Bilderberg 2017: Closed-Door Meeting of Global Leaders Will Focus on Trump ‘Progress Report’
Posted on Jun 2, 2017
The highly secretive Bilderberg meetings are taking place in this unassuming Westfields Marriott hotel in Chantilly, Va. (Flickr / CC 2.0)
Hundreds of political and economic elites are gathering in Chantilly, Va., for a three-day summit on international geopolitics known as the Bilderberg meetings. At the top of the group’s agenda? “The Trump administration: a progress report.”
The outcome of the summit is anyone’s guess, as the infamous Bilderberg meetings are top secret (the name “Bilderberg” comes from the Dutch hotel where the first summit was held in 1954). The summit “[kicked] off on Thursday in heavily guarded seclusion at the Westfields Marriott, a luxury hotel a short distance from the Oval Office,” The Guardian reports. “The hotel was already on lockdown on Wednesday, and an army of landscapers have been busy planting fir trees around the perimeter, to protect coy billionaires and bashful bank bosses from any prying lenses.”
The Guardian continues:
According to the meeting’s agenda, “China” will be discussed at a summit attended by the Chinese ambassador, the US commerce secretary, the US national security adviser, two US senators, the governor of Virginia, two former CIA chiefs – and any number of giant US investors in the country, including the heads of the financial services firms the Carlyle Group and KKR. Oh, and the boss of Google. ...
All this is the kind of thing that should be headline news, but with the president of Turner International attending, we can be fairly sure Bilderberg won’t make many ripples at CNN. And British readers should not expect much coverage at the London Evening Standard either: their new editor and longtime Bilderberg attendee George Osborne is on the list, despite a general election looming in a week’s time.
You could of course complain about a lack of press coverage of Bilderberg in the UK, but with the head of the media watchdog Ofcom at the conference, you may not get an immediate reply.
More than 130 participants from 21 countries are expected to attend, including top officials from the Trump administration, such as Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, strategist Chris Liddell and billionaire Peter Thiel.
In addition to these Trump administration leaders, other “big-hitters from geopolitics” will be in attendance, including Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund; Willem-Alexander, king of the Netherlands; and Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the U.S.
And it wouldn’t be a Bilderberg meeting without Henry Kissinger, whom The Guardian describes as the “gravel-throated kingpin of Bilderberg” and who has attended the summitsince its inception.
In an op-ed for The Guardian, Charlie Skelton notes the lack of diversity among Bilderberg participants and mocks the agenda topics. He writes:
They’re trumpeting the diversity of a conference where less than 25% of the participants are female. Which would be a huge step forward, if it were currently 1963.
And as for racial diversity, there are more senior executives of Goldman Sachs at this year’s Bilderberg than there are people of colour.
Perhaps by “diverse” they mean that some of the participants own hedge funds, whereas others own vast industrial conglomerates. Some are on the board of HSBC, others are on the board of BP. Some are lobbyists, others are being lobbied. That sort of thing.
Dafter still is the agenda item: “Can globalisation be slowed down?”. You think that the assembled heads of Google, AT&T, Bayer, Airbus, Deutsche Bank, Ryanair, Fiat Chrysler, and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange want to see a brake on globalisation? It’s the air that they breathe.
Other topics on the agenda include “The war on information,” “Why is populism growing?” and “Can globalization be slowed down?”
The secretive nature of the meetings is “a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists,” the BBC notes. “Some critics have accused the group—which has met every year since 1954—of plotting to impose a one-world government.”
Indeed, Bilderberg is being heavily discussed by conspiracy theorists on Twitter and is featured prominently on conspiracy sites such as InfoWars.
Although past conferences have generated protests, International Business Times reporter James Tennent reported that on Thursday, “the bangs had already fizzled out—three independent journalists and a few cops were in the sun outside.”
On its FAQ, Bilderberg states that press conferences were “stopped due to a lack of interest,” and adds that “[t]he meeting is closed to reporting journalists in order to encourage the highest level of openness and dialogue.”
“Bilderberg gave its last press conference in the mid-1970s,” Skelton says. “It’s time for them to lay down their arms, enter the 21st century, and start talking.”
Read the Bilderberg meeting agenda here and take a look at the full list of participants here. —Posted by Emma Niles. http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/bilderberg_global_leaders_trump_administration_progress_report_20170602
I am old enough to remember clearly how the Six-Day War was reported at the time. Just about everything we were told then was wrong, as the major historians of the period all acknowledge today. Let’s start with how the crisis was covered as it happened, 50 years ago:
* Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt, was portrayed as a dangerous demagogue, widely popular across the Arab world, who wanted to destroy Israel. The Western press regularly demonized him, and he was easily the most recognized Arab leader until Saddam Hussein.
* In May 1967, Nasser made his move. He ordered the United Nations to remove peacekeeping troops from the Sinai peninsula, where they had been serving as a tripwire to prevent conflict between Egypt and Israel.
* Next, Nasser escalated by closing the Straits of Tiran to international shipping, blockading Israel’s southern port of Eilat, which started to strangle the country.
* Meanwhile, Nasser was plotting with other Arab states, chiefly Syria and Jordan, to launch a joint invasion and push Israel into the sea.
* Israel’s very existence was in danger. Therefore, Israel launched a “preemptive” attack on June 5, fearing that it had no choice if it were to survive.
* Fortunately, despite the odds against Israel, it won in only 6 days.
* To protect itself against another onslaught, Israel occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. The occupation was the purely accidental consequence of a fight for Israeli survival.
This Mainstream Narrative remains unchallenged in the popular imagination, 50 years later. Just the other day, a New York Times reporter stated as fact that in 1967, “Israel defied annihilation by its Arab neighbors.”
Norman Finkelstein, the distinguished scholar, has done as much as anyone to uncover the truth about the Six-Day War. In a wide-ranging interview in his Brooklyn office, he refuted the Mainstream Narrative point by point. You can find his detailed revisionist account in a chapter of his now classic Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, supplemented by another work: Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. Finkelstein is known as combative, a man who has not been afraid to fight for the truth, despite damage to his career along the way. But what’s also vital to recognize is that he is a serious scholar, Talmudic in his intensity, and that no one has ever successfully challenged his research.
Norman Finkelstein, May 2, 2017, in his office in Brooklyn.
[We will run the entire interview with Finkelstein this weekend.]
Finkelstein emphasizes that no genuine academic today, whatever their political orientation, endorses the Mainstream Narrative. He starts by identifying what he has called the “Two Biggest Lies.”
* The truth is that Nasser and the other Arab leaders had absolutely no intention of invading Israel in June 1967.
* And Israel’s existence was never in the slightest doubt, as both Israeli and American leaders knew that Israel could easily win any conflict, even against a coalition of Arab states.
Finkelstein insists we cannot understand the Six-Day War without going back 11 years, to the 1956 Suez Crisis. That year, the Egyptian leader, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal — and Israel, Britain and France launched an unprovoked joint invasion of Egypt to seize the waterway back. But the United States, under President Dwight Eisenhower, opposed the attack, and pressured the tripartite invasion force to withdraw and leave the Canal to Egypt. Suez was a catastrophe for all three invading nations, and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign. Meanwhile, Nasser’s reputation in the Arab world, and across Africa, Asia and Latin America, rose to new heights.
Norman Finkelstein argues that the historical record shows that in 1967 Israel yearned to complete its failed mission of 1956. First, he says, Israel’s “primary goal was to neuter Nasser, to deliver a death blow to these uppity Arabs, and finish off what was called radical Arab nationalism.” He goes on that Israel’s government had a “secondary goal” — “to conquer the lands they had coveted but didn’t manage to seize in ’48: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan.”
Israeli leaders had only one big doubt: what would America do? If Israel did attack, would the United States force another humiliating climbdown, as in 1956? Or would Washington look the other way?
Finkelstein challenges the Mainstream Narrative’s account of the specific events in the months leading up to the war. His analysis is not at all unusual, and is shared to a great extent by other scholars. He argues that the facts show that Israel was not peacefully minding its own business, but instead regularly and violently provoking its Arab neighbors. In November 1966, in the largest military action since the Suez invasion, Israel attacked the West Bank town of Samu, then under Jordanian rule, killing 18 Jordanian soldiers and destroying 125 homes. Israel continued instigating along its border with Syria in April 1967, triggering an aerial battle in which 6 Syrian planes were shot down, including one over Damascus. Voices in the Arab world started to accuse Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Arabs, of standing by and doing nothing.
So Nasser did tell the United Nations to remove the peacekeeping troops from Egyptian Sinai, mainly so he could be seen to be taking some action. But Finkelstein points out that Israel could have asked for UN peacekeepers to be placed on its side of the border, which would have maintained the tripwire. Israel did no such thing.
Nasser’s closing of the Straits of Tiran has been similarly distorted in the Mainstream Narrative. Finkelstein explains that Nasser may actually have had the legal right to close the Straits, that he probably did not intend to maintain the closure, and that he offered to take the dispute to the International Court of Justice, but Israel refused. And Israel would not have choked overnight, but got 95 percent of its imports through its other ports and had a several months’ reserve supply of oil.
Meanwhile, Finkelstein says, Israeli diplomats descended on Washington, D.C. to find out if the United States would give them a green or at least an amber light. Finkelstein has looked through the historical record, and here is a summary of what he found:
* The U.S. agreed with Israel that Nasser had no plans to attack.
* The U.S. agreed that Israel would easily defeat Egypt on the battlefield, either alone or with any combination of other Arab nations.
* And the U.S. tacitly gave Israel permission to start the war, or at least indicated there would be no repeat of Eisenhower’s repudiation after the 1956 Suez invasion.
Once Israel attacked first, Finkelstein says the conflict should more aptly be called the Six-Day Walkover. “In fact,” he says, “the war did not last six days; it lasted closer to six minutes. Once Israeli planes in a surprise blitzkrieg knocked out the Egyptian air force still parked on the ground, the war was over. . . If the war lasted longer, it was only because Israel wanted to conquer the Egyptian Sinai, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights.”
Finkelstein does recognize that the Israeli public did believe the Mainstream Narrative, took to heart the lies and distortion their government was feeding the world, and genuinely feared the Arab states wanted to push them into the sea. He explains that the Israeli government “figured the Israeli people would give their all if they feared their backs were up against the wall. The leaders were culpable twice over; they provoked the crisis and then launched an unprovoked attack.”
Once the war ended, in the United States it was treated as a lark, a thrilling adventure. After Israel occupied the Egyptian Sinai, jokes circulated: “See the Pyramids. Visit Israel.”
But it was no joke for the at least 18,000 people who died in the fighting: 10,000-15,000 Egyptians; 6000 Jordanians; 1000-2500 Syrians; and nearly 1000 Israelis.
Israel did win its immediate war objectives; Nasser’s image was severely damaged, and he died three years later, with his brand of Arab nationalism greatly discredited. Israeli soldiers did occupy the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan.
Whether the occupation, now shuddering into its 51st year, has been good for Israel is still to be decided by history.
(Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/Clay Enos/Getty/Olivier Douliery/Photo Edit by Salon)
Here’s a joke you haven’t heard: What’s the difference between Wonder Woman and Donald Trump?
One is an moralistic aristocrat with a superiority complex about Western civilization who autocratically thrusts their warped notion of “justice” upon the world. The other, of course, is the president.
Lest you think I’m singling out the hero du jour, I should note that virtually any superhero can be inserted into that joke. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor, Iron Man — with few exceptions, superhero blockbusters read as if they were underwritten by the American Enterprise Institute. That’s because nearly all superhero movies glorify wealth (and the freedom it provides), aristocracy and/or monarchy, militarism, unilateralism, and right-wing fantasies about criminality.
You might object to this harsh critique of America’s most beloved (and profitable) film genre. After all, aren’t these movies little more than harmless summer popcorn flicks?
Not really.
Superhero films are far more than mere moving pictures. They are billion-dollar spectacles and marketing bonanzas, with endless spin-offs, product tie-ins, video games and toy lines. Many impressionable children come to identify with the archetype of the ultra-unique, mercenary hero, unilaterally deciding what is right and wrong. Just as worryingly, some children and adults are only exposed to global politics by what happens within the confines of action films.
The newly released “Wonder Woman” is an excellent example of the worst kind of superhero politics, the kind that cut across franchises and movie studios. As an origin story, the film begins in a common superhero setting: the demigod’s alternate-universe home — the land of the Amazons in this case — where Wonder Woman and her family live in an edenic paradise that also happens to be a monarchy.
The recent Thor and Superman films begin in much the same way. It is telling that these otherwordly paradises that superheroes often fall from have medieval politics. Wouldn’t it be nice to see a superhero come from a planet of primitive communists, or anarcho-syndicalists?
That’s unlikely to happen, of course. Superheroes are almost universally defined by their status (that’s what makes them super!). Hence, they tend to come from worlds that glorify individualism and hierarchical forms of government where elitism, not equality, reign. While Wonder Woman is almost unique in that her homeland is not a patriarchy, it is still a monarchy. Less than egalitarian, Themyscira sees plenty of squabbling between Amazonians of different ranks.
For a genre that is obsessed with superficial notions of “good” and “evil,” the distinction is often difficult to discern in many of its films. Early on in “Wonder Woman,” our hero rescues an American spy who is being pursued by a group of trigger-happy German soldiers. Yet, because the American spy was the one in distress, and the one whom Wonder Woman laid eyes on first, she comes to see the Allies’ side as “good” and the Germans as “evil.” Lucky that it didn’t happen the other way around or we’d have Wonder Wonder backing up the Central Powers. As it is, Wonder Woman’s belief in the righteousness of wantonly slaughtering Germans rests entirely on random chance.
As much as superheroes feel entitled to decide who’s good and who’s evil, they also give themselves license to decide who is a criminal and who isn’t. Yet no one individual can dole out justice. Justice is a collective principle. Hence, functioning democracies create complex systems of courts and jurors to ensure fair trials. For superheroes to serve as juries, judges and executioners makes them authoritarians acting outside the law by definition.
And besides, criminality is not something absolute or moral. It’s generally born of circumstance, a byproduct of inequality or perhaps a failed social welfare state.
Furthermore, the law itself — something superheroes like to uphold as righteous — is not inherently egalitarian. Anatole France perhaps put it best: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” When Batman busts a thief, is he working for absolute justice or absolute capitalism?
These nuances about the law are typically lost in the din of superhero movies. Often in these films, enemies are inherently evil and inhuman — think of Thanos or Ultron in the “Avengers” series — and irredeemable, consigned to death or imprisonment. It makes what’s going on here seem easier and less problematic than it actually is.
We’ve seen this myopic, absolutist mindset leaking over into politics. You’d be forgiven for wondering if George W. Bush had not watched one too many superhero movies when he uttered his infamous edict, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
If you’re a superhero nerd, you might be scribbling down all the exceptions to these points. After all, there are many nuanced characters who don’t fall into the good (or evil) bins. There are also superhero spats — such as “Captain America: Civil War” — that debate heroic, unilateral military action.
There are, too, “alternate universe” comics such as “Superman: Red Son,” one-shots that question the inherent righteousness of Western, liberal politics. But they are exceptions to a Spandex-wearing rule. And even these alternate worlds commit the universal sin of depicting the citizens at large as hapless set dressing with no free will.
Indeed, by far the worst sin of the superhero genre, and one which supersedes all these, is the way in which the superhero movies depict the body politic.
If you’ve often felt like a meaningless cog in a vast machine, just be thankful you’re not a random citizen in a superhero flick. Stripped of your free will, you’d be subject to the whims of a vast super-machinery you cannot comprehend. In these films, the public plays a background role to superheroes and citizens are easily fooled by villains. They rarely have a say in what the elites — good or evil — decide is best for them. Does this sound familiar?
You might even argue that the rise of a self-perceived Ãœbermensch like Donald Trump is tied to our nation’s myopic tendency toward superhero politics. After all, Trump positioned himself, again and again, as a superhero, a lone leader who could save us. “I alone can defeat ISIS,” and “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” were both phrases he actually said.
Though Bernie Sanders and Trump are often compared to each other given their populist undertones, actually listening to their rhetoric separates them. Sanders, in word and deed, has distinguished himself as the opposite of a superhero. “No, it’s not ‘Bernie can.’ ‘We can,’” he said at a summer 2016 campaign rally in California. It underscored the degree to which the candidate saw his cause as a movement, not a rally around a figurehead. Contrast that to Trump, who seems convinced that he can govern by diktat.
We are, then, living in the age of superhero politics. The voters — or at least, the Electoral College — chose a candidate who didn’t offer a vision of a movement from below, but of decree from above. Wonder Woman, Captain America and Iron Man also dole out justice from the heights (often literally, as flight is a pretty standard superhero trait).
If you watch a lot of superhero films, you might note that many end with scenes of the masses cheering, clapping or waving signs in support of the heroes. I’ve often wondered if there was a subtle self-awareness to this, if the CEOs of these movie studios had made sure to assure us that it’s okay to let the elites rule over us, so long as they maintain populist support.
In actuality, it’s quite rare that elites come to our rescue. Indeed, even when they want to, it’s unlikely they can. Who can save us from climate change? Who can help end racism, fix our infrastructure, heal economic injustice, end the patriarchy?
Historically, this kind of sweeping positive social change has come not from the elites above, but from street-level movements born of sweat and labor. The victories here have been won through hours of door-knocking, years of organizing and decades of protesting.
In fact, many of society’s ills are the fault of the elites. Worshipping them through the totem of the superhero seems like a step away from recognizing and redressing that.
Take off the costume, and you’ll see that superhero politics are just neoliberalism in disguise. Waiting for heroes or giving them the reins of power has failed us and continues to fail us. Superhero politics is the antithesis of democracy, a form of elite technocracy. It’s the rule of the powerful, selectively doling out their idea of justice on what they consider a mindless, applauding crowd.
The rights of the Palestinians were wholly absent from US President Donald Trump’s recent trip to Israel
By Ramzy Baroud
June 02, 2017 "Information Clearing House" - As if he had overnight been transformed into a master politician, US President Donald Trump’s 27-hour trip to Israel has left many analysts mystified.
Quoting former Israeli political adviser Mitchell Barack, TheNew York Times referred to Trump as the “Liberace of world leaders”, in a reference to the late pianist Wladziu Valantino Liberace. The latter, known as “Mr Showmanship”, was at one time the highest paid entertainer in the world and his successful career lasted over four decades.
New York Magazine quoted former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro trying to decipher the supposedly complicated persona of Trump in its online edition. “Either Trump’s visit was substance-free, or he ‘is being uncharacteristically subtle’ in planting the seeds for a new round of peace negotiations,” the magazine quoted Shapiro as saying, paraphrasing its tweets.
The US “liberal” media, which has stooped to many lows in its attacks on Trump, including on his family, his mannerisms, his choice of words, even his body language, became much more sober and quite respectful in the way it attempted to analyse his short trip to Israel and his very brief detour to Bethlehem where he met with Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas.
“Mr Trump’s speech at the Israeli Museum was so friendly and considerate of Israeli emotions,” reported the New Your Times, “that one right-wing Israeli legislator described it as deeply expressive of the ‘Zionist narrative.’” Palestinian emotions, however, were of no consequence, either to the Trump entourage, or, of course, to the New York Times or the rest of the mainstream media.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, still found faults, but certainly not because of Trump’s lack of balance and his failure to criticise the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.
Despite the fact that Trump has indeed fully embraced a “Zionist narrative”, and a particularly right-wing version of it (he made no reference to a Palestinian state, for example), he still fell short, according to the newspaper. His performance at Israel’s National Holocaust Memorial (Yad Vashem) did not impress.
Journalist Max Bearak wrote in the Post that “Trump’s entry in the guest book at Israel’s National Holocaust Memorial was strangely upbeat, self-referential and written in his signature all caps: ‘IT IS A GREAT HONOUR TO BE HERE WITH ALL OF MY FRIENDS — SO AMAZING & WILL NEVER FORGET,’” he said.
Bearak found such a choice of words and the style in which it was written offensive, especially when compared with the supposed thoughtfulness of former US president Barack Obama. The latter wrote a significantly longer note when he visited, which read in part that “at a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man’s potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world.”
Neither then, nor now, did the Washington Post bother to examine the historical context in which this particular sentence was written or identify the hypocrisy of the whole endeavour. Had it bothered to ask the Palestinians, they would have given a wholly different interpretation of Obama’s words.
Indeed, wherever occupied Palestinians look they find “man’s potential for great evil”: a 400-mile Israeli Annexation Wall being mostly built on their land; hundreds of military checkpoints dotting their landscape; and a suffocating military occupation controlling every aspect of their lives.
They see the holiest of their cities, Bethlehem and Al-Quds — occupied East Jerusalem — subdued by massive military force, and thousands of their leaders thrown into prison, many without charge or trial. They see siege; endless war; daily deaths and senseless destruction.
But since none of this matters to the “Zionist narrative”, it subsequently matters very little to the mainstream American media either.
Trump’s trip to Israel, however short, was indeed a master stroke by the ever-unpredictable Liberace of world politics, although it takes no particular genius to figure out why. From an American mainstream media perspective, to be judged “presidential” all US presidents have to commit to three main policies. These are, in no particular order, privileging the economic business elites, war when needed, and unconditionally supporting Israel.
The US media, otherwise polarised according to political allegiances, has taken a break from its raging conflict over Trump’s presidency and rallied behind him on two separate occasions: when he bombed Syria earlier this year and during his recent visit to Israel.
Ironically, the man has often been judged for lacking substance on numerous occasions in the past. But in fact his trip to Israel was the most lacking and most divisive occasion thus far. The fact that he time and again reiterated Israeli priorities was all the media needed to give the man a chance. Its collective verdict seemed to rebrand his lack of substance as his unique way of doing politics.
The Israeli media, which is often more critical of the Israeli government than the US media ever dares to be, needed to keep up with its “democratic” traditions on this occasion, but Trump’s grovelling gave little room for criticism. The often-impulsive Trump this time stuck to the script and followed his rehearsed speeches and media comments to the letter.
Nevertheless, Israeli journalist Josefin Dolsten found a way to nit-pick, composing for the Times of Israel a list of “seven awkward moments from Trump’s Israel trip”.
One of these, Dolsten wrote, was “a White House statement listing Trump’s goals for the trip that included a hilarious (and juicy!) typo: ‘promote the possibility of lasting peach’ between Israel and the Palestinians. Yes, we get it — it meant to say peace, but who’s to say the two sides can’t bond over some delicious fruit,” he asked.
For Palestinians, it can’t be easy to find humour in these tough times. Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including leader Marwan Barghouti, have been enduring a prolonged and life-threatening hunger strike in which they have been making the most basic demands for better treatment, longer visitation hours with their families, and an end to arbitrary detentions.
On the day that Trump, along with right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, lectured Palestinians on peace, 17-year-old Tuqua Hammad was shot for allegedly throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles at the entrance of her village of Silwad near Ramallah.
Hammad “was shot in the lower extremities, and Israeli troops prevented a Palestinian ambulance from accessing the victim to treat her,” the Ma’an news agency reported.
A few miles away, Trump was writing his remarks after visiting Israel’s Holocaust Museum. Regrettably, he failed to meet the expectations of the Washington Post, for unlike Obama he was not poignant enough in his language and style for the newspaper’s approval.
The irony of the story is inescapable. But the American media still cannot see it, for it also seems to follow a script in which Palestinian rights, dignity and freedoms are hardly ever mentioned.
The author is an internationally-syndicated columnist, media consultant, author of several books and founder of the website PalestineChronicle.com
Israel’s Yinon Plan, Saudi Wahhabism & US Wars: Arab Christians Pushed Into Mass Exodus
“The real danger lies in whether the Christian world loses the last early Christians...the last ancient souls of the earth.” Such is the dire prediction by one writer regarding the ongoing exodus of Arab Christians from the Middle East - an exodus triggered by Western neo-colonialism and Zionist expansion that suits the military-industrial complex.
A man is body-searched in front of a Christian church in Baghdad, Iraq Tuesday, July 6, 2004 in the early days of America’s second invasion of Iraq. Minutes before, American soldiers had shot and killed a motorist there who had been driving too close behind them, according to witnesses at the scene. (Mohammed Uraibi/AP)
WASHINGTON, D.C.– In the United States, religion is a major part of public life – so much so that it often finds its way into politics. At the national level of politics, it has historically been difficult to win an election, particularly at the national or state level, if one follows a faith not shared bythe vast majority of religious Americans: Christianity.
This phenomenon became even more pronounced following the rise of the “moral majority” in the 1980s. But despite the importance of Christianity in the public and private lives of American citizens and politicians, American Christians have raised little concern regarding the fate of Christianity in the religion’s birthplace – the Middle East.
The religious landscape of the Middle East has shifted significantly in recent years, as key religious groups, including Christians, have been making mass exoduses elsewhere. According to Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary,Christians are expected to compose 3.6 percent of the region’s population by 2025. A century prior, however, Christians represented 13.6 percent of the Middle East’s population.
Most reports on the subject have cited emigration as the leading cause of Christianity’s sharp decline in the Middle East, while few reports cite other factors that have pushed many Middle Eastern Christians to seek new lives abroad. Manymainstream investigations of the phenomenonhave blamed both Sunni-Shiite conflicts and terrorism for pushing Christians and other religious minorities to leave.
But they have also neglected to mention the role of foreign intervention and U.S.-led regime change efforts in creating these very crises. While most of the “Christian” politicians in the U.S. are careful to avoid pointing this out, Middle Eastern Christians are all too aware that foreign intervention by Western governments has made it nearly impossible for them to continue living in the Middle East.
Marwa Osman, a lecturer at Lebanon International University and political commentator, argued as much in an interview with MintPress News:
“The ‘moral’ fights of Christians in the West are mainly over abortion, birth control, transgender and same-sex marriage, where your beliefs rarely subject you to political and physical persecution. When ethnic or religious groups are subjected to organized violence and persecution because of who they are, their plight should be addressed urgently, because this is how genocide starts and this what the West is not doing. Rather, the West keeps investing in more wars that would directly result in a Christian exodus from the Middle East.”
Christianity’s beginnings in the Middle East
The Middle East is much more than just the birthplace of Christianity. It was also the region where the religion first took hold and where the foundation was laid that transformed the teachings of Jesus Christ into one of the world’s dominant faiths. The entire region is dotted with thousand-year-old Christian communities, some of which were founded by early church fathers and, in some cases, disciples of Jesus himself.
Priests lead a Christmas Eve’s Mass in the church of Mart Shmoni, in Bartella, Iraq, December, 2016. For the 300 who braved rain and wind to attend the mass in their hometown, the ceremony provided them with as much holiday cheer as grim reminders of the war still raging on around their northern Iraqi town. (AP/Cengiz Yar)
For instance, tradition holds that Christianity was firstbrought to Iraq by St. Thomas and his cousin Addai in the first century, later becoming a stronghold for a patchwork of Christian groups, including the Gnostics. It is also believed that St. Peter and St. Paulbrought Christianity to Syria, where – in Antioch – the term “Christians” to denote followers of Jesus was used for the first time.
In the earliest centuries of the last millennium, it was the Middle East that dominated Christian leadership and fellowship. When the Catholic church was officially formed at the Council of Nicea, there weremore bishops in the Middle East than in Western Europe.
While the ascension of Islam would soon drastically alter the region’s religious landscape, Christianity has retained an important role in the region in the centuries since – especially in countries where it has maintained prominence, such as Egypt and Lebanon. Even in nations with Muslim majorities, Christians proved to be an economically important minority, gaining political prominence as a result.
But the Arab Christians of the Middle East have by no means had it easy. For much of the last 2,000 years, the region’s Christians have been persecuted by multiple parties, including the Ottoman Empire of the 19thand 20th centuries, whose brutal campaign against Arab Christians claimed the lives of over two million people.
Having suffered so much, the resilience and endurance of the Mideast’s Christians is legendary. But it was Muslims in Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Palestine who provided refuge to the Christians being persecuted by the Ottomans as they established and expanded their empire.
Owing to this troubled history, the presence of Arab Christians throughout the region has been a factor in the proliferation of Arab secularism in select countries, namely Syria, pre-invasion Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. After so many centuries of being targeted and persecuted, Christians in the Middle East have still been some of the most ardent supporters of secularism in the region.
Iraqi Christians who live in Lebanon hold placards during a sit-in, in front of the United Nations Headquarters demanding speeding up their immigration cases in Beirut, Lebanon, Feb. 13, 2017. Thousands of Christians from Iraq and Syria have fled violence in their country and sought refuge in Lebanon, a religiously-mixed country. The placard in Arabic reads “Oppressed.” (AP/Bilal Hussein)
Abdo Haddad, a Syrian Christian writer now living in Europe, made this plain in an interview with MintPress News, stating “[as] the Christians of the East developed a political sense of survival over the years, their first choice was to secure and support a strong state run by laws and, preferably, with a secular administration.”
But if Christians continue to leave the region in large numbers, secularism itself could become a relic of the region’s rich history. As Todd Johnson told the Wall Street Journal, “The disappearance of such minorities sets the stage for more radical groups to dominate in society. Religious minorities, at the very least, have a moderating effect.”
Haddad added that the greatest threat is even more grave. “The real danger lies in whether the Christian world loses the last early Christians, the last guards, the last ancient souls of the earth. If killing such a unique and profound community and civilization passes as easily as it looks, imagine what would become in your own nations once you dare to announce your faith or origin…,” he said.
Christianity and regime change in Iraq, Syria and Iran
Interestingly enough, the very countries that have protected religious minorities in the name of Arab secularism are those that have found themselves the targets of U.S.-led regime change efforts over the years.
Syria is a prime example, having been targeted by the U.S. since the 1980s. The most recent aggression has manifested in a massive war in which foreign-funded extremist “rebels” have sought to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2011. Syria’s Christians, protected by the Syrian government’s commitment to secularism, have overwhelmingly supported Assad throughout the affair.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, right, checks a church damaged by militants during a visit to the Christian village of Maaloula, near Damascus, Syria. April 20, 2014. (Syrian Presidency via Facebook)
As Haddad observed, those familiar with the Syrian crisis are well-aware that Syrian Christians overwhelmingly support the Syrian government in its fight against extremist militias.“The Syrian People including Christians, like their President and see in him hopes for the future. This doesn’t mean Christians don’t want reforms and change, but they want them in a civilized, gradual and progressive manner (unlike what happened in Libya).”
Osman asserted that Syrian Christians support the government in part because government-controlled regions of Syria are the only regions in which its 2.5 million Christians are safe and treated as equals alongside the nation’s Muslims. “The regime’s downfall would have been followed by massive carnage, by new waves of refugees heading west, and by the imposition of an islamist dictatorship. Whether it would had been controlled by the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra front or by the vanishing ISIS would be irrelevant to the Christians who would have been murdered, exiled, or enslaved.”
The alternative to Assad offers little to Syria’s Christians, as armed opposition forces are overwhelmingly allied with Wahhabism and extremism, having frequently called for the establishment of an Islamic state that would adhere to a colonialist ideology funded by Western nations like the UK and the United States.
This would ultimately end the nation’s longstanding commitment to secularism and endanger the many religious minority groups that have long inhabited Syria. For instance, the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group with ties to al-Qaeda, has repeatedlytargeted Christians in Syria. Al-Nusra was recently taken off of terror watchlists in both the U.S. and Canada after simply changing its name.
Even “rebels” directly armed by the U.S., such as the Free Syrian Army, have massacred villages of Christians throughout the course of the war. In 2013, the Free Syrian Army raided the Christian-majority al-Duvair village near the Lebanese border,massacring all of its civilian residents, including women and children.
A half-burned image of Christ is placed next to a wall at a Greek Orthodox church in Maaloula, Syria, March 3, 2016. Maaloula, an ancient Christian town 40 miles northeast of Damascus, the church was pillaged by Syrian rebels and buildings riddled with shrapnel reflect fierce fighting that devastated the town two years ago. (AP/Pavel Golovkin)
As Osman told MintPress: “In Syria the U.S. government remains committed to supporting the ‘rebels,’ although there are no “moderates” among them: all meaningful forces on the ground are Wahhabi fundamentalists who persecute Christians.”
Iraq is another example of how U.S.- and UK-led regime change has influenced the exodus of Christians from the Middle East. The invasion displaced millions of Iraqis, many of whom have yet to return, and also removed many Iraqis’ ability to feed themselves byessentially annihilating the nation’s once-sizable agricultural industry. During and after the invasion, Christianswere considered close to Saddam Hussein’s regime, given that his former foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, is a Chaldean Christian. The Chaldean Christian community, which stood at around 1.4 million before the 2003 invasion, was said to have been treated preferentially under Hussein. Following his ouster and in the chaos since, the Iraqi Christian population has dwindled to less than 300,000.
Dahlia Wasfi, an Iraqi-American activist, told MintPress News that the Iraqi regime supported by the U.S. after the invasion has also played a major role in triggering the Christian exodus. Wasfi asserted that “the greatest threat to specifically Christian (as well as Sunni) families was the conservative Shia government brought to power in Iraq by U.S. administrators in 2005 (elections were run by the occupiers). In the years that followed,government-backed death squads terrorized the population, driving many Christian and Sunni families out.”
A Dwekh Nawsha militia member sits on top of a tombstone inside a 200-year-old monastery in the Christian village of Bakufa, 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) north of Mosul, Iraq, Nov. 12, 2014. Dwekh Naswha, or “self sacrifice” in Assyrian, is a Christian militia formed by volunteers to protect Christian territories in the Nineveh Province in Iraq. (AP/Bram Janssen)
“Recent assaults on the Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and the ongoing so-called ‘liberation’ of Mosul,” Wasfi argued, “are a continuation of the conservative Shia government’s efforts to change the demographics on the ground and consolidate its rule.”
Interestingly, many of the death squads Wasfi referenced were directly trained by the U.S., suggesting that the U.S. military had a key role in the targeting of Christians within Iraq.
Aside from the clear examples of Syria and Iraq, Iran – whose Christian communities are thriving – is the latest country to be targeted by Western neo-conservatives, as evidenced by rhetoric delivered by President Donald Trump during his first foreign trip.
While Iran has long been characterized as being discriminatory towards Christians in U.S. media, its Chaldean and Armenian Christian communities are protected by its constitution and guaranteed political representation in parliament. Jews and Zoroastrians are also similarly protected. However, evangelical Christians in Iran have been persecuted, particularly for allegedly proselytizing Muslims and members of other non-Christian religions. The total Christian population in Iran is difficult to accurately estimate, with some groups claiming there are 450,000 while others claim that there are as many as 1 million.
While secularism is hardly the driving factor behind U.S.-led regime change in the Middle East, the West’s targeting of Middle Eastern secular nations that protect Christians is an undeniable factor in prompting the exodus of the region’s Christians.
Persecution of Christians rampant in Saudi Arabia, Israel
However, other Middle Eastern nations – especially those supported by the West – are well-known for their persecution of religious minorities. Nowhere is this truer than in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the apartheid state of Israel.
In Saudi Arabia, the government openly condemns any person who fails to conform to the Wahhabi sect of Islam embraced by the House of Saud and a product of British colonialism to topple of the Ottoman Empire. It is a puritanical religious and political policy that targets not only those of different faiths but other Muslims. As Human Rights Watch noted in itsWorld Report for 2013: “Saudi Arabia does not tolerate public worship by adherents of religions other than Islam and systematically discriminates against its Muslim religious minorities, in particular, Shia and Ismailis. The chief mufti in March called for the destruction of all churches in the Arabian Peninsula.”
In 2014, the Saudi government detained 28 Christians for worshiping in a private home in the city of Khafji. Their whereabouts still remain unknown. At the time, Nina Shea, director of the Washington-based Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom,told Fox News: “Saudi Arabia is continuing the religious cleansing that has always been its official policy.”
But worse than the Saudis’ treatment of religious minorities within their own borders is their exportation of their intolerant Wahhabi ideology abroad. Many extremist terror groups – including Daesh (ISIS) and al-Qaeda – are followers of Wahhabism,and both aremajor beneficiaries of Saudi funding, which neither the Saudi government nor those of its allies in the West have sought to end. Saudi Arabia isthe world’s largest exporter and fundraiser of radical Wahhabi terrorism. These groups, as has been made clear by their actions in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere, tend to target religious minorities, particularly Christians.
Another chief ally of the West in the Middle East is also known for targeting Christians. Israel, best known for its persecution of the Palestinians,– whom are both Muslim and Christian– targets non-Jews due to its status as an apartheid ethno-religious state. As Wasfi explained to MintPress, “the military occupation by the colonial settler state of Israel, supported by Western governments” has been a major factor in the exodus of Christians from the Middle East.
Israelis and Palestinians protest after two cemeteries, one Muslim and the other Christian, were vandalized by graffiti in the mixed Arab Jewish neighborhood of Jaffa, Israel,, Oct. 8, 2011. (AP/Oded Balilty)
Israel’s government has a long history of desecrating churches and persecuting the historic Palestinian Christians. For example, following the capture of Jaffa by European Zionist-Jewish forces in May 1948, Catholic Palestinian priest Father Deleque reported: “Jewish soldiers broke down the doors of my church and robbed many precious and sacred objects. Then they threw the statues of Christ down into a nearby garden.” He added that, while Jewish leaders had reassured that religious buildings would be respected, “their deeds do not correspond to their words.”
That same year, the Christian Union of Palestine publicly complained that British backed European Zionist-Jewish forces had used several Christian churches and humanitarian institutions in Jerusalem as military bases andhad desecrated them. They added that three priests and more than 100 women and children had been killed by the indiscriminate shelling of their places of worship by European Zionist-Jewish forces.
Israel’s discrimination against Palestinian Christians has continued ever since. For instance, in 1982, the Baptist Church in Jerusalemburned down, a target of arson. No one was ever charged. When the Baptists sought to rebuild the church, groups of Jews demonstrated against the project and the district planning commission refused to grant a building permit. Three years later, the Israeli Supreme Court advised the Baptists to leave the “all-Jewish” area.
Such acts continue today. Pastor Steven Khoury, an Arab-Israeli Christian, said that “There’s no persecution in the Holy Land … unless you share your faith,” inan interview with the Voice of the Martyrs, a Christian non-profit that highlights the persecution of Christians worldwide. Khoury said he had witnessed church members being attacked because of their faith on many occasions.
Watch 60 Minutes’ Investigation into Israel’s Persecution of Christians in Palestine:
Palestinian Christians, due to their ethnicity, have been even more heavily targeted by the Israeli state, fleeing their homeland as a result along with thousands of their non-Christian countrymen. When European Zionist militias invaded Palestine to create the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian Christians numbered 200,000. By 1995, Christian Palestinians living in the region numbered only 50,0000. Now, of an estimated 400,000 Christian Palestinians, mostlive abroad, mainly in the Americas.
Zionist plan for Israeli superiority excludes Christians
So why has the West targeted mostly secular nations while simultaneously supporting countries and extremist groups that persecute religious minorities, particularly Christians? While the attack on secularism in the Arab world could be a consequence of Western neo-colonialism in the region, long-held plans for Israel’s regional dominance – a goal strongly supported by the West, particularly the U.S. – shed light on potential reasons for the West’s reluctance to respect religious diversity in the Middle East.
A Catholic monk stands in a doorway of the Latrun Trappist Monastery where Israeli police say vandals spray-painted anti-Christian and pro-settler graffiti and set the monastery’s door on fire, in Latrun, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel. (AP/Oded Balilt)
The Yinon Plan, as it is known, is a strategy intended to ensure Israel’s regional superiority in the Middle East that chiefly involves reconfiguring the entire Arab world into smaller and weaker sectarian states.
“Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims.”
This plan has been widely supported by numerous U.S. politicians – most notably by former Vice President Joe Biden, whopushed a non-binding resolution through the Senate that called for carving Iraq into the same states laid out in the Yinon Plan.
However, the plan to partition Iraq included no territory for Iraq’s Christians or its other religious minorities.
The Yinon Plan seeks to divide more than just Iraq. Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would all be partitioned, according to the plan, with parts of these countries being subsequently absorbed into “Greater Israel.” This can already be seen playing out in the Syrian conflict, where Israel’s involvement in the war largely revolves around its desire to claim the occupied Golan Heights as its own.
A nun looks at a heavily damaged Church of Multiplication after a fire broke out overnight near the Sea of Galilee in Tabgha, Israel, Thursday, June 18, 2015. A passage from a Jewish prayer, calling for the wiping out of idol worship, was found scrawled in red spray paint on a wall outside the Catholic church.
Thus, it could very well be the West’s commitment to the Yinon Plan that has helped to shape its policy of feigned ignorance regarding the plight of the region’s Christians. Middle Eastern Christians’ commitment to and strong preference for secularism has no place in a neo-colonial Middle East that built into sectarian states intended to be kept in constant war with one another. Israel’s desire to dominate the region – a goal abetted by their Western allies – may hold much of the blame for the continued exodus of Mideast Christians.
But ultimately, the continuing exodus of Christians is endemic of a larger crisis facing the region as years of conflict and modern warfare have taken into toll on the people as well as the environment.
Wasfi pointed to U.S military aggression as the main culprit for this burgeoning crisis. “In the bigger picture, the overall loss of life and devastation of what is historically known as the ‘Fertile Crescent’ by Western invasion, occupation, and continuous war is the great tragedy. […] The sooner U.S. military aggression in the region ends, the sooner the healing can begin.”
