zaterdag 14 mei 2016

Antisemitism? Zionist Propaganda!

A Palestinian Perspective on Britain’s ‘Anti-Semitic’ Controversy

May 11 2016 / 5:12 pm

Jeremy Corbyn leading a July 2014 demonstration against the Israeli war on Gaza. (Photo: RonF, via Flickr)

By Ramzy Baroud

There is a witch-hunt in the British Labour Party. Britain’s Opposition party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is being hounded for not rooting out alleged anti-Semitism in his party. Those leading the charge are pro-Israel Zionists and their supporters within the party, members who are mostly allied with the former Prime Minister, the largely discredited pro-war Tony Blair. The Blairites are quite unhappy that Corbyn, who won the party’s leadership election last September with a landslide victory is a non-elitist politician, with a deep-rooted grassroots activist past, and, yes, a strong stance for Palestinian rights.

Corbyn has been subjected to all sorts of attacks and ridicule from his own party, many members of which have been busy plotting to push him out, but remained hesitant because of his popular appeal. The Labour party had, in fact, lost much of its credibility since the days of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ and following the US lead in waging an immoral and illegal war on Iraq. Blair’s supporters changed the priorities of the party, which was ‘Labour’ by name only. Corbyn’s advent galvanized young people around fresh ideals, and renewed the shaky faith of the party’s traditional supporters.

But since he became a leader, the man’s agenda of anti-corruption and greater equality in Britain has been slowed down, or even entirely halted, by some most bizarre controversies. He was attacked over such things as his supposed poor sense of fashion, his alleged lack of patriotism, and more. The attacks have been so ridiculous, yet omnipresent, that they became the subject of popular memes and much satire.

And when it all failed, he was hit with another manufactured controversy, that of alleged anti-Semitism within his own party. The recent attacks have been the most organized, yet. They involve Israel supporters, British politicians, the mediaand other sources.

The media has tried to paint him as an embattled leader who is not able to control the uncontainable Jewish hate oozing from his party members.

British Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, known for his strong support of Israel joined the fray, charging that the lid has been lifted on bigotry within Labour and that investigation into anti-Semitism must be more than a ‘sticker plaster.’

The investigation and the preceding outcry of anti-Semitism, however, targeted those who were critical of Israel, not Jews, in general, or Judaism. Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who was suspended from Labour for suggesting links between the Nazi party and early Zionists, was not making any reference to Jews per se, and certainly not to Judaism. Arguably, if he was wrong, then it is a mere question of history, not race.

In its coverage of the controversy, even the BBC, delinks both concepts:

“Anti-Semitism is ‘hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people’, while “Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East.”

Indeed, the first is a racist ideology, while the latter is an entirely political and historical question, especially since early Zionists were largely atheists. Israel’s Zionist-Jewish contradiction wasphrased skillfully by Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, when he wrote:

“The secular Jews who founded the Zionist movement wanted paradoxically both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine; in other words, they did not believe in God but He, nonetheless, promised them Palestine.”

But the Rabbi, and many of those who unscrupulously joined the charge against Labour pretend that Zionism, a late 19th century political movement is the same as Judaism, a religion that dates back millennia.

However, there is nothing new here, and the manufactured ‘controversy’ is hardly limited to Britain or the Labour Party.

The message that Israeli hasbara (propaganda) has been steadily sending to its critics since the establishment of Israel over the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in May 1948: if you are critical of Israel, however slightly, you are a certified anti-Semite. If it happens that you are Jewish, then you are a self-hating Jew, and if you are an Arab, you must abandon the idea that you are, yourself, Semitic and Arab, by merely opposing Israel’s ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians who are all anti-Semites, anyway.

I doubt there is a self-respecting Palestinian intellectual who has not fended against accusations of being anti-Semitic for merely advocating Palestinian rights, and demanding accountability of Israeli violations of human rights and war crimes.

Many independent Jewish voices, too, have found themselves on the defensive, although within a different category. The classification of a ‘self-hating Jew’ has been ever so popular these days, especially as many Jewish activists have righteously joined the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). The once-marginalized voices are now a large and growing crowd.

Unable to defend Israeli action based on logical arguments, international law or common sense, Israel’s supporters use other means, threats, smears and vilifications, and also by fabricating non-existing controversies. And no one is immune.

Daniel Greenfield engaged in a bizarre diatribe in the Jewish Press on March 8, in an article entitled: “Bernie Sanders is NOT a Jew“. In the same familiar tone of distortion and self-pity, Greenfield theorized: “While Bernie Sanders invoked his last few drops of Jewishness and the Holocaust in support of a Muslim anti-Semite’s cry bullying, he didn’t feel the need to do so for the Jewish State when it actually stood on the verge of destruction. Instead, he had called for denying arms to Israel before the Yom Kippur War.”

How about the United Nations, which has failed to enforce a single resolution of the dozens of resolutions passed to demand justice for the Palestinians and accountability from Israel?

It is an “anti-Semitic circus” according to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The novel designation followed the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC’s) decision to compile a list of international and Israeli companies that do business in illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Despite the fact that the UN is yet to reverse the worsening plight of the Palestinians or advance their cause beyond symbolic gestures, one rarely hears the accusation that the UN is anti-Palestinian, or anti-Arab.

On the other hand, for merely censuring Israeli action by words only, the UN, according to Jennifer Rubin writing in the Washington Post on February 16, “tolerates and, by its silence, condones, anti-Semitism.”

The US government has blindly and unconditionally given credence to that notion, marching to the drumbeat of the Israeli government on every occasion and boycotting international institutions whenever Israel raises the frequently false flag of anti-Semitism.

The matter is not only pertinent to Israel and Palestine. Anyone who dares go against Israel’s interest in the region and around the world is a candidate for the manipulation of Israeli terminology.

Following the Iran nuclear deal between Iran and western powers, conservative commentator,Debbie Schlussel, coined new terminology: ‘Jews in the Name Only’ or JINOs. Those alleged JINOs are the 98 prominent ‘Hollywood Jews’, who backed the Iran deal in an open letter.

By completely shutting the door on any form of criticism of Israel, Zionism, and the censure of its military behavior in the region coupled with the daily violence meted out against occupied Palestinians, Israel has expanded the definition of anti-Semitism to include whole countries, governments, international institutions and millions of independently thinking individuals the world over.

However, not even such deliberate distortion should prevent us from making the differentiation loud and clear: anti-Jewish racism should be condemned as loudly and decisively as Islamophobia and any other form of racial discrimination and bigotry.

However, criticizing violent political movements and the behavior of any state that violates international law and human rights is a moral duty. Israel will not be the exception.

– Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. Baroud has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Palestine Studies from the European Centre for Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/palestinian-perspective-britains-anti-semitic-controversy/

The West Supports Zionist Fascism!

NRC Propaganda

Over het Songfestival gesproken, misschien organiseert Poetin volgend jaar wel het grootste officieuze homofeest van Europa. Zijn de homofans en -zangers dan wel veilig?

Dit is één van de meest relevante vraagstukken voor het NRC-volk op zaterdag 14 mei 2016.

Anti-Poeting propaganda van de kwaliteitskrant.

Media Lens. Propaganda Blitz

Anatomy Of A Propaganda Blitz - Part 1

: IN ALERTS 2016; POST 12 MAY 2016; LAST UPDATED ON 12 MAY 2016; BY EDITOR; HITS: 991

We live in a time when state-corporate interests are cooperating to produce propaganda blitzes intended to raise public support for the demonisation and destruction of establishment enemies.

Below, we will examine five key components of an effective propaganda campaign of this kind.

1: Dramatic New Evidence

A propaganda blitz is often launched on the back of 'dramatic new evidence' signifying that an establishment enemy should be viewed as uniquely despicable and targeted with 'action'.

The Blair government's infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD contained four mentions of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD against British citizens within 45 minutes of an order being given. But senior intelligence officials revealed that the original 45-minutes claim referred to the length of time it might have taken the Iraqis to fuel and fire a Scud missile or rocket launcher. The original intelligence said nothing about whether Iraq possessed the chemical or biological weapons to use in these weapons. The government had turned a purely hypothetical danger into an immediate and deadly threat.

In 2011, it was claimed that the Libyan government was planning a massacre in Benghazi, exactly the kind of action that Gaddafi knew could trigger Western 'intervention'. Investigative journalist Gareth Porter commented:

'When the Obama administration began its effort to overthrow Gaddafi, it did not call publicly for regime change and instead asserted that it was merely seeking to avert mass killings that administration officials had suggested might approach genocidal levels. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which had been given the lead role in assessing the situation in Libya, found no evidence to support such fears and concluded that it was based on nothing more than "speculative arguments".'

In 2013, the Syrian government was said to have launched a chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Damascus, just as UN chemical weapons experts were visiting the city. It was claimed that Assad had ordered the crossing of Obama's very clear 'red line' for 'intervention' – a war that would have destroyed the Syrian government and quite possibly resulted in Assad's violent death. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on the Ghouta attack:

'The quick announcement that Bashar al-Assad did it is simply not true.'

Western dissidents are subject to continuous smears but also full-on propaganda blitzes of this kind.

In 2012, after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange requested asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the corporate media rose up as one to denounce him as a vile 'narcissist' and buffoon. Always 'controversial', journalists now presented Assange as a fully-fledged hate figure.

In 2013, a single comment in an interview caused large numbers of journalists across the 'spectrum' to conclude that Russell Brand – then promoting a vocal form of anti-corporate dissent - was a 'vicious sexist', 'narcissist' and 'idiot'. The intensity of the attacks on him, which are ongoing, eventually resulted in Brand withdrawing from the public eye.

It is hardly in doubt that Assange, Brand and others are being targeted by state-corporate propagandists because they are challenging state-corporate power. How else can we explain the fact that criticism of the many hundreds of journalists and MPs who have repeatedly agitated and voted for wars that have wrecked whole countries is off the agenda? It is not even that criticism of Assange, Brand and co is disproportionate; there is very often no criticism at all of people who have brought death, injury and displacement to literally millions of human beings. But when Brand joked about his then girlfriend: 'When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me', these words were viewed as infinitely more deserving of vicious attack right across the media 'spectrum' than political actions destroying whole countries.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also, of course, been subject to a relentless, almost surreal, year-long propaganda campaign. As we will see in Part 2, this has most recently taken the form of accusationsthat 'Labour now seems to be a party that attracts antisemites like flies to a cesspit.'

Propaganda blitzes are fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage. State-corporate propagandists know that media attention will quickly move on from the claim of 'dramatic new evidence', so the durability of the claim is not a key concern. Marginalised media blogs and rare 'mainstream' articles may quickly expose the hype, but most corporate media will not notice and will not learn the lesson that similar claims should be received with extreme caution in future. A prime example was the campaign justifying war on Libya in 2011, which faced minimal corporate media scepticism just eight years after the obvious deception on Iraq.

2: Emotional Tone And Intensity

A crucial component of the propaganda blitz is the tone of political and corporate commentary, which is always vehement, even hysterical. High emotion is used to suggest a level of deep conviction fuelling intense moral outrage.

The rationale is clear enough: insanity aside, in ordinary life outrage of this kind is usually a sign that someone has good reason to be angry. People generally do not get extremely angry in the presence of significant doubt. So the message to the public is that there is no doubt. Thus the eruptions of moral outrage demanding that 'something must be done' to 'save' Libya and Syria from impending massacre(delivered by journalists blithely indifferent to the consequences of their earlier moral outrages, for example in Iraq). Thus the talk of 'The fascists at the poisoned heart of Labour' with their 'chilling' race hatred.

3: Manufacturing 'Consensus'

A third component of a propaganda blitz is the appearance of informed consensus. The dramatic claim, delivered with certainty and outrage, is typically repeated right across the political and media 'spectrum'. This cross-'spectrum' 'consensus' generates the impression that 'everyone knows' that the propaganda claim is rooted in reality. This is why the myth of a media 'spectrum' is so vital.

While a demonising propaganda blitz may arise from rightist politics and media, the propaganda coup de grace with the power to end public doubt comes from the 'left-liberal' journalists at the Guardian, the Independent, the BBC and Channel 4. Again, the logic is clear: if even celebrity progressive journalists – people famous for their principled stands and colourful socks – join the denunciations, then there mustbe something to the claims. At this point, it actually becomes difficult to doubt it.

Thus, in 2002, it was declared 'a given' by the Guardian that Iraq still retained WMD that might be a threat, despite the fact that both claims were easily refutable.

In 2007, George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian: 'I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb.' In October 2011, Monbiot wrote of Nato's war on Libya: 'I feel the right thing has been happening for all the wrong reasons.' At a crucial time in August 2013, Monbiot affirmed: 'Strong evidence that Assad used CWs [chemical weapons] on civilians.' He subsequently wrote in the Guardian of the Assad government's 'long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons'.

News of the killings of Syrian ministers in a bomb explosion were greeted by the Guardian's Owen Jones with: 'Adios, Assad (I hope).' Jones tweeted that 'this is a popular uprising, not arriving on the back of Western cruise missiles, tanks and bullets'. As was clear then and is indisputable now, Jones was wrong – the West, directly and via regional allies, has played a massive role in the violence. As if reading from the Nato playbook, Jones added:

'I'm promoting the overthrow of illegitimate and brutal dictatorships by their own people to establish democracies.'

This is why the mythology of the 'liberal-left' Guardian and Independent with their handful of noisy, tub-thumping progressives is so important and why we work so hard to challenge it. It is why expressions of progressive support for the Guardian – with occasional articles appearing by Noam Chomsky and others, and with Russell Brand, for example becoming a 'Guardian partner' – are so important.

The public is not for one moment fooled by a hard-right consensus. Agreement must appear to have been reached among 'all right-thinking people', including the 'lefties' at the Guardian.

4: Demonising Dissent

To challenge a propaganda blitz is to risk becoming a target of the blitz. Dissidents can be smeared as 'useful idiots', 'apologists', 'genocide deniers'. Anyone who even questioned the campaigns targeting Julian Assange and Russell Brand risked being labelled a 'sexist', a 'misogynist' and, in the case of Assange, a 'rape apologist'. Even as this media alert was being written, Oliver Kamm of The Times once again tweeted that Media Lens has 'long espoused genocide denial, misogyny & xenophobia'.

In fact we have been accused of supporting, or apologising for, everyone from Stalin to Milosevic, from the Iranian Ayatollahs to the North Korean dictatorship, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam and so on. It seems we are so deranged that we support completely contradictory political and religious movements and beliefs, even enemies who despise each other. This may be a function of our swivel-eyed hatred of the West, or perhaps because we are challenging state-corporate media bias.

When moral outrage is directed at people challenging a propaganda blitz, reputations can be easily and irreparably damaged. The public can be left with a vague sense that the target is 'dodgy', almost morally unhygienic. The smear can last for the rest of a person's career and life.

5: Timing and Strange Coincidences

The 'dramatic new evidence' fuelling a propaganda blitz often seems to surface at the worst possible time for the establishment target. On one level, this might seem absurdly coincidental – why, time after time, would the Official Enemy do the one thing most likely to trigger invasion, bombing, electoral disaster, and so on, at exactly the wrong time?

But remember, we are talking about 'bad guys' who, as everyone knows, are famously perverse. It is part of the Dr. Evil mind-set to strut provocatively and laugh in the face of disaster. Idiotic, blindly self-destructive behaviour is what being a 'bad guy' is all about. So the implausibly perfect timing may actually help persuade the public to think: 'This guy really is a nutcase. He's absolutely asking for it!' Much 'journalism' covering Official Enemies is about suggesting they are comically, in fact cartoonishly, foolish in exactly this way.

We have no doubt that, with sufficient resources, media analysts could easily prove that propaganda blitzes consistently arise with impeccable timing just ahead of key votes at the UN, in parliament and in elections.

In November 2002, before the UN vote on Resolution 1441, which 'set the clock ticking' for war, the Blair regime began issuing almost daily warnings of imminent terror threats against UK ferries, the Underground, and major public events. In 2003, Blair actually surrounded Heathrow airport with tanks - an action said to be in response to increased terrorist 'chatter' warning of a 'missile threat', of which nothing more was subsequently heard. Even the Guardian editors expressed scepticism about this sudden flood of 'threats':

'It cannot be ruled out that Mr Blair may have political reasons for talking up the sense of unease, in order to help make the case for a war against Iraq that is only backed by one voter in three.' (Leading article, 'Gloom in Guildhall,' The Guardian, November 12, 2002)

John Pilger cited a former intelligence officer who described the government's terror warnings as 'a softening up process' ahead of the Iraq war and 'a lying game on a huge scale'. (Pilger, 'Lies, damned lies and government terror warnings,' Daily Mirror, December 3, 2002) In fact, Blair was perpetrating a form of psychological terrorism on his own people.

Likewise, atrocity claims from Syria clearly peaked as the US drew closer to war in the summer of 2013. After Obama chose not to bomb, it was extraordinary to see the BBC's daily front page atrocity claims suddenly dry up.

In 2012, the pro-Assad 'shabiha' militia became globally infamous when they were blamed for the May 2012 Houla massacre in Syria. In September 2014, Lexis found that in the preceding three years, the 'shabiha' had been mentioned in 933 UK national newspaper articles. But in the twelve months from September 2013 to September 2014 – a time when Western crosshairs shifted away from Assad towards Islamic State - there were just 28 mentions of 'shabiha' (Media Lens search, September 15, 2014). In the last year, Nexis finds just 12 articles mentioning the terms 'Syria' and 'shabiha' in the entire UK national press.

Similarly, in Part 2, we will see how a propaganda blitz targeting Jeremy Corbyn coincided perfectly to damage his chances ahead of local elections in the UK.

In combination, the 'dramatic new evidence', moral outrage and apparently wide consensus, generate several important impacts.

Most people have little idea about the status of WMD in Iraq, about Gaddafi's intentions and actions in Libya, or what Corbyn thinks about anti-semitism. Given this uncertainty, it is hardly surprising that the public is impressed by an explosion of moral outrage from so many political and media 'experts'.

Expressions of intense hatred targeting 'bad guys' and their 'apologists' persuade members of the public to keep their heads down. They know that even declaring mild scepticism, even requesting clarification, can cause the giant state-corporate Finger of Blame to be cranked around in their direction. Perhaps they, too, will be declared 'supporters of tyranny', 'apologists for genocide denial', 'sexists' and 'racists'. The possibility of denunciation is highly intimidating and potentially disastrous for anyone dependent on corporate employment or sponsorship. Corporations, notably advertisers, hate to be linked to any kind of unsavoury 'controversy'. It is notable how 'celebrities' with potentially wide public outreach very often stay silent.

It is easy to imagine that people will often prefer to decide that the issue is not that important to them, that they don't know that much about it – not enough to risk getting into trouble. And, as discussed, they naturally imagine that professional journalists have access to a wealth of information and expertise – best to just keep quiet. This is the powerful and disastrous chilling effect of a fast-moving propaganda blitz.

Propaganda And Climate Change

The most devastating impact, however, is on the public perception of threats.

A series of propaganda blitzes have taught the public to associate an alarming situation with a unified eruption of concern and outrage right across party politics and media. This is a problem because genuine threats that do not trigger a propaganda blitz naturally appear to be far less urgent and threatening than they really are. And this is exactly what has happened with climate change.

Despite the endlessly and ominously tumbling records for temperature and extreme weather events – see here and here - despite increasingly urgent attempts to warn the public of a very real 'climate emergency', scientists are not close to being able to match the kind of alarm generated by a propaganda blitz.

These campaigns are rooted in vast power and resources defending establishment greed. They are motivated by the need to remove obstacles to power and profit, to control natural resources, to justify bloated arms budgets ('socialism for the rich'). Naturally, then, a propaganda blitz is not triggered by a threat requiring action that will harm these same elite interests.

As the state-corporate response to climate change makes very clear, propaganda blitzes are not really about averting 'threats'. It is tragicomic indeed to see high state officials and corporate media commentators endlessly emphasising 'security concerns' while doing little or nothing to address the truly existential threat of climate change. It is simply the wrong kind of threat requiring the wrong kind of action!

The result is that the climate emergency is felt by the public to be a medium-sized, manageable problem surrounded by uncertainty. A YouGov survey in January found that the 'British public is far more concerned about the threat posed by population growth than it is about climate change.' The case for dramatic new evidence has been made, but the emotional intensity, consensus and denunciation of climate denier 'dissidents' – for once, all justifiable - are lacking.

This is an awesome price to pay for corporate domination of politics and media. It seems the ultimate victims of propaganda will be the propagandists themselves and the public deceived by them.

In Part 2, we will see how a recent propaganda blitz aimed at Corbyn fits the pattern outlined above.

Next >

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016/818-anatomy-of-a-propaganda-blitz-part-1.html

U.S. Supports Terrorism

Terrorists Commit War Crimes, U.S. State Department: "We continue to have dialogue with them."

Russia asked the UN to blacklist Ahrar al Sham and Jaish al Islam as terrorist groups. The U.S. rejected that. "We continue to have dialogue with them," said the State Department.

A day later Ahrar al Sham joins al-Qaeda in breaking the ceasefire in Syria and in assaulting and ethnically cleansing a village loyal to the Syrian government. Meanwhile Amnesty International accuses both groups of indiscriminate attacks on civilians, including by use of chemical weapons, and of other war crimes.

May 11 Russia's bid to blacklist Syrian rebel groups at UN blocked by US, others

The U.S. and other countries at the United Nations Wednesday blocked Russia’s bid to blacklist two rebel groups in Syria saying it would undermine the war-torn country’s halt in fighting.Reuters reported that Britain, the U.S., France and Ukraine blocked the bid to blacklist Jaish al-Islam [(Army of Islam)] and Ahrar al-Sham. Moscow claimed the groups should have been excluded because of their ties to militant groups including ISIS and Al Qaeda.

May 11 - State Department Daily Press Briefing

QUESTION: -- on this issue? Both Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam – I mean, they have exactly the same bylaw, almost the same bylaws. They don’t have a constitution. They have what they call internal document. They espouse the same dogma, they believe the same thing, they practice the same practices as Jabhat al-Nusrah and as al-Qaida. Why shouldn’t they be designated as a terrorist organization?MS TRUDEAU: So we constantly review information. We are constantly assessing these groups. At this stage our position is that these groups are members of the cessation of hostilities. We continue to have dialogue with them. If our position changes, we’ll make that assessment then. But we are in constant review of this.

May 12 - Syria's al-Qaida branch seizes central Alawite village

DAMASCUS, Syria – Syria's al-Qaida branch and allied fighters from ultraconservative rebel factions on Wednesday seized a village of President Bashar Assad's minority Alawite sect in central Syria, following fierce clashes with government troops.
...
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group tracking the conflict, said families disappeared from Zaara after the militants overran the village. Along with Syria's al-Qaida branch known as the Nusra Front, other hard-line factions that took part in the raid on Zaara included Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Rahman.

May 13 - Syria: Armed opposition groups committing war crimes in Aleppo city

Armed groups surrounding the Sheikh Maqsoud district of Aleppo city have repeatedly carried out indiscriminate attacks that have struck civilian homes, streets, markets and mosques, killing and injuring civilians and displaying a shameful disregard for human life, said Amnesty International.
...
Two of the armed groups attacking YPG forces in Sheikh Maqsoud - Ahrar al Sham and Army of Islam - have sent their own representatives to the UN-brokered negotiations over the Syria conflict in Geneva. The other armed groups have approved other delegates to represent them at the talks.“The international community must not turn a blind eye to the mounting evidence of war crimes by armed opposition groups in Syria. [...],” said Magdalena Mughrabi [interim Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.]

Posted by b on May 13, 2016 at 11:17 AM | Permalink

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/05/terrorists-commit-war-crimes-us-state-department-we-continue-to-have-dialogue-with-them.html

U.S. War Crimes

WHY AREN’T HIROSHIMA AND

NAGASAKI WAR CRIMES?

by Jacob G. HornbergerMay 12, 2016

I don’t get it. On the one hand, we’re told that the intentional targeting of civilians in wartime is a war crime. On the other hand, we’re told that the intentional targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs was not a war crime.

Which is it?

The issue is back in the news with President Obama’s decision to visit Hiroshima. The question that is being debated is whether he should apologize for President Truman’s decision to order U.S. troops to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

If the targeting of civilians in wartime is okay, then clearly the decision to nuke the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a war crime.

But if that’s the case, then why was U.S. Army Lt. William Calley prosecuted during the Vietnam War? He’s the officer who intentionally killed several defenseless women and children in a Vietnamese village. The military prosecuted and convicted him of a war crime. Why? If it’s not a war crime to intentionally kill women and children in wartime, then why was Calley prosecuted and convicted of war crimes?

The fact is that it is a war crime for troops to intentionally target non-combatants in wartime. Nobody disputes that. But then given such, why the pass on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Everyone agrees that Truman was targeting non-combatants — mainly women, children, and seniors — when he ordered the nuking of those two cities. How do defenders of Truman’s decision avoid the inexorable conclusion that Truman’s action constituted a war crime?

Their primary argument is that the nuclear bombings of the cities shortened the war, thereby saving the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers who would have died had the war been continued to be waged, especially if an invasion of Japan had been necessary.

That’s in fact the rationale that has been cited for decades by U.S. soldiers who were fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Many of them have expressed gratitude over the years for what Truman did because it enabled them to live the rest of their natural lives while, otherwise, they might have been killed in subsequent battles.

But there are big problems with that rationale.

For one, the fact that killing non-combatants might or will shorten a war is not a legal defense to the war crime. Suppose Calley had said that his killing of those women and children had shortened the Vietnam War or that he intended to shorten the war by his actions. Would that have constituted a legal defense at his war crimes trial? Or suppose U.S. airmen who have bombed all those wedding parties in Afghanistan were to say, “We did it on purpose because we felt it would shorten the war.” Would they be let off the hook at their war crimes trial?

The answer is: No because that is not a legal defense to the war crime. The law does not say that the crime is excused if it succeeds in shortening the war or if it is intended to shorten the war.

Moreover, once that rationale is accepted, then doesn’t it logically apply to both sides in a war? What’s to prevent an enemy nation from intentionally targeting American non-combatants during war under the rationale that by doing so, it is bringing the war to an early conclusion, thereby saving the lives of many of its soldiers? Once both sides are relying on that rationale, doesn’t that effectively nullify the legal prohibition?

The fact is that soldiers die in war. That’s the nature of war. What’s one to say about a soldier who exclaims, “Thank you for killing those defenseless women, children, and seniors so that I could live out my natural life”? It’s certainly difficult to imagine Gen. George Patton ever saying such a thing. One cannot imagine that Patton would ever have been willing to kill defenseless women, children, and seniors if it meant that the lives of his soldiers would be spared. I think Patton would have said, “Get out there and fight. If you die, so be it. We are not going to kill defenseless women, children, and seniors just so you can live a longer life.”

Some defenders of the nuclear attacks say that since Japan started the war, the Japanese people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had it coming to them. But since when do individual citizens have much say as to when their nation goes to war or not? How much say did the American people have in George W. Bush’s and the U.S. national-security state’s decision to go to war against Iraq and Afghanistan?

And let’s not forget who intentionally maneuvered, postured, and provoked Japan into attacking the United States, especially with his oil embargo on Japan, his freezing of Japanese bank accounts, and his settlement terms that were deliberately humiliating to Japanese officials. That would be none other than President Franklin Roosevelt, who was willing to sacrifice the soldiers at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines in order to circumvent widespread opposition among the American people to getting involved in World War II. Isn’t there something unsavory about provoking a nation into starting a war and then using that nation’s starting the war to justify nuking its citizens in an attempt to bring the war to a quicker conclusion? Wouldn’t it have been better and less destructive to not have provoked Japan into attacking the United States in the first place?

Defenders of the nuclear attacks also say that Truman had only two choices: nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and continuing the war until Japan surrendered. But that’s just not true. There was another option open to Truman — a negotiated surrender. Given Truman’s steadfast insistence, however, on “unconditional surrender” —a ludicrous and destructive position if there ever was one — a negotiated surrender was an option that he refused to explore, choosing instead to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants in order to secure his “unconditional surrender” from Japan, which, by the way, turned out to not be “unconditional” after all since Japan was permitted to keep its emperor as part of its surrender.

The real reason why so many Americans still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the nuclear attacks on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes is their inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that their own government, including their own president and their own military, were capable of committing and actually did commit a grave war crime–the intentional killing of noncombatants consisting primarily of women, children, and seniors. In the minds of many Americans, that’s something only foreign governments are capable of and willing to do, not their own government.

U.S. Illegal Wars

MAY 13, 2016

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World

by LUCIANA BOHNE

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21^st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19^thcentury, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19^th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.

The “civilizing mission” was afoot.

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21^st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force.

Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words.

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.

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Luciana Bohne is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu

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