The Coup This Time: Failing to Overthrow Nicaragua

Violent Coup Fail in Nicaragua 

by Kevin Zeese - CounterPunch

July 24, 2018

On Clearing The FOG radio and podcast, Margaret Flowers and I interviewed Stephen Sefton, who lives in Nicaragua and is a founder of Tortilla con Sal. He names the names behind the violence and describes what is happening in Nicaragua.

The violent coup in Nicaragua has failed. This does not mean the United States and oligarchs are giving up, but this phase of their effort to remove the government did not succeed.

The coup exposed the alliances who are working with the United States to put in place a neoliberal government that is controlled by the United States and serves the interests of the wealthy.

People celebrated the failure of the coup but realize work needs to be done to protect the gains of the Sandinista revolution. 

Lessons Learned From The Failed Violent Coup In Nicaragua And Next Steps

  People Celebrate Revolution, Call For Peace, Show Support for Government

The people of Nicaragua showed their support for the democratically-elected government of Daniel Ortega with a massive outpouring in Managua in a celebration of the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. In addition to the mass protest in Managua, various cities had their own, in some cases very sizeable ones.

People have wanted peace to return to Nicaragua. They have also wanted the roadblocks removed, which have resulted in closed businesses, job loss and loss of mobility. Roadblocks have been removed, even in the opposition stronghold of Masaya. There were two opposition deaths and one police officer killed in the removal. There was also an earlier death of a policeman in Masaya, captured when he was off-duty, tortured and burnt to death. This brings the total of police killed since April up to at least 21 with hundreds injured. With the opening of the main road on the east side of Masaya, all Nicaragua’s main routes are open to traffic and buses etc are operating normally.

At the rally, President Ortega called on the people of Nicaragua to defend peace and reinstate the unity that existed in the nation before the violent opposition protests. He described how the violent coup attempted to destabilize the country and ended the peace that has existed through the eleven years of his time in office. He said,

“Peace must be defended every day to avoid situations like these being repeated.”

He also criticized the Catholic Bishops for their role in the failed violent coup. Ortega described the Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua as “coup leaders” for collaborating with the opposition during the protests. Not only did the Catholic leadership side with the opposition during the national dialogue, but priests were involved in kidnapping and torture. Pope Francis has a lot of work to do to rein in the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. If their role in these violent protests and opposition to an economy for the people is not stopped, this will become a scandal for the Catholic Church.

Other Latin American leaders spoke out against involvement in the coup. Bolivian President Evo Morales condemned US “interference” in Nicaragua, denouncing the “criminal strategies” used against the government of Daniel Ortega. Morales accused the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of “openly supporting violence” in Nicaragua. Also at the celebration were the foreign ministers of Cuba and Venezuela, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, and Jorge Arreza, all supporting Nicaragua over the violent coup of the United States and oligarchs.

The United States is Escalating Economic War and Support for Opposition

The United States is not giving up. Also on the anniversary of the revolution, the NICA Act, designed to escalate the economic war against Nicaragua, was introduced in the Senate. It has already been passed by the US House of Representatives. The Senate bill, called the Nicaragua Human Rights and Anti-corruption Act of 2018, imposes sanctions, calls for early elections and escalates US intelligence involvement in Nicaragua. It is a law that ensures continued US efforts to remove the democratically-elected government.

At the same time, USAID announced an additional $1.5 million for Nicaragua to build opposition to the government. This will fund the NGOs that participated in the protests, human rights groups that falsely reported the situation, media to produce the regime change narrative and other support for the opposition.

The coordination between Nicaraguan opposition and the United States was shown by Max Blumenthal’s attempted visit to an organization that funnels USAID and NED money to the opposition. He visited the Managua offices of the Institute of Strategic Studies and Public Policies (IEEPP in Spanish), but it was closed because its director, Felix Maradiaga, who was at the heart of the violent unrest, was in Washington, DC seeking more funding from USAID.

On July 18, the US-dominated OAS passed a resolution concerning “The Situation in Nicaragua.” An earlier effort to endorse a report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) was so biased that it failed. The report ignored the opposition’s widespread violence or inaccurately attributed it to the government. It also failed to recognize government actions in self-defense. The resolution approving the IACHR report was supported by only ten out of 34 countries.

The resolution, which was finally passed by the OAS, condemned violence on all sides and urged Nicaragua to pursue all options including the national dialogue to seek peace begun by Ortega. On the issue of elections, the resolution urged Nicaragua “to support an electoral calendar jointly agreed to in the context of the National Dialogue process.” Only this mainly symbolic resolution could pass muster in the OAS, despite US domination.

What Happened and What Was Learned

In our article “Correcting the Record: What Is Really Happening In Nicaragua,” Nils McCune and I describe what was behind the violent coup attempt. We reported that there was a lot of misinformation on what was occurring in Nicaragua, indeed the false narrative of regime change was part of the tactics of the failed coup. Perhaps most importantly we described the alignment of forces behind the coup.

The coup was a class war turned upside down. The Ortega government includes none of the oligarchic families, a first in the history of Nicaragua. He has put in place a bottom-up economy that has lifted people out of poverty, provided access to health care and education, given micro-loans to entrepreneurs and small businesses and created an economy energized by public spending. Ortega expanded coverage of the social security system; as a result, a new formula was required to ensure fiscal stability.

Ortega made a counter-proposal to the IMF/business proposal, which would cut social security and raise the retirement age. He proposed no cuts to social security and increasing employer contributions by 3.5% to pension and health funds, while only slightly increasing worker contributions by 0.75% and shifting 5% of pensioners’ cash transfer into their healthcare fund. These reforms were the trigger as it was the business lobby who called for the protests.

The forces aligned with the violent coup included the oligarchs, big business interests, foreign investors (e.g. Colombian financiers), the US-funded NGO’s and the Catholic Church, a long-term ally of the wealthy. Also involved was the Movement for Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS), a tiny Sandinista offshoot party, of former Sandanistas who left the party when Ortega lost an election in 1990 who are aligned with the US State Department.

Regarding students, there were already student protests around university elections, and these were redirected by the violent coup effort and supported by a small minority of students from private universities, the April 19th Movement. Some of these students had been brought to the US by the Freedom House, which has long ties to the CIA and met with far-right interventionist members of the US Congress, including Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Sen. Marco Rubio, and Sen. Ted Cruz.

These groups acted in opposition to the bulk of Nicaraguan society and showed their true colors. This includes:



No doubt more will come out about this in the future as the coup is researched and analyzed. As the facts become clear, the opposition will lose more political power and be even less likely to win elections. The blockades of roads with violence undermined the economy and had a negative impact on the poor and working class. If it becomes evident that this was a strategy of the opposition, they will lose power. NGO’s that are funded by the US and run by members of the MRS will be noted for their dishonest narrative and will be seen as an arm of the United States and not trusted by the people of Nicaragua. Media outside of Nicaragua will come to understand that human rights groups and NGOs are not reliable sources of information but need to be questioned. They need to be pushed to break their ties with the United States.

This does not mean all is well on the Sandinista side of the alliance of forces. The coup is an opportunity for self-reflection and self-criticism that is already happening, as seen in this list of 20 results from the coup, which begins with “A more consolidated and United FSLN.” In addition, the Action Group of the Solidarity with Nicaragua Campaign put forward seven propositions to unify around. The protest took advantage of challenges the Nicaraguan government faces in continuing to lift up the poor and economically insecure. It shows their need to build their capacity to quickly let the public know their side of the story. And, it shows the need for planning for a post-Ortega Sandinista government, as the president is in his third term.

The anniversary of the revolution was a good beginning at strengthening the unity of the Sandinista movement and celebration of the defeat of the coup, but there will be challenges ahead. Nicaragua is a poor country that needs foreign investment. If the United States escalates the economic war, which seems to be the intent, it will make it challenging to continue the social and economic programs that are lifting up the poor. Nicaragua had relied on investment from Venezuela, but it is also in the midst of an economic war, which along with the low oil prices has created economic challenges for them. Nicaragua has begun to build economic relationships with China, Russia, Iran and other countries; these will likely need to expand.

The misinformation was deep and widespread. Inside Nicaragua, there were stories of students being killed that never happened but that escalated the protests. The opposition claimed to be nonviolent when their strategy was to use violence to force regime change while the government quartered the National Police. False news and videos of attacks on neighborhoods and universities never stopped being manufactured. One example, students calling for help and claiming they were under attack, was later exposed in a video showing the students practicing the false social media narrative.

Peace and justice activists in the United States and western nations have learned they need to be much more careful believing reports on what is occurring in Nicaragua. The US-funding of NGOs involved in women’s issues, environmental protection and human rights in Nicaragua make them questionable sources of information for justice advocates. In addition, US-funded regime change efforts are getting more sophisticated at social media; and thus, care must be taken as social media has it is abused by regime change advocates. We must look to other sources that have shown the ability to report accurately e.g., Tortilla con Sal, Telesur, Redvolucion. Peace and justice advocates must be grounded in anti-imperialism and nonintervention by the United States.
 

Kevin Zeese is an organizer at Popular Resistance.

More articles by: Kevin Zeese

Pipeline to Syria: Following the Weapons Flow

America's Guns: Secret Pipeline to Syria

by AJE

15 Mar 2018

So how does this secretive but deadly trade function?

In a special two-part probe about America's guns, People and Power's Juliana Ruhfus and filmmaker Seamus Mirodan teamed up with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project to investigate US arms transfers overseas, and, subsequently, the consequences of lax rules governing the arms market closer to home.

- Subscribe to our channel: http://aje.io/AJSubscribe 

- Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish 

- Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera 

- Check our website: https://www.aljazeera.com/

Survivor Series: Omnivore v. Vegan No Contest

Watch how omnivore and plant-based diets compare

by Mercy for Animals

Is a Plant-Based Diet Really Better for the Environment and Your Health?

https://youtu.be/aei-Xtt6tVw 

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White Helmets Cover Evacuation of Western-Sponsored Terrorists from Syria

Israel Evacuated Alleged Mossad-Linked Rebel Commanders During “Humanitarian” White Helmet Rescue

by Whitney Webb  - MintPress News

July 23, 2018

Given that Israel had spent over $60,000 a year supporting Syrian rebel group Fursan al-Golan financially, it would make sense for Tel Aviv not only to develop and maintain ties with their commanders, but to rescue those commanders as the Syrian government continues its advance.

Over the weekend, and as MintPress predicted last Tuesday, the controversial Western government-funded “humanitarian” group, the Syrian Civil Defense — popularly known as the White Helmets — were evacuated from southern Syria as the Syrian government continues to gain ground in its offensive throughout the country’s southwest.

However, sources from within the Syrian opposition have revealed that the White Helmets were not the only ones evacuated from Syrian territory, as four top “rebel” commanders were also among the evacuees, undermining the heavily promoted narrative that the evacuation was purely “humanitarian” in nature.


White Helmets evacuation from Occupied
Golan to Jordan - IDF video screen grab

 According to Al Masdar News, four rebel commanders were evacuated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which oversaw the evacuation operation: Moaz Nassar and Abu Rateb, of Fursan al-Golan (the Knights of Golan); Ahmad Nahs, of Alwiyat Saif al-Sham (Sword of al-Sham); and Alaa al-Halaki; of Jaish Ababeel. Al Masdar’s sources also stated that those same four commanders had previously been recruited by Israeli intelligence early in the conflict and had maintained ties with the Mossad over the years.

Israeli ties to Syrian rebel groups

Though Al Masdar’s claims may seem shocking to some, there is plenty of evidence explaining why Israel would be interested in protecting commanders from these specific rebel brigades. In the case of Fursan al-Golan, for instance, the Wall Street Journal wrote last year that the Israeli government paid the rebel group an estimated $5,000 a month and a special Israeli army unit was created to oversee Israel’s support for Fursan al-Golan and other groups.

Israel’s support for the group has been so great that it’s spokesperson, Moatasem al-Golani, told the Journal that “we wouldn’t have survived without Israel’s assistance.”

Israel’s backing of the group is believed to have begun back in 2013 under orders from former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who sought to cultivate the presence of Wahhabi rebels along the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as a “buffer zone.”

Given that Israel had spent over $60,000 a year supporting the group financially, it would make sense for Tel Aviv not only to develop and maintain ties with their commanders, but to rescue those commanders as the Syrian government continues its advance. Otherwise, the capture of the commanders by Syrian forces could reveal further proof of the web of connections between their group (and other related groups) and the Israeli government, as well as other foreign governments, including the United States.

Indeed, the United States – Israel’s greatest ally – has also supported both Fursan al-Golan and Alwiyat Saif al-Sham, as both groups were trained and equipped by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) back in 2013. Alwiyat Saif al-Sham, for example, obtained TOW anti-tank missiles from the United States in the process. Though the group was “vetted” by the CIA, it joined forces in 2015 with the Jaish al-Haramon coalition, a group based in southern Syria and led by al-Nusra Front – the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda.

The assertion made by Al Masdar that the rescued rebel commanders had connections to Mossad is also in keeping with precedent, as the intelligence agency has long helped bolster terror groups throughout the region. For instance, Mossad has supported the terror group Jundallah, active in Iran and Pakistan, and the Iranian terror group Mujahedeen Khalq (MEK).

And, as MintPress has previously reported, even some commanders of ISIS (Daesh) were later revealed to actually be Mossad agents following their capture.

Assertions of an Israeli evacuation of rebel commanders, if confirmed, would prove Israel’s “humanitarian” rescue of White Helmets members and their families was aimed at protecting assets of Israeli and Western intelligence that had helped to prolong Syria’s now seven-year-long civil war.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. 

Fin de Siècle: Capitalism's Moral Cul de Sac

A New World Order: That Possible Dream

by Christopher Black - NEO

24/7, 2018

Well, my friends, I started to write an essay about the Brussels Declaration issued by NATO at the end of the American shakedown meeting with its allies on July 11, that, beneath the platitudes about “democracy” and “shared values” “defensive alliance,” “respect for international law” and layer upon layer of lies about “Russian aggression” is nothing less than a declaration of war. For that is what that document amounts to. Those interested can go to the NATO website and read it for themselves as paragraph after paragraph of fantasy and distortions are set out in that smug tone the war crowd likes to use to fool the rest of us.

But be prepared for your mind to be polluted with every word.

So I stopped writing that piece, tore it up; and I stopped because how often can any reasonable person write about the same thing, the same war propaganda dished out with breakfast, lunch and dinner on every TV channel, every radio channel, every newspaper, time after time, without being numbed by it all.

I started to write another piece about the Skripal affair but then news came that the British police claim to have identified two “suspects” in the original incident, and let it be leaked that, of course, they are Russians, no doubt named Boris and Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon, though the British government, to draw more attention to the leak, cautioned that the news may not be confirmed. But you can bet it soon will be, maybe by the time you read this. It’s difficult to keep up with the propaganda the forces for war are putting out on a daily basis.

I started to write another about the Trump-Putin meeting but once again, only succeeded in making myself depressed as I watched the US news media, from the so called “left” to the right, accusing Trump of treason for talking to president Putin about peace and cooperation instead of war and destruction.

All the mass media of the western world, that tragic array of countries led by charlatans, fools, gangsters and crooks that are the real face of capitalism, joined in with their fake gasps of consternation at the antics of the American president, all calling for the head of Vladimir Putin to be put on a spike next to Donald Trump’s.

Not since the days of the assassination of President Kennedy have we witnessed such malice and hatred against an American president. Not since the witch hunts of the McCarthy period when American society turned itself inside out has this level of hysteria been generated by the people that control the media and the government machinery.

Turn on the news, read a journal, and what you will see is not news but the ravings of secret service officials, interviewed by criminals with the morality of Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist hanged at Nuremberg, telling us they are the voice of truth and the rest of us better just shut up and take it.

I even heard one of them make the laughable statement that Putin’s gift of a soccer ball to Trump at their joint press conference, a mere souvenir of the World Cup, and a reminder to Trump that the Russians presented the best World Cup experience ever, is proof positive that Putin is “playing Trump”. I kid you not, and yes, they are that idiotic and that dangerous.

And yet, this same US president, who claims to want to resolve things with Russia, is the same man who bullied the NATO gang members to cough up more money for war preparations against Russia, who supports the ongoing Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine slaughtering the people of the Donbass, who increases the build up of NATO forces on Russia’s borders, who supports the coup attempt against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, against Maduro in Venezuela, who has slapped the Palestinians in the face, arranged for the White Helmet terrorists to be rescued from Syrian justice by Israel, and now Canada, who is harassing China with his navy and is intent on beggaring the world with a trade war so “America can be great, again.”

One has to wonder whether Trump is a willing dupe in the anti-Russian hysteria contrived by the war fanatics and willingly plays the foil so the hysteria can be raised to a crisis point. Trying to make sense of it all is a maddening affair, unless one goes back to basic principles of how the world works.

In his First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War Marx wrote:

“If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure?

“We defined the foreign policy aimed at by the International in these words: vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relation of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations.”

Yet, where does that exist now? Even president Xi of China recently wrote a letter to Paul Kagame, the mass murderer installed in power in Rwanda by the west, praising him and ignoring the millions of African dead that Kagame, among others, is responsible for. Morality is impaled on expediency and cynical opportunism. The great powers make international agreements and create institutions that temporarily establish how their competition for world plunder will be regulated and the rest of us be damned.

They did it after the First World War. 

In twenty years that world order resulted in a bigger, more destructive, war. At the end of the Second World War, another world order was established in which the US tried to destroy the socialist movements of the world while the Soviet Union and Red China resisted in war after war after war; until the counter-revolution in the USSR produced the weaker successor state of Russia, China began the slide back towards the rule of capital and the US declared a New World Order in which it planned to dominate and exploit the people of the world. It then attacked Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria and on and on.

But their attempt to create this new order has met resistance in every region of the world and as the situation of the people deteriorates, especially in the USA, the reaction becomes more and more irrational and desperate and dangerous to our survival. Even as our industrial civilization brings us all to the edge of extinction, they bang the drums of war.

These successive world orders are continually upset by the very conditions and circumstances they produce as capital searches for ways to increase its exploitation of resources, including human beings who are seen as just another resource to be used and destroyed, for new ways to secure more profit.

And so at each new historical phase, a new balance of world forces is established by fresh military conflict, followed by a fresh set of agreements, followed by new conflicts ad infinitum as the dialectic requires in a logic that only a socialist world order can stop.

International relations are a reflection of the contradictions existing in a world economy of competing national state and the class divisions within those states. The economy is global in character and so the struggle for the appropriation of global profit has become acute among the major economic powers with the United States facing a crisis that seems to be so deep that even world war is actively considered as a way out.

Capital has problems the world over, proved by the continuous push to squeeze the workers until we are just dry husks the world over. US capital has even bigger problems as its economy and influence weaken. So it is following the logic of war. If the system doesn’t favour you and you have the power to change it, change it to your benefit. That’s what they are doing, but in the doing they don’t care about life, or morality, or us.

Little the war crowd care about the working classes. They are capital. They are the dictatorship. We are the helots who they spit upon with every false word out of their mouths, who steal our money and who steal our lives so they can gorge themselves until they vomit and then gorge themselves the more.

So I did not succeed in writing what I intended but you have to forgive me because I’m beyond fed up with that dictatorship, with that system and their gorging while we starve and suffer their wars and decadence. I’m sure you are too.

For there is only one world order that I can accept, that can lead us, the working people of the world, out of the cul de sac we find ourselves in, a new world order founded upon morality and justice than can only come with the great emancipation of the working classes of the world, that possible dream, that only struggle can realise.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Story Whores: Peddling the Rowley Perfume Plot

The Silence of the Whores

by Craig Murray

25 Jul, 2018

The mainstream media are making almost no effort today to fit Charlie Rowley’s account of his poisoning into the already ludicrous conspiracy theory being peddled by the government and intelligence agencies.

ITV News gamely inserted the phrase “poisoned by a Russian nerve agent” into their exclusive interview with Charlie Rowley, an interview in which they managed to ask no penetrating questions whatsoever, and of which they only broadcast heavily edited parts.

Their own website contains this comment by their journalist Rupert Evelyn:

“He said it was unopened, the box it was in was sealed, and that they had to use a knife in order to cut through it.

“That raises the question: if it wasn’t used, is this the only Novichok that exists in this city? And was it the same Novichok used to attack Sergei and Yulia Skripal?”

But the information about opening the packet with a knife is not in the linked interview. What Rowley does say in the interview is that the box was still sealed in its cellophane. Presumably it was the cellophane he slit open with a knife.

So how can this fit in to the official government account? 

Presumably the claim is that Russian agents secretly visited the Skripal house, sprayed novichok on the door handle from this perfume bottle, and then, at an unknown location, disassembled the nozzle from the bottle (Mr Rowley said he had to insert it), then repackaged and re-cellophaned the bottle prior to simply leaving it to be discovered somewhere – presumably somewhere indoors as it still looked new – by Mr Rowley four months later. However it had not been found by anyone else in the interim four months of police, military and security service searching.

Frankly, the case for this being the bottle allegedly used to coat the Skripals’ door handle looks wildly improbable. But then the entire government story already looked wildly improbable anyway – to the extent that I literally do not know a single person, even among my more right wing family and friends, who believes it.

The reaction of the media, who had shamelessly been promoting the entirely evidence free “the Russians did it” narrative, to Mr Rowley’s extremely awkward piece of news has been to shove it as far as possible down the news agenda and make no real effort to reconcile it.

By his own account, Mr Rowley is not a reliable witness, his memory affected by the “Novichok”. It is not unreasonable to conjecture there may also be other reasons why he is vague about where and how he came into possession of this package of perfume.

The perfume bottle is now in the hands of the Police. Is it not rather strange that they have not published photos of it, to see if it jogs the memory of a member of the public who saw it somewhere in the last four months, or saw somebody with it?

The “perpetrators” know what it looks like and already know the police have it, so that would not give away any dangerous information. You might believe the lockdown of the story and control of the narrative is more important to the authorities than solving the crime, which we should not forget is now murder.

Why the Jewish Nation-State Law Does Not Destroy Israel's Democracy

Jewish Nation-state Law: Why Israel Was Never a Democracy

by Ramzy Baroud 

July 23, 2018

The head of the Arab Joint List Alliance at the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), Aymen Odeh, described the passing of the racist Jewish Nation-state Law as "the death of our democracy."

Did Odeh truly believe that, prior to this law, he had lived in a true democracy? 70 years of Israeli Jewish supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars, sieges, mass incarceration, numerous discriminatory laws, all aimed at the very destruction of the Palestinian people should have given enough clues that Israel was never a democracy, to begin with.

The Jewish Nation-state Law is merely the icing on the cake. It simply gave those who argued, all along, that Israel's attempt at combining democracy with ethnic supremacy was racism masquerading as democracy, the munition they needed to further illustrate the point.

There is no escaping the moral imperative now. Those who insist on supporting Israel must know that they are supporting an unabashed Apartheid regime.

The new law, which was passed after some wrangling on January 19, has divorced Israel from any claim, however untrue, to being a democratic state.

In fact, the law does not mention the word 'democracy' in its wording, not even once. Reference to the Jewish identity of the state, however are ample and dominant, with the clear exclusion of the Palestinian people from their rights in their historic homeland:

- “The state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people ...
- “The actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
- “The state will labor to ensure the safety of sons of the Jewish people …
- “The state will act to preserve the cultural, historical and religious legacy of the Jewish people among the Jewish diaspora,” and so on.

But most dangerous of all is the stipulation that "the state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."

True, illegal Jewish settlements already dot the Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem; and a de facto segregation already exists in Israel itself. In fact, segregation is so deep and entrenched, even maternity wards in Israeli hospitals separate between mothers, based on their race.

The above stipulation, however, will further accelerate segregation and cement Apartheid, making the harm not merely intellectual and political, but physical as well.

The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Adalah, has documented in its 'Discriminatory Laws Database' a list of over 65 Israeli laws that,

"[D]iscriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel and/or Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) on the basis of their national belonging."

According to Adalah,

"These laws limit the rights of Palestinians in all areas of life, from citizenship rights to the right to political participation, land and housing rights, education rights, cultural and language rights, religious rights, and due process rights during detention."

While it would be accurate to argue that the Jewish Nations-state bill is the officiation of Apartheid in Israel, this realization should not dismiss the previous reality upon which Israel was founded 70 years ago.

Apartheid is not a single law, but a slow, agonizing build-up of an intricate legal regime that is motivated by the belief that one racial group is superior to all others.

Not only does the new law elevate Israel's Jewish identity and erase any commitment to democracy, it also downgrades the status of all others. Palestinian Arabs, the natives of the land of historic Palestine upon which Israel was established, did not feature prominently in the new law at all. There was a mere stipulation made to the Arabic language, but only to downgrade it from being an official language, to a 'special one.'

Israel’s decision to refrain from formulating a written constitution when it was founded in 1948 was not a haphazard one. Since then, it has been following a predicable model where it would alter reality on the ground to the advantage of Jews at the expense of Palestinian Arabs.

Instead of a constitution, Israel resorted to what it termed ‘Basic Laws’, which allowed for the constant formulation of new laws guided by the ‘Jewish State’s’ commitment to racial supremacy than to democracy, international law, human rights or any other ethnical value.

The Jewish Nation-state Law is itself a 'Basic Law.' And with that law, Israel has dropped the meaningless claim to being both Jewish and democratic. This impossible task was often left to the Supreme Court which tried, but failed, to strike any convincing balance.

This new reality should, once and for all, end the protracted debate on the supposed uniqueness of Israel's political system.

And since Israel has chosen racial supremacy over any claim, however faint, to real democracy, western countries that have often shielded Israel must also make a choice on whether they wish to support an Apartheid regime or fight against it.

The initial statement by EU foreign affairs chief, Federica Mogherini was lackluster and feeble.

"We are concerned, we have expressed this concern and we will continue to engage with Israeli authorities in this context," she said, while renewing her commitment to the 'two-state solution.'

This is hardly the proper statement in response to a country that had just announced its membership in the Apartheid club.

The EU must end its wishy-washy political discourse and disengage from Apartheid Israel, or it has to accept the moral, ethical and legal consequences of being an accomplice in Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

Israel has made its choice and it is, unmistakably, the wrong one. The rest of the world must now make its choice as well, hopefully the right one: standing on the right side of history - against Israeli Jewish Apartheid and for Palestinian rights.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Eva Bartlett, David Swanson, Janine Bandcroft July 26, 2018

This Week on GR

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

July 26, 2018

Last week the Trudeau government announced Canada would provide refuge for members of the White Helmets and their families. The announcement came as a still unknown number of the group were evacuating southern Syria via the Occupied Golan and Israel.

Though Canada's minister of foreign affairs says she supports the group whole-heartedly, critics charge the Syria Civil Defence or White Helmets "humanitarian workers" work with and are intrinsically allied to al Qaeda, primarily through its Syria-based spin-off Jabhat Al-Nusra.

Listen. Hear.

Eva Bartlett is an independent Canadian journalist and activist who has lived in and reported from Gaza and Syria over the last decade.

She has been one of the few Western witnesses of the destruction of war from where Western missiles and bombs land, and one of even fewer to fix properly the responsibility on those firing and dropping them. Eva is recently returned from her eighth foray into Syria.

Eva Bartlett in the first half.

And; buoyed perhaps by his early days North Korean diplomatic success, Donald Trump has again resorted to Twitter to launch a bellicose attack against Iran, making, as he did against Kim Jong Un, thinly veiled threats of nuclear annihilation. But, Iran is not Korea, and in the context of a middle east already aflame, the American president may be painting himself into a corner leading to yet another war. 

David Swanson is a peace and political justice activist, journalist, radio host, and author whose book titles include: ‘War No More: The Case for Abolition,’ ‘When the World Outlawed War,’ ‘War Is a Lie,’ and ‘The Military Industrial Complex at 50’ among others. He’s director of WorldBeyondWar.org whose annual confab Designing a World Beyond War: Legalizing Peace takes place in Toronto this September. Find out more at: #NoWar2018. David also blogs at Let’s Try Democracy (DavidSwanson.org), WarIsACrime.org, and hosts the public affairs program, Talk Nation Radio.

David Swanson and getting beyond war 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 of some of the good things to get up to in and around our town in the coming week. But first, Eva Bartlett and the White Helmets Canada-bound.

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/

Ecuador's New Compradors Ask, "What's To Be Done With Julian?"

Julian Assange’s Asylum to be Rescinded

by TRNN

July 23, 2018

Since Julian Assange is now an Ecuadorian citizen, President Moreno must protest his rights, says Alfred de Zayas, former UN independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order.

Alfred de Zayas is Professor of Law at the Geneva School of Diplomacy, and retired senior lawyer with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. He just completed six years as U.N. Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order. 

Finding Yemeni's Disappeared By the United Arab Emirates'

God Only Knows

by Kathy Kelly  - VCNV.org

July 24, 2018

“If they would just confirm to us that my brother is alive, if they would just let us see him, that’s all we want. But we can’t get anyone to give us any confirmation. My mother dies a hundred times every day. They don’t know what that is like.”

In July of 2018, an Amnesty International report entitled “God Knows If He’s Alive,” documented the plight of dozens of families in southern Yemen whose loved ones have been tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared by Yemeni security forces reporting to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition that, with vital US support, has been bombarding and blockading famine and disease-ravaged Yemen for three brutal years. The disappearances, and torture, can sadly be laid at the doorstep of the United States.


Witness Against Torture activists protest at the
Embassy of the United Arab Emirates on January 9, 2018
Photo: Witness Against Torture 

One testimonial after another echoes the sentiments of a woman whose husband has been held incommunicado for more than two years. “Shouldn’t they be given a trial?” she asked.

“Why else are there courts? They shouldn’t be disappeared this way – not only are we unable to visit them, we don’t even know if they are dead or alive.”

The report describes bureaucratic farces in which families beg for information about their loved ones’ whereabouts from Yemeni prosecutors and prison officials, but the families’ pleas for information are routinely met with silence or intimidation.

The families are appealing to an unelected Yemeni exile government whose president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, (when “elected” president in 2012, he was the only candidate) generally resides in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The UAE has, so far, supported Hadi’s claim to govern Yemen. However, the Prosecutor General of Hadi’s government, as well as other officials, told Amnesty International the government of Yemen has no control over operations “spearheaded by the UAE and implemented by the Yemeni forces it backs.”

When months and years pass and families of people who are missing still have no news about their loved ones, some try to communicate unofficially with prison guards or with former detainees who have been released from various detention sites. They repeatedly hear stories about torture of detainees and rumors about prisoners who died in custody.

The Amnesty report implicates UAE-backed local forces in Yemen, as well as the UAE military, in the crimes of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees. Of seven former or current detainees interviewed by Amnesty, five said they were subjected to these abuses.

“All seven witnessed other detainees being tortured,” the report adds, “including one who said he saw a detainee held in a cell next to him being carried away in a body bag after he had been repeatedly tortured.”

In June 2017, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press exposed a network of clandestine prisons operated by the UAE in Yemen. Their reports described ghastly torture inflicted on prisoners and noted that senior US military leaders knew about torture allegations. Yet, a year later, there has been no investigation of these allegations by the Yemeni government, by the UAE, or by the UAE’s most powerful ally in the Yemen war, the United States.

“It is shocking, to say the least,” the Amnesty report states, “that one year after a network of secret prisons operated by the UAE and the Yemeni forces it backs was exposed, these facilities continue to operate and that there has not been a serious investigation undertaken into credibly documented violations, including systemic torture in custody.” 

The Amnesty report calls on the US to “facilitate independent oversight, including by the US Congress, over US military or intelligence cooperation with Yemeni and UAE forces involved in detention activities in Yemen.” It further calls for investigating any involvement of US military or intelligence personnel in detention-related abuses in Yemen.

To date, the US continues selling weapons to the UAE and to its coalition partner, Saudi Arabia, despite several Congressional debates and a few increasingly close votes demanding a full or partial end to US weapons sales considering the terrible practices being carried out as part of the Yemen war.

Since March of 2015, a coalition of nine countries led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE and relying on crucial U.S. logistical aid, has bombarded Yemen while blockading its major port, despite Yemen’s status as one of the poorest countries in the world. Targeting transportation, electrical plants, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools, mosques, weddings and funerals, the vicious bombing has led to starvation, displacement, and the spread of disease including cholera.

On the same day that the Amnesty report was released, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman pardoned “all military men, who have taken part in the Operation Restoring Hope of their respective military and disciplinary penalties, in regard of some rules and disciplines.” It seems likely that the Amnesty report precipitated this royal decree.

Along with three countries in North Africa’s “Sahel” desert region, Yemen has been cited as part of the worst famine crisis in the 70-year history of the UN. In the past three years of aerial and naval attacks, Yemen’s key port of Hodeidah has remained partially or fully closed despite the country’s vital need for relief supplies. And, while Yemenis suffer the chaos and despair characteristic of war, the Saudis and UAE refer to the war as “Operation Restoring Hope.”

Many thousands of Yemenis, subjected to consistent bombing and threats of starvation and famine, have fled their homes. Many seek refuge out of Yemen. For instance, close to 500 Yemenis have traveled nearly 500 miles to reach a visa-free port on South Korea’s Jeju Island.

On July 21, during an international phone call hosted by young friends in Afghanistan, listeners heard Kaia, a resident of Jeju Island, describe the “Hope School.” She explained how she and several other young people are trying to help welcome Yemenis now living in their village of Gangjeong. The young people are already committed to peacefully resisting U.S. and South Korean military destruction of their shoreline and ecosystem.

Now, they have started an informal school so Yemeni and South Korean residents can learn from one another. Small groups gather for conversational exchanges translated from Arabic to English to Korean. Many South Koreans can recall, in their own familial history, that seven million Koreans fled Japanese occupation of their land. Their Korean forebears relied on hospitality from people in other lands. The Catholic Bishop of the Jeju diocese, Monsignor Kang Woo-il, called on Koreans to embrace Yemeni refugees, labeling it a crime against human morality to shut the door on refugees and migrants.

Kaia’s account of the newly launched school describes an effort that truthfully involves restoring hope. The cynical designation of Saudi and UAE led war in Yemen as “Operation Restoring Hope” creates an ugly smokescreen that distracts from the crucial need to investigate war crimes committed in Yemen today.

US citizens bear responsibility for the US government’s support of these crimes.
The Yemenis mean us no harm and have committed no crime against us. Congressional votes have come quite close, with bipartisan support, to ending US participation in and support for the Saudi and Emirati led Coalition war against Yemen. Ending arms sales to the UAE and Saudi monarchies, supported by both sides of the aisle, will signal to the UAE and Saudi Arabia the US will no longer assist their efforts to prolong war and siege in Yemen.

On cue from the initiative and energy shown by young South Koreans, people in the US can and should organize campaigns to educate their communities, educational institutions, and media outlets about the plight of people in Yemen. Conscious of the nightmare faced by Yemenis whose husbands, brothers, fathers and sons have been disappeared or detained by shadowy military enforcers, US people can work toward implementing each recommendation in Amnesty’s devastating report.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

Seymour Hersh: The Reporter

America’s Reporter: the Hersh Method 

by Vijay Prashad - CounterPunch

July 23, 2018 
 

If Seymour Hersh had only broken the story of the massacre of unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam by the United States Army in 1968, it would have been enough to make a career. But that was only one story in a range of stories that this feisty and independent journalist has broken over the course of his long career.

He was the one who pointed his finger at a host of stories, including the U.S. programmes for chemical and biological weapons, the Israeli nuclear bomb and the shenanigans of the Nixon White House regarding Vietnam and Watergate. Recently, it was Hersh who wrote important stories on the death of Osama bin Laden and on allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the war in Syria. Each of his stories is received as a bombshell, largely because the story is likely to be a bombshell.

Over his long career, Hersh has worked for major U.S. publications such as The New York Times and for smaller outlets such as the Dispatch News Service. He did not care where he wrote as long as he could report with freedom and write with his usual bluntness. It was not prestige that Hersh was after, but the story. This is clear across his fascinating autobiography—Reporter: A Memoir (2018).

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the U.S. atrocities in My Lai did not stir him. It simply meant that he had done the right thing. It did not inflate his personality or make him eager for more establishment accolades. He won the Pulitzer Prize because he deserved it. If he wrote another story that deserved a prize, well, then he would get it. There was no need to write for the prize. To learn to write for the prize puts the reporter in the camp of the establishment. Hersh would have none of that.

Born in a hardscrabble home in Chicago, Hersh had none of the opportunities that were available to many of his peers. He went to college by luck and by determination and went to work with that same attitude. Like many good reporters, Hersh began on the night shift in Chicago, covering stories that taught him the essence of his craft. Listen to people’s stories, surely, but also do not take the word of the authorities without question. One night, in 1964, there was a clash between the police and a group of African Americans. The police told Hersh that the African Americans had shot at the police, hence the retaliation.

Hersh rushed back to the Associated Press office, where he worked, and filed his story about how African Americans had fired at the police. His night editor, Bob Olmsted, rewrote the lead. “Gunfire broke out tonight”, Olmsted wrote. When Hersh protested, Olmsted asked him if he had talked to any African Americans. He had not. “I had made no effort to get to the rioters across the police barriers,” Hersh recalled. He did not “begin to know what they thought the riot was about”. On that one night, Hersh writes, Olmsted, who would later be an editor at Chicago Sun-Times, “taught me a master’s degree worth of journalism”.

Stenographers of war 

Of course, many master’s courses in journalism do not teach the lesson that one must not become the stenographer of the state. Hersh begins his memoir by saying that today “the reporter is little more than a parrot”.

This is a harsh assessment but there is merit to it.

So much of the world of journalism now adopts the views of the state without any question. Press releases are directly reprinted as if they are news reports. The view of the state is allowed to define stories of monumental importance. Trust in the state has become a fundamental attitude in newsrooms and amongst opinion writers. Even more so, trust in corporations has become commonplace.

If there is an oil spill, the view of the oil company is taken more seriously than the views of the people who are impacted by the spill. This is the lesson that Hersh learned early in his career.

When Hersh went to Washington from his time in Chicago, he was confronted directly with the most important story of the mid 1960s, the U.S. war on Vietnam. Leonard Downie, who was a fixture at The Washington Post, wrote in The New Muckrakers:

“Most major stories written by Pentagon correspondents on national issues reflected the official point of view.” 

There were important exceptions, although these reporters were pilloried for their brutal honesty.

As Hersh writes:

“If you supported the war, you were objective; if you were against it, you were a lefty and not trustworthy.” 

Hersh rightly praises the work of Harrison Salisbury, who went to Hanoi for The New York Times and wrote about the morale in Vietnam’s north, as well as about civilian casualties as a result of the U.S. bombing raids on cities and towns. Hersh went into the world of the Pentagon to see if he could corroborate from within the U.S. military what Salisbury found in Vietnam.

He was able to do so and wrote landmark pieces both on the collapse of morale in the U.S. forces and on the futility of the bombing raids and on civilian casualties. The leadership of the U.S. military denied all this. Hersh’s conclusion is important: “I had no idea of the extent to which the men running the war would lie to protect their losing hand.”

Hersh’s method

How did Hersh get the stories that other reporters seemed to miss? The first point is his attitude. He cultivated scepticism about governmental and corporate power. Hersh was not awed by the leadership or eager for its approval. This allowed him to ask questions that it did not want asked and that it prevented from being asked by using every means. It is because he did not believe that the U.S. was always good or right that he was able to do the landmark stories that he did. Hersh’s Reporter should be read by young journalists. It is itself an education. There is buried in this book a manual for how to do good journalism.

Here are some basic points to explain his method:

(1) Read. Hersh read. “Read before you write,” he notes in reference to an important but buried article that he had read by Elinor Langer in Science, the weekly publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reading Langer in this obscure publication allowed Hersh to see that the U.S. government was pursuing a chemical and biological weapons programme. He would not have known of such a story or pursued it if he had not read Langer’s work.

(2) Research. Having read Langer, Hersh went to the Pentagon library and read everything available on the chemical and biological weapons programme. He digested whatever public material was available. He learned which U.S. military bases had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He read the weekly newspapers of those bases. Here he found reports on retirement parties for colonels and generals that offered details about where they had decided to retire. This information was crucial.

(3) Find and cultivate sources. Hersh then travelled to the towns that housed the bases as well as the towns where the retired military officers had moved. He tried to meet retired officers and others to ask them about the weapons programme and its impact on the local communities (as well as on their own health). Painstaking work allowed him to find one or two people who would talk to him and then point him to others. This is how Hersh found William Calley, who gave him the My Lai story. Some of these retired officers were upset by the chemical and biological weapons programme or were disgruntled by being passed over for promotion. “Want to be a good military reporter?” Hersh asks “Find those officers.” Over the course of his career, Hersh cultivated many of these officers and other military officers. They would slip him reports and lead him to other people like themselves. These kind of sources are crucial for the Hersh method. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Colby, would later say of Hersh and the CIA: “He knows more about this place than I do.” He was probably right.

(4) The Hersh rule. In the book, Hersh says that when he interviewed officials he would often ask them about their work outside the story at hand. When he interviewed a judge, for instance, he asked him about his appellate decisions—having read them already. “Never begin an interview by asking core questions,” Hersh writes. “I wanted him to know I was smart and capable of some abstract thought. And I wanted him to like me and, perhaps, trust me.” That judge would eventually deliver Hersh a crucial part of the My Lai story.

(5) Write to learn more, stay on the story. There is something to be said for persistence. Hersh would stay on a story for as long as he needed. He would write short articles, which would shake the trees and draw in more sources—some family member who wanted to say something, some government official (including elected officials) who wanted Hersh to know something. He was not in a hurry to put out his final story. There would be time for that. Journalism, for Hersh, was a process, not about the creation of a product.

(6) Resist intimidation. One of the realities of being a journalist is that you always face intimidation of one kind or another. Murder and imprisonment are the harshest sentences. But there is an everyday quality by which the state and corporations go after reporters. Hersh tells many such stories, including when high government officials would call him up to make him uncomfortable or scared. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Seymour?” asked Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger’s loyal deputy. This must have rankled. It was in the context of Hersh’s story about Kissinger and the wiretapping of just about everyone. Hersh stood firm.

All this is fine, but how does one make a living if one follows the Hersh method? Which news house would tolerate this kind of reporter, not only by financing them for extended periods of time as they chased important stories, but also by allowing them to question the government and corporations? Nobody hired Hersh for the totality of his career.

He sought a long-term deal with The New York Times but could not get it. “How’s my little commie?” Abe Rosenthal, his boss at The New York Times, said to him in 1971. Hersh says he wrote in the “golden age of journalism”, but his own career was idiosyncratic, funded by an article here or there, a short stint here or there, a book deal here or there. While Hersh grumbles about freelance journalism, his entire career seems peppered with examples of the freelance life.

So much more could be said about Reporter. One hopes that Hersh will come back and write another book about matters to which he alludes at the close of this one. Some of his most important stories in recent years have been about the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Hersh’s stories, which raised important questions about the validity of these allegations, had been reported mainly from U.S. government sources. He does not say enough about these stories. One would like to know more. One would like, as well, to know why U.S. publications had refused to run these stories, which eventually ran in British and German publications.

“I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work,” he writes in the final pages.

But this is not enough. Hersh is a good raconteur of the process of his reporting. I would have liked more of his sense of those stories and his judgment about how they were squelched and then received.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book is No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2015).

More articles by:Vijay Prashad

Watching the White Helmets Whitewash

Whitewashing the White Helmets – Peter Ford, Former UK Ambassador to Syria Responds to UK Government Statement

by Vanessa Beeley  - 21st Century Wire 

July 23, 2018

Former Ambassador to Syria 2003 – 2006, Peter Ford responds to the UK Government statement by Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt on “exceptional” Israeli evacuation of the UK/US Coalition intelligence construct, the White Helmets:

“Following a joint diplomatic effort by the UK and international partners, a group of White Helmets volunteers from southern Syria and their families have been able to leave Syria for safety.

They are now being assisted by the UNHCR in Jordan pending international resettlement.

The White Helmets have saved over 115,000 lives during the Syrian conflict, at great risk to their own. Many White Helmets volunteers have also been killed while doing their work – trying to rescue civilians trapped in bombarded buildings or providing first aid to injured civilians. White Helmets have been the target of attacks and, due to their high profile, we judged that, in these particular circumstances, the volunteers required immediate protection. We therefore took steps with the aim of affording that protection to as many of the volunteers and their families as possible.

We pay tribute to the brave and selfless work that White Helmets volunteers have done to save Syrians on all sides of the conflict.”

Peter Ford responds:

The government statement contains two bare-faced lies. The White Helmets most definitely have not assisted all sides in the conflict. From the beginning they have only ever operated in rebel-held areas. Government controlled areas have the real Syrian Civil Defence and Syrian Red Crescent. This is quite a big whopper on the government’s part. It goes without saying that the media will not pick up on it.

Secondly the White Helmets are not volunteers.

They are doing jobs for which they are paid, by Western governments. They have a press department 150 strong, bigger than that for the whole of the UK ambulance service. Their claims of saving over 115,000 lives have never been verified. The co-location of their offices with jihadi operation centres has been well documented.

Apparently the government are lying because they are nervous of being accused of importing into this country scores of dangerous migrants who have many times been reported to be associating with extremists (social media is rife with self-propagated videos of their misdeeds such as participation in beheadings and waving ISIS and Al Qaida flags), and wish to whitewash them.

The White Helmets’ dramatic exfiltration leaves many questions unanswered

1. Why was it deemed necessary to evacuate this particular group in the south when other groups of White Helmets simply got on the buses to Northern Syria when military operations concluded in Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta and elsewhere, and when similar exodus by bus has been arranged for rebels in Deraa?

2. Why should White Helmets be considered to be more at risk than combatants, many of whom have either ‘reconciled’ or been bussed out? In the demonology of the government side the White Helmets are not seen as worse than other jihadis.

3. Might the British government have been afraid of this particular group being caught and interrogated, revealing perhaps the truth about alleged chemical weapon incidents?

4. Will they now be foisted on to areas of the UK already struggling to absorb migrants, or will they go to places like Esher and Carshalton?

5. Will local councils be informed about the backgrounds of these fugitives? Will local councils be given extra resources to absorb them and cope with resulting security needs, bearing in mind that Raed Saleh, leader of the White Helmets, was refused a visa to the US in 2016?”

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE WHITE HELMETS BY READING THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES:

White Helmets Centre in Saqba, Eastern Ghouta Next Door to Terrorist Bomb Factory
“Humanitarians” and the ‘Moderate’ Bomb Factory in Saqba, Eastern Ghouta.

BBC and Guardian Whitewash of UK FCO Funding Scandal in Syria
What to Expect From BBC Panorama and Guardian’s Whitewash of UK Gov’t Funding Terrorists in Syria

White Helmets Evidence Presented at Geneva Press Club:
Vanessa Beeley Presents Exposé on White Helmets at Swiss Press Club in Geneva

‘Global Britain’ – UK Funding a Shadow State in Syria
‘Global Britain’ is Financing Terrorism and Bloodshed in Syria and Calling it ‘Aid’

White Helmets – Hollywood Poster Boys:

WHITE HELMETS: State Sanctioned Terrorism and Hollywood Poster Boys for War

21st Century Wire:
New Report Destroys Fabricated Myth of Syria’s ‘White Helmets’

Initial Investigation into White Helmets:
Who are Syria’s White Helmets?

21st Century Wire article on the White Helmets:
Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception ~ the “Moderate” Executioners

Who Funds the White Helmets?
Secret £1bn UK War Chest Used to Fund the White Helmets and Other ‘Initiatives’

Original investigative report:
The REAL Syria Civil Defence Exposes Fake White Helmets as Terrorist-Linked Imposters

Irish Peace Prize Farce
Tipperary’s White Helmets Peace Prize: A Judas Kiss to the Antiwar Movement and Syria

White Helmets Executions
WHITE HELMETS: Severed Heads of Syrian Arab Army Soldiers Paraded as Trophies

CNN Fabricate News About the White Helmets
A NOBEL LIE: CNN’s Claim That ‘White Helmets Center in Damascus’ Was Hit by a Barrel Bomb

White Helmets Links to Al Nusra
WHITE HELMETS: Hand in Hand with Al Qaeda and Extremist Child Beheaders in Aleppo

Report by Patrick Henningsen
AN INTRODUCTION: Smart Power & The Human Rights Industrial Complex

Open Letter by Vanessa Beeley
White Helmets Campaign for War NOT Peace – Retract RLA & Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

Staged Rescue Videos
(VIDEO) White Helmets: Miraculous ‘Rag Doll Rescue’

White Helmets Oscar Award Farce:
Forget Oscar: Give The White Helmets the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Best War Propaganda Film

Cory Morningstar report:
Investigation into the funding sources of the White Helmets, including Avaaz, Purpose, The Syria Campaign

Open letter to Canadian MPs from Stop the War Hamilton (Canada):
Letter from the Hamilton Coalition to Stop War to the New Democratic Party in Canada ref the White Helmet nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize:

Open letter to Canada’s NDP Leader on Nobel Prize:
Letter to NDP from Prof. John Ryan protesting White Helmet nomination for RLA and Nobel Peace Prize.

READ MORE WHITE HELMETS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire White Helmets Files

READ MORE SYRIA NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Syria Files

SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV 

The Architecture of Putin's Power

Is Putin’s Rule a Dictatorship? 

by TRNN

July 22, 2018

On Reality Asserts Itself, Prof. Alexandr Buzgalin says while Putin heads a powerful state, this is not a system of one man rule; more than 100 billionaires and a stratum of top bureaucrats have political power – with host Paul Jay.

Professor Buzgalin teaches political economy and is director of the Center for Modern Marxist Studies at Moscow State University.

Dementia in the Western Establishment

Donald Trump was Elected by Russia? Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment

by Diana Johnstone - Global Research

July 20, 2018

Mainstream Media Reaction to Trump-Putin Meeting

 

Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and most of its copycat European subsidiaries.

The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are ready to leap off the cliff.

For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.

Donald Trump was elected by Russia?

On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn’t need to try to “undermine our democracy”. It would mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be knocked over by a tweet.

Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating millions of Americans as “deplorables” because they didn’t fit into her identity politics constituencies.

The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi, the call for a no-fly zone in Syria … they didn’t have to invent it. It was there. So was the hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus, perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.

When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on Hillary herself. Screaming about “Russian hacking the DNC” has been a distraction from much more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn’t need those “revelations” to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.

So at worst, “the Russians” are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.

But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of accusations of “treason” when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to normalize relations with Russia.

This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic “cooperation” associations.

They have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to themselves.

The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.

Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the “findings” of US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies “found” that Iraq was bursting with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?

But for the mainstream media, “the story” at the Helsinki summit, even the only story, was Trump’s reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in advance.

Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the “big stories” on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few exceptions. To get the job, one must have important “sources”, meaning government spokesmen who are willing to tell you what “the story” is, often without being identified. Once they know what “the story” is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: “The President has betrayed our great country to the Russian enemy. Treason!”

This demented chorus on “Russian hacking” prevented mainstream media from even doing their job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting.

For example, “the Moon of Alabama” site offers an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy, which sounds infinitely more plausible than “the story”. In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a reverse version of Kissinger’s strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump’s policy, unlike the caterwauling we’ve been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.

Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it’s got to be a zero sum game, winner take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.

They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project, no strategy. Just hate Trump.

He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been assassinated yet.

It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo, murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless countries by government-financed “non-governmental organizations” (the National Endowment of Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the world’s greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children.

But the diplomatic Russians know how to be polite.

Still, if Trump actually makes a “deal”, there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else’s expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.

Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:

“We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work jointly.”

In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have much choice.

On another subject, Trump said that “our militaries” get along with the Russians “better than our politicians”. This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.

In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon!

The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility – and perhaps this one too.

“Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world”

Trump declared “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics.”

That is more than his political enemies can claim.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr.