Telling It to the Hand: Western Governments and Their Media Ignore Inconvenient Douma Testimony

The west closes its ears to Douma testimony 

by Jonathan Cook

28 April 2018

The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month – the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states.
"Douma Boy" Hassan Diab - Ignored as
“supposed witness” by press.

The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk – a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of the alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.

The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event an “obscene masquerade” and “theatre”. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria.

Testimony from witnesses is surely a crucial part of determining what actually happened. The US, UK and France are surely obligated to listen to the witnesses first, and then seek to discredit the testimony afterwards if they think it implausible or coerced. The evidence cannot be tested and rebutted if it is not even considered.

The second is that the media are echoing this misplaced scorn for evidence. They too seem to have prejudged whether the witnesses are credible before listening to what they have to say (similar to their treatment of Fisk). Tellingly, the Guardian described these witnesses as “supposed witnesses”, not a formulation that suggests any degree of impartiality in its coverage.

Notice that when the Guardian refers to witnesses who support the UK-UK-French line, often those living under the rule of violent jihadist groups, the paper does not designate them “supposed witnesses” or assume their testimony is coerced. Why for the Guardian are some witnesses only professing to be witnesses, while others really are witnesses. The answer appears to depend on whether the testimony accords with the official western narrative. There is a word for that, and it is not “journalism”.

The third and biggest problem, however, is that neither the trio of western states nor the western media are actually contesting the claim that these “supposed witnesses” were present in Douma, and that some of them were shown in the video. Rather, the line taken by the Guardian and others is that:

“The veracity [of] the statements by the Russian-selected witnesses at The Hague will be challenged, since their ability to speak truthfully is limited.”

So the question is not whether they were there, but whether they are being coerced into telling a story that undermines the official western narrative, as well as the dubious rationale for attacking Syria.

But that leaves us with another difficulty. No one, for example, appears to be doubting that Hassan Diab, a boy who testified at the hearing, is also the boy shown in the video who was supposedly gassed with a nerve agent three weeks ago. How then do we explain that he is now looking a picture of health? It is not as though the US, UK and French governments and the western media have had no time to investigate his case. He and his father have been saying for at least a week on Russian TV that there was no chemical attack.

Instead, we are getting yet more revisions to a story that was originally presented as so cut-and-dried that it justified an act of military aggression by the US, UK and France against Syria, without authorisation from the UN Security Council – in short, a war crime of the highest order.

It is worth noting the BBC’s brief account. It has suggested that Diab was there, and that he is the boy shown in the video, but that he was not a victim of a gas attack. It implies that there were two kinds of victims shown in the video taken in Douma: those who were victims of a chemical attack, and those next to them who were victims of dust inhalation.

That requires a great deal of back-peddling on the original narrative.

It is conceivable, I suppose, that there was a chemical attack on that neighbourhood of Douma, in which people like Diab assumed they had been gassed when in fact that they had not been, and that others close by were actually gassed. It is also conceivable that the effects of dust inhalation and gassing were so similar that the White Helmets staff mistakenly filmed the “wrong victims”, highlighting those like Diab who had not been gassed. And it is also conceivable, I guess, that Diab and his family now feel the need to lie under Russian pressure about there not being a gas attack, even though their account would, according to this revised narrative, actually accord with their experience of what happened.

But even if each of these scenarios is conceivable on its own, how plausible are they when taken together. Those of us who have preferred to avoid a rush to judgment until there was actual evidence of a chemical weapons attack have been invariably dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”. But who is really proposing the more fanciful conspiracy here: those wanting evidence, or those creating an elaborate series of revisions to maintain the credibilty of their original story?

If there is one thing certain in all of this, it is that the video produced as cast-iron evidence of a chemical weapons attack has turned out to be nothing of the sort.

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Debauchery Now! The "Left" Cheerleaders for NATO's Endless War

The "Cruise Missile Left" Now Cheerleading NATO's Next Wars

by Daniel HaipHong - BAR via MintPress News

April 26, 2018

The US-led alliance has waged war on Syria for eight years, hoping to overthrow the independent Arab state led by President Bashar Al-Assad. Syria was believed to be another domino destined to fall in imperialism’s great power game to contain any international threat to its rule. Former NATO general Wesley Clarke revealed US plans in 2007 to use the September 11th attacks to justify the overthrow seven countries in five years: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria. Most of these countries have since been thrown into chaos by way of US imperial expansion in the Middle East and North Africa.
Photo | Khalid Albaih/Flickr

Clarke’s admission should be enough to clarify the Trump Administration’s most recent airstrikes on Syria as an escalation of the broader war for US hegemony in the region and the world.

Yet many who reside in the United States view the war on Syria from the lens of the US empire. This lens is articulated by both US political parties, their foreign partners, and their faithful corporate media servants. These expert liars claim that Assad is a butcher and the Syrian government a brutal “regime.” They don’t talk about how the US military occupies a large portion of Syria, coincidently in the country’s most resource-rich region.

Also ignored is the fact that US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have loathed the Syrian government for its decision in 2009 to construct an independent pipeline with Iran and Iraq to transport precious gas and oil resources to European markets. Never mind that the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel to name a few have funded and armed hundreds of thousands of jihadist mercenaries for seven years in hopes that they would rid of pesky Assad and his nationalist policies. Imperialism wants Assad out because he stands in the way of US goals to dominate the region and keep Iran, Russia and China’s rise to global prominence at bay.

Syria is the number one target of US imperialism. The ongoing war there has the potential to spark a confrontation between great powers unforeseen in human history. In many ways, this confrontation has already begun. Russian forces in Syria have daily confronted US-backed jihadists armed with American-made weapons. US coalition strikes have killed Russian military personnel. Just prior to Trump’s airstrikes, seven Iranians were murdered in Syria by Israeli fighter jets . Russia has spent years enhancing its military capabilities in preparation for a major confrontation with the US, whether in Syria or at its own borders with NATO.

Yet when the US, UK, and France launched over a hundred strikes on Syrian territory on April 14th, few in the US and West expressed any public outrage. Anti-war groups like the United National Anti-war Coalition (UNAC) mobilized around the country, but that was about it. Americans were once again immobilized for the usual reasons. Wall to wall pro-war corporate media coverage blaming Assad for the attack effectively drowned out any anti-war analysis from reaching the ears of most Americans.

Perhaps the most important factor in the lack of outrage was the scant possibility that American troops were going to be sacrificed during the escalation. No Russians were hit by the strikes, so a larger military confrontation was unlikely. And the US military showed how weak it has become as the Syrian government was able to shoot down a majority of the strikes with decades-old Soviet technology.

Americans usually care about American troops dying but have a difficult time developing class-based solidarity with people around the world. The Black Radical Tradition has historically been the force that counters white supremacist chauvinism and pro-war sentiments in the US. Eight years of Obama effectively shifted the Black polity so far right that polls showed Black Americans possessing a more favorable view of Obama’s declaration of war against Syria in 2013 than whites and Latinos.

Neoliberal identity politics and the two-party duopoly system has for now swallowed the left whole. The Democratic Party wing of imperialism has dug deep into its Wall Street coffers to disguise itself as the anti-Trump “resistance” that will bring stability back to the empire.

The Democrats and their Republican allies seek a more stable Administration in Washington to properly manage the affairs of the ruling class. Those affairs mainly deal with the questions of austerity and war. Trump has been deemed “morally unfit” for the Presidency by spooks like James Comey because his unpredictable and egoist tendencies make him less interested in the preservation of empire and more interested in the preservation of the voting bloc and conditions that made his Presidency possible. We largely have the “cruise missile left” to thank for the lack of an alternative to the crisis of US imperialism. The cruise missile left has aligned with the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies against Trump and have dropped any anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist tendencies in the process.

Nowhere is this clearer than in its position on Syria. The cruise missile left is best represented by the likes of Democracy Now! and The Intercept. Both sources have worked together to subtly forward the agenda of US imperialism. Since 2011, Amy Goodman has never strayed from the NATO line on countries such as Libya, Syria, and Russia.

Like the corporate media, Goodman and her staff at Democracy Now! have provided positive coverage of so-called humanitarian groups like the White Helmets which have long been proven to work directly with NATO-armed jihadist mercenaries ravaging Syria .

The Intercept and Democracy Now! have refused to invite any guests on their show that deviate from the NATO line on Syria.

These sources have benefited from the corporate takeover of the US media. Democracy Now! and The Intercept act as an escape valve from corporate media lies, which make them more difficult to criticize when they serve the same interests as the corporate media outlets that spurred their formation. In their coverage of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, both Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald joined the imperial chorus that the Syrian government bore responsibility for an attack that had yet to be proven even happened.

Even Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis admitted that the US lacked evidence backing up their claims against Assad. The Intercept and Democracy Now! staked their firm position against the Syrian government despite the overwhelming evidence that Syria destroyed its chemical weapons in the OPCW brokered deal between Russia and the US in 2013 and that Syria, Russia, and their allies are the only parties interested in coming to a peaceful resolution to the war.

Cruise missile leftists thus bear much of the responsibility for the US, UK, and French airstrikes conducted against Syria on April 14th. After the strikes, Amy Goodman invited Chelsea Manning and so-called activist Rahmah Kudaimi to her show. Manning was given little time to speak while over seventy percent of the joint interview was taken up by Kudaimi’s assertions that US airstrikes “enable” the Syrian “regime.” Kudaimi practically begged the US to conduct the airstrikes correctly and fulfill the legitimate demand of the Syrian people to overthrow the Syrian government. Nowhere did Amy Goodman challenge such blatant support of US imperial objectives in Syria and beyond.

Democracy Now! and The Intercept are more interested in the overthrow of the Syrian government than its own government’s role in the region. Neither source gives any coverage to the influx of head-chopping jihadist mercenaries whose roots lie in the CIA-sponsored war in Afghanistan in 1979. Neither mentions how numerous primary sources, such as the 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency leaked document, pin US, Turkish, and Saudi support for “Salafists” in Syria for the rise of ISIS. The millions of displaced Syrians and hundreds of thousands dead fall at the feet of US imperialism. And the cruise missile left would rather the world become engulfed in the flames of World War III than admit this fact.

The US government is the most murderous entity the world has ever known yet the focus of the cruise missile left remains the chauvinistic and racist depictions of the Syrian government. These depictions have been proven to be outright lies time and time again. The Syrian government is the rightfully elected government of the Syrian people. President Bashar Al-Assad was reelected to office in 2014 by a large majority. Cruise missile leftists on Democracy Now! or The Intercept never bother to ask how a nation attacked by imperialism would benefit from murdering its own citizens and suppressing a legitimate rebellion of the people.

The imperial war on Syria is legitimate to the cruise missile left because it allows them to express white supremacy as a civilizing crusade. It was no different during the US-NATO invasion of Libya. Gaddafi was painted by the cruise missile left as a barbaric and despotic dictator who armed his Black mercenary army with Viagra to rape women and children. Assad has faced the same treatment as Gaddafi. The political legitimacy that collaboration with imperialism affords means much more to the cruise missile left than solidarity. After all, solidarity with oppressed people won’t get you lucrative partnerships with billionaire-backed foundations like First Look Media, the primary benefactor for The Intercept.

Democracy Now! and The Intercept not only betray the people of Syria and Russia when it peddles pro-war narratives, but also poor and working-class people here in the United States. Neither the terror of police occupation and mass incarceration in the Black community nor the poverty being enforced by the US austerity regime will become any less ruthless should US imperialism spark a nuclear conflict in Syria. In fact, endless war only exacerbates the declining conditions of the oppressed. The cruise missile left, however, sees its petty privileges as far more important than the future of humanity.

For those of us who have already decided that humanity comes first, our task remains the development of an alternative press that the cruise missile left is unwilling to provide.

Unlike The Intercept, Black Agenda Report, where this article first appeared, provides alternative media each week without billionaire support from the likes of Pierre Omidyar. And because of this, we rely on readers like you to keep us going. Please consider a donation. 

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He is currently writing a book with Roberto Sirvent entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: Essays on Race, Empire, and Historical Memory. He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com

Celibate Avengers: Toxic Masculinity and the Military Ethos

Toronto Van Attack: Toxic Masculinity and the Canadian Forces

by Yves Engler - Dissident Voice

April 25th, 2018

Progressive online commentary about Monday’s van attack in Toronto has focused on the influence of “toxic masculinity”.

The analyses should be expanded to include the alleged perpetrator’s ties to a powerful patriarchal institution that is Canada’s biggest purveyor of violence.

Early reports suggest alleged mass murderer Alek Minassian may have targeted women and been motivated by sexism.

Before carrying out his horrific attack he posted on Facebook about the “Incel Rebellion”, a community of “involuntarily celibate” men who hate women, and praised misogynistic US mass murderer Elliot Rodger. Minassian reportedly wrote:

“Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161.The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

It should surprise no one that alongside his call for an “Incel Rebellion” the misogynist Minassian cited his (short) military service. Last fall he joined the Canadian Forces, which has one hundred thousand active members and three hundred thousand retired members.

A 2015 investigation led by former Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps found a “culture of misogyny” in the CF “hostile to women and LGTBQ members.” While women now represent 15% of military personnel, the Deschamps report concluded that “the overall perception is that a ‘boy’s club’ culture still prevails in the armed forces.”

Until 1979 women were excluded from the Royal Military College. Until 1989 women were excluded from combat roles in the CF. In 2000 the submarine service was finally opened to women.

A 1992 Department of National Defence survey found that 26.2% of female CF respondents were sexually harassed in the previous 12 months. Subsequent investigations have shown steady improvements, but 27.3% of women in 2016 still reported having been victims of sexual assault at least once since joining the CF.

The Deschamps review “found that there is an undeniable problem of sexual harassment and sexual assault in the CAF.” In 2017 plaintiffs in five separate cities united to sue over sexual assault, harassment and gender-based discrimination in the CF.

When Nichola Goddard became the first female CF member to die in Afghanistan it came to light that she wrote her husband about sexual violence on the base. Goddard wrote about “the tension of living in a fortress where men outnumbered women ten to one” and “there were six rapes in the camp last week, so we have to work out an escort at night.”

But, the CF only admits to investigating five reports of sexual harassment or assault in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2010. Valerie Fortney, author of Sunray: The Death and Life of Captain Nichola Goddard said she “hit a brick wall” when seeking to investigate sexual harassment in Afghanistan.

Male veterans have repeatedly engaged in gender-based violence. Last year Lionel Desmond killed his wife, daughter, mother and himself while Robert Giblin stabbed and threw his pregnant wife off a building before killing himself in 2015.

After the worst incident of patriarchal violence in Canadian history members of the elite Airborne Regiment reportedly held a celebratory dinner to honour Marc Lepine. In 1989 Lepine massacred fourteen women at the Université de Montréal while shouting “you’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!”

Not only is the CF a patriarchal social force, it is the country’s greatest purveyor of violence. The Canadian military spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year promoting militarism and during the past quarter century it has fought wars of aggression in Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Iraq (not to mention helping to overthrow an elected government in Haiti and engaging in gunboat diplomacy in a number of locations).

To a large extent the CF is the institutional embodiment of toxic masculinity and therefore it’s not surprising that Minassian was drawn to it. His connection to an organization that receives over $20 billion a year in public funds while upholding patriarchy and promoting violence ought to be part of the discussion of this horrible act.

Yves Engler is the author of A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation .

Read other articles by Yves.

In the Backyard: Gringos Gaze South Again

The Empire Turns Its Sights on Nicaragua – Again! 

by Dan Kovalik - CounterPunch

April 25, 2018

It was only a matter of time before the US government and its compliant media would once again put Nicaragua in their sights. And, that time has indeed come.

Last year, the US House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act of 2017 (NICA Act) which would cut that already-poor country off from loans offered by international financial institutions.

Citing the Alliance for Global Justice, Telesur reported at the time that, “‘[t]he Nicaraguan government uses foreign assistance from international financial institutions to support social spending on health and education which have become an ever larger proportion of the national budget.’”



Image: MPN

Telesur explained that the NICA Act therefore,

“poses a serious danger to the Central American nation’s economy and could result in a humanitarian crisis and waves of economic refugees that would flee toward the U.S. border, joining waves of migrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.”

Currently, Nicaragua is the only country victimized by the US-backed Central American Wars which is not also a source of immigrants to the US. This is in no small part due to the Sandinistas’ effective social programs. As for the Sandinistas’ social programs, even the New York Times acknowledged that “[m]any poor people who receive housing and other government benefits support” Sandinista President, Daniel Ortega.

Incredibly, as the US is preparing to build a wall ostensibly to keep out Central American and Mexican migrants, it is poised to exacerbate the very migration problem it claims to want to stop. This simply defies all logic and notions of morality and decency.

As Noam Chomsky has opined numerous times, the US shall never forgive the Nicaraguan people for overthrowing the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979, for militarily defeating the Contras and for then voting back in the Sandinistas in 2007. The NICA Act is pay-back for such crimes.

But meanwhile, the NICA Act was getting no apparent movement in the US Senate and appeared to be a dead letter. And so, right on cue, we witness violent protests in Nicaragua which closely resemble the violent guarimbas which have plagued Venezuela on and off since Nicolas Maduro was elected in 2013.

These demonstrations will surely be used as a pretext to revive the NICA Act in the US Senate.

There are a number of curious things about the protests in Nicaragua.

First, while the mainstream press has explained these protests as a response to a “social security overhaul” announced by the government, it was largely students and other youth who have been demonstrating, and not those directly affected by the announced cuts.

Photo: Jakob Christensen | CC BY 2.0 

 And, though the government reversed itself on the previously-announced social security cuts in response to the protests, the New York Times stated with glee that this probably would not stop the protests from continuing.

Moreover, it must be pointed out that the proposed social security cuts which provided the impetus for the protests were themselves necessitated in no small part by the House passage of the NICA Act which, as Telesur noted, “has already put a chill on foreign direct investment into the Nicaraguan economy, having a knock-on effect on local lending activity and private investments.” Of course, this is all according to plan.

Several alternative Spanish-speaking news outlets, including the on-line publication Mision Verdad, have detailed a number of ways in which the violent demonstrations in Nicaragua look like those organized by the right-wing in Venezuela. These include:

1. the demonstrators’ use of “artisanal weapons,” such as mortars and rockets, designed to obscure “the line between peaceful protest and the tactics of subversion and urban warfare,” and thus to provoke a government response which could be labeled “a violation of human rights”; 
2. attempts to falsely blame the government for chemical weapons use (a tried and true way to provoke foreign intervention); 
3. the inflation of the number of those killed in clashes, combined with the downplaying of the deaths of state security forces; 
4. looting of private and public property, including memorials to left-wing revolutionary leaders such as Hugo Chavez; 
5. the use of snipers; and 
6. the support of the Catholic Church and various NGOs for the anti-government activities.

Not surprisingly, the Cold War-era National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has recently been giving substantial funding to groups in Nicaragua seemingly to stoke the very types of anti-government actions taking place right now. For example, the NED, in 2017, gave $72,440 to the Comision Permanente de Derechos Humanos de Nicaragua (CPDHN) for “human rights” monitoring. Curiously, the CPDHN is a key source the Western press has been relying upon for the lop-sided information about the current protests and the government’s response to them.

The NED has also been giving substantial monies to youth and student groups in Nicaragua – such groups now serving as the main source of the current unrest. In addition, the NED has given support to “independent” (i.e., anti-government) media outlets and to other civil society groups for the purpose of “raising awareness” about how the Nicaraguan government is allegedly repressing them. All told, the NED last year alone gave well over a $1 million in aid to civil society groups for the purpose of ginning up social strife in Nicaragua.

During the 1980s, Nicaragua – a tiny country which remains the second poorest in the Hemisphere — inspired many of us, myself included, with its heroic resistance to violent US aggression. Nicaragua has remained a symbol of opposition to US imperialism, and that has galled the powers-that-be in this country – particularly Neo-Cons such as current National Security Adviser John Bolton.

We must stand with Nicaragua now, as many of us did before, in opposing continued US hostilities in the form of the NICA Act and interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs. Nicaragua deserves such solidarity.   

Daniel Kovalik lives in Pittsburgh and teaches International Human Rights Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

More articles by: Dan Kovalik

Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Hillary

No Remorse For Hillary 

by Craig Murray

24 Apr, 2018

I am hopeful that the commendable discovery process involved in US litigation will bring to light further details of the genesis of Christopher Steele’s ludicrous dossier on Trump/Russia, and may even give some clues as to whether Sergei Skripal and/or his handler Pablo Miller were involved in its contents.

The decision by the Democratic National Committee to sue the Russian Government, Wikileaks, Julian Assange personally and the Trump campaign is an act of colossal hubris. It is certain to reveal still more details of the deliberate fixing of the primary race against Bernie Sanders, over which five DNC members, including the Chair, were forced to resign.

It will also lead to the defendants being able to forensically examine the DNC servers to prove they were not hacked – something which astonishingly the FBI refused to do, being instead content to take the word of the DNC’s own private cyber security firm, Crowdstrike. Unless those servers have been wiped completely (as Hillary did to her private email server) I know that is not going to go well for the DNC.

I cannot better Glenn Greenwald’s article on why it is a terrible idea to sue Wikileaks for publishing leaked documents – it sets a precedent which could be used to constrain media from ever publishing anything given them by whistleblowers. It is an astonishingly illiberal thing to undertake. Nor is it politically wise. The media has done its very best to ignore as far as possible the actual content of the leaks of DNC material, and rather to concentrate on the wild accusations of how they were obtained. But the fundamental crookedness revealed in the emails is bound to get some sort of airing, not least as the basis of a public interest defence.

I have often been asked if I regret my association with Wikileaks, given they are held responsible for the election of Donald Trump. My answer is that I feel no remorse at all.

Hillary Clinton lost because she was an appalling candidate. A multi-millionaire, neo-con warmonger with the warmth and empathy of a three week dead haddock and an eye for the interests of Wall Street, who regarded ordinary voters as “deplorables” (a term she used not just once, but frequently at fund-raisers with the mega-wealthy).

Hillary Clinton conspired with the machine that was supposed to be neutrally running the primaries, to fix the primaries against Bernie Sanders. The opinion polls regularly showed that Sanders would beat Trump, and that the only Democratic candidate who Trump could beat was Clinton. Egomania and a massive sense of entitlement nevertheless led her not just to persist to get the candidacy, but persist to rig the candidacy. She then proceeded to ignore major urban working class battleground states in her campaign against Trump and focus on more glamorous places.

In short, Hillary was corrupt rubbish. Full stop, and not remotely Wikileaks’ fault.

Wikileaks did not go out to get the evidence against Hillary. They were given it. Should they have withheld the knowledge of the rigging of the field against Bernie Sanders from the American people, to let Clinton benefit from the corruption? For me that is a no-brainer. It would have been a gross moral dereliction to have done so. It is also the case that Wikileaks can only publish what they are given. Had they been given dirt on Trump, they would have published. But they were not given any leaks on Trump.

I should put in an aside here which might surprise you. I like Anthony Weiner. I have never met him, but I watched the amazing 2016 fly on the wall documentary Weiner and he came across as a person of genuine goodwill, passion and commitment, undermined by what is very obviously a pathological illness. I realise that was not the general reaction, but it was mine.

But – and now I am going to really annoy people – I have to say that from an international perspective, rather than an American domestic perspective, I am also not in the slightest convinced that Trump has been worse for the World than Clinton would have been. Trump has not, to date, initiated any new military intervention or substantially increased any military conflict during his Presidency. In fact his current actions more closely match his words about non-intervention during his election campaign, than do his current words. Despite hawkish posturing, he has not substantially increased American military intervention in Syria.

My reading of the reported chemical weapon attack on Douma is this. Whether it was a false flag chemical attack, a pro-Assad chemical attack, or no chemical attack at all I do not know for sure. But whichever it is, it was used to attempt to get Trump to commit to a major escalation of American involvement in the war in Syria. So far, he has not done that. The American-led missile attack was illegal, but fortunately comparatively restrained, certainly in no way matching Trump’s rhetoric. All the evidence is, and there is a great deal of evidence from Libya and Afghanistan, that Clinton would have been far more aggressive.

That leaves the dichotomy between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions. Certainly there is every sign of a sharp tilt to the neo-cons, His apparent preference in his press conference with Macron today for an extended presence of France, the former colonial power, and US troops in Syria is deeply troubling. His sacking of the sensible Tillerson from the State Department, and his appointment of the odious John Bolton as National Security Adviser all appear to be terrible signs. But still, nothing has actually happened. There is a reading that Trump is placating the neo-cons with position and rhetoric while his actions – in Syria and in what a hating political class fails to acknowledge has all the makings of a diplomatic coup in North Korea – go in a very different direction.

It is beyond doubt that Hillary, who cannot open her mouth without denouncing Russia for causing her own entirely self-inflicted failure – would be taking the new Cold War to even worse extremes than it has already reached, to the delight of the military-industrial complex and her Wall Street friends. It is open to debate, but I would contend that it is very probable that President Hillary would have launched a major attack on Syria by now, just like she presided over as Secretary of State in Libya.

So my answer is this. Firstly, Clinton caused her own downfall by arrogance, and by failing to grasp the alienation of ordinary people from neo-liberal policies that impoverished them while the rich grew massively richer. Secondly, I strongly suspect that if Hillary were President, more people would be dead now in the Middle East.

So no, I have no regrets at all.

——————————————————

Finally, a change of policy on this blog.

For thirteen years now it has operated with a policy of not accepting donations, except for occasional legal funds. It has now reached a size and cost, not least because of continual attacks, that make income essential. It is also the case that due to change in personal circumstance I am no longer in a position to devote my time to it without income – the need to earn a living caused the blog to go dark for almost five months last year, and the last six weeks this journalism has stopped me doing anything else to pay the rent. So, with a certain amount of pride swallowed, here is your chance to subscribe:

Support This Website

 

US Cities Rejecting Israeli Method Police Training

US City's Ban on Police Training in Israel Builds Momentum Against Racist Violence 

by TRNN

April 24, 2018

The City Council in Durham, North Carolina made history this month when it voted unanimously to prohibit police exchanges with Israel. Thousands of police officers from departments throughout the United States traveled to Israel to receive military-style training with Israeli military and police forces, some of which enforce an illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank.

And it's not just local police that have trained in Israel, but also sheriffs, Border Patrol agents, ICE officers, and FBI agents. Durham is the first city in the U.S. to ban police exchanges with Israel.

Durham, North Carolina's city council banned police exchanges with Israel in a landmark vote. Jewish Voice for Peace director Rebecca Vilkomerson says this is an important step to combat police brutality, militarization, and oppression of Palestinians.

The Douma Deception: Media Lies in Plain View

Douma: Part I - Deception in Plain Sight

by Media Lens

April 26, 2018

See Part II here...

UK corporate media are under a curious kind of military occupation. Almost all print and broadcast media now employ reporters and commentators who are relentless and determined warmongers.

Despite the long, unarguable history of US/UK lying on war, and the catastrophic results, these journalists instantly confirm the veracity of atrocity claims made against Official Enemies, while having little or nothing to say about the proven crimes of the US, UK, Israel or their allies.

They shriek with a level of moral outrage from which their own government is forever spared. They laud even the most obviously biased, tinpot sources blaming the 'Enemy', while dismissing out of hand the best scientific researchers, investigative journalists and academic sceptics who disagree.

Anyone who challenges this strange bias is branded a 'denier', 'pro-Saddam', 'pro-Gaddafi, 'pro-Assad'. Above all, one robotically repeated word is generated again and again: 'Apologist... Apologist... Apologist'.

Claims of a chemical weapons attack on Douma, Syria on April 7, offered yet another textbook example of this reflexive warmongering. Remarkably, the alleged attack came just days after US president Donald Trump had declared of Syria:

'I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation.'

The 'mainstream' responded as one, with instant certainty, exactly as they had in response to atrocity and other casus belli claims in Houla, Ghouta, Khan Sheikhoun and many other cases in Iraq (1990), Iraq (1998), Iraq (2002-2003), Libya and Kosovo.

Once again, the Guardian editors were sure: there was no question of a repetition of the fake justifications for war to secure non-existent Iraqi WMDs, or to prevent a fictional Libyan massacre in Benghazi. Instead, this was 'a chemical gas attack, orchestrated by Bashar al-Assad, that left dead children foaming at the mouth'.

Simon Tisdall, the Guardian's assistant editor, had clearly decided that enough was enough:

'It's time for Britain and its allies to take concerted, sustained military action to curb Bashar al-Assad's ability to murder Syria's citizens at will.'

This sounded like more than another cruise missile strike. But presumably Tisdall meant something cautious and restrained to avoid the terrifying risk of nuclear confrontation with Russia:

'It means destroying Assad's combat planes, bombers, helicopters and ground facilities from the air. It means challenging Assad's and Russia's control of Syrian airspace. It means taking out Iranian military bases and batteries in Syria if they are used to prosecute the war.'

But surely after Iraq - when UN weapons inspectors under Hans Blix were prevented from completing the work that would have shown that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMD – 'we' should wait for the intergovernmental Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspectors to investigate. After all, as journalist Peter Oborne noted of Trump's air raids:

'When the bombing started the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was actually in Damascus and preparing to travel to the area where the alleged chemical attacks took place.'

Oborne added:

'Had we wanted independent verification on this occasion in Syria surely we ourselves would have demanded the OPCW send a mission to Douma. Yet we conspicuously omitted to ask for it.'

Tisdall was having none of it:

'Calls to wait for yet another UN investigation amount to irresponsible obfuscation. Only the Syrian regime and its Russian backers have the assets and the motivation to launch such merciless attacks on civilian targets. Or did all those writhing children imagine the gas?'

The idea that only Assad and the Russians had 'the motivation' to launch a gas attack simply defied all common sense. And, as we will see, it was not certain that children had been filmed 'writhing' under gas attack. Tisdall's pro-war position was supported by just 22% of British people.

Equally gung-ho, the oligarch-owned Evening Standard, edited by veteran newspaperman and politically impartial former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, headlined this plea on the front page:

'HIT SYRIA WITHOUT A VOTE, MAY URGED'

Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, formerly the paper's comment editor, also poured scorn on the need for further evidence:

'Besides, how much evidence do we need?... To all but the most committed denialists and conspiracists, Assad's guilt is clear.'

Freedland could argue that the case for blaming Assad was clear, if he liked, but he absolutely could not argue that disagreeing was a sign of denialist delusion.

Time and again, we encounter these jaw-dropping efforts to browbeat the reader with fake certainty and selective moral outrage. In his piece, Freedland linked to the widely broadcast social media video footage from a hospital in Douma, which showed that Assad was guilty of 'inflicting a death so painful the footage is unbearable to watch'. But when we actually click Freedland's link and watch the video, we do not see anyone dying, let alone in agony, and the video is not in fact unbearable to watch. Like Tisdall's claim on motivation, Freedland was simply declaring that black is white.

But many people are so intimidated by this cocktail of certainty and indignation – by the fear that they will be shamed as 'denialists' and 'apologists' – that they doubt the evidence of their own eyes. In 'mainstream' journalism, expressions of moral outrage are offered as evidence of a fiery conviction burning within. In reality, the shrieks are mostly hot air.

In the Observer, Andrew Rawnsley also deceived in plain sight by blaming the Syrian catastrophe on Western inaction:

'Syria has paid a terrible price for the west's disastrous policy of doing nothing'.

However terrible media reporting on the 2003 Iraq war, commentators did at least recognise that the US and Britain were involved. We wrote to Rawnsley, asking how he could possibly not know about the CIA's billion dollar per annum campaign to train and arm fighters, or about the 15,000 high-tech, US anti-tank missiles sent to Syrian 'rebels' via Saudi Arabia.

Rawnsley ignored us, as ever.

Just three days after the alleged attack, the Guardian's George Monbiot was asked about Douma:

'Don't you smell a set up here though? Craig Murray doesn't think Assad did it.'

Monbiot replied:

'Then he's a fool.'

Craig Murray responded rather more graciously:

'I continue to attract attacks from the "respectable" corporate and state media. I shared a platform with Monbiot once, and liked him. They plainly find the spirit of intellectual inquiry to be a personal affront.'

Monbiot tweeted back:

'I'm sorry Craig but, while you have done excellent work on some issues, your efforts to exonerate Russia and Syria of a long list of crimes, despite the weight of evidence, are foolish in the extreme.'

The idea that Murray's effort has been 'to exonerate Russia and Syria of a long list of crimes' is again so completely false, so obviously not what Murray has been doing. But it fits perfectly with the corporate media theme of Cold War-style browbeating: anyone challenging the case for US-UK policy on Syria is an 'apologist' for 'the enemy'.

If Britain was facing imminent invasion across the channel from some malignant superpower, or was on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the term 'apologist' might have some merit as an emotive term attacking free speech – understandable in the circumstances. But Syria is not at war with Britain; it offers no threat whatsoever. If challenging evidence of Assad's responsibility is 'apologism', then why can we not describe people accepting that evidence as 'Trump apologists', or 'May apologists', or 'Jaysh al-Islam apologists'? The term really means little more than, 'I disagree with you' – a much more reasonable formulation.

As Jonathan Cook has previously commented:

'Monbiot has repeatedly denied that he wants a military attack on Syria. But if he then weakly accepts whatever narratives are crafted by those who do – and refuses to subject them to any meaningful scrutiny – he is decisively helping to promote such an attack.'

Why Are These Academics Allowed?

The cynical, apologetic absurdity of questioning the official narrative has been a theme across the corporate media. In a Sky News discussion, Piers Robinson of Sheffield University urged caution in blaming the Syrian government in the absence of verifiable evidence.

In a remarkable response, Alan Mendoza, Executive Director of the Henry Jackson Society, screeched at him:

'Who do you think did it? Was it your mother who did it?'

Again, exact truth reversal – given the lack of credible, verified evidence, it was absurd to declare Robinson's scepticism absurd.

Mendoza later linked to an article attacking Robinson, and asked:

'Why are UK universities allowing such "academics" - and I use the term advisedly because they are not adhering to any recognised standard when promoting material with no credible sourcing, and often with no citation at all - to work in their institutions?'

In 2011, Mendoza wrote in The Times of Nato's 'intervention' in Libya:

'The action in Libya is a sign that the world has overcome the false lessons [sic] of Iraq or of "realism" in foreign policy.'

The UN had 'endorsed military action to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding'.

In fact, the unfolding 'humanitarian catastrophe' was fake news; Mendoza's mother needed no alibi. A September 9, 2016 report on the war from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons commented:

'Despite his rhetoric, the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence...'.

The Times launched a shameful, front-page attack on Robinson and other academics who are not willing to accept US-UK government claims on trust. The Times cited Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University:

'Clearly we can all disagree about the war in Syria, but to deny an event like a chemical attack even occurred, by claiming they were "staged", is to fall into an Orwellian world.'

In similar vein, in a second Guardian comment piece on Douma, Jonathan Freedland lamented: 'we are now in an era when the argument is no longer over our response to events, but the very existence of those events'. Echoing Soviet propaganda under Stalin, Freedland warned that this was indicative of an intellectual and moral sickness:

'These are symptoms of a post-truth disease that's come to be known as "tribal epistemology", in which the truth or falsity of a statement depends on whether the person making it is deemed one of us or one of them.'

And this was, once again, truth reversal – given recent history in Iraq and Libya, it was Lucas and Freedland who were falling into an Orwellian fantasy world. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens made the obvious point:

'Given the folly of the British government over Iraq and Libya, and its undoubted misleading of the public over Iraq, it is perfectly reasonable to suspect it of doing the same thing again. Some of us also do not forget the blatant lying over Suez, and indeed the Gulf of Tonkin'

Hitchens clearly shares our concern at media performance, particularly that of the Guardian, commenting:

'Has Invasion of the Bodysnatchers been re-enacted at Guardian HQ? Whatever the dear old thing's faults it was never a Pentagon patsy until recently. Rumours of relaunch as The Warmonger's Gazette, free toy soldier with every issue.'

Hitchens questioned Guardian certainty on Douma:

'But if facts are sacred, how can the Guardian be so sure, given that it is relying on a report from one correspondent 70 miles away, and another one 900 miles away.. and some anonymous quotes from people whose stories it has no way of checking?'

He added:

'The behaviour of The Guardian is very strange & illustrates just what a deep, poorly-understood change in our politics took place during the Blair years. We now have the curious spectacle of the liberal warmonger, banging his or her jingo fist on the table, demanding airstrikes.'

Indeed, in discussing the prospects for 'intervention' in the Guardian, Gaby Hinsliff, former political editor of the Observer, described the 2013 vote that prevented Britain from bombing Syria in August 2013 as 'that shameful night in 2013'. Shameful? After previous 'interventions' had completely wrecked Iraq and Libya on false pretexts, and after the US regime had been told the evidence was no 'slam dunk' by military advisers?

In the New Statesman, Paul Mason offered a typically nonsensical argument, linking to the anti-Assad website, Bellingcat:

'Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8 helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has been.'

Thus, echoing Freedland's reference to 'denialists and conspiracists', sceptics can only be idiot victims of Putin's propaganda. US media analyst Adam Johnson of FAIR accurately described Mason's piece as a 'mess', adding:

'I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99 yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don't support scoring goals, that they in fact oppose war.'

Surprisingly, the Bellingcat website, which publishes the findings of 'citizen journalist' investigations, appears to be taken seriously by some very high-profile progressives.

In the Independent, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas also mentioned the Syrian army 'Mi-8' helicopters. Why? Because she had read the same Bellingcat blog as Mason, to which she linked:

'From the evidence we've seen so far it appears that the latest chemical attack was likely by Mi-8 helicopters, probably from the forces of Syria's murderous President Assad.'

On Democracy Now!, journalist Glenn Greenwald said of Douma:

'I think that it's—the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government...'

This was an astonishing comment. After receiving fierce challenges (not from us), Greenwald partially retracted, tweeting:

'It's live TV. Something [sic – sometimes] you say things less than ideally. I think the most likely perpetrator of this attack is Syrian Govt.'

We wrote to Greenwald asking what had persuaded him of Assad's 'likely' responsibility for Douma. (Twitter, April 10, direct message)

The first piece of evidence he sent us (April 12) was the Bellingcat blog mentioning Syrian government helicopters cited by Mason and Lucas. Greenwald also sent us a report from Reuters, as well as a piece from 2017, obviously prior to the alleged Douma event.

This was thin evidence indeed for the claim made. In our discussion with him, Greenwald then completely retracted his claim (Twitter, April 12, direct message) that there was evidence of Syrian government involvement in the alleged attack. Yes, it's true that people 'say things less than ideally' on TV, but to move from 'quite overwhelming' to 'likely', to declaring mistaken the claim that there is evidence of Assad involvement, was bizarre.

Political analyst Ben Norton noted on Twitter:

'Reminder that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the US government and is a notorious vehicle for US soft power'

Norton added: 'It acts like an unofficial NATO propagandist, obsessively focusing on Western enemies.'

And:

'Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which is funded by NATO, US, Saudi, UAE, etc.

And:

'According to Meedan, which helps fund Bellingcat — along with the US government-funded NED — Bellingcat also works with the group Syrian Archive, which is funded by the German government, to jointly produce pro-opposition "research"'

And:

'The board of the directors for Meedan, which funds Bellingcat, includes Muna AbuSulayman—who led the Saudi oligarch's Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation—and Wael Fakharany—who was the regional director of Google in Egypt & North Africa (US gov. contractor Google also funds Bellingcat)'

And:

'Bellingcat—which gets money from the US gov-funded NED and fixates obsessively on Western enemies—claims to be nonpartisan and impartial, committed to exposing all sides, but a website search shows it hasn't published anything on Yemen since February 2017.'

Although Bellingcat is widely referenced by corporate journalists, we are unaware of any 'mainstream' outlet that has seriously investigated the significance of these issues for the organisation's credibility as a source of impartial information. As we will see in Part 2, corporate journalism is very much more interested in challenging the credibility of journalists and academics holding power to account.

Part 2 here...

DE and DC

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Phil Little, Richard Sanders, Janine Bandcroft April 26, 2018

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Gorilla-Radio.com

April 26, 2018

Though seldom spoken now, those past a certain age will remember the Dirty Wars waged in South America in the last half of the last century. Perhaps the worst of it was when The Dirty Wars soiled Central America: El Salvador, Nicarauga, Guatemala, and of course Honduras from where Gringo mastermind, John Negroponte coordinated Central America's share of the infamous Operation Condor.

The rise of leftist governments in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Sandinista reemergence in Nicaragua in the early years of this century was hopeful. Even in Guatemala truth and reconciliation commissions were established to acknowledge, if not punish, the genocidal horror visited upon the Mayan majority.

But that short-lived hope is ending. The fascists are risen again in Latin America, and Honduras is again in the middle of the nightmare.

Listen. Hear.

Phil Little is a former Catholic missionary, retired teacher, and for the last five years has acted as "accompaniment" for social and human rights activists in Honduras at risk because, as he says, "the theory [is] that a person is less likely to be killed if accompanied by a foreigner, preferably a gringo." That belief proved tragically over-optimistic in the case of murdered Honduran activist, Berta Cáceres in 2016. Phil will be at Cafe Simpatico tomorrow night, 1923 Fernwood Road, in the heart of Fernwood, with Kay Gimbel of CASC and MJAC, and micro-economist, Bill Feyrer presenting 'Honduras Today'.

Phil Little in the first half.

And; as Stephen Harper's Canada was first among nations to recognize and sign trade deals with the coup government of Honduras, so too has his successor been quick to adopt militarism, leaping in support of the recent bombing of Syria before it happened. But then, Justin Trudeau was only acting in accordance with the new understanding of Canadian values, as expressed by the Canadian Pension Plan. Your CPP long ago decided to adopt the ruthless morays of corporate war profiteers; and, you may be happy to know, the killing business has never been better.

Richard Sanders is founder and coordinator of Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and serves as editor to COAT’s publication, Press for Conversion. COAT cleaves to the quaint old notion war should not be regarded as a profit-driver by government, or used as an investment vehicle for its citizen's retirement fund.

Richard Sanders and how the CPP helped Canadians profit from the US/UK/France Air Strikes Against Syria, and will profit again the fires next time in the second half.

And; Victoria-based activist and CFUV Radio broadcaster at-large, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour with the Left Coast Events Bulletin and some of the good things to get up to around here for the coming week. But first, Phil Little and matters of life and death in Honduras, where corruption IS the operating system.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Thursday between 11-Noon Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

Enough is Enough: Anti-Semitism and the Ongoing Gaza Atrocity

Jewish Guilt is the Discourse of The Goyim

by Gilad Atzmon

April 24, 2018

For quite some time the British have accepted that British Jewish organizations have hijacked the political discourse. As has happened in other Western countries, the British political establishment has engaged is a relentless rant against antisemitsm.

Sometime the focus drifts for a day or two. An alleged ‘Russian nerve gas attack’ provided a 48 hour pause. Occasionally we bomb Arabs in the name of ‘human intervention’ only to realize a day or two later that we have, once again, followed a premeditated foreign agenda.

But, somehow, we always return to the antisemitsm debate, as if our media and politicians are a herd of flies gravitating to a pile of poop.

Last week the BOD/JLC, two Jewish organisations that claim to ‘represent’ British Jews published this painful to watch video.

Judging by the number of viewers, Brits are tired of this nauseating outburst. Brits know very well that when it comes to hate crimes, Jews are not high on the victim list; Jews are far less ‘victimized’ than Blacks, Muslims, Roma, trans-sexuals, gays and many others.

Since Jewish community ‘leaders’ remain obsessed with antisemitism, I will try to help these ‘leaders’ understand the universal perspective on the meaning of antisemitsm.

True Antisemitsm is when IDF snipers film themselves shooting unarmed Semite protestors* like sitting ducks while laughing their heads off!

True Antisemitsm is when the Jewish State legislates and enforces institutional racism against actual Semites, Blacks and Goyim in general.

The Gaza siege is an example of what common people see as real Antisemitsm. It is designed to humiliate and deprive Semites for being Semites and it has turned Gaza into the largest open air prison known to man.

Enough is Enough is humanity expressing collective fatigue of these barbarian actions.

I would prefer to believe that the Jewish fear of antisemitsm is actually an expression of collective Jewish guilt. For obvious reasons, Jews find it hard to compartmentalize Jewish identity within the context of the Jewish State being a rogue State.

There are a few modes of dealing with collective guilt that have been recognized. Repression seems to be the most common one. Some argue, in that regard, that escapism and denial are Israel’s primary belief systems.

Acknowledgment of guilt is, undoubtedly, far more painful. The Germans made it into their way of living after the last big war. Maybe Jews can actually learn from the Germans -- instead of attempting to emulate 3rd Reich’s racist agenda—— Israel and its supporters should try to reproduce German’s post WWII remorse. As it happens, there are a very few Jews and Israelis who acknowledge their responsibility for the Palestinian plight and support the Palestinian Right of Return. These rare Jews are brave enough to admit that Israel is inherently anti-Semitic and racist to the core.

However, silencing Israel’s dissent is the usual Jewish political method to resolve Jewish guilt. Attributing the ‘Antisemitic’ slur to others is how both Zionists and the so called ‘anti’ kick the ball to the goyim’s yard. This method was effective for a while but it doesn’t work anymore: being called an anti-Semite in 2018 is a synonym for an ethically driven humanist, an anti racist, a truth teller, peace and Justice role model, a rock star. The list of ‘anti-semites’ is growing exponentially, probably in direct proportion with the tidal rise in Jewish guilt. The more guilty (some) Jews feel, the more the rest of us are becoming anti-Semitic in their eyes.

“Unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” was, probably Jacques Lacan’s most astute psychoanalytical observation. It is the fear that the Other, in this case, the gentile, the humanist, sees you truly. It is the fear that the goy can detect your shame. Jewish Guilt as such is the unbearable fear that the Goyim know.
   

* the author of this piece very well knows that ‘Semitic’ is neither a racial nor an ethnic category. It refers instead to a group of languages. The reference to semitism is made in order to deconstruct the Judeo-centric ‘antisemitic argument.’

 

If they want to burn it, you want to read it!

 

Being in Time - A Post Political Manifesto,

Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com and here (gilad.co.uk).

Regime Change Nicaragua: Contra Ghosts and Waiting for Ortega to Fall

Is Nicaragua Next in Line for NATO-Style Regime Change?

by Tortilla Con Sal  - TeleSur

April 23rd, 2018

The pattern is similar to events in Libya, Syria and Venezuela, where extreme right-wing political minorities conspired with foreign elites to overthrow the national status quo.

Events in Nicaragua over the past week are clearly modeled on the kind of U.S.-led, NATO-driven regime change that succeeded in Libya, Ivory Coast and Ukraine, but has so far failed in Thailand, Syria and Venezuela.

At a national level, the protests have been led by the private sector business classes defending their rate of profit against socialist policies in defense of low-income workers and people on pensions. Since April 18, violent protests have taken place across Nicaragua.

The Events So Far

The protests began a couple of days after the government announced proposed reforms to the social security system, which is running a deficit of around US$75 million a year. The government announced the proposed reforms following the suspension of talks by Nicaragua’s private sector business organization, Cosep. Pending possible modifications, the reforms are due to come into effect on July 1.

In the protests, as of Friday, 10 people have been killed and over 80 people injured, including at least 30 police officers. Most fatalities resulted from lethal use of firearms by right-wing provocateurs. Mainstream Western media reports cover up the fact that – far from being peaceful – the protests have been characterized by lethal violence from extreme right-wing shock groups trying to destabilize Nicaragua, just as they have done in Venezuela. In response, workers and students supporting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have mobilized against the violent opposition provocations.

The protests started in earnest in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, on April 18 and rapidly spread to important provincial centers such as Leon in the west, Granada to the south and Esteli to the north. The protests were fueled by inflammatory messaging on social networks and deliberate manipulation by right-wing media. Some right-wing TV cable media went off the air – their signal apparently having been deliberately taken down – without any clear, independently verifiable explanation.

Apart from the deaths and injuries caused by the violent opposition protests, widespread damage was caused to infrastructure, including local Social Security Institute offices; municipal authority offices in Esteli and Granada; university buildings in Managua and Leon; Sandinista party offices in Chinandega and Masaya, and government offices in Managua. There, too, opposition gangs tried to enter and destroy the brand new ‘Denis Martinez’ baseball stadium; the brand new Fernando Velez Paiz Hospital, and the Institute of Social Security head office. The gangs also attacked most of the Sandinista-aligned radio stations, including Nuevo Radio Ya and Radio Sandino, trying to set them on fire.

A group of more than 100 protesting students retreated from the main university area in Managua and took refuge in the city’s Catholic cathedral. The police contained them there until their peaceful departure was negotiated. Further afield in Nueva Guinea, towards Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, an opposition gang attacked a cultural event held in support of the government, wounding various government supporters. In many places, gangs of opportunist delinquents have intermingled with the political protests, which have also involved attacks on commercial business premises and vehicles, as well as bystanders not involved in the protests.

While the private business sector organization Cosep has called for peaceful demonstrations, extremists from the right-wing Citizens for Liberty and Sandinista Renewal Movement political organizations have led the violent protests. They have made effective use of social networks, spreading false information and inflammatory accusations so as to confuse and mislead people – especially young people – who know little or nothing about the Social Security reforms, which have turned into a mere pretext for violent protests aimed at destabilizing a government which enjoys overwhelming electoral support.

Both evangelical religious authorities and the Catholic church hierarchy have urged calm and called for dialogue. Cosep has insisted that people protest peacefully and called to reopen talks on social security reform with the government. The army and police completely support the government, and the police have acted with restraint in the face of lethal provocation. Trade unions and the main student organization have condemned the violence and expressed support for the government’s proposed social security reforms. The Union of Older Adults, which lobbies for better pension rights and health benefits for older people, also supports the proposals, which include a five percent deduction from older people’s pensions in exchange for full rights to the same healthcare as active workers.

Context: Nicaragua’s Social Security Sytem

After Nicaragua’s right-wing parties won the national elections 1990, the three subsequent right-wing governments mismanaged the Social Security Institute (INSS), cutting back coverage and reducing benefits. During the same period, millions of dollars of INSS funds were misappropriated to fund private sector businesses and make illicit payments to individuals. When a new Sandinista government took office under President Daniel Ortega in January 2007, the social security fund had an unsustainable deficit and a much-reduced contributions base.

Since then, the INSS has increased the number of people covered by social security and also extended the benefits the system provides. These now include hemodialysis, oncology therapies, spinal surgery, ophthalmology, neurosurgery, hip and knee replacements, kidney transplants and other very expensive, specialized procedures.

Despite having greatly increased the number of people contributing to the system, the INSS is still running a deficit of around US$75 million. The dispute between the government and the private business sector is over how to fund that deficit. The private business sector wants to reduce costs by applying the following neoliberal plan:

• Raising the retirement age from 60 to 65
• Eliminating the reduced pension paid to retired people who were unable to complete the 750 weekly contributions required to receive a full pension
• Eliminating the minimum pension that ensures no one has a pension lower than the minimum wage for industrial workers
• Eliminating the annual Christmas bonus equivalent to one month’s pension
• No longer maintaining the value of the pension against the national currency to compensate for the annual sliding devaluation of five percent applied by the Central Bank
• Doubling the number of weekly contributions qualifying for a pension from 750 to 1500
• Privatizing the INSS medical clinics

The government wants to protect the social security health system and increase social security coverage and benefits as a collective public good by:

• Gradually increasing the employer’s contribution by 3.25 percent
• Increasing the employee’s contribution by 0.75 percent
• Increasing the government’s contribution for public sector workers by 1.25 percent
• Removing the salary ceiling so that people earning high salaries pay social security contributions proportionate to their income
• Deducting 5 percent from retirees’ pensions so they receive the same healthcare benefits as active workers (which they currently do not)
• Maintaining the number of weekly contributions to qualify for a full pension at 750
• Maintaining the reduced pension and the minimum pension
• Maintaining the Christmas bonus
• Maintaining pensions’ value against the annual 5 percent devaluation
• Keeping all INSS clinics in the public system

 

Latest Developments

President Daniel Ortega has confirmed the government will continue discussions with Cosep, the organization representing Nicaragua’s private sector business, as well as the other organizations taking part in the talks about how to defend the sustainability of the INSS.

Disturbances continue in various parts of Nicaragua, with more deaths and injuries being reported. Church representatives, business leaders and political figures are calling for an end to the violence. For the right-wing political groups provoking the violence, the INSS reform is simply the opportunistic pretext of the moment, but it is unclear whether they aim to cause longer-term destabilization.

The pattern so far is similar to events in Libya, Ivory Coast, Syria, Ukraine, Thailand and Venezuela. In these countries, extreme right-wing political minorities conspired with foreign elites – mainly in the United States and Europe – to overthrow the national status quo and take power.

In Nicaragua, the small, minority right-wing political opposition have openly sought financial and political support in the United States and Europe explicitly to undermine and destabilize Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The obvious model they are working from is Venezuela. The next couple of weeks will tell if Nicaragua is going to suffer yet another U.S. intervention with all that implies for the country’s people and the region.

© teleSUR