zondag 29 maart 2015

Henk Hofland en de Massa 34


H.J.A. Hofland in De Groene Amsterdammer: 'Het bezit van de kernbom is onderdeel van de Iraanse buitenlandse politiek die al jaren wordt gekenmerkt door het streven naar expansie zo niet een overwicht in de regio.'


Henk Hoflands column in De Groene Amsterdammer van 25 maart 2015 begint aldus:

De bom van Iran

Aan het einde van de maand zullen de Iraniërs en Amerikanen op hun conferentie in Zwitserland een voorlopig akkoord over het Iraanse atoom­programma moeten bereiken.

Dat is de afspraak. Deze zomer zou er dan een definitieve overeenkomst worden gesloten. Maar het is hoe langer hoe meer de vraag of die goede voornemens stand zullen houden.

De voor de hand liggende vraag is dus: wat is de oorzaak van deze ontwikkeling? Hofland begint met 

de herverkiezing van Netanyahu, die zich na zijn overwinning wel wat diplomatieker tegenover de Arabische wereld opstelt, maar zijn eerste daden nog bij zijn woorden moet voegen. 

Hoe nu: 'Arabische wereld'? Het handelt hier om Iran! De meeste Iraniërs zijn geen Arabieren. En Arabisch is, net als Hebreeuws, een Semitische taal, Perzisch daarentegen is een Indogermaanse taal. Het kan zijn dat de hoogbejaarde meent dat Perzen tot 'de Arabische wereld' behoren, maar dat is onjuist; misschien bedoelde hij met 'de Arabische wereld' de islamitische 'wereld.' Waarschijnlijk bedoelde hij het laatste. Hoe dan ook, Hofland geeft als verklaring voor het feit dat 'Het Israel van Netanyahu,' dat hij eerder kwalificeerde als 'een uiterst militante staat,' nog steeds niet de daad bij het woord heeft gevoegd, en wel omdat, volgens de mainstream-opiniemaker: 

Jaren van opgebouwd wantrouwen niet zomaar even ongedaan [kunnen] worden gemaakt.

Dit is het gangbare neoconservatieve excuus voor de bedreigingen en het terrorisme van de 
zionistische staat. Om de werkelijkheid te kunnen verdraaien, verzwijgt Hofland ondermeer 
het feit dat 

The contents of a secret report by Israel’s Mossad spy agency on Iran’s nuclear programme leaked to the media this week are shocking and predictable in equal measure.

Shocking because the report reveals that the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has spent years trying to convince the international community and Israelis that Tehran is racing towards building a nuclear bomb, when evidence presented by his own spies suggests the opposite.

Predictable because since early 2011 Israel’s security establishment has been screaming as loudly as any secret service realistically could that Netanyahu was not to be trusted on the Iran issue.

The significance of the leak is not just historical, given that Netanyahu is still trying to scaremonger about an Iranian threat and undermine negotiations between western powers and Tehran.

According to the report, leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian newspaper, Mossad concluded in 2012 that Tehran was 'not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.'

At the time, Netanyahu was widely reported to be pushing for a military strike against Iran. He had recently flourished a cartoon bomb at the UN in New York, claiming Tehran was only a year away from developing a nuclear weapon. The international community had to act immediately, he said.

Mossad however estimated that Iran had limited amounts of uranium enriched to 20 per cent, far off the 93 per cent needed for a bomb. Tehran has always argued it wants low-grade uranium for a civilian energy programme, as allowed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty that Tehran it has signed.

In 2012, the New York Times reported that the Mossad and the US shared similar assessments of Iran’s nuclear programme. 'There is not a lot of dispute between the US and Israeli intelligence communities on the facts,' a senior US official told the paper.

Earlier, in 2007, a US spy agency report suggested Iran had abandoned any efforts to develop a military nuclear programme years before, and was not trying to revive it.

Bovendien weet Hofland als vooraanstaande opiniemaker in de polder ook het volgende:


Early last month the Department of Defense released a secret report done in 1987 by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis that essentially confirms the existence of Israel’s nukes. DOD was responding to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by Grant Smith, an investigative reporter and author who heads the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy. Smith said he thinks this is the first time the US government has ever provided official recognition of the long-standing reality.

It’s not exactly news. Policy elites and every president from LBJ to Obama have known that Israel has the bomb. But American authorities have cooperated in the secrecy and prohibited federal employees from sharing the truth with the people. When the White House reporter Helen Thomas asked the question of Barack Obama back in 2009, the president ducked. 'With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,' Obama said. That was an awkward fib. Obama certainly knows better, and so do nearly two-thirds of the American people, according to opinion polls.

In my previous blog, 'What about Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?' I observed that the news media focused solely on Iran’s nuclear ambitions but generally failed to note that Israel already had nukes. That produced a tip about the Pentagon release in early February.

Yet the confirmation of this poorly kept secret opens a troublesome can of worms for both the US government and our closest ally in the Middle East. Official acknowledgement poses questions and contradictions that cry out for closer inspection. For many years, the United States collaborated with Israel’s development of critical technology needed for advanced armaments. Yet Washington pushed other nations to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires international inspections to discourage the spread of nuclear arms. Israel has never signed the Non Proliferation Treaty and therefore does not have to submit to inspections.

Washington knew all along what the inspectors would find in Israel. Furthermore, as far back as the 1960s, the US Foreign Assistance Act was amended by concerned senators to prohibit any foreign aid for countries developing their own nukes. Smith asserts that the exception made for Israel was a violation of the US law but it was shrouded by the official secrecy. Since Israel is a major recipient of US aid, American presidents had good reason not to reveal the truth.

The newly released report — 'Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations' — describes Israel’s nuclear infrastructure in broad terms, but the dimensions are awesome. Israel’s nuclear research labs, the IDA researchers reported, 'are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.' Indeed, the investigators observed that Israel’s facilities are 'an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories.'

The IDA team visited Israeli labs, factories, private companies and government research centers in Israel and relevant NATO nations (details on NATO allies were redacted from the released version). On Israel, the tone of the report was both admiring and collegial. 'The SOREQ center,' it said, for instance, 'runs the full nuclear gamut of activities from engineering, administration and non-destructive testing for electro-optics, pulsed power, process engineering and chemistry and nuclear research and safety. This is the technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.'

Ook dat verzuimt Hofland te vermelden. Hij moet wel omdat hij anders zijn geloofwaardigheid te grabbel gooit. Hoe moet hij immers zijn publiek vertellen dat van hem Iran geen nucleaire wapens mag hebben, maar Israel wel? Zeker nadat de grijze éminentie zelf eerder 'Het Israel van Netanyahu een uiterst militante staat,' heeft genoemd. Zelfs voor hem is het onmogelijk zijn toch zo volgzame mainstream-publiek ervan te overtuigen dat een 'uiterst' agressieve, fanatieke, oorlogszuchtige, strijdlustige 'staat' tenminste 200 nucleaire wapens mag bezitten en Iran geen één, terwijl het laatste land de afgelopen twee eeuwen geen enkele staat heeft aangevallen en de zogeheten 'Joodse natie' in haar korte bestaan meerdere keren. Tenslotte verzwijgt Hofland tevens het volgende:

Noam Chomsky: Opposing Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel’s Goal Isn’t Survival — It’s Regional Dominance

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the United States as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran during a controversial speech before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Dozens of Democrats are threatening to boycott the address, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. Netanyahu’s visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the United States, are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31 deadline. 'For both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran,' says Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'They have a common interest in ensuring there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region.' Chomsky also responds to recent revelations that in 2012 the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, contradicted Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb, concluding that Iran was 'not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.'



Alleen door al deze informatie buiten beschouwing te laten probeert Henk Hofland zijn neoconservatieve meningen geloofwaardig te maken. Zonder overdrijving kan worden gesteld dat de 87-jarige columnist van De Groene Amsterdammer zich gedraagt als een demagogische intrigant, die de ene moment beweert 'Orde bestaat niet en is verderfelijk' — de titel van één van zijn essay-bundels — om het volgende moment met evenveel stelligheid te verklaren dat om de neoliberale orde te handhaven het een 'noodzaak [is] voor het Westen om grenzen aan de Russische expansie te stellen. We naderen het stadium waarin van Poetin alles te verwachten valt.'  

Hij gaat in zijn paniekzaaierij op dezelfde manier te werk als de Amerikaanse militante neoconservatief John R. Bolton, die  als voormalig 'United States ambassador to the United Nations' onder Bush junior in de New York Times van 26 maart 2015 onder de kop 'To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran' beweerde:

The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

Om de lezer een indruk te geven in welk gezelschap Hofland en De Groene Amsterdammer zich bevinden, is het niet alleen belangrijk te weten hoe extreem Bolton's standpunten zijn, maar ook op welke manier hij met het verdraaien van feiten en met leugens te werk gaat. John Bolton was 

involved in the Iran–Contra affair and… is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Fox News Channel commentator… He was a foreign policy adviser to 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bolton is also involved with a number of politically conservative think tanks and policy institutes, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Institute of East-West Dynamics, the National Rifle Association

Bolton also led the Bush administration's opposition on constitutional grounds to the International Criminal Court, negotiating with many countries to sign agreements, called Article 98 agreements, with the U.S. to exempt Americans from prosecution by the court, which is not recognized by the U.S.; more than 100 countries have signed such agreements. Bolton said the decision to pull out of the ICC was the 'happiest moment' of his political career to date.

Bolton was instrumental in derailing a 2001 biological weapons conference in Geneva convened to endorse a UN proposal to enforce the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. 'U.S. officials, led by Bolton, argued that the plan would have put U.S. national security at risk by allowing spot inspections of suspected U.S. weapons sites, despite the fact that the U.S. claims not to have carried out any research for offensive purposes since 1969.'

Bolton recalls that his 'happiest moment at State was personally "unsigning" the Rome Statute,' which had set up the International Criminal Court… Bolton stated in June 2004 congressional testimony that Iran was lying about enriched uranium contamination: 'Another unmistakable indicator of Iran's intentions is the pattern of repeatedly lying to... the IAEA, ... when evidence of uranium enriched to 36 percent was found, it attributed this to contamination from imported centrifuge parts.' However, later isotope analysis supported Iran’s explanation of foreign contamination for most of the observed enriched uranium. At their August 2005 meeting the IAEA's Board of Governors concluded: 'Based on the information currently available to the Agency, the results of that analysis tend, on balance, to support Iran’s statement about the foreign origin of most of the observed HEU contamination.' […]

Critics allege Bolton tried to spin intelligence to support his views and political objectives on a number of occasions. Greg Thielmann, of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), was assigned as the daily intelligence liaison to Bolton. Thielmann stated to Seymour Hersh that, 'Bolton seemed troubled because INR was not telling him what he wanted to hear... I was intercepted at the door of his office and told, "The undersecretary doesn't need you to attend this meeting anymore."'

According to former coworkers, Bolton withheld information that ran counter to his goals from Secretary of State Colin Powell on multiple occasions, and from Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice on at least one occasion.

On May 28, 2008, at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, the British activist George Monbiot attempted to make a citizen's arrest of Bolton, for his role as an architect of the Iraq War. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Monbiot was ejected by security personnel.

In July 2013, Bolton was identified as a key member of Groundswell, a secretive coalition of right wing activists and journalists attempting to make political change behind the scenes through lobbying of high-level contacts.
In June 2011, Bolton dismissed Palestinian claims to statehood as a 'ploy.'

Bolton has been a strong critic of the United Nations for much of his career. In a 1994 Global Structures Convocation hosted by the World Federalist Association (now Citizens for Global Solutions), he stated,

'there is no United Nations... there is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that´s the United States, when it suits our interests, and when we can get others to go along.' […]


Bolton was also one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, PNAC letter sent to President Bill Clinton urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power using U.S. diplomatic, political and military power.

The November 15, 2005, Washington Times article 'Can the U.S. find a substitute for the U.N.?' noted that Bolton advocates 'a revolution of reform' at the UN. Specifically, he called for:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council to work more closely to craft powerful resolutions and make sure they are enforced, and to address the underlying causes of conflicts, rather than turning them over to the Secretariat and special envoys;
A focus on administrative skills in choosing the next secretary-general; and
A more credible and responsible Human Rights Commission.

Bolton noted that the U.S. had the option of relying on regional or other international organizations to advance its goals if the U.N. proves inadequate.

On July 28, 2005, it was revealed that a statement made by Bolton on forms submitted to the Senate was false. Bolton indicated that in the prior five years he had not been questioned in any investigation, but in fact he had been interviewed by the State Department's Inspector General as part of an investigation into the sources of pre-war claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After insisting for weeks that Bolton had testified truthfully on the form, the State Department reversed itself, stating that Bolton had simply forgotten about the investigation. 

Ik citeer dit alles omdat de werkwijze van John Bolton in meer dan één belangrijk opzicht identiek is aan die van Henk Hofland. Net als de Amerikaanse neoconservatief gelooft hij in het recht van de sterkste en niet in het internationaal recht. De VS mag van beide heren overal ter wereld met geweld ingrijpen om de belangen van het Westen te waarborgen. Net als Bolton gaat Hofland ervan uit dat de 'noodzaak' bestaat 'voor het Westen om grenzen aan de Russische expansie te stellen,' terwijl voor Washington en Brussel; 'there is no United Nations... there is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that´s the United States, when it suits our interests.' Vandaar dat Bolton en Hofland kunnen speculeren over de wenselijkheid om welk land dan ook, in strijd met het internationaal recht, aan te vallen zodra dit voor 'het vredestichtende Westen' van geopolitiek of puur economisch belang is. Naast deze ideologische overeenkomsten lopen ook de methodes om het beoogde doel te bereiken volkomen parallel. Beiden schrikken er niet voor terug om te liegen en te verzwijgen. John Bolton schreef in de New York Times van 26 maart 2015 'To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,' en Henk Hofland schreef in De Groene Amsterdammer van diezelfde 26 maart 2015 onder de kop 'De bom van Iran'

Het bezit van de kernbom is onderdeel van de Iraanse buitenlandse politiek die al jaren wordt gekenmerkt door het streven naar expansie zo niet een overwicht in de regio.

Hofland verzwijgt te vertellen waar die Iraanse 'expansie' dan heeft plaats gevonden. Hij verzwijgt tevens dat ook Israel naar de hegemonie in de regio streeft en bovendien nog steeds expandeert in de Palestijnse bezette gebieden. Maar dat mag van Bolton en Hofland, want de zionistische huurlingen-staat beschermt de neoliberale belangen van de westerse elite. Beide propagandisten dienen dezelfde belangen. Bolton werd geboren in 1948, Hofland in 1927, beiden zijn blanke mannen, beiden groeiden op in een christelijke staat, beiden zijn bejaard, en beiden willen dat er bloed vloeit, en voor beiden gelden die scherpzinnige woorden waarmee de joodse Nobelprijswinnaar Norbert Elias zijn boek Massa & Macht afsluit:

Men kan zich niet onttrekken aan het vermoeden dat achter elke paranoia, zoals achter elke macht, dezelfde diepere tendens schuil gaat: de wens de anderen uit de weg te ruimen, om de enige te zijn of, in de mildere en vaak toegegeven vorm, de wens zich van de anderen te bedienen, zodat men met hun hulp de enige wordt.


John Bolton: ''there is no United Nations... there is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that´s the United States, when it suits our interests, and when we can get others to go along.' 




March 29, 2015

Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, Sacrilegious Women


[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There are few pleasures greater for me at TomDispatch than posting the writings of Eduardo Galeano, whom I worked with for years in my other life as a book editor, and consider one of the greats of planet Earth. Today, thanks to the kindness of the editors of Nation Books and in my official absence -- I’m on vacation -- here are selections from his latest book, just out in paperback, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. If you’ve never tried Galeano, then believe me, your life is missing a piece. Tom]

His book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent came out in 1971 and proved to be the first vampire thriller of our American imperial age. Its blood-sucker of a plot was too outrageous not to be mesmerizing: a country called the United States declares a “good neighbor” policy for those living in its hemisphere because they just look so tasty, and then proceeds to suck the economic blood out of country after country. Hollywood never topped it. “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” couldn’t hold an incisor to it; Buffy was a punk by comparison.

In 1995, when his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow came out, he won the World Cup of sports writing. No one was ever quicker on the page; every sentence, a goal. Next to him, Pelé and Diego Maradona were second stringers.

The Pentagon invented the Internet for its own ends (and the NSA has used it just that way), but compared to him they were latecomers to techno-wizardry. After all, in writing his Memory of Fire trilogy about the Americas, he rediscovered the long-lost time machine of H.G. Wells, brought it up to date, and used it -- talk about interconnectivity -- to weave the most vibrant lives in North and South America over thousands of years into an unforgettable tapestry of humanity. Thirty years later, he dusted that machine off again, souped it up, stepped in and, like Odysseus on his voyages or Orpheus entering Hades, ventured into the human experience from ancient Ur to late last night. The result: his monumental history of everything and everyone: Mirrors.

Back in 2000, in his book Upside Down, he proved a wizard of prediction. Years ahead of the climate change movement and before the full-scale rise of the BRICS countries, which meant a vast new middle class married to the car and a North American version of the good life, he reminded his readers that, for the South to live like the North, humanity would need not one fading planet but many.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking, of course, about the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. He was, early in his professional life, a cartoonist and never lost the lightness of spirit that went with that role. Still, the world he observed and experienced in prison, in exile, year after year, decade after decade, especially through the eyes of the poor and those denied their voice, was anything but light. Yet he approached the underworld of history with an empathy and understanding which is almost indescribable. His friends died in struggles across Latin America and yet, in an act of wizardry, he was capable of bringing them back to life on the page. He heard voices no one else could hear and similarly brought them to life and so to our attention.

He has only to appear -- I’ve witnessed this personally -- and people he’s never met have the sudden urge to tell him stories they would tell no one else. And he was and remains, among so many other things, a man who always had an eye for the particular trials (and terrors and losses and triumphs) of women in a world that generally preferred to ignore whatever they did or dreamed of doing. He has nothing of the “mansplainer” in him. And so, today, thanks to the editors of Nation Books, here are passages on women from his most recent work, just out in paperback, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. Think of it as a secular prayer book for any year. Tom
A World of Violence
On Women Who Refused to Live in Silence and Be Consigned to Oblivion 
 
By Eduardo Galeano
[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s book Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, just out in paperback (Nation Books).] 
The Shoe
(January 15)
In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin.
Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal.
Along the way, she lost a shoe.
Some hand picked it up, that shoe dropped in the mud.
Rosa longed for a world where justice would not be sacrificed in the name of freedom, nor freedom sacrificed in the name of justice.
Every day, some hand picks up that banner.
Dropped in the mud, like the shoe.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.


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