved in battling the Saudi NATO sourced terror hordes on the ground.

In direct contrast with this deliberate policy of divide and conquer,  Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky is a man of religious respect and tolerance, he embraces Christians, Sunnis and Sufis alike despite his Shia centric movement and its ties with Tehran, which naturally represents an additional and perceived monumental threat to US/NATO and Saudi/Israeli regional hegemony.

The Islamic Movement is also renowned for its reformist policies, prioritizing education and establishing Islamic schools incorporating secular subjects in addition to Quranic teaching.  Hospitals and health clinics have been set up where care is free for those without the means to pay for it.  The Sheikh has deterred his supporters from shedding their own blood to commemorate the shedding of Imam Hussein’s blood and redirected them to donate this blood to local hospitals, thus saving lives in memory of their beloved Imam Hussein.

The Western media silence over the Zaria massacre is indicative of their collusion in this mass killing of innocents and proof of the role they play in exacerbating global sectarian division at the behest of their Washington, Tel Aviv and Saudi donors and backers.

The initial silence of the Palestinian community, the media, the NGOs, the solidarity organisations is less expected and more worrying given the Islamic Movement’s steadfast support of the Palestinian cause and opposition to the illegal State of Israel.

This is a missed opportunity for the unity of peoples suffering from the same symptoms of neo colonialism, regardless of creed, sect or religion.  Al Quds represents the identity, not only of Palestinians but of the entire Arab world. Those who defend it from Israeli occupation are those who are enduring their own form of occupation by the patented terror armies: Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. As these nations unite behind Palestine to prise loose Israel’s jaws from the third most sacred site for the Muslim Ummah, Palestine is needed to unite behind those who give their lives for Palestine and thus for Humanity.  It is this unity that will resolve the ancient theological disputes that are permitting the externally induced sectarian fault lines to widen and deepen.

We live in a world where those who are honoured are the sowers of discord and the reapers of mayhem, the state sponsored agents of chaos.  We no longer honour the true heroes, we honour an illusion called power and greed.  The state media apparatuses serve only to keep historic Fitna (sedition) wounds festering and the “NGO complex” pied piper plays the tune of stake-holding in human suffering, created in advance by the Empire’s composers of death.

Leaders, visionaries,  like Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky show us the way to a new world, one that is driven by justice and progress, dependent upon compassion, communication and unification. They show us that courage, universal respect & humility is needed to evade the dystopian future that is being forced upon us by the ruling elite. It is these men of integrity who resist corruption and maintain their morals and fundamental principles despite their own personal suffering and loss, that we should honour and aspire to emulate.

“Reason with this: Who is carrying out senseless killings in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon? They are the same people carrying out attacks here, and we know them. We cannot be cowed” ~ Sheikh Ebrahim Zakzaky.

END.

Thanks to:

Dan Glazebrook:  https://www.rt.com/op-edge/323656-deadliest-terror-boko-haram/

WSWS:  http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/30/nige-j12.html

21st Century Wire:  http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/12/14/gladio-global-gangs-and-counter-gangs-in-europe-ireland-iraq-and-now-in-syria/

Plfpakistan:  http://www.plfpakistan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47167:hammad-zakzakys-message-to-pakistani-nation-a-day-before-his-martyrdom&catid=4:general

Elbinawi.wordpress.com:  https://elbinawi.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/why-they-targeted-sheikh-zakzaky/

+++

The Debate – Massacre of Shias in Nigeria (Dec 14th, 2015):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ae1AJE5akc

[Vanessa Beeley is a photographer, writer, peace activist and volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine.  She lived in Gaza during Operation Pillar of Defence and again in 2013.  In 2014 she established the Gaza Smile Project to raise funds for children in Gaza. Since 2011, Vanessa has spent most of her time in the Middle East .  She was recently invited to be on the steering committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement.]

POSTER SERIES: WANTED FOR DESTROYING OUR FUTURE: AVAAZ

Climate Criminals

The Dirtiest Fossil Fuel Lobbyists behind the doors of #COP21

The consultants for Gates, Rockefeller, & UN behind the doors of #COP21

The world is calling for a commitment to a 100% clean future at the climate summit in Paris. But a group of climate criminals is trying to stop that deal. Their tactics are different, but their end game is the same: shift the focus away from emissions targets and keep fossil fuels at the centre of human development. Some even argue that more money should be spent on coal – the worst carbon-polluting fuel. Most get paid by fossil fuel companies like Exxon to speak against climate action. Some of them have launched extreme public attacks against scientists and others.

Grassroots groups across the world are calling for a dismantling of the suicidal capitalist economic system. But a group of climate criminals (also known as the non-profit industrial complex) is trying to stop this imperative. Their tactics are different, but their end game is the same: shift the focus away from necessary emissions targets and keep first world consumption and the capitalist economic system dependent on infinite growth at the centre of “human development”. Some even argue that more money should be spent on a third industrial revolution – all of which is fossil fuel based and fossil fuel dependent. Most get paid by foundations such as Rockefeller to create acquiescence to the expansion of corporate power and privatization. Some of them have launched extreme public attack campaigns to feign legitimacy, but ultimately they defend the current power structures (upon which they depend and often are created by) and capital while advancing imperial interests and western ideologies throughout the globe.

That is why Avaaz is exposing the seven biggest climate criminals attending the COP21 Paris climate summit. We are publishing their photo and their biographies and insider dossiers on their activities to shine a spotlight on their dirty backroom dealings and stop them from destroying our future.

That is why WKOG is exposing the seven biggest criminals accelerating climate change and destabilizations/wars. We are publishing their photo and their biographies and insider dossiers on their activities to shine a spotlight on their dirty backroom dealings and stop them from destroying our future.

#1: Avaaz co-founder Tom Perriello

Tom Perriello is a long-time collaborator with Avaa co-founder Ricken Patel. Together, they co-founded Avaaz.org, Res Publica and FaithfulAmerica.org. Perriello is a former U.S. Representative (represented the 5th District of Virginia from 2008 to 2010) and a founding member of the House Majority Leader’s National Security Working Group.

Today Perriello is involved in the current destabilization of Burnudi and Congo well underway. On July 6, 2015 it was announced by the U.S. State Department that Avaaz co-founder Tom Perriello would be fulfilling his role for the expansion of U.S. imperialism as special envoy for the African Great Lakes region and the Congo-Kinshasa. [Further reading: Avaaz Hones In On Burundi as Next U.S. Fait Accompli]

The role of Avaaz, Purpose Inc. (the for-profit PR arm of Avaaz), and Avaaz co-founders in U.S./E.U. led destabilizations/invasions across the globe is now extensively documented. Burundi serves as a rinse, rather, repeat performance, only with far less notoriety/interest.

Perriello and Patel also co-founded and co-directed DarfurGenocide.org which officially launched in 2004. “DarfurGenocide.org is a project of Res Publica… Today, this organization is now known as “Darfurian Voices”: “Darfurian Voices is a project of 24 Hours for Darfur.” The U.S. Department of State and the Open Society Institute were just two of the organization’s funders and collaborating partners. Other Darfurian Voices partners include Avaaz, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Centre for Transitional Justice, Darfur Rehabilitation Project, Humanity United, Darfur People’s Association of New York, Genocide Intervention, Witness, Yale Law School, The Sigrid Rausing Trust and the Bridgeway Foundation. Of all the listed partners of DarfurGenocide.org, with the exception of one located in London, England, all of the entities involved are American and based on U.S. soil.

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section I

#2: Avaaz co-founder Ricken Patel

Ricken Patel is co-founder and executive director of Avaaz International. Patel has served as a consultant for the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Crisis Group, Harvard University, CARE International, and the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Patel serves on the 350.org International Advisory Council. 350.org and Avaaz are two of twenty NGOs that founded GCCA (TckTckTck), the NGO at the helm of the global climate marches. [Source: http://350.org/about/intl-ad-council/]

Patel is also co-founder and executive director of Res Publica, which was formally launched in 2003. Res Publica is based in New York.

Res Publica is a primary co-founder of Avaaz along with MoveOn. Res Publica’s stated goal is to “develop innovative solutions to global justice and security threats.” Res Publica “ran as a pilot project” in Sierra Leone in 2001-2002 and has three full-time fellows, Ricken Patel, Tom Perriello and Tom Pravda. Res Publica is supported by a broader network of “Friends of Res Publica” and a Global Advisory Board. Who the broader network of “Friends of Res Publica” actually are, is anyone’s guess.

29 December 2004: “Over two days in early December approximately three-dozen religious activists met at the Washington office of the Center for American Progress, a recently formed think tank headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. The Res Publica-driven agenda for the closed-door gathering included sessions on ‘building the movement infrastructure’ and ‘objectives, strategies and core issues.’”

Perriello (now President and CEO of Center for American Progress) described Res Publica as an “incubator for social entrepreneurship.”

The Res Publica email address is actually respublica@avaaz.org.

Patel was co-director of DarfurGenocide.org, an organization he helped establish with Perriello and the U.S. State Department.

Avaaz (one of the 20 NGOs that founded GCCA/TckTckTck) was instrumental in the undermining of the small vulnerable states in 2009 at COP15. [Further reading: The Most Important COP Briefing That No One Ever Heard | Truth, Lies, Racism & Omnicide]

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: mperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section I

#3: Avaaz co-founder Jeremy Heimans

Jeremy Heimans is co-founder of both Avaaz and GetUp! GetUp, founded in 2005, is an internationally recognized social and political online “movement” that purports to have more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined. Heimans is also co-founder and CEO of Purpose: “a profit-with-purpose business that builds movements to help solve major global problems.”

Vision: “Purpose is a global initiative that draws on leading technologies, political organizing and behavioral economics to build powerful, tech-savvy movements that can transform culture and influence policy.”

Avaaz co-founder David Madden is also a co-founders of the New York consulting firm, Purpose Inc. Utilizing the “behavioral economics of hatred”, Purpose has created at least four anti-Assad NGOs/campaigns: The White Helmets, Free Syrian Voices, The Syria Campaign and March Campaign #withSyria. [Further reading: SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire] [Further reading: Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception – Part I]

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II

#4: Avaaz co-founder Tom Pravda

Tom Pravda is a British diplomat who co-founded both Res Publica and Avaaz. He has been listed as both secretary and treasurer to Avaaz. Pravda also sits on the advisory board of Res Publica. Pravda has worked for the United Nations in New York and is an advisor to the U.S. State Department, the UK Foreign Office and the European Union. Pravda has been a member of the UK Diplomatic Service since 2003 where he has worked on EU trade and development policy and relations with the Middle East and Africa.

Pravda is a specialist in the Great Lakes Region/DRC, where he advised/advises the U.S. State Department, the UK Foreign Office and the European Union on diplomatic, security and development strategies and programming for the region.

Pravda has also interned for Global Witness and the World Development Movement. Global Witness receives immense funding from governments including Canada and the UK. In 2005, Global Witness also received funding from the NED for their work to “advocate for good governance of natural resource management in Liberia.”

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II

#5: Avaaz co-founder Eli Pariser

Eli Pariser is co-founder of Avaaz as well as president/chairman of MoveOn.org’s board. Prior to position of chair, Pariser served as the Executive Director of MoveOn.org. Pariser has worked directly with former Vice President Al Gore on drafting MoveOn-sponsored speeches and assisted in fundraising for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. In December 2003 Pariser worked with Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros, on a MoveOn.org campaign. On December 9, 2004, one month after Kerry’s defeat, Pariser declared that MoveOn had effectively taken control of the Democratic Party.

In an e-mail distributed to MoveOn.org members on November 22, 2005, Pariser announced that his organization had created a spinoff entity called the New Organizing Institute, “a unique grassroots program that trains young, technology-enabled political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations.”

A fellow of the Soros-funded New Organizing Institute, he served as Obama’s ghostwriter for social media applications such as Twitter.

Pariser has recently aligned himself with SumOfUs as a U.S. Advisory Board member and is a co-founder of Upworthy (which works to make trending issues go viral online).

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II

#6: Avaaz co-founder David Madden

David Madden, is the co-founder of the Australian NGO, GetUp, co-founder of its U.S. counterpart MoveOn.org, as well as co-founder of Avaaz.

Madden has consulted for the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program. As well, Madden has worked for the World Bank in Timor Leste, and for the United Nations in Indonesia. Prior to this, Madden served as an officer in the Australian Army.

Madden is also a co-founders of the New York consulting firm, Purpose Inc. with Avaaz co-founder Jeremy Heimans and Avaaz’s James Slezak. [Further reading: SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the Art of Selling Hate for Empire]

Madden has taken up residence in Burma/Myanmar [March 23, 2013: Western Media Celebrates Faux Progress in Myanmar] where he has co-founded the marketing firm, Parami Road: “Our clients are mostly international companies entering Myanmar and they demand an international standard of work.”

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section II

#7: Avaaz co-founder Andrea Woodhouse

Avaaz co-founder Andrea Madden works for the World Bank in Burma [Myanmar]. Her husband is Avaaz co-founder David Madden who has taken up residence in Burma (see above).

Woodhouse is a consultant to both the United Nations and the World Bank. Woodhouse is a  social entrepreneur having founded two social ventures, Avaaz and Win Back Respect, “a foreign policy advocacy group that ran a $5 million media campaign during the 2004 U.S. presidential election promoting ‘a more multilateral foreign policy’ and ran an advocacy tour with General Wesley Clark.”

Further reading, full background and bio: Avaaz: Imperialist Pimps of Militarism, Protectors of the Oligarchy, Trusted Facilitators of War | Part II, Section III

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WATCH | Eritrea: The Danger of a Good Example in Africa

Why NGOs and Leftish Nonprofits Suck (4 Reasons)

Skewed News

by Stephanie McMillan

October 13, 2015

 

[Stephanie McMillan’s daily comic strip “Minimum Security” is syndicated online at Universal Uclick’s gocomics.com. She also draws and self-syndicates a weekly editorial cartoon, “Code Green.” Her website is minimumsecurity.net.]

WATCH: LIBYA: Race, Empire, and the Invention of Humanitarian Emergency

Zero Anthropology

by Maximilian Forte

Based on the author’s latest book, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War On Libya and Africa (Baraka Books, Montreal, 2012), and nearly two years of extensive documentary research, this film places the 2011 US/NATO war in Libya in a more meaningful context than that of a war to “protect civilians” driven by the urgent need to “save Benghazi”. Instead it counters such notions with the actual destruction of Sirte, and the consistent and determined persecution of black Libyans and African migrant workers by the armed opposition, supported by NATO, as it sought to violently overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and the Jamahiriyah. This film takes us through some of the stock justifications for the war, focusing on protecting civilians, the responsibility to protect (R2P), and “genocide prevention,” and examines the racial biases and political prejudice that underpinned them. The role of Western human rights organizations, as well as misinformation spread through “social media” with the intent of fostering fear of rampaging black people, are especially scrutinized.

Further Reading: Libya: The Second Anniversary of a Bloody Coup (February 17, 2013)