Tag Archives: International Law

Forget liberating Ukraine – We first need to liberate our minds

Posted on by
1

Because we in the West are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, and the most dangerous

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Nothing should better qualify me to write about world affairs at the moment – and Western meddling in Ukraine – than the fact that I have intimately followed the twists and turns of Israeli politics for two decades.

We will turn to the wider picture in a moment. But before that, let us consider developments in Israel, as its “historic”, year-old government – which included for the very first time a party representing a section of Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens – teeters on the brink of collapse.

Crisis struck, as everyone knew it would sooner or later, because the Israeli parliament had to vote on a major issue relating to the occupation: renewing a temporary law that for decades has regularly extended Israel’s legal system outside its territory, applying it to Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.

That law lies at the heart of an Israeli political system that the world’s leading human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, now belatedly admit has always constituted apartheid. The law ensures that Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law receive rights different from, and far superior to, those of the Palestinians that are ruled over by Israel’s occupying military authorities.

The law enshrines the principle of Jim Crow-style inequality, creating two different systems of law in the West Bank: one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. But it does more. Those superior rights, and their enforcement by Israel’s army, have for decades allowed Jewish settlers to rampage against Palestinian rural communities with absolute impunity and steal their land – to the point that Palestinians are now confined to tiny, choked slivers of their own homeland.

In international law, that process is called “forcible transfer,” or what we would think of as ethnic cleansing. It’s a major reason that the settlements are a war crime – a fact that the International Criminal Court in the Hague is finding it very hard to ignore. Israel’s leading politicians and generals would all be tried for war crimes if we lived in a fair, and sane, world.

So what happened when this law came before the parliament for a vote on its renewal? The “historic” government, supposedly a rainbow coalition of leftwing and rightwing Jewish parties joined by a religiously conservative Palestinian party, split on entirely predictable ethnic lines.

Members of the Palestinian party either voted against the law or absented themselves from the vote. All the Jewish parties in the government voted for it. The law failed – and the government is now in trouble – because the rightwing Likud Party of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined the Palestinian parties in voting against the law, in the hope of bringing the government down, even though his legislators are completely committed to the apartheid system it upholds.

Upholding apartheid

What is most significant about the vote is that it has revealed something far uglier about Israel’s Jewish tribalism than most Westerners appreciate. It shows that all of Israel’s Jewish parties – even the “nice ones” that are termed leftwing or liberal – are in essence racist.

Most Westerners understand Zionism to be split into two broad camps: the right, including the far-right, and the liberal-left camp.

Today this so-called liberal-left camp is tiny and represented by the Israeli Labour and Meretz parties. Israel’s Labour Party is considered so respectable that Britain’s Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, publicly celebrated the recent restoration of ties after the Israeli party severed connections during the term of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

But note this. Not only have the Labour and Meretz parties been sitting for a year in a government led by Naftali Bennett, whose party represents the illegal settlements, they have just voted for the very apartheid law that ensures the settlers get superior rights over Palestinians, including the right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.

In the case of the Israeli Labour Party, that is hardly surprising. Labour founded the first settlements and, apart from a brief period in the late 1990s when it paid lip service to a peace process, always backed to the hilt the apartheid system that enabled the settlements to expand. None of that ever troubled Britain’s Labour Party, apart from when it was led by Corbyn, a genuinely dedicated anti-racist.

But by contrast to Labour, Meretz is an avowedly anti-occupation party. That was the very reason it was founded in the early 1990s. Opposition to the occupation and the settlements is supposedly hardwired into its DNA. So how did it vote for the very apartheid law underpinning the settlements?

Utter hypocrisy

The naïve, or mischievous, will tell you Meretz had no choice because the alternative was Bennett’s government losing the vote – which in fact happened anyway – and reviving the chances of Netanyahu returning to power. Meretz’s hands were supposedly tied.

This argument – of pragmatic necessity – is one we often hear when groups professing to believe one thing act in ways that damage the very thing they say they hold dear.

But Israeli commentator Gideon Levy makes a very telling point that applies far beyond this particular Israeli case.

He notes that Meretz would never have been seen to vote for the apartheid law – whatever the consequences – if the issue had been about transgressing the rights of Israel’s LGBTQ community rather than transgressing Palestinian rights. Meretz, whose leader is gay, has LGBTQ rights at the top of its agenda.

Levy writes: “Two justice systems in the same territory, one for straight people and another for gay people? Is there any circumstance in which this would happen? A single political constellation that could bring it about?”

The same could be said of Labour, even if we believe, as Starmer apparently does, that it is a leftwing party. Its leader, Merav Michaeli, is an ardent feminist.

Would Labour, Levy writes, “ever raise its hand for apartheid laws against [Israeli] women in the West Bank? Two separate legal systems, one for men and another for women? Never. Absolutely not.”

Levy’s point is that even for the so-called Zionist left, Palestinians are inherently inferior by virtue of the fact that they are Palestinian. The Palestinian gay community and Palestinian women are just as affected by the Israel’s apartheid law favoring Jewish settlers as Palestinian men are. So in voting for it, Meretz and Labour showed that they do not care about the rights of Palestinian women or members of the Palestinian LGBTQ community. Their support for women and the gay community is dependent on the ethnicity of those belonging to these groups.

It should not need highlighting how close such a distinction on racial grounds is to the views espoused by the traditional supporters of Jim Crow in the U.S. or apartheid’s supporters in South Africa.

So what makes Meretz and Labour legislators capable of not just utter hypocrisy but such flagrant racism? The answer is Zionism.

Zionism is a form of ideological tribalism that prioritizes Jewish privilege in the legal, military and political realms. However leftwing you consider yourself, if you subscribe to Zionism you regard your ethnic tribalism as supremely important – and for that reason alone, you are racist.

You may not be conscious of your racism, you may not wish to be racist, but by default you are. Ultimately, when push comes to shove, when you perceive your own Jewish tribalism to be under threat from another tribalism, you will revert to type. Your racism will come to fore, just as surely as Meretz’s just did.

Deceptive solidarity

But of course, there is nothing exceptional about most Israeli Jews or Israel’s Zionist supporters abroad, whether Jewish or not. Tribalism is endemic to the way most of us view the world, and rapidly comes to the surface whenever we perceive our tribe to be in danger.

Most of us can quickly become extreme tribalists. When tribalism relates to more trivial matters, such as supporting a sports team, it mostly manifests in less dangerous forms, such as boorish or aggressive behavior. But if it relates to an ethnic or national group, it encourages a host of more dangerous behaviors: jingoism, racism, discrimination, segregation and warmongering.

As sensitive as Meretz is to its own tribal identities, whether the Jewish one or a solidarity with the LGBTQ community, its sensitivity to the tribal concerns of others can quickly dissolve when that other identity is presented as threatening. Which is why Meretz, in prioritizing its Jewish identity, lacks any meaningful solidarity with Palestinians or even the Palestinian LGBTQ community.

Instead, Meretz’s opposition to the occupation and the settlements often appears more rooted in the sentiment that they are bad for Israel and its relations with the West than that they are a crime against Palestinians.

This inconsistency means we can easily be fooled about who our real allies are. Just because we share a commitment to one thing, such as ending the occupation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we do so for the same reasons – or we attach the same importance to our commitment.

It is easy, for example, for less experienced Palestinian solidarity activists to assume when they hear Meretz politicians that the party will help advance the Palestinian cause. But failing to understand Meretz’s tribal priorities is a recipe for constant disappointment – and futile activism on behalf of Palestinians.

The Oslo “peace” process remained credible in the West for so long only because Westerners misunderstood how it fitted with the tribal priorities of Israelis. Most were ready to back peace in the abstract so long as it did not entail any practical loss of their tribal privileges.

Yitzhak Rabin, the West’s Israeli partner in the Oslo process, showed what such tribalism entailed in the wake of a gun rampage by a settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994 that killed and wounded more than 100 Palestinians at worship in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

Rather than using the murder spree as the justification to implement his commitment to remove the small colonies of extreme settlers from Hebron, Rabin put Hebron’s Palestinians under curfew for many months. Those restrictions have never been fully lifted for many of Hebron’s Palestinians and have allowed Jewish settlers to expand their colonies ever since.

Hierarchy of tribalisms

There is a further point that needs underscoring, and that the Israel-Palestine case illustrates well. Not all tribalisms are equal, or equally dangerous. Palestinians are quite capable of being tribal too. Just look at the self-righteous posturing of some Hamas leaders, for example.

But whatever delusions Zionists subscribe to, Palestinian tribalism is clearly far less dangerous to Israel than Jewish tribalism is to Palestinians.

Israel, the state representing Jewish tribalists, has the support of all Western governments and major media outlets, as well as most Arab governments, and at the very least the complicity of global institutions. Israel has an army, navy and air force, all of which can rely on the latest, most powerful weaponry, itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. Israel also enjoys special trading status with the West, which has made its economy one of the strongest on the planet.

The idea that Israeli Jews have a greater reason to fear the Palestinians (or in a further delusion, the Arab world) than Palestinians have to fear Israel is easily refuted. Simply consider how many Israeli Jews would wish to exchange places with a Palestinian – whether in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem or from the minority living inside Israel.

The lesson is that there is a hierarchy of tribalisms, and that a tribalism is more dangerous if it enjoys more power. Empowered tribalisms have the ability to cause much greater harm than disempowered tribalisms. Not all tribalisms are equally destructive.

But there is a more significant point. An empowered tribalism necessarily provokes, accentuates and deepens a disempowered tribalism. Zionists often claim that Palestinians are a made-up or imaginary people because they did not identify as Palestinians until after the state of Israel was created. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously suggested the Palestinians were an invented people.

This was, of course, self-serving nonsense. But it has a kernel of truth that makes it sound plausible. Palestinian identity clarified and intensified as a result of the threat posed by Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe, claiming the Palestinian homeland as their own.

As the saying goes, you don’t always fully appreciate what you have until you face losing it. Palestinians had to sharpen their national identity, and their national ambitions, faced with the threat that someone else was claiming what they had always assumed belonged to them.

Superior values

So how does all this help us understand our own tribalism in the West?

Not least, whatever the anxieties being encouraged in the West over the supposed threat posed by Russia and China, the reality is that the West’s tribalism – sometimes termed “Western civilization,” or “the rules-based order,” or “the democratic world,” or, even more ludicrously, “the international community” – is by far the most powerful of all tribalisms on the planet. And so also the most dangerous.

Israel’s tribal power, for example, derives almost exclusively from the West’s tribal power. It is an adjunct, an extension, of Western tribal power.

But we need to be a little more specific in our thinking. You and I subscribe to Western tribalism – either consciously or less so, depending on whether we see ourselves as on the right or the left of the political spectrum – because it has been cultivated in us over a lifetime through parenting, schools and the corporate media.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1532236818782908416

We think West is best. None of us would want to be Russian or Chinese, any more than Israeli Jews would choose to be Palestinian. We implicitly understand that we have privileges over other tribes. And because we are tribal, we assume those privileges are justified in some way. They either derive from our own inherent superiority (a view often associated with the far right) or from a superior culture or traditions (a view usually embracing the moderate right, liberals and parts of the left).

Again, this echoes Zionist views. Israeli Jews on the right tend to believe that they have inherently superior qualities to Palestinians and Arabs, who are seen as primitive, backward or barbarian-terrorists. Overlapping with these assumptions, religious-Zionist Jews tend to imagine that they are superior because they have the one true God on their side.

By contrast, most secular Jews on the left, like the liberals of Meretz, believe that their superiority derives from some vague conception of Western “culture” or civilization that has fostered in them a greater ability to show tolerance and compassion, and act rationally, than do most Palestinians.

Meretz would like to extend that culture to Palestinians to help them benefit from the same civilizing influences. But until that can happen, they, like the Zionist right, view Palestinians primarily as a threat.

Seen in simple terms, Meretz believes they cannot easily empower the Palestinian LGBTQ community, much as they would like to, without also empowering Hamas. And they do not wish to do that because an empowered Hamas, they fear, would not only threaten the Palestinian LGBTQ community but the Israeli one too.

So liberating Palestinians from decades of Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing will just have to wait for a more opportune moment – however long that may take, and however many Palestinians must suffer in the meantime.

New Hitlers

The parallels with our own, Western worldview should not be hard to perceive.

We understand that our tribalism, our prioritizing of our own privileges in the West, entails suffering for others. But either we assume we are more deserving than other tribes, or we assume others – to become deserving – must first be brought up to our level through education and other civilizing influences. They will just have to suffer in the meantime.

When we read about the “white man’s burden” worldview in history books, we understand – with the benefit of distance from those times – how ugly Western colonialism was. When it is suggested that we might still harbor this kind of tribalism, we get irritated or, more likely, indignant. “Racist – me? Ridiculous!”

Further, our blindness to our own super-empowered Western tribalism makes us oblivious too to the effect our tribalism has on less empowered tribalisms. We imagine ourselves under constant threat from any other tribal group that asserts its own tribalism in the face of our more empowered tribalism.

Some of those threats can be more ideological and amorphous, particularly in recent years: like the supposed “clash of civilisations” against the Islamist extremism of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

But our preferred enemies have a face, and all too readily can be presented as an improbable stand-in for our template of the bogeyman: Adolf Hitler.

Those new Hitlers pop up one after another, like a whack-a-mole game we can never quite win.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – supposedly ready to fire the WMD he didn’t actually have in our direction in less than 45 minutes.

The mad ayatollahs of Iran and their politician-puppets – seeking to build a nuclear bomb to destroy our forward outpost of Israel before presumably turning their warheads on Europe and the U.S.

And then there is the biggest, baddest monster of them all: Vladimir Putin. The mastermind threatening our way of life, our values, or civilization with his mind games, disinformation and control of social media through an army of bots.

Existential threats

Because we are as blind to our own tribalism as Meretz is to its racism towards Palestinians, we cannot understand why anyone else might fear us more than we fear them. Our “superior” civilization has cultivated in us a solipsism, a narcissism, that refuses to acknowledge our threatening presence in the world.

The Russians could never be responding to a threat – real or imagined – that we might pose by expanding our military presence right up to Russia’s borders.

The Russians could never see our NATO military alliance as primarily aggressive rather than defensive, as we claim, even though somewhere in a small, dark mental recess where things that make us uncomfortable are shoved we know that Western armies have launched a series of direct wars of aggression against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and via proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela.

The Russians could never genuinely fear neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine – groups that until recently Western media worried were growing in power – even after those neo-Nazis were integrated into the Ukrainian military and led what amounts to a civil war against ethnic Russian communities in the country’s east.

In our view, when Putin spoke of the need to de-Nazify Ukraine, he was not amplifying Russians’ justifiable fears of Nazism on their doorstep, given their history, or the threat those groups genuinely pose to ethnic Russian communities nearby. No, he was simply proving that he and the likely majority of Russians who think as he does are insane.

More than that, his hyperbole gave us permission to bring our covert arming of these neo-Nazis groups out into the light. Now we embrace these neo-Nazis, as we do the rest of Ukraine, and send them advanced weaponry – many billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry.

And while we do this, we self-righteously berate Putin for being a madman and for his disinformation. He is demented or a liar for viewing us as a existential threat to Russia, while we are entirely justified in viewing him as an existential threat to Western civilization.

And so we keep feeding the chimerical devil we fear. And however often our fears are exposed as self-rationalizing, we never learn.

Saddam Hussein posed an earlier existential threat. His non-existent WMDs were going to be placed in his non-existent long-range missiles to destroy us. So we had every right to destroy Iraq first, preemptively. But when those WMDs turned out not to exist, whose fault was it? Not ours, of course. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He didn’t tell us he did not have WMDs. How could we have known? In our view, Iraq ended up being destroyed because Saddam was a strongman who believed his own propaganda, a primitive Arab hoisted by his own petard.

If we paused for a moment and stood outside our own tribalism, we might realize how dangerously narcissistic – quite how mad – we sound. Saddam Hussein did not tell us he had no WMDs, that he had secretly destroyed them many years earlier, because he feared us and our uncontrollable urge to dominate the globe. He feared that, if we knew he lacked those weapons, we might have more of an incentive to attack him and Iraq, either directly or through proxies. It was we who trapped him in his own lie.

And then there is Iran. Our endless fury with the mad ayatollahs – our economic sanctions, our and Israel’s executions of Iran’s scientists, our constant chatter of invasion – are intended to stop Tehran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon that might finally level the Middle East’s playing field with Israel, whom we helped to develop a large nuclear arsenal decades ago.

Iran must be stopped so it cannot destroy Israel and then us. Our fears of the Iranian nuclear threat are paramount. We must strike, directly or through proxies, against its allies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Gaza. Our entire Middle East policy must be fashioned around the effort to prevent Iran from ever gaining the bomb.

In our madness, we cannot imagine the fears of Iranians, their realistic sense that we pose a much graver threat to them than they could ever pose to us. In the circumstances, to Iranians, a nuclear weapon might surely look like a very wise insurance policy – a deterrence – against our boundless self-righteousness.

Vicious cycle

Because we are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, as well as the most dangerous. We create the reality we think we oppose. We spawn the devils we fear. We force our rivals into the role of bogeyman that makes us feel good about ourselves.

In Israel, Meretz imagines it opposes the occupation. And yet it keeps conspiring in actions – supposedly to aid Israel’s security, like the apartheid law – that justifiably make Palestinians fear for their existence and believe they have no Jewish allies in Israel. Backed into a corner, Palestinians resist, either in an organized fashion, as during their intifada uprisings, or through ineffectual “lone-wolf” attacks by individuals.

But the Zionist tribalism of Meretz – as liberal, humane and caring as they are – means they can perceive only their own existential anxieties; they cannot see themselves as a threat to others or grasp the fears that they and other Zionists provoke in Palestinians. So the Palestinians must be dismissed as religious maniacs, or primitive, or barbarian-terrorists.

This kind of tribalism produces a vicious cycle – for us, as for Israel. Our behaviors based on the assumption of superiority – our greed and aggression – mean we inevitably deepen the tribalisms of others and provoke their resistance. Which in turn rationalizes our assumption that we must act even more tribally, even more greedily, even more aggressively.

Cheerleading war

We each have more than one tribal identity, of course. We are not only British, French, American, Brazilian. We are Black, Asian, Hispanic, white. We are straight, gay, trans, or something even more complex. We are conservative, liberal, left. We may support a team, or have a faith.

These tribal identities can conflict and interact in complex ways. As Meretz shows, one identity may come to the fore, and recede into the background, depending on circumstances and the perception of threat.

But perhaps most important of all, some tribalisms can be harnessed and manipulated by other, narrower, more covert tribal identities. Remember, not all tribalisms are equal.

Western elites – our politicians, corporate leaders, billionaires – have their own narrow tribalism. They prioritize their own tribe and its interests: making money and retaining power on the world stage. But given how ugly, selfish and destructive this tribe would look were it to stand before us nakedly pursuing power for its own benefit, it promotes its tribal interests in the name of the wider tribe and its “cultural” values.

This elite tribe wages its endless wars for resource control, it oppresses others, it imposes austerity, it wrecks the planet, all in the name of Western civilization.

When we cheerlead the West’s wars; when we reluctantly concede that other societies must be smashed; when we accept that poverty and food banks are an unfortunate byproduct of supposed economic realities, as is the toxifying of the planet, we conspire in advancing not our own tribal interests but someone else’s.

When we send tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, we imagine we are being selfless, helping those in trouble, stopping an evil madman, upholding international law, listening to Ukrainians. But our understanding of why events are unfolding as they are in Ukraine, more so than how they are unfolding, has been imposed on us, just as it has on ordinary Ukrainians and ordinary Russians.

We believe we can end the war through more muscle. We assume we can terrorize Russia into withdrawal. Or even more dangerously, we fantasize that we can defeat a nuclear-armed Russia and remove its “madman” president. We cannot imagine that we are only stoking the very fears that drove Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place, the very fears that brought a strongman like Putin to power and sustain him there. We make the situation worse in assuming we are making it better.

So why do we do it?

Because our thoughts are not our own. We are dancing to a tune composed by others whose motives and interests we barely comprehend.

An endless war is not in our interests, nor in those of Ukrainians or Russians. But it might just be in the interests of Western elites that need to “weaken the enemy” to expand their dominance; that need pretexts to hoover up our money for wars that profit them alone; that need to create enemies to shore up the tribalism of Western publics so that we do not start to see things from the point of view of others or wonder whether our own tribalism really serves our interests or those of an elite.

The truth is we are being constantly manipulated, duped, propagandized to advance “values” that are not inherent in our “superior” culture but manufactured for us by the elites’ public-relations arm, the corporate media. We are made into willing co-conspirators in behavior that actually harms us, others, and the planet.

In Ukraine, our very compassion to help is being weaponized in ways that will kill Ukrainians and destroy their communities, just as Meretz’s caring liberalism has spent decades rationalizing the oppression of Palestinians in the name of ending it.

We cannot liberate Ukraine or Russia. But what we can do may, in the long term, prove far more significant: We can start liberating our minds.

In Redux of Iraq War Run Up, Media Cheers on Assassination of Soleimani

Posted on by
1

Gen. Qassim Soleimani, center, attends a meeting of a group of the Guard members with Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran on Oct. 2, 2019. Photo | AP

With echoes of Iraq, media are once again cheering an attack against a Middle Eastern country on the grounds of a supposedly imminent strike against the United States.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

Early Friday morning, a U.S. airstrike assassinated Iranian Lt. General Qassem Soleimani as he traveled from Baghdad’s international airport. A charismatic and capable military figure, Soleimani was widely considered to be one of the most powerful and influential individuals in Iran. Two years to the day since MintPress News reported that the U.S. government had given the green light to assassinate him, Soleimani’s convoy was struck from the air. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented the decision as a defensive one, claiming that Soleimani was preparing an “imminent attack” against the U.S. When pressed, he refused to give any more evidence or details. Despite claiming the strike made Americans much safer, the government immediately instructed all U.S. citizens to leave Iraq and avoid the American Embassy.

Assassinating foreign leaders is a major international war crime under international law, yet across the corporate spectrum, media applauded the bombing, or “precision targeting,” as CNN described it. Unsurprisingly, many conservative media outlets supported the Trump administration’s decision to potentially spark a huge international conflict. The Washington Examiner quoted one “expert” celebrating the killing as more important than Bin Laden’s death and a “massive blow to the regime.” Fox News quickly published an opinion piece from Christian Whiton of the strongly hawkish Center for the National Interest, praising Trump for acting “correctly and decisively,” preventing further American bloodshed by taking out a major “terrorist.” It also immediately invited major Neoconservative hawks and public faces of the Iraq War, Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer, on air to discuss the situation and inform its audience what to think.

Media with more liberal audiences ­– who claim to be leading the resistance against a dangerous fascist commander-in-chief – were no less supportive of Trump’s latest aggressive actions. Just as it had done with U.S.-supported coup attempts in Venezuela and Bolivia, resistance media lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with the president and condemned Soleimani as guilty of a myriad of crimes against humanity. CNBC’s headline read, “America just took out the world’s no. 1 bad guy,” accusing him of being the leader of the world’s “most active and pervasive terrorist army.” It claimed that Trump’s decision had “saved current lives” and represented “justice” to his many victims. It also claimed that it saved further American lives as it would “deter future Iranian attack plans.” “There’s no question Soleimani had American blood on his hands” claimed one source in USA Today; “he was an enemy.” It is worth noting, however, that the American deaths being referenced are not civilians, but members of an invading and occupying army in Iraq who were killed by locals resisting a foreign occupier.

The New York Times claimed he had “spent the last decade replicating the Hezbollah model in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how” and held him responsible for “driving over 10 million [Syrian] people from their homes” not mentioning the American role in any of those warzones. Meanwhile, CNN’s Alex Marquardt claimed that, “US lawmakers are united in their support of the killing of Soleimani” and that Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that, “this is a man who deserved to be killed because of everything he has done against American forces” and were busy “congratulating” Trump for his heroism. The message from corporate media was clear: “Soleimani is a ruthless killer. He’s a horrible human being,” (CNN). The evidence presented for this claim was that “he commanded a division in the Iran/Iraq War” – a war in which the United States armed, funded and supported its then ally Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, causing around one million deaths.

In reality, corporate media are not celebrating Soleimani’s assassination because of his many (real) faults, but rather because of his qualities as an effective leader and organizer, someone who has constantly stymied American efforts to further dominate the region. In Syria, where the U.S. has all but allied with Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra in order to overthrow the Assad dynasty, Iran has provided a significant counterweight to American-backed forces. Likewise, it continues to support groups such as Hezbollah that resist the U.S. and its allies across the region. It has also, rhetorically at least, supported the Houthi rebels fighting against a U.S./Saudi onslaught, although the extent of Iranian involvement is questionable.

The U.S. government has announced that it is preparing to increase its presence in the wake of the Soleimani assassination, sending at least 3,000 more troops to the region. With echoes of Iraq, media are once again cheering an attack and a military build-up against a Middle Eastern country on the grounds of a supposedly imminent strike against the United States. History, they say, never repeats itself. But it often rhymes.

 

Related Video

CODEPINK Denounces Illegal Entry and Arrest at DC Venezuelan Embassy and Vows to Keep Fighting to Protect the Embassy

Posted on by
Reply

By Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

Source: Code Pink

Thursday, May 16, Washington D.C. — At 9:30 AM in the morning, D.C. police officers illegally entered the Venezuelan embassy in Washington D.C. in the Georgetown neighborhood and arrested four activists lawfully living in the building since April 10, as guests of the legitimate Venezuelan government. The four activists are Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese (with the group Popular Resistance), Adrienne Pine (an academic) and David Paul (a CODEPINK member). They are part of the Embassy Protection Collective that has been living in the embassy since April 10.

“They are charged with ‘interference with certain protective functions.’ It is notable that they were not charged with trespassing, which makes it perfectly clear that the US government does not want to be in the position of having to explain who is lawfully in charge of these premises,” says the Embassy Protection Collective’s attorney Mara Verheyden Hilliard. “What we are seeing today is the most extraordinary violation of the Vienna Convention. The fact that the State Department has broken into a protected diplomatic mission to arrest the peace activists inside is something that will have repercussions the world over.”

“We denounce these arrests, as the people inside were there with our permission, and we consider it a violation of the Vienna Conventions,” says Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron. “We do not authorize any of the coup leaders to enter our embassy in Washington DC. We call on the US government to respect the Vienna Conventions and sign a Protecting Power Agreement with us that would ensure the integrity of both our Embassy in Washington DC and the US Embassy in Caracas.” The US has been negotiating with Switzerland to take charge of its Caracas Embassy and Venezuela has been negotiating with Turkey to take charge of its DC Embassy. These critical negotiations will be broken, however, if the US illegally hands over the Venezuelan Embassy to the forces of opposition leader Juan Guaido.

On April 10, members of the Embassy Protection Collective, including activists from CODEPINK, Popular Resistance and the ANSWER Coalition, moved into the Venezuelan embassy in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. to serve as an interim embassy protection force to prevent the Trump administration from allowing representatives of non-elected opposition leader Juan Guiado from taking over the building as part of a repeatedly attempted and failed coup.

From April 10-April 30, members of the Embassy Protection Collective were able to come and go freely from the building, with up to 50 activists sleeping there. On April 30, a group of Guaidó supporters —coinciding with Guaidó’s failed call for an uprising inside Venezuela — descended on the embassy, determined to oust the activists and seize the building. They blared sirens, horns, and megaphones and surrounded the perimeter of the building with tents, refusing to allow food, medicine, supplies, or people to enter. Multiple peace activists were physically assaulted and arrested in attempts to approach the building with food. On May 8, Potomac Electric Power Company (Pepco), assisted by the Secret Service, cut electricity despite all utility bills being paid in full.

The Collective maintains that the arrests are illegal under Articles 22 and 45 of the 1961 Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations, in which diplomatic premises are “inviolable” and agents of the receiving State may not enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission. The Trump Administration has not only allowed illegal seizures of diplomatic premises belonging to Venezuela, but has actively facilitated it by giving the Military Attache building and the New York City Consulate to the opposition.

“This struggle is far from over. We will continue to fight to stop this embassy from being handed over by the Guaidó supporters,” says CODEPINK Codirector Medea Benjamin. “The Embassy Protection Collective recognizes that turning over the embassy over to Guaidó would place the U.S. embassy in Caracas in jeopardy. We will continue to use all methods at our disposal to keep the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. empty until a diplomatic solution — a Protecting Power Agreement — can be worked out between the U.S. and the Venezuelan governments.”

A Protecting Power Agreement would allow third countries to take charge of both the Venezuela and US Embassies. Such an agreement could lead to further negotiations to avoid a military conflict that would be catastrophic for Venezuela, the United States, and for the region. It could lead to a catastrophic loss of lives and mass migration from the chaos and conflict of war, exacerbating the existing humanitarian crisis stoked by U.S. economic sanctions. It could cost the United States trillions of dollars and become a quagmire similar to the U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Related Article:

Who’s behind the pro-Guaido mob that besieged Venezuela’s embassy in Washington?

 

The Triumph of Evil

Posted on by
Reply

(Museum of the Revolution, León, Nicaragua)

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.”

Nicolas Maduro Moros was elected president of Venezuela in 2013 and again in 2018. Previously he served as vice president and foreign minister, and he was elected to the National Assembly in 2000. Despite Washington’s propaganda campaign against him and Washington’s attempt to instigate violent street protests and Maduro’s overthrow by the Venezuelan military, whose leaders have been offered large sums of money, Maduro has the overwhelming support of the people, and the military has not moved against him.

What is going on is that American oil companies want to recover their control over the revenue streams from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Under the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez, continued by Maduro, the oil revenues instead of departing the country have been used to reduce poverty and raise literacy inside Venezuela.

The opposition to Maduro inside Venezuela comes from the elites who have been traditionally allied with Washington in the looting of the country. These corrupt elites, with the CIA’s help, temporarily overthrew Chavez, but the people and the Venezuelan military secured his release and return to the presidency.

Washington has a long record of refusing to accept any reformist governments in Latin America. Reformers get in the way of North America’s exploitation of Latin American countries and are overthrown.

With the exceptions of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Latin America consists of Washington’s vassal states. In recent years Washington destroyed reform governments in Honduras, Argentina and Brazil and put gangsters in charge.

According to US national security adviser John Bolton, a neoconservative war monger, the governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua will soon be overthrown. New sanctions have now been placed on the three countries. Washington in the typical display of its pettiness targeted sanctions against the son of the Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. https://www.rt.com/news/456841-bolton-russia-venezuela-threat/

Ortega has been the leader of Nicaragua since for 40 years. He was president 1985-1990 and has been elected and reelected as president since 2006.

Ortega was the opponent of Somoza, Washington’s dictator in Nicaragua. Consequently he and his movement were attacked by the neoconservative operation known as Iran-Contra during the Reagan years. Ortega was a reformer. His government focused on literacy, land reform, and nationalization, which was at the expense of the wealthy ruling class. He was labeled a “Marxist-Leninist,” and Washington attempted to discredit his reforms as controversial leftist policies.

Somehow Castro and Ortega survived Washington’s plots against them. By the skin of his teeth so did Chavez unless you believe it was the CIA that gave him cancer. Castro and Chavez are dead. Ortega is 74. Maduro is in trouble, because Washington has stolen Venezuela’s bank deposits and cut Venezuela off the international financial system, and the British have stolen Venezuela’s gold. This makes it hard for Venezuela to pay its debts.

The Trump regime has branded the democratically twice-elected Maduro an “illegitimate” president. Washington has found a willing puppet, Juan Guaido, to take Maduro’s place and has announced that the puppet is now the president of Venezuela. No one among the Western presstitutes or among the vassals of Washington’s empire finds it strange that an elected president is illegitimate but one picked by Washington is not.

Russia and China have given Maduro diplomatic support. Both have substantial investments in Venezuela that would be lost if Washington seizes the country. Russia’s support for Maduro was declared by Bolton today to be a provocation that is a threat to international peace and security. Bolton said his sanctions should be seen by Russia as a warning against providing any help for the Venezuelan government.

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?

How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”

The top officials of the US government have announced that they intend to overthrow the governments of 3 countries and this is not seen as “a threat to international peace and security?”

How much peace and security did Washington’s overthrow of governments in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the attempted overthrow of Syria bring?

Washington is once again openly violating international law and the rest of the world has nothing to say?

There is only one way to describe this: The Triumph of Evil.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats

Assange arrest: The turning point is here—don’t let them win

Posted on by
1

Will we wait until they come for us because our homes are built atop resources they wish to plunder, because we shared information online they found objectionable, because we dared to question why madmen are in control of our country and much of the world?

By Whitney Webb

Source: Intrepid Report

LONDON—Yesterday morning, the London-based branch of Empire made good on its threat and boldly moved to begin dismantling the vestiges of democracy and press freedom that still remain, vestiges that have allowed people throughout the Western world to pretend that their government and politicians still respect their rights and the rule of law.

Julian Assange, the man who has helped expose a litany of crimes and the in-your-face corruption of the world’s most powerful people and governments, was pulled from the embassy of the country where he not only holds citizenship but had been granted asylum. The dangerous precedents Assange’s arrest has set—not just for journalism, but also for national sovereignty and international law—are staggering.

With Assange now in U.K. custody, his fate will mirror our own, as Assange’s fate and that of journalists around the world, as well as the public itself, are increasingly intertwined. After all, those who are after Assange and seek to rob him of his freedom—the U.S. Empire, the “deep state,” the shadow government, the global elite, etc.—are after our freedom as well.

If we remain silent as they jail, extradite, torture or even kill this man, we may expect a similar fate for ourselves. It will not come tomorrow. It will not come next week. It could be years away. But make no mistake, the global empire, whose core is the U.S. government, will now be empowered to charge and imprison anyone it deems a threat to its operations.

Those operations, including those that Assange helped to expose, often involve the mass murder of innocent civilians—untold numbers of children among them—in order to loot the resources of other sovereign nations. They also often involve the installation of puppet governments by either covert (e.g., election “meddling”) or overt (e.g., regime-change wars) means.

Those responsible for the most egregious violations of international law, for war crimes, for the slaughter of innocent life, are not imprisoned, degraded or tortured—they are rewarded and promoted. As we have seen today—and in recent weeks, particularly following Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment—those who seek to expose these crimes are the ones who are threatened, tortured and punished.

Like it or not, we are all already a part of this war

The world has known for years that Assange would meet this fate. Little was done. Now, the turning point is here. Will we continue to escape into the false realities of television, cinema, video games, and whatever we use to distract us and numb our pain while the actual world in which we live devolves into a technocratic, imperial dictatorship? Will we continue to ignore the obvious threats to our lives and our children’s lives because confronting these threats is uncomfortable and often difficult?

Will we wait until they come for us because our homes are built atop resources they wish to plunder, because we shared information online they found objectionable, because we dared to question why madmen are in control of our country and much of the world?

Such an eventuality may seem laughable to some, but those days are not far away and are already here for many people around the world, even in the West. Assange’s arrest is the first shot of a war to which all of us, like it or not, have already been drafted because it is a war for the very world in which we live—a war for our society, our planet, our livelihood, our right to self-determination. You can try to escape to the ends of the Earth, thousands of miles away from “the West” (as I myself did), only to find that there is no country anywhere in the world that is not currently under siege.

Never before in history has the global oligarchy been more powerful. The concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few is unprecedented, worse even than in the Gilded Age or the final days of the Roman Empire. These people do not plan to cede any of this power to you. They do not want you to have control over your own lives. To them, we are already slaves. And those who are silent, especially now, are sending a signal to the elites that they embrace that servitude.

The revolution will not be televised and the war will not be won on social media

For too long, actions in defense of Assange, and more broadly in protest of Empire, have been focused in the virtual realm—that is, on the Internet and social media. While the Internet and social media are important tools for sharing information, their use for that end is being suppressed like never before and it will not be long before social media is entirely censored and devoid of dissent. If we wait until that day comes, and put all our eggs in the social media basket, we will have shot ourselves in the foot and it could well be a fatal blow.

We can no longer run from the world, escape into our remaining comforts—particularly those online—while the world burns. Assange may be the first journalist to be arrested and extradited under these circumstances, but he will not be the last. What we do now will determine how far they go.

The U.S. and its allies are prepping for several wars, many of them against countries much larger than Iraq, and such wars could make Iraq and Afghanistan look like skirmishes by comparison. The people behind Assange’s arrest and perpetual imperial wars do not care about your tweets or Facebook posts. They want your focus to remain on the virtual world and away from the real one over which they are consolidating their control.

Now is the time to resist. Now is the time to insist. Now is the time to take to the streets, to talk to your neighbors, family and co-workers of the dangers facing us all. Your voice and your actions matter. The longer we wait, the worse things will become. The turning point is here. Don’t let them win.

 

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Russia’s Seattle Consulate Broken Into: the US Openly Flouts its International Obligations

Posted on by
Reply

By Alex Gorka

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

They did it again. On April 25, US inspectors broke into the Russian consulate in Seattle, which had been shuttered and vacated at the order of the American government, in a response to the Skripal case. The “inspection” was actually a break-in, since the locks had to be forced. The Russian staff had closed the mansion on April 24 but kept the keys, as the house is still the property of the Russian government. Officially, the Russian Federation (RF) still owns the mansion and its flag still flies from the roof, but the US owns the land and consular activities will no longer be authorized on that site.

The forced entry into the consulate was a flagrant violation of international law. True, the US government has the right to declare that the mission has been stripped of its diplomatic immunity. But it takes two to tango, and Russia never agreed to lift that immunity. That declaration has no validity without Russia’s consent.

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 protects embassy and consulate property abroad by bestowing upon it the status of inviolability (Article 22). No unauthorized entry is allowed. Moreover, the host country is responsible for protecting all foreign missions from intrusions, damage, and similar events. Diplomatic sites cannot be searched. No document or property can be seized.

The 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations states that consulates, along with their property, are always to be protected by their host, even during an armed conflict. No entrance without permission is allowed (Article 31).

According to the US-USSR Consular Convention of 1968, the diplomatic properties on each other’s soil are sacrosanct. The consulates enjoy diplomatic immunity. Like it or not, the US has just violated that document by entering the Seattle consulate.

As one can see, all the relevant international conventions state, by and large, the same thing – there is no entrance without permission. This is a hard-and-fast rule, but now all of these conventions have just been breached in broad daylight!

The question arises — what’s the use of signing agreements with someone who flouts them? Today they enter foreign compounds, tomorrow they unilaterally pull out of the Iran deal, and then what? The US can walk away from any major arms-control agreement, just like it abandoned the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2002. Washington signs agreements in order to force others to comply with them, while the US enjoys the freedom to interpret them at will. Nothing is binding upon that “shining city on a hill.”

The relevant domestic law in the US, the 1982 Foreign Missions Act, states that the secretary of state may demand that any foreign mission be stripped of its property if such a move is needed to protect US interests. This can be done provided that one year has passed from the date on which that foreign mission ceased its diplomatic or consular functions. In this case, one year has not passed. What’s more, no clear explanation is offered as to what exactly is meant by “US interests.” And in fact, this act is contradicted by international law. Why should a foreign mission comply with it, if all the conventions listed above are very explicit about property rights and the US is a party to all of them? Anyway, the US law is not relevant in this case, unlike the binding accords America has signed.

It is true that the two nations are engaged in an ongoing “diplomatic war.” That’s a process that’s easy to start and extremely difficult to end. It was not Moscow that started this folly. But even wars have their rules. The US actions are unprecedented and are doing serious damage to the country’s international image. The Seattle consulate’s closure has greatly complicated the lives of many people who have nothing to do with politics.

What about gains? There have been hardly any, especially taking into consideration that the US mission in St. Petersburg, which is going to be closed in response, is much more important for Americans than the consulate office in Seattle was for Russians. The expulsions and closures may go on until the ambassadors are the only ones left, but no one will win. “Tit-for-tat” expulsions are a game with no winners or losers. They are meaningless and doomed to ineffectuality

The ongoing Russian-US “diplomatic war” cannot continue forever. The day will inevitably come when Washington will have to reach some new agreements with Moscow about consulate offices. It’s highly likely that Russia will demand additional guarantees of the safety of its property on American soil. Other nations may follow suit.

Gross violations of international law inflict great damage. The US will not be trusted. It will be viewed as a state that can reject its commitments at any time it chooses. From now on, all nations will know that their embassies and consulates in the US are not protected by the international agreements the American government flouts so easily.

 

Obama to Putin: Do as I Say Not as I Do

Posted on by
Reply

ralph_nader

By Ralph Nader

Originally posted at Counterpunch.org

Dear President Obama:

As you ponder your potential moves regarding President Vladimir V. Putin’s annexation of Crimea (a large majority of its 2 million people are ethnic Russians), it is important to remember that whatever moral leverage you may have had in the court of world opinion has been sacrificed by the precedents set by previous American presidents who did not do what you say Mr. Putin should do – obey international law.

The need to abide by international law is your recent recurring refrain, often used in an accusatory context toward Mr. Putin’s military entry in Crimea and its subsequent annexation, following a referendum in which Crimean voters overwhelmingly endorsed rejoining Russia. True, most Ukrainians and ethnic Tatars boycotted the referendum and there were obstacles to free speech. But even the fairest of referendums, under UN auspices, would have produced majority support for Russia’s annexation.

Every day, presidential actions by you violate international law because they infringe upon national sovereignties with deadly drones, flyovers and secret forays by soldiers – to name the most obvious.

President Bush’s criminal invasion and devastation of Iraq in 2003 violated international law and treaties initiated and signed by the United States (such as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter). What about your executive branch’s war on Libya, now still in chaos, which was neither constitutionally declared, nor authorized by Congressional appropriations?

“Do as I say, not as I do,” is hard to sell to Russians who are interpreting your words of protest as disingenuous. This is especially the case because Crimea, long under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, became part of Russia over 200 years ago. In 1954, Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, out of sympathy for what Ukraine endured under the Nazi invasion and its atrocities. It mattered little then because both “socialist republics,” Ukraine and Crimea, were part of the Soviet Union. However, it is not entirely clear whether Khrushchev fully complied with the Soviet constitution when he transferred Crimea to Ukraine.

Compare, by the way, the United States’ seizure of Guantanamo from Cuba initially after the Spanish-American War, which was then retained after Cuba became independent over a century ago.

The Russians have their own troubles, of course, but they do have a legitimate complaint and fear about the United States’ actions following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Led by President William Jefferson Clinton, the United States pushed for the expansion of the military alliance NATO to include the newly independent Eastern European countries. This was partly a business deal to get these countries to buy United States fighter aircrafts from Lockheed Martin and partly a needless provocation of a transformed adversary trying to get back on its feet.

As a student of Russian history and language at Princeton, I learned about the deep sensitivity of the Russian people regarding the insecurity of their Western Front. Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union took many millions of Russian lives. The prolonged Nazi siege of the city of Leningrad alone is estimated to have cost over 700,000 civilian lives, which is about twice the total number of United States soldiers killed in World War II.

The memories of that mass slaughter and destruction, and of other massacres and valiant resistance are etched deeply in Russian minds. The NATO provocation was only one of the West’s arrogant treatments of post-Soviet Russia, pointed out in the writings of Russian specialist, NYU professor Stephen Cohen (see his pieces in The Nation here:http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen). That sense of disrespect, coupled with the toppling of the elected pro-Russian President of Ukraine in February, 2014 (which was not lawful despite his poor record) is why Mr. Putin’s absorption of Crimea and his history-evoking speech before the Parliament, was met with massive support in Russia even by many of those who have good reasons to not like his authoritarian government.

Now, you are facing the question of how far to go with sanctions against the Russian government, its economy and its ruling class. Welcome to globalization.

Russia is tightly intertwined with the European Union, as a seller and buyer of goods, services and assets, and to a lesser but significant degree with the United States government and its giant corporations such as oil and technology companies. Sanctions can boomerang, which would be far worse than just being completely ineffective in reversing the Russian annexation of Crimea.

As for sanctions deterring any unlikely future Russian moves westward into Ukraine, consider the following role reversal. If Russia moved for sanctions against the United States before Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and other attacks, would that have deterred either you or George W. Bush from taking such actions? Of course not. Such an outcome, politically and domestically, would not be possible.

If you want continued Russian cooperation, as you do, on the critical Iranian and Syrian negotiations, ignore the belligerent baying pack of neocons who always want more United States wars, which they and their adult children avoid fighting themselves. Develop a coalition of economic support for Ukraine, with European nations, based on observable reforms of that troubled government. Sponsor a global conference on how to enforce international law as early as possible.

Drop the nonsense of evicting Russia from the G8 – a get-together forum of leaders. Get on with having the United States comply with international law, and our constitution on the way to ending the American Empire’s interventions worldwide, as has been recommended by both liberal and conservative/libertarian lawmakers, along with much public opinion.

Concentrate on America, President Obama, whose long unmet necessities cry out from “sea to shining sea.”

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.

Editor’s note: Those unfamiliar with the life and career of Ralph Nader should check out the excellent documentary “An Unreasonable Man” (2006), which happens to be available on YouTube: