Author Archives: Paul Woodward

The convenient lie that helps many Israelis and their friends avoid facing the truth

There’s a common deceit that individuals and groups of people have employed throughout history as a way of avoiding accepting responsibility for their own actions. Here’s how it works and it’s amazingly simple:

If you do things that offend others, you can ignore their complaints by insisting that their grievance is based, not on what you have done, but on who you are.

By claiming that you are a victim of animosity based on your identity, you instantly become blameless.

Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s absurd claim that a Palestinian inspired the Holocaust, Jay Michaelson writes: comments like Netanyahu’s are made all the time on the Israeli Right. They’re meant for domestic consumption, to inspire the nationalist base. The Arabs hate us, anti-Zionism is just anti-Semitism, and most importantly, the Intifada is about Jew-hatred, not resistance to the occupation.

Such claims may seem controversial to outsiders. But they are all catnip to the American and Israeli Right, and to most of Netanyahu’s audience at the World Zionist Congress. (The congress was established by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in 1897. Nowadays it is mostly ceremonial, but millions of philanthropic dollars are at stake.)

These claims are central to the ultra-nationalist narrative. Palestinian violence isn’t resistance—it’s bigotry. Thus, peace is not the answer, because it won’t eradicate the Jew-hatred. Only Jewish strength is the answer. (Of course, blaming Palestinian violence on anti-Semitism also stokes deep Jewish fears, and collective trauma about the Holocaust.)

This was the ideology of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism (and the fan of Jewish fascism) as well as Netanyahu’s own father. Force is all the Arabs understand, because they hate Jews and will keep hating Jews no matter what. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Intervention in Syria may last a year or longer, Russian official says

Bloomberg reports: As Russia’s air war in Syria nears its fourth week, officials now admit that Moscow’s aim is far broader than the publicly announced fight against terrorist groups.

The Kremlin’s real goal is to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad retake as much as possible of the territory his forces have lost to opponents, including U.S.-backed rebels, Russian officials told Bloomberg News. Moscow’s deployment of several dozen planes, as well as ships in the Black and Caspian Seas, could last a year or more, one official said.

President Vladimir Putin is willing to run the risk of falling into the kind of quagmire that helped sink the Soviet Union a generation ago for the chance to roll back U.S. influence and demonstrate he can dictate terms to Washington. If the strategy is successful, Russia’s largest military drive in decades outside the former Soviet Union would force the U.S. and its allies to choose between Assad, whom they oppose for his human-rights abuses, and the brutal extremists of Islamic State.

“They’re going to have to recognize that Islamic State is the real threat that has been countered only by the Syrian regular army commanded by President Bashar al-Assad,” said Iliyas Umakhanov, deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house Federation Council, who oversees international relations at the assembly.

A top Russian military official said on Friday that the Kremlin sees no moderate opposition in Syria, leaving only terrorists and the pro-Assad forces Moscow is backing. [Continue reading…]

This echoes the position that the Assad regime has long maintained: that the only opposition it faces is from “terrorists.”

On the one hand the Syrian government claims that it is open to diplomatic initiatives and yet at the same time it says there is nothing to negotiate until its opponents have been “eradicated.”

In essence, what Putin and Assad are saying is this: We want to promote peace — as soon as we’ve won the war.

Facebooktwittermail

Hamas calls for Russian intervention to protect Palestinians from Israeli aggression

Haaretz reports: Hamas called on Russia on Saturday to intervene in what it describes as Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people.

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal spoke with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov on Saturday evening, according to a statement released by the group.

Referring to the recent spate of attacks perpetrated by Palestinians against Israelis, Meshal told Bogdanov that the “uprising” is a result of the Israeli “policies of oppression” toward the Palestinian people, as well as attempts to “damage the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” Meshal asked that Russia press Israel to stop the “aggression” against Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

According to the Hamas statement, Bogdanov expressed discontent over Israeli conduct, and promised to take action against it, including measures in the international arena. [Continue reading…]

The only way in which Russia currently has an interest in influencing Israel is by blocking its access to Syrian air space.

The New York Times reported last week:

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced on Thursday that it had established a hotline with the Israeli military to avoid clashes in the sky during these operations. On Wednesday, representatives of both sides used the hotline to inform each other about their plans, the ministry said in a statement.

The next day, it became obvious how this hotline is meant to function: the Russians can use it to warn “the Israelis that entering Syrian airspace would be a pretext for opening fire.”

As far as Hamas’s petitions are concerned, they should already understand that Putin has made his philosophy clear: sovereignty means that a government can do whatever it wants within the territory it controls.

Beyond that, let’s not forget that there are a million Israelis who were born in Russia. How many Palestinians are there of Russian descent?

Putin’s intervention in Syria is far from unwelcome in the eyes of many Israelis.

In Haaretz, Moshe Arens asks whether Israel would be better off if Putin succeeds in Syria. “The one advantage of a dictatorship is that there is someone there — someone you can threaten, someone with whom you can negotiate and even make peace.”

It’s not without reason that the canny sign writers in Kafranbel see Russia, Israel, Iran and Hezbollah all siding with Assad against the Syrian people.

Facebooktwittermail

Why would a community leader with faith in Gandhi turn to violence?

Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters had their commitment to non-violence severely tested.

In the West nowadays, however, most proponents of peace face less extreme challenges. It’s much easier to denounce war and stand up for peace if you are neither directly exposed to war nor subject to violent attacks.

For this reason, when it comes to the situation in the Middle East, many observers outside the region are inclined to focus on the innocent victims of war and occupation because they find it too difficult to identify with the armed adversaries. There is an unwillingness to entertain the notion that in certain sets of conditions, almost anyone might turn to violence. It’s much more comfortable to assume that some people have violent inclinations while others do not.

For anyone with this perspective, the story of Bahaa Alian, a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, might be instructive.

Creede Newton and Dylan Collins write: On Tuesday, Oct. 13, two simultaneous attacks rocked Jerusalem in what was the bloodiest day of the current round of violence.

Around nine in the morning, Bilal Ranem, 23, and Bahaa Alian, 22, two Palestinian men from the Jabal al-Mukaber neighborhood in East Jerusalem, boarded a bus in nearby East Talpiot, an Israeli settlement. One was armed with a knife and the other with a pistol. As the bus began moving, the men started shooting and stabbing. Ten were injured, and two killed, including one of the attackers.

Rubi Muhatbi, an 18-year-old Israeli, told Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most widely-read daily, that in that “moment, you feel fear and stress and you don’t know what to do. I preferred running away rather than confronting him… all I was thinking about was I was either going to survive this or I die.”

The attack was shocking by any standard, but it was made doubly so for us after the identities of the attackers were released. We quickly realized that we had met Bahaa Alian, the attacker who was killed, less than a year ago.

From what you’ve read in media reports, these two men were either terrorists who were quickly “neutralized” by Israeli security forces, or troubled Palestinian youth from an impoverished neighborhood, surrounded by Jewish-only settlements.

Perhaps both are true, but neither agrees with the impression Alian made when we met him. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria’s overlords


Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani is conspicuous by his absence on this billboard, but with a group of four it would be that much harder to make Assad look like the man at the top.

Facebooktwittermail

American assassination

This week, The Intercept published a series of articles on U.S. drone warfare, “The Drone Papers” — a title clearly intended to evoke memories of “The Pentagon Papers,” leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

Micah Zenko, a senior fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes:

Having read probably every major reported story about U.S. counterterrorism operations for the past dozen years, I am consistently disappointed that journalists leave out essential context, history, or directly relevant previous reporting by other journalists. Often, what is promoted as an “exclusive” or “breaking” story can only be described this way by omission. Whether that omission is done unconsciously, due to a lack of knowledge of others’ work, or mandated by space constraints for print editions, it misleads readers about the uniqueness of the story reported. Thankfully, the Intercept has taken the time to put its stories into context and explicitly name and link to the work of other journalists and even academics. This is a model that all national security journalists should emulate.

Nevertheless, Zenko reaches this conclusion:

as impressive and important as “The Drone Papers” are, I am sadly certain that this balanced reporting and its eye-opening disclosures will not compel any new concerns or investigations in Washington. Nor should we ever expect them under this president and this Congress.

For researchers and human rights activists, reporting of this kind is bound to be welcomed, yet it’s debatable whether it contains any significant eye-opening disclosures. Indeed, I have my doubts about whether any major piece of investigative journalism can be based on Powerpoint presentations.

Only 15 copies of the Pentagon Papers were officially made. How many analysts, contractors, and other officials have had access to the so-called Drone Papers? If we knew that, we would probably be able to infer more about the position of the source and likewise assess whether the documents contain any closely guarded secrets.

Even though the Obama administration has been seriously lacking in transparency when it comes to the mechanics and legal rationales it has applied during a period in which it has succeeded in normalizing assassination, the fact that most Americans support drone warfare does not seem to be the result of a lack of information.

The American public is famously ignorant — especially when it comes to foreign affairs — yet I don’t believe that those Americans who support drone strikes do so because they don’t know enough about how the government decides who can justifiably be assassinated.

If the target is a man with a dark skin, an Arabic name, he wears a beard and baggy clothing, he has been deemed dangerous enough to be called a terrorist and is located in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia, that in many Americans’ eyes is sufficient “due process” to incinerate him with a Hellfire missile.

The bureaucratic process leading up to such a missile strike is a legal and political structure built upon a broad social foundation.

That social foundation is what allowed President Obama to joke about drone strikes and what gave him the confidence to pursue a policy of assassination.

Prudence required the construction of necessary legal protections so that no one in the chain of command might later face prosecution, and yet what must have convinced Obama that he was entitled to claim the authority to sign death warrants was his well-founded belief that he was in alignment with the mood and values of the American public.

The permissive atmosphere that facilitated the implementation and expansion of drone warfare has always hinged on the assumptions that it takes place in parts of the world so forbidding that no American would want to be sent there and that those whose lives get snuffed out would never be welcome on these shores.

These are not political or legal considerations, but rather visceral sentiments about what it means to be an American and how little value is attached to the rest of the world and its inhabitants.

Moreover, drone warfare has been deemed acceptable not only because of who it targets and where it takes place, but also because it embodies the most popular conception of American justice.

The only so-called advanced nation on this planet that still applies the death penalty is one in which justice is primarily conceived in terms of retribution.

The legal process, rather than being seen as the method for administering justice, is just as often viewed as an impediment to the application of justice. From this perspective, drone warfare far from undermining the rule of law has instead, in the eyes of many Americans, made it more efficient.

Those American observers who choose to characterize drone warfare as an expression of the national security state gone wild, are also conveniently ignoring the culpability of fellow Americans. Blame the government and then everyone else remains innocent.

In reality, Obama was only able to sign off on drone strikes because he was getting a quiet nod from most Americans.

Facebooktwittermail

Worst job in Syria being given to Cubans

Update: The Cuban government denies these reports.

*

University of Miami:

The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies has received information that General Leopoldo Cintra Frias, Head of the Cuban Armed Forces, visited Syria recently leading a group of Cuban military personnel sent by Cuba in support of Syria’s dictator Assad and Russian involvement in that country.

The Cuban military contingent will be primarily deployed in Syria manning Russian tanks provided to Assad by the Russians.

“An Arab military officer at the Damascus airport reportedly witnessed two Russian planes arrive there with Cuban military personnel on board. When the officer questioned the Cubans, they told him they were there to assist Assad because they are experts at operating Russian tanks, according to Jaime Suchlicki, the institute’s executive director,” reports Fox News.

As well as providing expertise in their assigned task, the Cubans enter the war with two other “advantages”: they don’t speak Arabic and thus won’t be exposed to dispiriting battlefield accounts from their Syrian counterparts, and prior to their arrival in Syria they almost certainly had no access to YouTube (Cuba has very limited broadband internet access) so may not be aware of the high toll American-made anti-tank missiles have taken in recent weeks.

Facebooktwittermail

Syrian political dissident: The Western left ‘simply do not see us’

In an interview* late last year, Yassin Al Haj Saleh, one of Syria’s leading political dissidents, was asked: What do you think the Western left could best do to express its solidarity with the Syrian revolution?

He responded:

I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. What I always found astonishing in this regard is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history. Rarely have I found a useful piece of information or a genuinely creative idea in their analyses. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate. So they do not really need to know about us.

David Bromwich, a professor of English Literature at Yale and stalwart of the American antiwar left, exemplifies the trend which Saleh describes.

For him, Syria is a nest of bloodthirsty Islamists fighting a religious war at the behest of foreign powers. The opponents of Assad that Western governments hoped would be the instruments of regime change are a ragtag mob entrusted with a fantasy. The only thing we really need to know about Syria, apparently, is that we should stay out.

Perhaps like Patrick Cockburn, Bromwich welcomes Russia’s direct intervention in the war. He seems to believe that Russia, by virtue of its closer proximity, has a genuine interest in the fate of Syria, yet the fate of Syrians is another question.

In an exercise in textual criticism, Bromwich’s current concern is Washington and the media’s resuscitation of the term moderate — a term around which, he says, the West has long contrived its fantasies.

The fact that the professor makes a living from analyzing language might explain why he has more interest in the words used by New York Times reporters than he has in the lives of Syrians.

But as a leftist, how did he forget what it means to be a humanitarian? How can he show so little interest in the lives of the Syrian people?

In his latest commentary, the refugee crisis doesn’t get a single mention.

Turkey is now warning that Russia and Iran’s escalating intervention in the war may lead to millions more refugees fleeing the country.

In that event, don’t expect Russia to assume any responsibility.

On September 9, while the refugee crisis in Europe dominated the Western media, Russia’s state-funded RT.com reported:

The head of the Federal Migration Service, Konstantin Romodanovsky, told TASS on Wednesday that Russia is ready to accept refugees from Syria on condition that they violate no laws.

He added that Russian authorities were studying asylum applications from Syrian citizens and rendered help to these people, but noted that “historically European countries are more appropriate as refuge for Syrians than the Russian Federation.”

The report offered no explanation of what makes European countries more appropriate. Maybe it’s simply the fact that they have more liberal immigration policies than Russia.

After Samar Kriker sought refuge in Russia, having been rescued in the Mediterranean by a Russia-bound tanker, he was then confined in a detention center cell for 23 hours a day. After his asylum application was rejected, he was expected to be deported back to Damascus.

For those whose cause is resistance to American imperialism, stories such as that might look like mere distractions, promulgated to stir unreasoned sentiment. If we keep our gaze high enough, there will be no risk of seeing the people below.

*Charles Davis’ article, “Anti-imperialism 2.0: Selective sympathies, dubious friends,” drew my attention to this interview.

Facebooktwittermail

Anti-interventionist Donald Trump: Middle East would be more stable with Hussein and Gadhafi

NBC News reports: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, when asked if he believes the Middle East would be better today if Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were still in power, responded, “It’s not even a contest.”

He related the situations in both of those countries with what is currently happening in Syria and seemed to endorse a stronger President Bashar Assad, even while admitting that he is “probably a bad guy.”

“You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there — it’s a mess — if you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there — it’s a mess — it’s [Syria] going to be same thing,” the real estate mogul said. [Continue reading…]

This is a point of view that appeals to a lot of liberals and peace activists these days, but it begs at least two questions:

How sustainable is stability when it derives from political oppression?

And what is the long-term price of torture?

Without exception, authoritarian regimes across the Middle East have relied on the same techniques for suppressing political opposition: torture.

Torture has the virtue of silencing critics without turning them into martyrs.

The streets can remain quiet when the screams of those having their fingernails ripped out are muffled by heavy prison doors.

But torture doesn’t just scar bodies — it scars minds, feeding a desire for vengeance that has inspired many a terrorist.

Is this what peace and stability really looks like?

Maybe the real lesson of the last decade has not been that regime change is itself such a terrible idea, but rather that the methods employed to achieve that goal have been worse than useless.

The issue is not one of intervention vs non-intervention but rather a question of what might actually lead to the desired goal.

The insular perspective of those who posture as realist defenders of national interest, suggests that it’s none of our business what happens within the borders of other states, but the reality is that sooner or later the misery of every dysfunctional state will spill out across its borders.

Facebooktwittermail

Pope Francis’s reception in the U.S. from the left and the right

Gerard O’Connell writes: Pope Francis comes to embrace all the people of the United States and is likely to encourage them to renew their devotion to family life and their understanding of the demands of solidarity as well as the responsible use of their global power.

As we have read in his programmatic document, “The Joy of the Gospel,” and as he spelled out clearly in the encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home,” this Jesuit pope from Argentina is calling Christians to a new simplicity of life and a depth of spirit that replaces materialism, hyper-individualism and the pursuit of constant pleasure with an integrity that knows what it is to sacrifice, to live in compassion and solidarity, to work for the common good, to care for creation, to show mercy and to attempt to pattern our lives after Jesus himself. His radical message is clear, simple and firmly rooted in the Gospels, which he never tires of encouraging people to read. [Continue reading…]

Jesus said to Rush Limbaugh, “Go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” But when Rush heard this statement, he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property. (Matthew 19)

Jesus wouldn’t have been welcome on Fox News. Indeed, as an undocumented Palestinian, he wouldn’t have even made it through U.S. Immigration.

Facebooktwittermail

Israel and Russia agree to coordinate military operations in Syria

Haaretz reports: The Israeli and Russian militaries will form a joint committee to coordinate their activities in Syria, Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and his Russian counterpart Valery Gerasimov agreed in a meeting in Moscow on Monday evening.

The committee, which will be headed by the countries’ deputy chiefs of staff, would coordinate both naval and aerial activities, as well as electro-magnetic activities, to avoid interference in electronic warfare, a senior Israeli officer told reporters.

“There’s aerial activities to the north of the country that may or may not overlap with the Russians’ activities there,” the officer said.

The two deputy chiefs of staffs are set to meet in two weeks, though it has yet to be decided whether the meeting will take place in Israel or in Russia. The officer said the frequency of the meetings would be decided later on.

​The officer refused to say whether the United States was briefed regarding the coordination between the two militaries. [Continue reading…]

In a commentary highlighted by the news editors for the UK’s Stop the War Coalition last week, Simon Jenkins wrote: “The only intervention likely to work in Syria just now is from Moscow.”

This is a sentiment which seems to resonate in those quarters of the anti-imperialist camp that still resolutely see the ills of the Middle East all rooted in Western interference.

Are we to now view Vladimir Putin as a peacemaker-in-waiting who will help resolve the worst conflict of the twenty-first century?

As Russia moves in advanced jets and deploys 2,000 military personnel to its new air base outside Latakia in the “first phase of the mission there,” what happened to the voices of anti-interventionism? As usual, the only interventions worth denouncing, must emanate from Western capitals.

The axis of foreign powers propping up the Assad regime — Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah — have a common interest, but evidently that won’t preclude Russia giving an occasional green light for Israel to bomb Hezbollah.

Still, I don’t imagine this turn of events will surprise anyone inside the so-called axis of resistance, because ultimately, each of its members has the same interest: self-preservation. Zionism — the nominal target of their resistance — merely provides a distraction behind which they each consolidate their own power.

In his meeting with Israel’s prime minister, Putin downplayed Netanyahu’s fears of a widening threat from Hezbollah by pointing out that Syria is in no position to expand the conflict.

“We know and understand that the Syrian army and the country in general are not in a condition to open a second front. The Syrians are busy fighting for their own statehood,” Putin said.

“Israel and Russia have common goals – to ensure stability in the Middle East,” Netanyahu noted, and as vacuous as that statement might sound, it seems true — depending on how you define stability.

In the eyes of many observers these days, the only reliable guarantors of stability in the region are its authoritarian regimes. Thus Israel welcomed General Sisi’s ascent to power in Egypt and likewise sees in Assad, a better known devil than the unknown or worst-feared alternative.

A region that has been ripped apart by the effects of decades of corrupt and brutal rule must now be protected by rulers cast in the same mold. But really: how’s that supposed to work?

Stephen Walt, whose anti-interventionism comes wrapped in some ritualistic self-criticism, remains convinced that a no-fly zone in Syria couldn’t accomplish much.

“Remember that the United States operated ‘no-fly zones’ over Iraq throughout the 1990s, and Saddam Hussein remained solidly in power until we invaded in 2003.”

True. But Walt neglects to note that the beneficiaries of one of those no-fly zones — Iraq’s Kurds — were, under its protection, able to establish what became and continues to be the most stable part of Iraq, notwithstanding the current threat posed by ISIS.

As much as the West has become afflicted by a loss of faith in democracy, a pervasive cynicism, and the sence of political impotence experienced by ordinary people as they witness unaccountable interests exercising power, the thing we mustn’t forget about our oftentimes sad system of governance is that within a predictable span of time, each of our elected leaders leaves office.

Consider, for instance, the battery-powered vice president whose destructive impact on the world is hard to overstate.

Dick Cheney might still meddle in politics, but having left office, he lost his power. No doubt it’s a shame that instead of getting thrown in jail, he’s still offered a podium to sound off as a talking head on cable networks. Even so, he and his neoconservative cohorts are mostly a spent force — as demonstrated with their failure to block the Iran nuclear deal.

The most problematic leaders in the world continue, without exception, to be those with an unyielding grip on power.

As much as U.S.-backed efforts at regime change have proved disastrous, that doesn’t mean everyone’s better off when such regimes are left in place.

If a remedy for cancer proves ineffective or counterproductive, the remedy gets ditched — not the fight against cancer.

Facebooktwittermail

Aylan Kurdi drowned because the deaths of Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb and so many others were ignored

Even now, when the carnage and destruction throughout Syria has been so extensively documented, there are still those in the West who parrot the Assad regime by claiming that most of the blame for the war rests on foreign jihadists and their Arab and Western supporters. It’s a claim much easy to repeat than it is to substantiate.

While the Assad regime has the most blood on its hands, culpability must be shared by a world that preferred to ignore what was happening at the very beginning as a civilian uprising was brutally crushed.

Those who had spoken out most loudly during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, largely remained silent during Syria’s descent into hell.

Western imperialism was apparently much easier to oppose than ruthless oppression.

At the same time, for those with no particular political axe to grind, Syria remained easy to ignore because it could be viewed as part of a region a world away from the concerns of the average American.

Charles Homans writes about what finally grabbed his attention: Why this boy?

It feels like an obscene question to ask of the photographs of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish child whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey yesterday morning, images that have since appeared on the front pages of the major American and European newspapers and flooded Twitter with video montages and sorrowful memes, the social-media equivalents of the stuffed animals and bouquets that pile up at the sites where children have died in car accidents or shootings.

But as human rights groups have grown hoarse reminding us, nearly 12,000 children have reportedly been killed so far as a result of the Syrian civil war. Nearly 2 million more are living as refugees, according to Unicef. Both the Islamic State and its enemies have enlisted child soldiers in their causes. It’s not just the numbing statistics that are familiar. The Internet is flooded with images of dead Syrian children, and it’s hard to imagine that the people who were transfixed by Aylan on Facebook yesterday had not seen at least some of them. Why this picture? Why not all the others?

For me, it was the shoes. Aylan appeared in my Twitter feed early yesterday afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day wrecked by his image. More than once I found myself staring out the window, thinking about the boy on the beach. I have a young son, a couple of years younger than Aylan but close enough to him in size that every detail of the photo — down to the angle of repose that, as more than one artist noticed, so precisely echoes that of an exhausted child asleep in his crib — was terribly familiar. [Continue reading…]

As I wrote yesterday, we didn’t see him as other; we saw him as ours.

And perhaps lurking beneath that sympathy and sense of kinship was a subliminal awareness of the absence of those visible marks of otherness — that other than by name, he was not visibly Middle Eastern or Muslim.

Four years ago, the lives and sometimes gruesome deaths of individual children in Syria were details in an unfolding drama whose outcome seemed to matter little to most Americans and Europeans.

Hamza-Al-Khatib-photoOn March 30, 2011, the New York Times reported: Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Dara’a, on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.

But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

“These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,” the narrator says. “Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?”

In Syria and beyond, the youth’s battered body has cast into shocking relief the terrors wielded by the Syrian state against its people.

Circulating in various versions, the video has injected new life into a six-week uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that has appeared to settle into a bloody stalemate of protests and violent government responses. In the days since news of the death spread, more than 58,000 people have visited and expressed support for a Facebook page memorializing the boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, as a “child martyr.”

Demonstrators in several Syrian cities protested the boy’s death last weekend, weaving chants and banners dedicated to him into the mix of antigovernment slogans that have become staples of the uprisings shaking the Arab world. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Refugees — the real antiwar activists

For those of us living in countries where our daily lives are not impacted by the effects of war, there’s not much sacrifice involved in opposing war.

It was different during the Vietnam war. At that time, those who refused to fight might end up going to prison or fleeing the country.

Nowadays, it’s easier to declare one’s opposition to war than it is to go on a gluten-free diet.

For millions of refugees, however, this isn’t so much a moral or political question; it’s a question of life or death.

(Click the speaker icon, bottom right, to hear the simple message from this Syrian boy in Budapest.)

From the impoverished mindset of an anti-immigrant bigot like Peter Bucklitsch — a UKIP member and parliamentary candidate in Britain’s 2015 election — refugees are greedy people seeking “the good life” and their suffering is the result of their unwillingness to patiently wait in line.


This perspective mirrors a commonly-held view of the separation between the rich and the poor: that the poor, driven by envy, want to deprive the rich of the profits of their hard work.

What this separation actually represents is the psychological insulation provided by wealth: that it diminishes the individual’s capacity to empathize.

If the refugee is the archetypal outsider — the person who now belongs nowhere — perhaps the reason the images of Aylan Kurdi have had a wide impact after so many other images of human misery inside Syria have seemed easy to ignore, was because this innocent child, neatly dressed and still wearing his tiny shoes, looked like he could have belonged to anyone.

We didn’t see him as other; we saw him as ours.

And this signals what marks our world cleaved as it is by so many conflicting identities: a lack of solidarity.

The call to respond to the refugee crisis, is not just a call to take pity on those whose lives have been torn apart by war, but also to recognize that our lives are just as fragile as theirs.

*

Just stop the war — easier said than done.

Aylan Kurdi’s family were originally from Kobane. Even though Kurdish fighters with U.S. air support were able to militarily reclaim the city from ISIS, it has since been left in ruins.

Turkey’s effort to prevent a Kurdish state emerge in northern Syria is likely to mean that Kobane has little prospect of reconstruction.

The Assad regime, propped up by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, will continue fighting for its survival for as long as it retains outside support.

And thus the tide of refugees will continue to flow.


The lack of response from the wealthiest Arab states is worth noting, but it doesn’t absolve Europe from the need to craft a coherent policy for confronting a collective crisis.

As Dr Françoise Sivignon and Janice Hughes underline:

Seeking asylum is not a crime. Migrants are not a security risk. They have not come to occupy Europe or to get medical care. They are simply, desperately, seeking a dignified life. In fact, migration drives economic prosperity and social and cultural diversity. It is an asset not a threat.

Likewise, the U.S., given its instrumental role in destabilizing the Middle East, and given its history as a nation of immigrants, should play a leading role in providing refuge for those who have fled from the wide-ranging effects of America’s wars.

For that to happen, pro-immigrant voices in the U.S. need to become louder than the anti-immigrant and xenophobic currents that exert an over-sized influence on America’s dealings with the rest of the world.

Facebooktwittermail

The world’s failure in Syria

The Guardian reports: The full horror of the human tragedy unfolding on the shores of Europe was brought home on Wednesday as images of the lifeless body of a young boy – one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos – encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west. [Continue reading…]


To speak of the world’s failure in Syria, presupposes some sort of global responsibility, yet many war-weary Americans might wonder: what makes Syria our responsibility?

The answer is simple: the war in Iraq.

Had the U.S. and its allies not invaded Iraq in 2003, it’s hard to envisage that the region with Syria at its epicenter would now be ripping itself apart.

That’s not to suggest that absent the Iraq war, there would now be something that could reasonably be called Middle East peace.

Yet it’s fair to assume that however the region’s systemic injustices might have metastasized over the last decade, the result would most likely not have been the worst refugee crisis since World War Two.

Facebooktwittermail

What Israel owes the U.S. for improving its security

A headline in the JTA reads: “What America will offer Israel after the nuclear deal.”

It’s long been understood that the Obama administration, if successful in sealing the Iran nuclear deal, would then offer additional military support to Israel to sooth Netanyahu’s continuing Iranophobia.

But given that every proponent of the deal has argued vigorously that it will result in improved regional security and improved security for Israel, it would seem to make more sense that instead of increasing aid, the U.S. should now be cutting it.

I know — that’s too rational — but I’m just saying…

JTA reports: The moment the Iran nuclear deal becomes law, as seems increasingly likely given growing congressional support for the agreement, the focus of the U.S.-Israel conversation will shift to the question of what’s next.

What more will Washington do to mitigate the Iranian threat and reassure Israel and other regional allies?

For starters, President Barack Obama seems ready to offer an array of security enhancements. Among them are accelerating and increasing defense assistance to Israel over the next decade; increasing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East; stepping up the enforcement of non-nuclear related Iran sanctions; enhancing U.S. interdiction against disruptive Iranian activity in the region; and increasing cooperation on missile defense. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS employs Hollywood style to bring back the gold standard

It’s easy enough to mock the grandiosity of ISIS propaganda, but it should be just as easy to see how its slick video productions appeal to its targeted audience.

In its latest release, ISIS introduces its newly minted currency: the gold dinar (and explains why coins with a fixed value are useful because it’s impractical to pay for a house with dates). And, as though to signify its successful penetration across America’s borders, the message is delivered in an American accent.

At the same time as it appeals to dreams of a caliphate — dreams that increasingly take tangible forms — ISIS also taps into currents of dissent which resonate in many quarters across the globe, such as anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, laced with anti-Semitism.

As much as ISIS is commonly condemned for its medieval barbarism, what receives less attention than it deserves is the degree to which the group in its propaganda is engaged in forms of populism that have social and political traction in the West far outside jihadist circles.

Within a few hours, the video had been removed from YouTube, but it can still be viewed here.

Bloomberg reports: Islamic State first announced its intention to issue its own money in November, five months after it seized the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced a caliphate. The move was seen by analysts as part of the group’s efforts to build the institutions of a functioning state.

The jihadists have amassed a war chest of millions of dollars, partly through collecting taxes, and by seizing oil refineries. Bank and jewelry store robberies, extortion, smuggling and kidnapping for ransom are other important sources of revenue for the group, which metes out brutal punishment to anyone who opposes its rule, including beheadings and crucifixions.

Baghdad-based economist Basim Jameel said the announcement is an attempt to boost the morale of Islamic State fighters, who have suffered battlefield setbacks in recent months, including the loss of Tikrit in March.
Minting the coins is relatively easy, Jameel said, as goldsmiths in Mosul imported machines from Italy in recent years, each one able to produce about 5,000 coins a day. The metals probably come from banks the group seized, ransoms, the homes of Christians and other minorities who fled, he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

American generals and admirals lobbying for Israel against Iran deal

Given the uncritical admiration many Americans have for men in military uniforms, it wasn’t surprising to see the White House’s effort to promote the Iran deal enlisting support from three dozen retired senior military officers who released an open letter earlier this month.

Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, U.S. Marine Corps, who served as the eighth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until his retirement in 2011, and his colleagues, called the agreement “the most effective means currently available to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

The voices of those in uniform can be trusted to put America first — at least that’s supposed to be the value of getting political support from a bunch of former generals.

But given the degree to which the Iran deal has been turned into a partisan issue, and given the Republican tilt of the military, it’s not surprising that another letter would follow, this time carrying the signatures of nearly 200 retired generals and admirals who oppose the deal. Shameless in making hyperbolic assertions, this letter claims that Iran has been waging war against the United States for the last 36 years!

And whereas the concern of the former letter was focused squarely on U.S. national security interests, the preeminent security concern of the larger group of former generals and admirals is not that of their own nation, but that of Israel.

“Removing sanctions on Iran and releasing billions of dollars to its regime over the next ten years is inimical to the security of Israel and the Middle East,” the letter states.

In Washington DC, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is an organization whose mission is the promotion of “a strong U.S. security relationship with Israel.”

To that end, JINSA spares no expense in trying to persuade retired American generals and admirals that Israel’s security interests should remain uppermost in their minds and thus it instituted an annual Generals and Admirals Program to Israel.

A few years ago, Jason Vest reported:


The bulk of JINSA’s modest annual budget is spent on taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line.

Naturally, when it comes to opposition to the Iran deal JINSA is manning the front lines.

But here’s what’s noteworthy about the latest exercise in letter writing designed to put Israel’s interests first when crafting U.S. foreign policy: a large majority of JINSA’s advisory board members who are retired generals and admirals, did not sign the letter opposing the Iran deal.

The board includes 36 such figures and yet only eight of them were signators.

It’s hard to say how many of the non-signers made an active choice not to sign. Even so, JINSA’s leaders would surely have expected more solid support on this issue.

What this lack of solidarity most likely illustrates is that the divide between those who support or oppose the Iran deal has virtually nothing to do with objective assessments about the national security interests of the U.S., Israel or any other nation.

The opponents to this deal are in fact opponents of any deal with Iran.

And the suggestion that standing with Israel necessitates standing against the deal, is an equation that can be seen as false not only among the deal’s strongest advocates but probably even many of JINSA’s own advisory board members.

Facebooktwittermail

Sheldon Adelson and the wave of TV ads opposing the Iran deal

A recent headline at The Intercept seems to have been crafted to deceive its readers:

“Wave of TV Ads Opposing Iran Deal Organized By Saudi Arabian Lobbyist”

Parse those words very carefully, avoid the grammatical trap of assuming that a Saudi Arabian lobbyist would be Saudi Arabian, and you might grasp that the ads, though organized by the said lobbyist, may or may not have any connection to Saudi Arabia.

But most people don’t dissect headlines with such lawyerly exactness and thus wouldn’t hesitate in jumping to this conclusion:

“Saudis Financing TV Ads Opposing Nuke Deal with Iran”

That headline appears above a report appearing at the Macedonian International News Agency which is simply The Intercept report re-published without attribution.

So what’s the deception?

The ads in question are being run by a group called the American Security Initiative whose president is former Republican Senator Norm Coleman.

Coleman now works for the major lobbying law firm Hogan Lovells, where he provides legal services for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia and legal services for other existing firm clients.

On that basis — and not much else — The Intercept’s Lee Fang has constructed a report that will lead many readers to believe the Saudis are behind the ad campaign, even though that conclusion is never spelled out. The report doesn’t make its conclusion explicit — even though it’s strongly inferred in the headline — presumably because it’s a claim for which there is no direct evidence.

But maybe it’s true. Maybe the Saudis are sinking millions of dollars into this ad campaign. It’s possible.

Yet there already is a much more plausible source for the funding for the American Security Initiative: the casino boss who bankrolls Benjamin Netanyahu, Sheldon Adelson.

The reason for believing it’s Adelson’s money rather than the Saudis’ isn’t simply because the tycoon’s opposition to the Iran deal is well-known. It’s because his financial links to the American Security Initiative have already been reported.

In Washington this March, Adelson co-chaired a fundraising event where Coleman made a pitch for the American Security Initiative.

Coleman is a close ally of Adelson — both are board members of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The primary goal of the Coalition right now is to kill the Iran deal.

Following the March fundraiser and Coleman’s pitch for the American Security Initiative, the Daily Beast reported: “A GOP source said Adelson is expected to help fund the new security group, but Coleman declined to comment.”

So why is The Intercept now pointing at the Saudis when Adelson’s already been fingered?

Facebooktwittermail