thepolemicist

[thepolemicist]

The Warm War: Russiamania At The Boiling Point

Is it war yet?

Yes, in too many respects.

It’s a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come.

I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation of emerging adversaries the US is desperate to entame before any one or combination of them becomes too strong to defeat.  These include countries like Iran and China, which are developing forces capable of resisting American military aggression against their own territory and on a regional level, and have shown quite too much uppitiness about staying in their previously-assigned geopolitical cages.

But Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program of regime change—indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and directly in Syria, where Russia actively got in the way. So Russia is the focus of attack, the prime target for an exemplary comeuppance.

Is it, then, a new Cold War, even more dangerous than the old one, as Stephen F. Cohen says?

That terminology was apt even a few months ago, but the speed, ferocity, and coordination of the West/NATO’s reaction to the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals, as well as the formation of a War Cabinet in Washington, indicates to me that we’ve moved to another level of aggression.

It’s beyond Cold. Call it the Warm War. And the temperature’s rising.

The Nerve of Them

There are two underlying presumptions that, combined, make present situation more dangerous than a Cold War.

One is the presumption of guilt—or, more precisely, the presumption that the presumption of Russian guilt can always be made, and made to stick in the Western mind.

The confected furor over the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals demonstrates this dramatically.

Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible.

False certainty is the ultimate fake news. It is just not true that, as she says: “There is no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state is culpable.” This falsity of this statement has been demonstrated by a slew of sources—including the developers of the alleged "Novichok" agent themselves, a thorough analysis by a former UN inspector in Iraq who worked on the destruction of Russian chemical weapons, establishment Western scientific outlets like New Scientist (“Other countries could have made ‘Russian’ nerve agent”), and the British government’s own mealy-mouthed, effective-but-unacknowledged disavowal of that conclusion. In its own words, The British government found: “a nerve agent or related compound,” “of a type developed by Russia.” So, it’s absolutely, positively, certainly, without a doubt, Russian-government-produced “Novichok”....or something else.

Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. It’s a knowledgeable family.

It boggles the—or at least, my—mind how, in the face of all this, anyone could take seriously her ultimatum, ignoring the procedures of the Chemical Weapons Convention, gave Russia 24 hours to "explain"—i.e., confess and beg forgiveness for—this alleged crime.

Indeed, it’s noteworthy that France initially, and rather sharply, refused to assume Russian guilt, with a government spokesman saying, “We don’t do fantasy politics. Once the elements are proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made.” But the whip was cracked—and surely not by the weak hand of Whitehall—demanding EU/NATO unity in the condemnation of Russia. So, in an extraordinary show of discipline that could only be ordered and orchestrated by the imperial center, France joined the United States and 20 other countries in the largest mass expulsion of Russian diplomats ever.

Western governments and their compliant media have mandated that Russian government guilt for the “first offensive use of a nerve agent” in Europe since World War II is to be taken as flat fact. Anyone—like Jeremy Corbyn or Craig Murray—who dares to interrupt the "Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!" chorus to ask for, uh, evidence, is treated to a storm of obloquy.

At this point, Western accusers don't seem to care how blatantly unfounded, if not ludicrous, an accusation is. The presumption of Russian guilt, along with the shaming of anyone who questions it, has become an unquestionable standard of Western/American political and media discourse.

Old Cold War McCarthyism has become new Warm War fantasy politics.

Helled in Contempt

This declaration of diplomatic war over the Skripal incident is the culmination of an ongoing drumbeat of ideological warfare, demonizing Russia and Putin personally in the most predictable and inflammatory terms.

For the past couple of years, we’ve been told by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Marco Rubio, and Boris Johnson that Putin is the new Hitler. That’s a particularly galling analogy for the Russians. Soviet Russia, after all, was Hitler’s main enemy, that defeated the Nazi army at the cost of 20+ million of its people—while the British Royal Family was not un-smitten with the charms of Hitlerian fascism, and British footballers had this poignant moment in 1938 Berlin:

“War” is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we’ve also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner’s ominous “We have been attacked. We are at war,” video, as well as the bipartisan (Hillary Clinton, John McCain) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an “act of war” equivalent to Pearl Harbor. Indeed, Trump’s new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it, explicitly “a casus belli, a true act of war.”

Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It’s noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as “the enemy”: "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy."

Which is strange, because, since the Taliban emerged from the American-jihadi war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban and Russia have “enduring enmity” towards each other, as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts it. Furthermore, the sixteen-year-long American war against the Taliban has depended on Russia allowing the U.S. to move supplies through its territory, and being “the principal source of fuel for the alliance’s needs in Afghanistan.”

So the general has to admit that this alleged Russian “destabilising activity” is a new thing: "This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months… When you look at the timing it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it's interesting to note the timing of the whole thing."

Yes, it is.

The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted.

This is not a serious framework for respectful international relations between two sovereign nations. It’s downright childish. It paints everyone, including the party trying to impose it, into an impossible corner. Is Russia ever going to abandon Crimea, confess that it shot down the Malaysian jet, tricked us into electing Donald Trump, murdered the Skripals, is secretly arming the Taliban, et. al.? Is the U.S. ever going to say: “Never mind”? What’s the next step? It’s the predicament of the bully.

This is not, either, an approach that really seeks to address any of the “crimes” charged. As Victoria Nuland (a Clintonite John Bolton) put it on NPR, it’s about, “sending a message” to Russia. Well, as Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov said, with this latest mass expulsion of diplomats, the United States is, “Destroying what little remained of US-Russian ties.” He got the message.

All of this looks like a coordinated campaign that began in response to Russia’s interruption of American regime-change projects in Ukraine and especially Syria, that was harmonized—over the last 18 to 24 months—with various elite and popular motifs of discontent over the 2016 election, and that has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks with ubiquitous and unconstrained “enemization”1 of Russia. It’s hard to describe it as anything other than war propaganda—manufacturing the citizenry’s consent for a military confrontation.

Destroying the possibility of normal, non-conflictual, state-to-state relations and constituting Russia as “the enemy” is exactly what this campaign is about. That is its “message” and its effect—for the American people as much as for the Russia government. The heightened danger, I think, is that Russia, which has for a long time been reluctant to accept that America wasn’t interested in “partnership”, has now heard and understood this message, while the American people have only heard but do not understand it.

It’s hard to see where this can go that doesn’t involve military conflict. This is especially the case with the appointments of Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and John Bolton—a veritable murderers’ row that many see as the core of a Trump War Cabinet. Bolton, who does not need Senate confirmation, is a particularly dangerous fanatic, who tried to get the Israelis to attack Iran before even they wanted to, and has promised regime change in Iran by 2019. As mentioned, he considers that Russia has already given him a “casus belli.” Even the staid New York Times warns that, with these appointments, “the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically.”

The second presumption in the American mindset today makes military confrontation more likely than it was during the Cold War: Not only is there a presumption of guilt, there is a presumption of weakness. The presumption of guilt is something the American imperial managers are confident they can induce and maintain in the Western world; the presumption of weakness is one they—or, I fear, too many of them—have all-too blithely internalized.

This is an aspect of the American self-image among policymakers whose careers matured in a post-Soviet world. During the Cold War, Americans held themselves in check by the assumption, that, militarily, the Soviet Union was a peer adversary, a country that could and would defend certain territories and interests against direct American military aggression—“spheres of interest” that should not be attacked. The fundamental antagonism was managed with grudging mutual respect.

There was, after all, a shared recent history of alliance against fascism. And there was an awareness that the Soviet Union, in however distorted a way, both represented the possibility of a post-capitalist future and supported post-colonial national liberation movements, which gave it considerable stature in the world.

American leadership might have hated the Soviet Union, but it was not contemptuous of it. No American leader would have called the Soviet Union, as John McCain called Russia, just “a gas station masquerading as a country.” And no senior American or British leader would have told the Soviet Union what British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia last week: to “go away and shut up.”

This is a discourse that assumes its own righteousness, authority, and superior power, even as it betrays its own weakness. It’s the discourse of a frustrated child. Or bully. Russia isn’t shutting up and going away, and the British are not—and know they’re not—going to make it. But they may think the Big Daddy backing them up can and will. And daddy may think so himself.

Like all bullies, the people enmeshed in this arrogant discourse don’t seem to understand that it is not frightening Russia. It’s only insulting the country, and leading it to conclude that there is indeed nothing remaining of productive, non-conflictual, US-Russian “partnership” ties. The post-Skripal worldwide diplomatic expulsions, which seem deliberately and desperately excessive, may have finally convinced Russia that there is no longer any use trying. Those who should be frightened of this are the American people.

The enemy of my enemy is me.

The United States is only succeeding in turning itself into an enemy for Russians. Americans would do well to understand how thoroughly their hypocritical and contemptuous stance has alienated the Russian people and strengthened Vladimir Putin’s leadership—as many of Putin’s critics warned them it would. The fantasy of stoking a “liberal” movement in Russia that will install some nouveau-Yeltsin-ish figure is dissipated in the cold light of a 77% election day. Putin is widely and firmly supported in Russia because he represents the resistance to any such scheme.

Americans who want to understand that dynamic, and what America itself has wrought in Russia, should heed the passion, anger, and disappointment in this statement about Putin’s election from a self-described “liberal” (using the word, I think, in the intellectual tradition, not the American political, sense), Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT TV (translator's errors corrected):

Essentially, the West should be horrified not because 76% of Russians voted for Putin, but because this elections has demonstrated that 95% of Russia’s population supports conservative-patriotic, communist and nationalist ideas. That means that liberal ideas are barely surviving among measly 5% of population.

And that’s your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into “Russians never surrender” mode…

[W]ith all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies, you forced us to stop respecting you. You and your so called “values.”

We don’t want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer.

We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you. …

For that you only have yourself to blame. …

In meantime, you’ve pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately after you declared him an enemy, we united around him….

It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us chose patriotism.

Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.

Get cleaned up, now. You don’t have much time left.

In fact, the whole “uprising”/color revolution strategy throughout the world is over. It’s been fatally discredited by its own purported successes. Everybody in the Middle East has seen how that worked out for Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the Russians have seen how it worked out for Ukraine and for Russia itself. In neither Russia nor Iran (nor anywhere else of importance) are the Americans, with their sanctions and their NGOs and their cookies, going to stoke a popular uprising that turns a country into a fractured client of the Washington Consensus. More fantasy politics.

The old new world Washington wants won’t be born without a military midwife. The U.S. wants a compliant Russia (and “international community”) back, and it thinks it can force it into being.

Fear Knot

Consider this quote from The Saker, a defense analyst who was born in Switzerland to a Russian military family, “studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all [his] life,” and lived for 20 years in the United States. He’s been one of the sharpest analysts of Russia and Syria over the last few years. This was his take a year ago, after Trump’s cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield—another instant punishment for an absolutely, positively, proven-in-a day, chemical crime:

For one thing, there is no US policy on anything.

The Russians expressed their total disgust and outrage at this attack and openly began saying that the Americans were “недоговороспособны”. What that word means is literally “not-agreement-capable” or unable to make and then abide by an agreement. While polite, this expression is also extremely strong as it implies not so much a deliberate deception as the lack of the very ability to make a deal and abide by it. … But to say that a nuclear world superpower is “not-agreement-capable” is a terrible and extreme diagnostic.

This means that the Russians have basically given up on the notion of having an adult, sober and mentally sane partner to have a dialog with...

In all my years of training and work as a military analyst I have always had to assume that everybody involved was what we called a “rational actor”. The Soviets sure where.  As were the Americans.…

Not only do I find the Trump administration “not agreement-capable”, I find it completely detached from reality. Delusional in other words. …

Alas, just like Obama before him, Trump seems to think that he can win a game of nuclear chicken against Russia. But he can’t. Let me be clear here: if pushed into a corner the Russian will fight, even if that means nuclear war.

There is a reason for this American delusion. The present generation of American leadership was spoiled and addled by the blissful post-Soviet decades of American impunity.

The problem is not exactly that the U.S. wants full-on war with Russia, it’s that America does not fear it.2

Why should it? It hasn’t had to for twenty years during which the US assumed it could bully Russia to stay out of its imperial way anywhere it wanted to intervene.

After the Soviet Union broke up (and only because the Soviet Union disappeared) the United States was free to use its military power with impunity. For some time, the U.S. had its drunken stooge, Yeltsin, running Russia and keeping it out of America’s military way. There was nary a peep when Bill Clinton effectively conferred on NATO (meaning the U.S. itself) the authority to decide what military interventions were necessary and legitimate. For about twenty years—from the Yugoslavia through the Libya intervention—no nation had the military power or politico-diplomatic will to resist this.

But that situation has changed. Even the Pentagon recognizes that the American Empire is in a “post-primacy” phase—certainly “fraying,” and maybe even “collapsing.” The world has seen America’s social and economic strength dissipate, and its pretense of legitimacy disappear entirely. The world has seen American military overreach everywhere while winning nothing of stable value anywhere. Sixteen years, and the mighty U.S. Army cannot defeat the Taliban. Now, that’s Russia’s fault!

Meanwhile, a number of countries in key areas have gained the military confidence and political will to refuse the presumptions of American arrogance—China in the Pacific, Iran in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe and, surprisingly, the Middle East as well. In a familiar pattern, America’s resultant anxiety about waning power increases its compensatory aggression. And, as mentioned, since it was Russia that most effectively demonstrated that new military confidence, it’s Russia that has to be dealt with first.

The incessant wave of sanctions and expulsions is the bully in the schoolyard clenching his fist to scare the new kid away. OK, everyone’s got the message now. Unclench or punch?

Let’s be clear about who is the world’s bully. As is evident to any half-conscious person, Russia is not going to attack the United States or Europe. Russia doesn’t have scores of military bases, combat ships and aircraft up on America’s borders. It doesn’t have almost a thousand military bases around the world. Russia does not have the military forces to rampage around the world as America does, and it doesn’t want or need to. That’s not because of Russia’s or Vladimir Putin’s pacifism, but because Russia, as presently situated in the political economy of the world, has nothing to gain from it.

Nor does Russia need some huge troll-farm offensive to "destabilize" and sow division in Western Europe and the United States. Inequality, austerity, waves of immigrants from regime-change wars, and trigger-happy cops are doing a fine job of that. Russia isn’t responsible for American problems with Black Lives Matter or with the Taliban.

All of this is fantasy politics.

It's the United States, with its fraying empire, that has a problem requiring military aggression. What other tools does the U.S. have left to put the upstarts, Russia first, back in their places?

It must be hard for folks who have had their way with country after country for twenty years not to think they can push Russia out of the way with some really, really scary threats, or maybe one or two “bloody nose” punches. Some finite number of discrete little escalations. There’s already been some shoving—that cruise missile attack, Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet, American attacks on Russian personnel (ostensibly private mercenaries) in Syria—and, look, Ma, no big war. But sometimes you learn the hard way the truth of the reverse Mike Tyson rule: "Everyone has a game plan until they smack the other guy in the face."

Consider one concrete risk of escalation that every informed observer is, and every American should be, aware of.

The place where the United States and Russia are literally, geographically, closest to confrontation is Syria. As mentioned, the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey, have already attacked and killed Russians in Syria, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have a far larger military force than Russia in Syria and the surrounding area. On the other hand, Russia has made very effective use of its forces, including what Reuters calls “advanced cruise missiles” launched from planes, ships, and submarines that hit ISIS targets with high precision from 1000 kilometers.

Russia is also operating in accordance with international law, while the U.S. is not. Russia is fighting with Syria for the defeat of jihadi forces and the unification of the Syrian state. The United States is fighting with its jihadi clients for the overthrow of the Syrian government and the division of the country. Russia intervened in Syria after Obama announced that the U.S. would attack Syrian army troops, effectively declaring war. If neither side accepts defeat and goes home, it is quite possible there will be some direct confrontation over this. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t.

A couple of weeks ago Syria and Russia said the U.S. was planning a major offensive against the Syrian government, including bombing the government quarter in Damascus. Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia’s General Staff, warned: “In the event of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, Russia’s armed forces will take retaliatory measures against the missiles and launchers used.” In this context, “launchers” means American ships in the Mediterranean.  

Also a couple of weeks ago, Russia announced a number of new, highly-advanced weapons systems. There’s discussion about whether some of the yet-to-be-deployed weapons announced may or may not be a bluff, but one that has already been deployed, called Dagger (Kinzhal, not the missiles mentioned above), is an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile that files at 5-7,000 miles per hour, with a range of 1200 miles. Analyst Andrei Martyanov claims that: “no modern or perspective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter.” Air-launched. From anywhere.

The U.S. attack has not (yet) happened, for whatever reason (Sputnik reporter Suliman Mulhem, citing “a military monitor,” claims that’s because of the Russian warnings). Great. But given the current state of America’s anxiously aggressive “post-primacy” policy—including the Russiamania, the Zionist-driven need to destroy Syria and Iran, and the War Cabinet—how unlikely is that the U.S. will, in the near future, make some such attack on some such target that Russia considers crucial to defend?

And Syria is just one theater where, unless one side accepts defeat and goes home, military conflict with Russia is highly likely. Is Russia going to abandon the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass if they’re attacked by fascist Kiev forces backed by the U.S.? Is it going to sit back and watch passively if American and Israeli forces attack Iran? Which one is going to give up and accept a loss: John Bolton or Vladimir Putin?

Which brings us to the pointed question: What will the U.S. do if Russia sinks an American ship? How many steps before that goes full-scale, even nuclear? Or maybe American planners (and you, dear reader) are absolutely, positively sure that will never happen, because the U.S. has cool weapons, too, and a lot more of them, and the Russians will probably lose all their ships in the Mediterranean immediately, if not something worse, and they’ll put up with anything rather than go one more step. The Russians, like everybody, must know the Americans always win.

Happy with that, are we? Snug in our homeland rug? ‘Cause Russians won’t fight, but the Taliban will.

This is exactly what is meant by Americans not fearing war with Russia (or war in general for that matter). Nothing but contempt.

The Skripal opera, directed by the United States, with the whole of Europe and the entire Western media apparatus singing in harmony, makes it clear that the American producers have no speaking role for Russia in their staging of the world. And that contempt makes war much more likely. Here’s The Saker again, on how dangerous the isolation the U.S. and its European clients are so carelessly imposing on Russia and themselves is for everybody:

Right now they are expelling Russian diplomats en masse and they are feeling very strong and manly. …

The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made preparations for war in Europe. …Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the continental US.

Mass diplomatic expulsions, economic warfare, lockstep propaganda, no interest whatsoever in respectfully addressing or hearing from the other side. What we’ve been seeing over the past few months is the “kind of stuff that happens when two sides are about to go to war.”

The less Americans fear war, the less they respect the possibility of it, the more likely they are to get it.

Ready or Not

The Saker makes a diptych of a point that gets to the heart of the matter. We’d do well to read and think on it carefully:

1. The Russians are afraid of war. The Americans are not. 2. The Russians are ready for war. The Americans are not.

Russia is afraid of war. More than twenty million Soviet citizens were killed in WWII, about half of them civilians. That was more than twenty times the number of Americans and British casualties combined. The entire country was devastated. Millions died in the 872-day siege of Leningrad alone, including Vladimir Putin’s brother. The city’s population was decimated by disease and starvation, with some reduced to cannibalism. Wikileaks calls it  “one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history [and] possibly the costliest in casualties.”  Another million-plus died in the nine-month siege of Stalingrad.  

Every Russian knows this history. Millions of Russian families have suffered from it. Of course, there was mythification of the struggle and its heroes, but the Russians, viscerally, know war and know it can happen to them. They do not want to go through it again. They will do almost anything to avoid it. Russians are not flippant about war. They fear it. They respect it.

The Americans are not (afraid of war). Americans have never experienced anything remotely as devastating as this. About 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, 150 years ago. (And we’re still entangled in that!) The American mainland has not been attacked by a significant military force since the War of 1812. Since then, the worst attacks on American territory are two one-off incidents (Pearl Harbor and 9/11), separated by seventy years, totaling about six-thousand casualties. These are the iconic moments of America Under Siege.

For the American populace, wars are “over there,” fought by a small group of Americans who go away and either come back or don’t. The death, destruction, and aroma of warfare—which the United States visits on people around the world incessantly—is unseen and unexperienced at home. Americans do not, cannot, believe, in any but the most abstract intellectual sense, that war can happen here, to them. For the general populace, talk of war is just more political background noise, Morgan Freeman competing for attention with Stormy Daniels and the Kardashians.

Americans are supremely insouciant about war: They threaten countries with it incessantly, the government routinely sells it with lies, and the political parties promote it opportunistically to defeat their opponents—and nobody cares. For Americans, war is part of a game. They do not fear it. They do not respect it.

The Russians are ready for war. The Nazi onslaught was defeated—in Soviet Russia, by Soviet Citizens and the Red Army—because the mass of people stood and fought together for a victory they understood was important. They could not have withstood horrific sieges and defeated the Nazis any other way. Russians understand, in other words, that war is a crisis of death and destruction visited on the whole of society, which can only be won by a massive and difficult effort grounded in social solidarity. If the Russians feel they have to fight, if they feel besieged, they know they will have to stand together, take the hits that come, and fight to the finish. They will not again permit war to be brought to their cities while their attacker stays snug. There will be a world of hurt. They will develop and use any weapon they can. And their toughest weapon is not a hypersonic missile; it’s that solidarity, implied by that 77%. (Did you read that Simonyan statement?) They may not be seeking it, but, insofar as anybody can be, they are ready to fight.

Americans are not (ready for war): Americans experience the horror of was as a series of discrete tragedies visited upon families of fallen soldiers, reported in human-interest vignettes at the end of the nightly news. Individual tragedies, not a social disaster.

It’s hard to imagine the social devastation of war in any case, but American culture wants no part of thinking about that concretely. The social imagination of war is deflected into fantastic scenarios of a super-hero universe or a zombie apocalypse. The alien death-ray may blow up the Empire State Building, but the hero and his family (now including his or her gender-ambivalent teenager, and, of course, the dog) will survive and triumph. Cartoon villains, cartoon heroes, and a cartoon society.

One reason for this, we have to recognize, is the victory of the Thatcherite/libertarian-capitalist “no such thing as society” ideology. Congratulations, Ayn Rand, there is no such thing as American society now. It’s every incipient entrepreneur for him or herself. This does not a comradely, fighting band of brothers and sisters make.

Furthermore, though America is constantly at war, nobody understands the purpose of it. That’s because the real purpose can never be explained, and must be hidden behind some facile abstraction—"democracy,” “our freedoms,” etc. This kind of discourse can get some of the people motivated for some of the time, but it loses its charm the minute someone gets smacked in the face.

Once they take a moment, everybody can see that there is nobody with an army threatening to attack and destroy the United States, and if they take a few moments, everybody can see how phony the “democracy and freedom” stuff is and remember how often they’ve been lied to before. There’s just too much information out there. (Which is why the Imperial High Command wants to control the internet.) Why the hell am I fighting? What in hell are we fighting for? These are questions everybody will ask after, and too many people are now asking before, they get smacked in the face.

This lack of social understanding and lack of political support translates into the impossibility of fighting a major, sustained war that requires taking heavy casualties—even “over there,” but certainly in the snug. American culture might be all gung-ho about Seal Team Six kicking ass, but the minute American homes start blowing up and American bodies start falling, Hoo-hah becomes Uh-oh, and it’s going to be Outta here.

Americans are ready for Hoo-hah and the Shark Tank and the Zombie Apocalypse. They are not ready for war.

You Get What You Play For

“Russiagate,” which started quite banally in the presidential campaign as a Democratic arrow to take down Trump, is now Russiamania—a battery of weapons wielded by various sectors of the state, aimed at an array of targets deemed even potentially resistant to imperial militarism. Trump himself—still, and for as long as he’s deemed unreliable—is targeted by a legal prosecution of infinite reach (whose likeliest threat is to take him down for something that has nothing to do with Russia). Russia itself is now targeted in full force by economic, diplomatic, ideological—and, tentatively, military—weapons of the state. Perhaps most importantly, American and European people, especially dissidents, are targeted by a unified media barrage that attacks any expression of radical critique, anything that “sows division”—from Black Lives Matter, to the Sanders campaign, to “But other countries could have made it”—as Russian treachery.

The stunning success of that last offensive is crucial to making a war more likely, and must be fought. To increase the risk of war with a nuclear power in order to score points against Donald Trump or Jill Stein—well, only those who neither respect, fear, nor are ready for war would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.

It’s impossible to predict with certainty whether, when, or with whom a major hot war will be started. The same chaotic disarray and impulsiveness of the Trump administration that increases the danger of war might also work to prevent it. John Bolton may be fired before he trims his moustache. But it’s a pressure-cooker, and the temperature has spiked drastically.

In a previous essay, I said that Venezuela was a likely first target for military attack, precisely because it would make for an easy victory that didn’t risk military confrontation with Russia. That’s still a good possibility. As we saw with Iraq Wars 1 (which helped to end the “Vietnam Syndrome”) and 2 (which somewhat resurrected it), the imperial high command needs to inure the American public with a virtually American-casualty-free victory and in order to lure them into taking on a war that’s going to hurt.

But the new War Cabinet may be pumped for the main event—an attack on Iran. Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton are all rabid proponents of regime-change in Iran. We can be certain that the Iran nuclear deal will be scrapped, and everyone will work hard to implement the secret agreement the Trump administration already has with Israel to “to deal with Iran’s nuclear drive, its missile programs and its other threatening activities”—or, as Trump himself expresses it: “cripple the [Iranian] regime and bring it to collapse.” (That agreement, by the way, was negotiated and signed by the previous, supposedly not-so-belligerent National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster.)

Still, as I also said in the previous essay, an attack on Iran means the Americans must either make sure Russia doesn’t get in the way or make clear that they don’t care if it does. So, threatening moves—not excluding probing military moves—against Russia will increase, whether Russia is the preferred direct target or not.

The siege is on.

Americans who want to continue playing with this fire would do well to pay some respectful attention to the target whose face they want to smack. Listen to Vladimir Putin talking to Western journalists in Saint Petersburg in 2017 (Really, watch the twelve-minute video. There’s an adult in the room.):

We know year-by-year what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you that they tell tales to, and you spread them to the citizens of your countries.

Your people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger--and this is what worries me.  

How can you not understand that the word is being pulled in an irreversible direction. That's the problem.  

Meanwhile they pretend that nothing's going on. I don't know how to get through to you anymore.

Russia did not boast or brag or threaten or Hoo-Hah about sending military forces to Syria. When it was deemed necessary—when the United States declared its intention to attack the Syrian Army—it just did it. And American 10-dimensional-chess players have been squirming around trying to deal with the implications of that ever since. They’re working hard on finding the right mix of threats, bluffs, sanctions, expulsions, “Shut up and go away!” insults, military forces on the border, and “bloody nose” attacks to force a capitulation. They should be listening to their target, who has not tired of asking for a “partnership,” who has clearly stated what his country would do in reaction to previous moves (e.g., the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and stationing of ABM bases in Eastern Europe), whose country and family have suffered from wartime devastation Americans cannot imagine, who therefore respects, fears, and is ready for war in ways Americans are not, and who is not playing their game:

Notes:

1 Ironically, given current drivers of Russiamania, this is a reference to remarks by Janet Napolitano. “The Enemization of Everything or an American Story of Empathy & Healing?”

2 Though it’s ridiculous that it needs to be said: I’m not talking here about the phony fear engendered by the media presentation of the “strongman,” “brutal dictator” Vladimir Putin. This is part and parcel of comic-book politics—conjuring a super-villain, who, we all know, is destined to be defeated.

[thepolemicist]

Go to source

It happened.

Yes, I was surprised. Since I spend a lot of time in western Pennsylvania, I knew there was more support for Trump than the media let on, but he just seemed too incompetent, incoherent, and disorganized a candidate to defeat the Clinton machine. I enjoyed torturing my friend who has been very close to Hillary for decades with scary stories about Trump surging. But in our early election day texting, I confessed that I thought it would be called for Hillary by 11PM at the latest. I was as wrong as everyone else.

I did not vote for either Hillary or Trump, and was resigned to taking my chances with either horrible outcome, but I was implicitly anticipating the dangers of a Clinton administration. I also thought, however, that there might be one positive effect of Hillary’s presidency. Contrary to what might be considered the usual leftist line that electing the explicitly ultra-reactionary Trump would foment the revolution, or at least radical discontent, I thought that, in the American context, Hillary being president would help the left the most.

If Trump wins, I argued, and his policies fail miserably and obviously, Democrats and liberals would spend the next four years saying: “See, you should have voted for Hillary,” and channeling oppositional energy into a familiar anti-Trump, anti-Republican, “Let’s make sure we elect a Democrat in 2020” politics—as we saw after Bush’s election in 2000.  The Democrats would once again present themselves as the system’s way out.

On the other hand, I thought that, if Hillary were to win and wreak her expected havoc on America and the world, Democrats and liberals would not be able to blame the Republicans. It would be the left that could say “See what you voted for?” The system would have failed in its Democratic guise. Because this might finally persuade more progressive-minded people to break with the Democratic Party once and for all. it was Hillary’s presidency, not Trump’s, that would open new paths for the left.

Now we have Donald Trump as president. His election is a disgrace, and we know what a disaster his administration will be for the country and the world. Mr. Anti-establishment, “drain the swamp,” tribune of the forgotten, is already filling up his clown car cabinet with the same-old tired Republican reactionaries and incompetents (Sarah Palin, Giluliani, Christie, Bolton), not to mention turning to industry and Wall Street lobbyists (and here) and, of course, Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin) to run the Treasury. As business news site Quartz so aptly headlines: Trump criticized Clinton for her Wall Street ties, but he’s the best thing to happen to big banks.

Just as with Hillary, there's the (fake) public position, and then there's the (real) private position, and Trump’s betrayal of whichever working-class voters thought he would be their savior has already begun. Let’s hope they don't cling to their illusions about him as long as foolish liberals have clung to theirs about Obama.

So the task for the left is to organize and fight—against every piece of crap policy Trump and his crew try to foist on us, and for a different political world. No doubt. But here’s where my fears about President Donald as opposed to President Hillary are already making me shudder. If our idea of organizing is to spend the next four years in a hashtag “opposition" movement (#FightTrump), managed and funded by the Democrats and their favored oligarchs, in order to mobilize support for the 2020 candidacy of an Elizabeth Warren, a Cory Booker, or a Lin-Manuel Miranda (Who can't see that coming?)—the next capitalist-imperialist identity-politics candidate—then we will have learned nothing.

As I write, the pressing question for many is whom to name as the next DNC Chair: Howard Dean or Keith Ellison. Who the hell cares? If our idea of organizing is to reform the Democratic Party—get the right guy or gal in charge—we will have learned nothing. The Democratic Party is a counter-revolutionary center-right capitalist party, and the DNC Chair is an employee of the donors. The problems we are facing, and the solutions we need to fight for, are way more radical than anything the Democratic Party will ever consider. If we haven’t learned this, we’ve learned nothing.

Even just considering electoral politics in the most basic democratic terms, we need to fight for the elimination of the electoral college, a transparent and trustworthy voting system, some form of Instant Runoff Voting, an end to voter caging and suppression, public financing, and access of third parties to debates, the media, and ballots in all states. Is the Democratic Party going to fight for any of that?

Did nobody notice that Trump, for whom only 27% of the eligible electorate voted, actually lost the popular vote by more than 500,000, and maybe more than two million, votes? By the only salient democratic measure of the people’s will, Hillary Clinton won the election. So how is the country all racist and/or sexist? If the Electoral College didn’t exist, would any of Hillary’s supporters be excoriating the 2016 voting electorate for its racism and misogyny, or would they be congratulating that electorate—the very same electorate with the very same result—for its embrace of diversity? White Supremacy didn’t defeat Hillary; the Electoral College did.

Wouldn't it make more sense for Hillary supporters, instead of complaining about the imputed racist and/or misogynist attitudes of those who didn't vote for her, to champion the cause of the majority who did, and focus on agitating for the reforms that are needed to make our electoral system actually democratic?

This is not revolutionary, but simple democratic, politics, but it implies the need for a difficult fight for serious changes. Does anyone think the Democratic Party, which so worships the system that it respectfully accepted having a couple of presidential elections stolen from it, is up for even that?

And that’s not counting the hard problems, the socio-economic problems.

Yes, there’s plenty of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia all across the United States, including among those low-income rural white voters in Pennsylvania who voted for Obama in 2008 and flipped to Trump this year. Trump personally has a history of trafficking in such vile attitudes, and his campaign certainly did. Everyone must fight them whenever and wherever they appear, and they will be a central target—along with his militarism, imperialism and authoritarianism—of left opposition to the Trump administration.

But those attitudes existed in western Pennsylvania and the rest of the country in 2008 and 2012, too. Why were there five million fewer votes for Clinton this year than Obama in 2012? Why did over 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, and one third who voted for him in both elections, vote for Trump this year? Six states flipped from Obama to Trump. Is the only salient fact about this Obama-Trump voting bloc that it’s racist?

Trump got a whole 1% more  of the white vote than Romney. Why did Hillary get a lower share of African-American (-7%) and Latino (-6%) votes than Obama did in 2012, while Trump got a higher share of both (+2%) than did Romney? Most importantly, why did 45% of the electorate stay home?

If we don’t seriously confront the fact that many of those millions of voters who switched from Obama to Trump, or to their couches, did so because of the failures of eight years of a Democratic administration, we will learn nothing.

This wasn’t a sudden switch, and it wasn’t personal. As Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara point out, over the eight years of the Obama administration, “Democrats have lost almost a thousand state-legislature seats, a dozen gubernatorial races, 69 House seats and 13 in the Senate.” This year, they lost the presidency and the Senate.

That’s an extended slide into disaffection. It would be foolish to think it was because voters took a few years to notice the color of Barack’s skin. It would be supremely foolish not to consider that white working-class voters in Rust Belt states switched to Republican—and black and Latino working-class voters stayed home—because eight years of the Obama administration did nothing to  stop the ongoing destruction of their lives and communities. It would be foolish not to recognize that Obama did not deliver the change he was promised, the change those voters of all races voted for—in 2008 and in declining numbers in 2012. It would be foolish to refuse to consider that this year’s rejection of Hillary was because they knew she was going to continue ignoring them in the same way.

Do we notice what's happened to Detroit and Flint, and to the hundreds of exurban communities surrounding cities like that? Or do we just notice how mellifluously and rhetorically correctly it was done? Do we really think five million people who voted for Obama, some twice, did not vote for Hillary because they all want to go around grabbing pussy, rather than because of what's been happening to them for the last eight years?

Sure, there are plenty of pissed-off white people. Should there not be? Should working-class whites—and every other working-class constituency, and all of their progressive allies—not be furious that their lives have been destroyed over the past thirty years by what Paul Street calls “a relentless top-down class war on their livelihoods, unions, and standard of living,” and over the past eight years by the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the country to the top ten-thousandth of the population? Should they not bridle at the infinite increase in military spending and the endless series of wars to which their children are sent, which have no discernible interest for them? Should they not be livid at the utterly corrupt private health insurance system, now called Obamacare, that is flaying them to death with increasing premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, for fewer coverage options?

Should middle-aged white Americans not object when they have been struck by one of the starkest indicators of a group that’s been relegated to the social wastebin: “Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” As two Dartmouth economists remark: “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude.…Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this.”

This is the kind of scourge that happens when a population has been discarded and has lost hope, as have “Millions of once ‘productively employed’ white working class people … [who have] become ‘surplus Americans’ in a time when Silicon Valley geniuses soberly design the near total elimination of manual labor and intellectuals debate the coming of ‘a world without work.’”

Liberals delight in perplexing about how working-class Republican voters can be too ignorant to realize how they’re being conned by oligarchs in populist drag. It’s the process Christopher Hitchens, in his better days, called “the essence of American politics…the manipulation of populism by elitism,” and Paul Street restates as: “the cloaking of plutocratic agendas, of service to the rich and powerful, in the false rebels’ clothing of popular rebellion.” We’ve seen this repeatedly, and Trump is the latest example.

But perhaps those liberals should perplex in the mirror. As Steve Hendricks points out:

For decades now, we liberals have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie that they vote for hucksters…[who] go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them there — shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social Security and Medicare.

But here’s an equally pathetic farce you don’t hear about much: Democrats are just as conned…Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks, defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares as these, and the winners go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them… Any leftist who wonders why her voice isn’t heard in Washington shouldn’t be asking what’s the matter with Kansas. She should be asking what’s the matter with New York.

Conservative Kansans fall for a plutocratic, imperialist agenda cloaked in patriotism, religion, and nostalgia for the good old Ed Sullivan days; liberal New Yorkers fall for the same plutocratic, imperialist agenda dressed up in multiculturalism, identity politics, and celebration of the good new Caitlin Jenner days. Who’s the bigger fool? How’s that working out for everybody? For the millions of victims of that top-down, plutocratic class war — in the ghettos of the cities and the hollows of Appalachia? For the Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans, whose countries have been destroyed? Ad infinitum.

Yes, the voters who switched from Barack to Donald are fools for thinking that Trump is going to help them in any way, but they are not fools for thinking that Hillary Clinton would not have.

And how smart or foolish is it to think the thing to do now is to try and persuade them on the next version of Hillary, Clinton 3.0 (Obama was 2.0)—which is all the Democratic Party is going to offer them. This bouncing back and forth between phony, mendacious saviors—from "hope and change" to "make America great again"—while ignoring, or posing false solutions to, the fundamental socio-economic forces ripping the country apart, is the characteristic of American liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican, politics. It suffers a lot of fools.

The problems that America faces, that cause so much frustration and rage, are now deep and persistent, and will require solutions that will be very radical in the American context. But they’ll  have to be, as the man said, as radical as reality. American workers are not suffering just because of trade agreements and offshoring. By some measures, 88% of jobs were lost to robots and other labor-saving devices. Tax incentive might bring some factories come back, but neither the Donald nor the Democrats can bring back jobs from China that don’t exist. China now has “zero labor” factories that run 24/7 with the lights off. When thousands of truck drivers lose their jobs, those self-driving Uber vehicles will still be zipping around American interstates, and the profits will be driven into pockets in Silicon Valley, without a pit stop in Beijing.  As Barry Lando points out, we are in the midst of a “perfect storm of technology” that “will lead to a net loss of over 5 million jobs in 15 major developed and emerging economies by 2020.”

So it's the entire architecture of capitalism that has to be questioned—the whole issue of who produces wealth and who appropriates it, and what kind of social order would do that justice. All the issues raised by that pesky guy who keeps returning, “yesterday and today.” There is no avoiding it. This is a moment requiring very radical thinking and action. No more half-assed tinkering.

The radicalism will come, either from the right or from the left, but it will come. Correction: It is coming from the right; the left better make another kind of radicalism real. And this is going to require—not, pace Barack, an "intramural scrimmage," but a knock-down fight on behalf of everybody in the bottom 90% of the country, a fight in which we must force the ruling class to lose wealth and power.

That’s also going to require the American left, such as it is, to make a serious examination of the relationship between identity politics and class politics—a relationship that, for the last thirty years, has been a function of most of the American left's management by, and submission to, the Democratic Party as a party of capital. The effective hegemony of the Democratic Party over left-liberal discourse and strategizing has created and enforced, as Adolph Reed, Jr. puts it, a “moral economy” that implicitly accepts as just: “a society in which 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources…, provided that roughly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Latino, 50% were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people.” This is equal-opportunity capitalist identity politics, and it’s been pursued—time to be honest—at the expense of class politics. Or, as Reed puts it more sharply: “it is [itself] a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism.”

To fight Trump and all he represents, we need to join the well-honed commitment to racial and gender equality with an invigorated, inclusive, and pointedly anti-capitalist class politics, which will hurt ruling class interests, prerogatives, and power, and which the Democratic Party will therefore do everything in its power to steer us away from.

The intensification of inequality—which even a mainstream Keynesian economist like Piketty understands is an intrinsic tendency of capitalism—will only get exponentially worse, given the dynamic of automated productivity discussed above. In this context, we’re facing questions that might seem utopian, but they are urgent necessities for any kind of just society. Why should the wealth deriving from the fantastic new sources of productivity not be appropriated and distributed socially, allowing for less work and greater social security for everyone?

There will, in fact, be no way to substantially and  permanently improve the lives of the discarded and enraged—of all colors and genders—without changing our social economy from one in which the first priority is that individuals are entitled to accumulate as much wealth as possible, to one in which the first priority is that everyone has economic security and social dignity. And that’s a radical change that will demand a fight.

We have to start by fighting for things like: universal single-payer healthcare, steep, frankly redistributive progressive taxation (as we had in the 50s, bordering on a “maximum income” policy), a complete overhaul of the electoral process, expansion of Social Security, free public higher education and a cancelling of student debt, and an end to ceaseless wars for the defense industries and for Israel (and, yes, you have to say that last bit, or go back to scrimmaging). Then we have to go on to demand guaranteed jobs and income for all.

These demands have to, and can, be made in a way that’s direct and easily understood. Single-payer is simpler to explain than Obamacare because single-payer isn’t hiding conflicting popular and profit interests. Sure, there will be fights over how to pay for them, and those fights will be opportunities to learn about and dispel economic myths (including the myth that taxes pay for government programs, but that’s another story). These measures do not add up to socialism, but they will move toward a socialist reorganization of society, and should be promoted frankly as such.

Yes, it is time for affirmative action for the entire working class, and that is socialism.

Tell me how impossible all this is, how the entire ruling class and establishment media will mobilize against it. You mean like how impossible it was for Donald Trump to become President?

Here’s the first lesson everyone on the left should learn from Donald Trump: All these formidable establishment powers are not as omnipotent as they have fooled us into thinking they are. If you have a movement and a leadership which actually, forthrightly, fights for the things that will improve the lives of everyone except the top 10%, and mobilizes the bottom 90%, things suddenly become possible.

That kind of leadership will never come from the committed-to-capitalism Democratic Party (yes, including Elizabeth Warren).

Of course, we will not get all of these things at once, but getting even one would be a major reversal of fortune—a step, finally, in the right direction. Let’s take the one example of single-payer healthcare. You couldn’t ask for a better issue. Obamacare is collapsing on its own deceptive contradictions, and Trump and the Republicans are promising to “replace” it. But the only thing you can replace it with that won’t be worse is a single-payer system. This is not that hard to explain. Medicare, an enormously popular program, is right there as an example. Indeed, the fight for single-payer is going will be the way to prevent the privatization of Medicare.

There can be no left progressive movement of any worth in the Untied States that doesn’t start fighting right now for a single-payer, universal coverage health insurance program, And no movement that’s managed by Hillary and the “Never, ever” Democrats will do that. That’s why progressives and leftists should spend zero minutes fretting over who will become Soros and Saban’s next towel boy or girl at the DNC. Ignore them, and just wage the damn fight.  

The second lesson that Trump has shoved our face into is more sobering: The left has failed. As Reed puts it, again: “The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one.” For the reasons cited above and many others, the left in America is a political non-entity. When the Libertarians, led by Mr. “Who’s Aleppo?” win three times the vote of Jill Stein and the Greens, it’s telling us something about the extensive hold of capitalist ideology. It’s that thing I hear when my working-class Latino Facebook friend and my renowned female doctor in one of the nation’s premier medical research facilities, both tell me they voted for Trump because: “He’s a businessman, and he knows how to create the jobs. He tells it like it is.” That’s the pop-culture, Apprentice-Shark Tank flavor of capitalist ideology that helped to elect Trump, and that we are a long way from overcoming.

Of course, this is not a fixed position. The success of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the increasing attractiveness of the socialist idea to millennials, demonstrate that there are real possibilities. But Bernie’s capitulation, and his refusal to run on the Green ticket, betrayed what I think was a very real possibility to spread left-oppositional ideas across the political map. It’s very possible that Bernie could have beaten Trump. And even if Bernie had lost on a third-party line, he would likely have gotten enough of the vote to change the political conversation going forward in important ways.

That opportunity for the American left was lost to Bernie’s TINA conviction: There Is No Alternative—to the Democratic Party. His choice was a trailing shadow of the opportunity that Syriza lost in Greece last year, because, as I pointed out in previous essays, the Syriza leadership could not imagine their way out of the European version of TINA (explicitly: No Alternative to capitalism).

In Europe and America, the capitulation of an incipient populist left paves the way for a populist right. Political actors like Bernie and Syriza are so convinced that if they fight for the left they’ll lose to the right, that they revert to fighting for a center that no longer exists—and the right wins anyway. It doesn’t make one terribly hopeful. We’ve already lost a couple of precious opportunities.  Let’s not lose any others.

Ironically, it is Donald Trump who has demonstrated—albeit in a Bizarro, demented way—the political truth of the old May '68 slogan: Demand the impossible.

If we don't want to do that? Well, America is now a ship of fools, with Donald at the helm. Enjoy the ride.

[thepolemicist]

Hillary’s Hide-and-Seek

Go to source.

This Sunday’s New York Times (NYT) article by Amy Chozicko, headlined “Issues in Hillary Clinton’s Past Leave Her Muted in Furor Over Donald Trump” (“Clinton Treads Lightly Amid Furor Over Trump” in the print edition) provides a fine example of how the mainstream press covers up Hillary Clinton’s problems, even when they claim to be reporting on them.

The article introduces itself as explaining Hillary’s “virtual silence” regarding the issues of Donald Trump’s piggish treatment of women—issues that she herself raised in this campaign. The article mentions, in the most non-specific way possible, that she’s an “imperfect messenger” for these issues because of her “missteps” in dealing with her own “husband’s history” of piggish behavior. It alludes to her “role in countering the women who accused him of sexual misconduct” as part of a “painful past” that “haunted Mrs. Clinton last Sunday” when Trump brought some of her husband’s accusers to the debate.

The article goes on at length to quote from Michelle Obama’s speech, to elucidate how Hillary slyly changes the subject to cat videos when asked, and to talk about how she struggles to overcome the electorate’s lingering resistance to a woman president. It mentions how, “without mentioning the accusations against Mr. Trump,” she says things like: “This election is incredibly painful. I take absolutely no satisfaction in what is happening on the other side with my opponent.”

What the article does not do is mention a single specific “misstep” or “imperfection” in the way she “countered” her husband’s “accusers” and verified mistresses. In an article of some 1300 words, there is not one that clearly describes any of the things that Hillary Clinton did and said in that regard—the precise things that cause Hillary to “tread lightly” about Donald Trump’s abusiveness, and cause her the discomfort the article purports to explain.

Despite what Ms. Chozicko does take many words to mention, what puts Hillary in a “complicated place” now is not that she “stayed as a devoted wife to her husband through infidelities and humiliation.” As Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick remarked back in 2008: “Sure, her husband's behavior has humiliated her. But she has also helped him humiliate the women he's been involved with.”

It was Hillary Clinton who called Gennifer Flowers “trailer trash” and a ”failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé," and who got on national television with her husband to ridicule Flowers, who was telling the truth. It was Hillary who called Monica Lewinsky, who was telling the truth, a “narcissistic loony toon.” It was Hillary who described Bill’s mistresses as “bimbos.” Carl Bernstein also told how Hillary not only “thr[e]w herself into efforts to discredit Flowers,” she tried to “persuade horrified campaign aides to bring out rumors that Poppy Bush had not always been faithful to Barbara.”

Hillary could have stood by her man, and said nothing about the women Bill was screwing. Instead, she chose to publicly and aggressively slut-shame and ridicule those women in order to actively support her husband’s lies about them. Hillary Clinton did to those women what Clarence Thomas and Alan Simpson did to Anita Hill. To quote Henneberger and Lithwick again: “If her biggest fans knew who she really blamed—other women—they might not still be fans.”

That’s what’s causing Hillary to “tread lightly” now, and that’s what you'd never know from reading this NYT article, even though it’s exactly what the article purports to explain. Furthermore, the NYT and the author know these facts and have deliberately chosen to hide them within vague terms like "imperfections" and, you know, “It’s complicated.” For the Times, what occurred between Hillary and these women has all been so “painful” and “haunting”—for Hillary. That's a kind of rhetorical protection that the NYT would never offer one of its/the Democratic establishment's political opponents.

In other words, the NYT article is not a good-faith attempt to inform us about, and analyze, Hillary's problem. It's an effort to hide it. Rather than explain Hillary’s avoidance, Ms. Chozicko mimics it.

This whole rigmarole reflects a fundamental problem: Does anybody really contend, in a principled and consistent way, that a candidate’s (man or woman) personal nasty sexual behavior in itself disqualifies that person for the presidency? Or doesn’t everyone actually use that issue only opportunistically—to attack the candidate they don’t like for other political reasons?

Lyndon Johnson used to wave around his dick—which he called Jumbo—and once forced himself on a White House secretary, showing up at her bed and ordering her to ”Move over. This is your president.” Is any Democratic Party liberal going to say we should denounce his presidency solely on that behavior (straight-up rape!), or will they insist on prioritizing things like the Civil Rights Act and Medicare? (For that matter, will his opponents not prioritize things like the Vietnam War?) Will any of them judge Richard Nixon to be a better president or political persona because he was more “correct” in his sexual behavior?

This is not just about how things went in the past, either: If Corey Booker runs against Marco Rubio eight years from now, and someone unearths incidents about Corey like those now being unearthed about Trump, will Chris Hayes, or Rachel, or Michelle say that Booker is then disqualified? Or will they say—as many of the same people attacking Trump today said about Bill Clinton yesterday—that’s “just about sex” and shouldn’t disqualify him to be president? And besides, it’s the most important election ever!

Sure, it’s harder to get away with now, as it should be, but, when making a political judgement, a person’s loutish sexual behavior is always going to be relativized and judged as less decisive than their policy positions—by his or her supporters, at least. Like it or not, people’s sexual and political personae are frequently in contradiction, and there’s no cure. Even those for whom women’s issues are of paramount importance will find it hard not to prefer a personally sexist candidate who supports abortion rights, contraceptive availability, maternity leave, etc., over a personally impeccable candidate who doesn’t. Many did exactly that with Bill Clinton, and will do so again.

Those who did not, do not, and would not reject Johnson or Kennedy or Bill Clinton or the next Democratic iteration thereof, despite his piggish sexism, because other politics outweigh that fault, can’t really look down on supporters of other candidates who make exactly the same kind of calculation. Whether you vote for a piggish genital-grabber because s/he won’t criminalize abortion, or because s/he won’t start WWIII, you’re prioritizing policy over personal behavior. What’s annoying are those who sanctimoniously insist that everyone must reject a candidate because of his/her personal sexual behavior, when it’s obvious that they really don’t believe that at all.

In the present case, there are a thousand reasons to reject Donald Trump, and his piggishness makes for a nice part of the mix. Still, one might think it’s important to get seriously into those other political issues, to compare positions on things like the economy, war, etc. We’re not so much on that terrain anymore, are we?

We’re not so much on that terrain anymore, are we? The United States just launched a military attack on the poorest country in the Arab world? Obama is considering starting WWIII in defense of al-Qaeda? Hey, let’s interview this woman who sat next to Donald Trump on an airplane thirty years ago. Diversion, anyone?

Barring a deus ex machina, Trump is now effectively toast, having been burned to a crisp over the last two weeks by the issue of his sexual aggressiveness, which was pursued relentlessly by the Clintonites and the press as a disqualifier.

Nothing to regret about that result, but it is to be remarked how, once that issue is stoked, it becomes an unstoppable train that flattens everything else, starting with the candidate it was aimed at. It wasn’t his vicious, racist remarks about Muslims, or about the Central Park Five, that quickly and definitively steamrolled The Donald; it was grabbing pussy. We should be wary of those who are so gleeful about having this train barreling down the track at Trump, and who have, and would again, object to that same dynamic if it were threatening to crush their favored politician.

We should remark, too, how Hillary played and fared in this game. It was she who started this fire, when, at the very end of the first debate, she brought up Trump’s derogatory remarks about women, and his fat-shaming of Alicia Machado. Then there appeared, fortuitously, the Access Hollywood tape, ensuring that the issue would be pursued. As the NYT article says, Hillary then retreated into her cone of “virtual silence” on the subject, leaving the heavy-hitting to Michelle and crew. Hillary can continue to “tread lightly,” insisting that she takes “absolutely no satisfaction” in what is happening to Trump. Absolutely.

Donald provided an easier target than Poppy.

And when Trump, at the next debate, brought in some of the women whom Hillary slut-shamed, the network commentators were aghast at how he was using these confused and troubled women for his political advantage, and dragging the Presidential campaign into the gutter.

The net result is that Hillary did not just go “virtually silent” about Trump, she virtually stopped campaigning at all. She decided to spend most of her time squirreled away in “debate prep,” far from unmanaged questions—letting the media and his own big mouth finish off Trump, confident that her enormous ad buys in the last couple of weeks will seal the deal.

So, Hillary gets to raise the issue, and then hide from it. And the NYT helps her, with an article that pretends to explain why she’s hiding from the issue, but is itself actually hiding the real reasons from its readers. She throws a stink bomb into the campaign, and then runs off to be showered and perfumed by the press, which casts her aggressive slut-shaming as “imperfection.” Catch me if you can.

Certainly well played, and Hillary supporters may delight in the result. But no one should be surprised at how many people—from right to left—see through this hide-and-seek, know right where Hillary and the establishment press stand, and, when not enraged at, are increasingly bored with, how this game is always played.

[thepolemicist]

Plan B Is Not Bernie

Go to source.

I admit: It’s all speculation.

On April 4th, I wrote on Facebook: “My prediction: the next President of the United States will be someone who is not yet in the race. (e.g., Possible alternative Dem ticket: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.) How crazy am I?”

This wasn’t just a wild guess. It was based on a few considered convictions.

The first major conviction is that Bernie Sanders was not going to be Democratic nominee.

To begin with, the Democratic Party, an institution dedicated to plutocratic class rule and imperialism, would not allow Bernie Sanders to be their nominee. The plutocracy will not permit Bernie Sanders to be the CEO of American and world capitalism, let alone the Commander-in-Chief of the American empire.

Furthermore, Bernie Sanders does not want to play either of those roles. He entered the race, as his advisors acknowledged to the New York Times, “to spread his political message about a rigged America rather than do whatever it took to win the nomination,“ and he has repeatedly pledged to support whomever the Democrats nominate.

Whatever unexpected and undeniable success his campaign has had, it’s a “political revolution” that will be limited to exerting pressure on the Democratic Party and its eventual nominee. One can complain that it’s been blocked by electoral hijinks or by the anti-democratic superdelegates, but those sores have been festering for a long time in the party Bernie chose to run in. At this point, if Hillary comes to the convention with one more pledged delegate and more popular votes than Bernie—which she will—she will win fair and democratically square—and any attempt by him to use superdelegates against her would contradict his own erstwhile complaints about them. At any rate, those supredelegates were put in place expressly to prevent anyone like him from becoming the nominee, and are not going to be persuaded, even by wonderful arguments based electoral logic, to forsake their duty. Which of these folks is going to switch to Bernie because polls show he’d do better against Trump in the general?

Bernie’s not going to turn the superdelegates, and he knows it.  He has never been, and is still not, a threat to win the nomination, and the Democratic Party knows it. Stlll, Bernie has run harder, and been undeniably more successful than anyone expected.  He’s been a stubborn obstacle to Hillary’s expected coronation, and this has had some real effects. It has even forced Hillary to making positive noises about “Medicare-for-some.” More importantly, it has exposed her deep political weaknesses, stemming from her commitment to establishment politics as well as her unlikeability. Bernie has won a string of impressive victories, and is showing persistent strength among key demographics. He may prevent Hillary from going to the convention with enough pledged delegates to win without superdelegate votes, and that would be a significant political insult to Hillary. But she’ll get those votes and get over it.

The Sanders campaign will not stop Hillary, and knows it. It is now focused on getting some progressive platform concessions.  Because we can all remember the many times a President has said: "OMG, I can't do that. It contradicts what's in the platform."

With Hillary as the nominee, supported by Bernie, the Democratic Party will once again have the heavily favored candidate of Wall Street, the neocons, and the media, and all will be right with the world. Of course, this will do some damage to the Democratic Party. It will alienate Bernie’s supporters, some fraction of whom will refuse to vote for Hillary. But not enough to deprive her of a November victory, or to prise a single cold finger of the ruling class’s hand from its grip on the Party and the country. It’s become clear that there’s a crisis of legitimacy for Hillary, and for the electoral duopoly as a whole, but the plutocracy will be content with having eight more years to prolong the problem.

But what if, for some other reason, Hillary can’t win? What’s the Democratic Party plan B?

Hint: It’s not Bernie.

There are a couple of wild cards in play that could knock Hillary out. One is her health.  I’ve thought for a few years that she was showing some weakness. This has certainly not been visible during the campaign, so it remains a purely speculative concern.

The other, however, is very real: Her email server.

Despite the attempt of liberal commenters (and Bernie Sanders) to insist “There's nothing to see here. Move along,” it is inexcusable, and prima facie illegal, for a Secretary of State to keep state documents concerning sensitive diplomatic and national security matters on a private server in her bathroom. We now know this included information that was classified “Above Top Secret/SAP” (Special Access Programs). SAPs are the “crown jewels” of the intelligence community, Area 51-type secrets. Apparently, a Romanian guy who calls himself “Guccifer” hacked her server (“and it was pretty easy”), and the Russians hacked him. So the Russians now have about 20,000 of her emails, presumably containing all the American state secrets they were able to collect from HIllaryNet, which they are deciding whether and when to release. Clearly, from the U.S. government’s point of view, Hillary created a serious security problem, and from her campaign’s point of view, a looming threat.

Also relevant to those who profess interest in open and accountable governance, is the fact that her powder-room PC violated federal rules designed “to make and preserve records to be readily available when needed, such as for congressional inquiries or FOIA requests.” Pardon me for thinking, especially since her lawyers have already deleted 30,000 of them, that hiding documents from public scrutiny might have been precisely the point.

But it doesn’t make any difference what I think. It’s what the FBI thinks that matters. In that regard, we should take notice that the FBI has extradited Guccifer, and is now interrogating Hillary’s close aides. Yesterday Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton’s Chief of Staff as Secretary of State, walked out of an FBI interview, according to the Washington Post, “after being asked about emails.” And today (May 11th), I got a message from a friend of mine, who’s been a close supporter of Hillary for a long time, saying that the FBI interviews with her staff are not going well, and it’s “disturbing.”

Then I typed “Joe Biden” into Google, and got this:

Seeds of doubt?  Is it a coincidence that that the Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren pairing gets national press the day after Hillary’s Chief of Staff walks out of an FBI interrogation?

Don’t get me wrong. I, of course, think that Obama will do his best to steer the FBI investigation away from incriminating Hillary, who is too cherished an establishment fish to fry.

Unless, that is, the head of the FBI, James Comey, or a quorum of his senior agents, refuses to toe the line. Yesterday, Comey rejected Hillary’s attempt to downplay the FBI investigation as a “routine inquiry.” Comey is also the guy who, as Acting Attorney General in 2004, refused the order of his boss, John Ashcroft, to re-authorize a surveillance program Comey thought was illegal.

Or unless the Russians, who seem to have a soft spot for the Donald, release something fatally damaging. Would it not destroy her campaign if they just showed that they were able to get the documents from her server?

Or unless it becomes clear that Trump has, and will use, seriously damaging information from the FBI and/or SVR.

Or unless….

Turns out there are a number of possible scenarios in which the email card, played against Hillary’s other weak cards—her increasingly obvious unlikeability, her rejection by youth and white workers, her inability to force Bernie out on schedule at all—will force her to fold.

Whatever anybody says in public, it’s inconceivable that Hillary, and the DNC/Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, are not worrying—at least thinking—about this in some juice-filled room.  And for the latter, that means preparing—at least considering—a plan B.

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?  Bernie Sanders, who has won all the elections and delegates and stuff, becomes, by acclamation, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

Unless, that is, the plutocrats, corporations, bankers, lobbyists, militarists, Zionists, et. al., who actually run the Democratic Party, say: “Over our dead bodies!” (If only.) Which they will.  If Hillary is forced out, Bernie will then, for the first time, be a threat, and there will be a response unlike anything we’ve seen so far. I hope Bernie and his supporters understand that the Democratic Party and the powers behind it will do anything—at least as much as the Republicans did against Trump—to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination.

What’s a tragically torn party to do? At this point, Bernie would probably be able to take the nomination if he insisted. He would have a ton of pledged delegates, and a good chance at cobbling together a majority from all the others now floating free. On the other hand, he is still unacceptable.

Bernie and the party will have reached the dog-who-caught-the-car moment I imagined in a previous post, except a lot further down the road, with Bernie wielding a lot more political capital. The party establishment will not be able to frontally attack, or summarily dismiss him, but they can still warn him that he faces the McGovern effect in the general election: listless party support, while the ruling class money and media suddenly realize their lesser evil—Donald Trump—isn’t so bad, after all.

If Bernie takes the nomination, it will tear the party apart, Indeed, for him to succeed any further, he will have to accept and embrace that civil war he has created in the party, and seize and thoroughly radicalize the entire party apparatus.

I still do not think Bernie wants to, or can, do that. I also recognize that he has fought harder and longer than I (or he, at the outset) thought, and shows no outward sign that he would shy from taking the nomination if he could get it. At this point, with the enthusiasm he has generated, if he were to accede to anyone else, he would risk destroying his own political credibility, while still tearing the party apart. And he and the party know this.

Unless, perhaps, the party could come up with a ticket that Bernie and a large portion of his followers could persuade themselves embodies his progressive political message. There is, of course, only one other person in the Democratic Party who could make that happen, whose progressive populist cred rivals that of Bernie Sanders—and that is Elizabeth Warren.

If the party establishment lost Hillary Clinton, and wanted to propose an alternative to Bernie Sanders, it would have to include Elizabeth Warren. She hits many of the same buttons as Bernie: the pernicious influence of money in politics, the scandal of student debt, he need to rein in big banks, etc. She would combine a strong dose of educated economic progressivism—highlighted in the present context by her viralized, devastating, critique of Hillary’s fealty to Wall Street on Bill Moyers—with the feminist identity-politics appeal that Hillary plays to. A woman who claims to have created “the intellectual foundation” for Occupy Wall Street! What more could Democratic progressives ask for?

Of course, with Warren carrying such credentials a public image—a “fevered Marxist,” according to Trump supporter, Jeffrey Lord—the party would have to soothe establishment anxiety by pairing her, as VP, with an establishment-friendly but likeable guy with a stabilizing hand: Biden-Warren, that’s the ticket! Joe Biden (Al Gore could be an alternate) is an uninspiring but reliable hand on the tiller, but he’s an Obama favorite and loyalist.  Position Warren as the passionate Joan of Arc who will help a united party slay the Donald, and as the inevitable, progressive face of the Democratic Party’s future, and you’ve got a package that starts to look saleable.

Still not enough, though. You would have to include a very nice prize before Bernie would buy that box of Cracker Jacks. Bernie has gone a long way, and his accrued political capital demands a real and immediate payoff. There would have to be a firm, public, irreversible promise of something significant—an undeniable concession such as single-payer healthcare for all or forgiveness of student loans, that would allow Bernie and his supporters to say they made a real difference. Now you’d have a package that they might buy.

They would, I’m afraid, be getting a snake in the box. Outside of the fevered minds of the most dull-witted conservatives, Elizabeth Warren is not only no “Marxist,” she is no Bernie Sanders. Try Hillary-Lite. Yes, she would push for some substantive reforms, but on an “intellectual foundation” oriented toward rationalizing capitalism. As more perspicacious conservatives like Christopher Caldwell see, she’s a “closet conservative.” Hillary Clinton broke with the Republicans in college; Elizabeth Warren was a Republican into her forties. Why? Because “It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.” Indeed, when asked whether she voted for arch-conservative Ronald Reagan, who shared the same worry, she refused to answer. So we know the answer.

Warren still thinks “There should be some Republicans and some Democrats,” with Republicans “providing some healthy opposition.” The consistent principle of her quest it to look for “people who best supported markets.” I’m not sure about Occupy Wall Street, but that’s Elizabeth Warren’s “intellectual foundation.” It’s in the Clintonite Democratic Party that she found a home for promoting that, and herself, politically.

Elizabeth Warren’s other important qualification is her full-on embrace of imperialism and Zionism.  As Dave Swanson says, She’s “perfectly fine with the wars but wants the bankers to help pay for them.”

Then again, this is consistent with a strain of “left” populism that’s OK with ignoring—until they become refugees—those millions of people in societies destroyed by American and its allies and proxies throughout the Middle East—a “progressivism” that doesn’t want to think too much about the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, or about the ongoing aggression and apartheid imposed on millions of Palestinians, or about “kill lists.” We don’t have to talk about all that nasty, complicated stuff, if shutting up gets us a $15 minimum wage. Progressive Except Imperialism. Not nasty old white-man Republican imperialism, of course; shiny new equal-opportunity, single-payer imperialism.

Wait: Progressive populist domestic policies, rationalizing without overturning capitalism, benign indifference at best to American exceptionalism…maybe a bit like Bernie, after all. Hillary-lite, Bernie-heavy.

Bottom line: Bernie would have achieved, in less than a year, some major reform that had eluded progressive forces for decades. As it did in response to every successful reform effort, the ruling class would have paid a price. It will be a price the plutocracy considered necessary for keeping its deadly grip on the American political process, thereby preserving its options for recovering any loss, and then some, down the road.

Whatever. Unlikely to happen. Just a “What if?”

It’s almost certain that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee of the Democratic Party and the next President of the United States. But if, perchance, she gets derailed by a deus ex machina like the FBI, you can bet that the Democratic Party will have a Plan B, and it won’t be Bernie Sanders. It will be an attempt to stop Bernie Sanders. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that a Joe Biden-Elizabeth Warren ticket gets mentioned in the national press the day after Hillary’s Chief of Staff walks out of an FBI interrogation. Or is someone floating a balloon?

Would Bernie ever bite?  Maybe not, but if the day comes, it’s some dish like this that the Democratic Party will try to serve.

[thepolemicist]

Vexed by Vaxxed

Go to source.

“Ideology, after all, is more influential than laws.….[N]o one…would dream of making legislation to force people to read certain books and prevent them from reading others.”1

--Literary critic H. Bruce Franklin

The treatment of the movie Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is an astounding example of ideological discipline performed by the American cultural elite.

As everybody knows by now, Robert DeNiro selected Vaxxed for his Tribeca Film Festival. Because he and Grace Hightower have a child with autism, he thought it was important that the issues raised in the film be shown to the public.

Vaxxed presents a personal admission and documentary evidence from Dr. William Thompson, a senior scientist and the lead author of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) study that purported to disprove a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. His evidence indicates that the panel actually found a link—and specifically a 300% increase in risk among African-American boys—and contrived to hide it. The panel’s effort to manipulate the data and destroy evidence in order to bury the link extended an inquiry that was meant to take six months into four years.

Thompson says that he, his co-authors, and the CDC, “omitted statistically significant information”; that “my supervisors have broken laws”; that they destroyed evidence in a way he “assumed … was illegal and would violate both FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and DOJ [Department of Justice] requests”; that he has “stopped lying,” and has “great shame now when I meet families of kids with autism because I have been part of the problem….I was complicit, and I went along with this, we did not report significant findings.” He also describes the atmosphere that reigned in the CDC thusly: “The federal government is hostile to anyone who says anything negative about any industry.”2

That is the crux of the movie. It makes the case that this participant’s stunning statement-against-interest evidence of fraud should be seriously investigated. You’ll be excused if you had no idea this is what the film is about, or if you thought—i.e., if the media coverage of it led you to believe—it was about something else entirely, about making some “anti-vaccination” argument. There is nothing in the film that is “anti-vaccination.” Unless criticizing the side-effects (now acknowledged, but once completely ignored) of Lipitor makes one “anti-drug.” Believe me, there are some voices out there that reject the efficacy and theory of vaccines in general. Neither Vaxxed nor anybody in it is one of them. In fact, the film explicitly supports vaccination, even as it urges more serious attention to the safety of one specific vaccine.  But you’d have to see the movie to know that.  (If you want a good idea of what the film is like beyond the trailer, take a look at this segment from Thom Hartmann’s show.)

As everyone also knows, within 48 hours after announcing the screening of Vaxxed, DeNiro was pressured into removing the film from the festival schedule.

Really, who the hell has the power to slap down Robert DeNiro? At Tribeca!

Well, first of all, the Immunization Action Coalition (IAC)—a kind of ideological SWAT Team, funded in part by pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Pfizer, etc.—certainly played a crucial role. The IAC is an ideological flying squad, on call to stop discussion, or, as supporter Alison Singer puts it, “to respond to every incident however large or small…[that] allows people to think that there’s something still to be discussed.” Ms. Singer insisted that, by pressuring DeNiro to pull the film, “science won,”  “This is not about free speech,” she said, “this is about dangerous speech….We don’t discuss whether the world is flat or round any more.”

Predictably, the New Yorker’s “anti-denialist” defender of GMOs, Michael Specter, pitched in, proclaiming: "It's shocking…It's comparable to Leni Riefenstahl making a movie about the Third Reich … The fact that a respectable organization like the Tribeca Film Festival is giving Wakefield a platform is a disgraceful thing to do."

More cogently, in the context of a film festival, documentary filmmaker Penny Lane (Our Nixon) chimed in with an open letter denouncing the film as part of “the anti-vaccination hoax” that “knowingly spread[s] dangerous lies,” and called for the festival to cancel the film’s screening. When she got that desired outcome, she gushed about how pleased and “amazed” she was to witness this “momentous and significant” moment in American film history: “This is completely unprecedented…Has a documentary film ever been pulled from a festival lineup once revealed to be a fraud?”

Whoopee. A controversial documentary revealing primary evidence of a government agency’s deception of the American people on behalf of Big Pharma hounded out of America’s iconic liberal film festival. Helluva thing for a filmmaker to celebrate. Completely comfortable allowing audiences to see certain films and prevent them from seeing others. No legislation necessary.

Consider Specter’s “if Leni Riefenstahl made a movie about the Third Reich” remark. Guess what? She did. A few, in fact. And I’ll bet film festivals show them all the time. And I’ll bet that if anyone tried to browbeat a festival to pull Triumph of the Will, Penny Lane would be in high dudgeon urging the organizers not to cave to the pressure. So, yeah, this little act of censorship, in which liberal cultural workers anathematize a film criticizing a pharmaceutical company and a government agency, more than they would a film glorifying the Third Reich, is indeed a momentous moment in film history. We should all let that sink in. Triumph of the shrill.

It’s not—It never is, is it?—about free speech, you see, it’s about “danger” and the roundness of the earth.

Of course, Penny Lane does not know what critique the film contains, and does not know that it is not—by any stretch of the imagination—“anti-vaccination,” because she (like Michael Specter) did not see it before denouncing it, and calling for removing it. Her denunciations did not, and could not, explain by whom, and how, the film she didn’t see had been “revealed to be a fraud.” Her entire argument, and—as we see repeated in Specter’s remarks—the pre-emptive response of almost every defender of vaccine orthodoxy, is: because Andrew Wakefield. 3

Here, I must say that I have no interest in, or brief for or against, Andrew Wakefield. I’ve always considered him a distraction from the main issues. Whatever one thinks of Wakefield and his twelve co-authors’ entirely non-earth-shattering Lancet article of 18 years ago, it does not affect the fundamental issues about vaccines in general, or the MMR-autism link in particular, or the case made in the film. The media always want to turn a story about vaccines into a story about Andrew Wakefield, as if he were the source of all wariness about vaccines and autism. (He is not; the parents of children suffering from autism are.)

Unfortunately, his presence here as the film’s director gives the media and critics that hook. Indeed, it made me decidedly unenthusiastic about seeing the film, since I was really not interested in a retelling of the Andrew Wakefield controversy. But, because of the nasty, unprecedented, campaign of censorship against it, I did see it, and was surprised and pleased to see that it is not about him; it’s about Dr. William Thompson and his evidence regarding the CDC study. It’s a careful recounting of that prima facie evidence of deliberate deception, told with sharp, gut-wrenching attention to the plight of autism-affected families. It echoes many of the concerns of another documentary, which DeNiro mentions in his interviews, and which Wakefield has nothing to do with, called Trace Amounts. But you have to see the movie to know that. Speaking on the basis of my own reluctance, I say: Don’t let Wakefield scare you off.

Some of the more powerful moments in Vaxxed involve two pediatricians who describe how they rely on, trust, and strictly follow the CDC immunization schedule in their practices. Then they are given the evidence and data from the CDC’s study, gathered via Dr. Thompson. After reading it, one doctor, Dr. Jim Sears, says: “Everything I’ve been telling my patients [about vaccines] for 10 years has been based on a lie and a cover-up.” Another, a young African-American doctor, Rachel Ross, says that from now on, when parents ask about MMR shots for their children, she will tell them she wouldn’t give it to her own child. What led those doctors to that conclusion is the documents of the CDC itself. That’s the evidence that changed those doctors’ minds, and it is to keep you from seeing that, not to protect you from evil Andrew Wakefield, that “very powerful forces” have mobilized to keep this film from screens. But you have to see the movie to understand that.

In considering all the forces that might have pressured DeNiro to pull the film, we should also be aware that, while Robert DeNiro may be the public wizard of the Tribeca Film Festival, behind the curtain there is a less visible money machine fronted by his partner, Jane Rosenthal. You didn’t think the filmmaking munchkins ran the show, did you? It’s capitalist culture, after all. That machine is a family affair, which includes Jane’s husband, billionaire real-estate investor Craig M. Hatkoff, and Jane’s nephew-in-law, Jonathan Patricof, who is the President and CEO of Tribeca Enterprises, the “diversified entertainment and media company that owns Tribeca Productions, the Tribeca Film Festival, and Tribeca Cinema.” Jonathan’s dad, billionaire venture capitalist Alan Patricof, runs Apax Partners Funds, one of the world’s largest private equity funds, and “one of the leading global investors in the Healthcare sector.” Apax’s Investments include companies involved in “vaccines and clinical trial material, cold-chain management, protocol support and regulatory advice.”

Not that that necessarily means anything, of course. This is just how culture, and medicine, and science are done in these capitalist United States. Keeping the world round, and all. But one might be excused for considering whether what is in fact the capital infrastructure of the Tribeca Film Festival exerted some influence in the decision by Robert DeNiro—or whoever’s in charge—to pull a film critical of the $300-billion-a-year pharmaceutical industry.

I urge you to watch DeNiro and Rosenthal’s interviews on Good Day New York and the Today Show. You can’t miss the visible discomfort between them. Rosenthal’s practically squirming in her seat; her body and lips are tensed, and she’s ready to spring into squashing any positive mention of the film. When the anchor of GDNY asks DeNiro if he would still like to release the film, and he looks like he’s about to say something positive. Rosenthal interrupts him, snapping: “We’re not releasing it.” It’s hard to avoid the impression that she’s there as his minder.

A week later, on Today, DeNiro takes a much stronger stance in favor of the film. When asked, he comes close to explicitly saying he regrets pulling the film, and urges people to see it and another documentary called Trace Amounts (which is about mercury in vaccines and the environment). When Rosenthal changes the subject, he comes back to it, with passion, saying “There’s something there that people aren’t addressing. And for me to get so upset here, today, on the Today Show, with you guys, means there’s something there.. All I wanted was for the movie to be seen. People can make their own judgement. But you must see it.”

Rosenthal, meanwhile, makes a point of answering a question nobody asked her: “It wasn’t our sponsors or donors that were threatening to pull out of the festival. It was our filmmakers.” Later in the interview, DeNiro seems to second this. However, Penny Lane’s open letter, the most publicized filmmaker intervention, makes no such threat. If she didn’t, who did? I want—the world needs—to see the list of courageous filmmakers, who must be proud of their pro-free- but anti-dangerous-speech stance, and who threatened Robert DeNiro with pulling their films from his festival.

If we are even permitted to talk about such things.

By the way, Penny Lane & Co might defend their censoriousness at Tribeca by pointing out that it’s a private festival, free to exercise its editorial judgement, and there is no issue of government censorship in that instance. True enough. I guess it would have been better if the artists, rather than Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had, in a momentous moment, demanded the censoring of Chris Ofili’s dung-painted Virgin Mary from the publicly-financed Brooklyn Museum of Art. In this case, it’s “only” the ethico-political attitude toward “free (dangerous) speech” in the context that’s in question (and to which, precisely, I object).

And I suppose it’s not a First Amendment, only a free-speech issue when the Huffington Post pulls an article that had been published by anti-fracking activist Lance Simmens, which gave a dangerously positive take on Vaxxed. The article was one-fifth about the movie and four-fifths about climate change, fracking, glyphosate/Monanto, PCBs, and the BP oil spill—all discussed in the context of “the corruption of government regulatory agencies [and] the corruption of science and scientific method itself,” and the nation’s failure “to balance out the avarice of the private sector with a regulatory framework in the public sector.” Simmens has published almost 200 articles over 8 years on Arianna’s notoriously indiscriminate hodgepodge of a website, without interference. This one, however, was, I guess, not “free” but “dangerous” speech, and just had to be pulled. Perhaps Arianna was only responding to the petitions of her scores of unpaid columnists.

But it does become a First Amendment issue, when, following on Penny and the Round-Earthers’ victory at Tribeca, the film they targeted is also pulled from the WorldFest Festival in Houston, which bills itself as “the oldest Independent Film & Video Festival in the World.” This time, there’s no tale about the revolt of the filmmakers. This time, the festival’s organizer received “very threatening calls … from high Houston Government officials (the first and only time they have ever called in 49 years) ... Heavy handed censorship, to say the least… they both threatened severe action against the festival if we showed it, so it is out. Their actions would have cost us more than $100,000 in grants….There are some very powerful forces against this project.” As the local news reported it: “Ffor the first time in nearly half a century an elected government leader [Mayor Sylvester Turner] has intervened to prevent a scheduled film from being screened.” Truly a momentous and significant moment in American film history.

University of Houston Law Professor Peter Linzer says: “The Mayor has no business censoring films at a film festival,” and, as the local news paraphrases him: “unlike private individuals, who have the prerogative to pick and choose what speech they present, the law holds government officials to a much higher standard when it comes to censorship.” Linzer, who served as a litigant for the ACLU on a flag-burning case, also makes the point that: "Speech is not benign. People can get hurt. People can get injured by speech, but it's the best thing we've got."

But what does Penny say?

Ubiquitous private and public censorship, and nary a word of objection from the liberal cultural elite. It takes very powerful force indeed to demand this kind of instant, absolute compliance from Tribeca to Houston. And it’s not the union of safe-speech artists—not Penny’s crew, but Jane’s—which wields it.

Are liberals and lefties really comfortable ignoring, accepting, or even applauding what’s going on here? Do they really want to embrace the discourse of "There is no debate!" on this subject? Can the most culturally influential of them, so enthusiastically, with such militant, “scientific” self-righteousness, discipline their friends and colleagues with: "Shut up! I will not permit any discussion of the subject. It is literally beyond question by rational minds.”? Can they seriously issue a mandate that we all must reject—and, indeed, actively shut down—any critical discussion, any cultural expression, of the potential risks of any medication called a vaccine, as if it were equivalent to discussing whether the earth is flat? Can they also mandate that we regard parents, doctors  and scientists who do raise doubts about any of the scores of concoctions of pathogens and adjuvants injected into the bloodstreams of their children as some combination of stupid, anti-scientific, and—by some bizarre leap of illogic—reactionary?

Frankly, I think such an attitude is ridiculous—scientifically, ethically, and politically ridiculous.

Somehow liberal-minded folks, who are so sensitive to corporate (including pharmaceutical company) greed and corporate-government collusion, are completely buying into the idea that those concerns should never be raised when talking about one particular corporate pharmaceutical product.

Somehow, Merck, the drug company that recently brought us a drug (Vioxx) that caused about 30,000 heart attacks, is to be trusted without question regarding any drug it produces that is called a vaccine. Somehow, the FDA that approved that drug, and the CDC that managed the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment are now to be trusted without question regarding any drug they call a vaccine. Because, you know, the pharmaceutical industry and its once-upon-a-time captured regulators maybe used to do nasty things, way back in the Vioxx days, but they don’t do them anymore. At least when it comes to vaccines. Like the FBI, since J. Edgar Hoover died, doesn’t spy on innocent Americans anymore.

That’s why it’s really OK—literally beyond question of rational minds—that vaccines are not subject to the same safety testing as other pharmaceuticals; it is OK that there is no testing of the synergistic contraindications of administering multiple vaccines at the same time; It is OK that, pace Hillary, it is vaccines, not guns, that are the only product in America whose manufacturers are fully exempted by law from responsibility for the harmful effects of their products, no matter how defective their design. And it means nothing—not to be discussed—that the lead author of the CDC paper used to disprove any autism-MMR link now says, with documentary evidence, that the report was essentially fraudulent: "Oh my God, I did not believe that we did what we did, but we did. It’s all there… This is the lowest point in my career, that I went along with that paper." Move along. Nothing to see here.

Really, there is nothing scientific, let alone leftist, about such an attitude. Rarely have we seen such an intense campaign in such a brief time over such a specific policy that has so effectively coaxed and browbeat social subjects, with liberals eagerly policing the ideology, to live their compliance as the proof of their rationality.

Regarding the specific issue of CDC’s treatment of the MMR-autism link that’s the subject of the movie, there are a few suggestions that I think would be helpful. First of all, Dr. Thompson, who still works for the CDC and is represented by whistleblower attorneys, has been asking for two years to testify before Congress. For some reason, somebody has avoided this. He should be allowed to do testify and present his evidence under public scrutiny, as should those he has charged with manipulating and destroying evidence. Those would include Dr. Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC, to whom Thompson wrote a letter in 2004, informing her of "problematic" findings regarding an MMR-autism link. Dr. Gerberding left the CDC in 2009 to become the president of the $5-billion-a-year Vaccine Division of Merck, which makes the largest number of CDC-recommend/mandated vaccines, including MMR. Dr. Gerberding recently sold about half of her Merck stock for $2.3 million, so she should be able to take the time off to testify.

Maybe Dr. Thompson is a liar, peddling false, self-incriminatory information to satisfy some warped sense of self-hatred. Maybe Dr. Gerberding is a stalwart and principled protector of the public good, whose millions in corporate campaign contributions career emoluments betray no conflict of interest. Let’s find out.

We might also consider producing and administering the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines separately. After all, a lot of suspicion about the vaccine, reflected in the disputed data, has to do with the risks of giving a combination of pathogens all at once to a very young child. Why not just eliminate that doubt? Especially since there is no claimed scientific or medical reason not to. The three vaccines are, in fact, manufactured separately and mixed later, for reasons of cost-saving, not science. In fact, Japan, that nest of scientifically-illiterate flat-earthers, has banned the trivalent MMR vaccine since 1993, after a record number of children developed nasty reactions like non-viral meningitis, including blindness, and loss of control of limbs. Why not give parents and doctors the choice of using single vaccines?

I think it would also be sensible to require the same safety testing for the vaccines we pump into our children’s bloodstreams as we do for any other pharmaceutical drug. This is a complicated issue. There is testing of vaccines, but it is not exactly the same as for other drugs. Most testing is done by the drug manufacturers. Testing for efficacy is mainly testing for “immunogenicity”—the ability of the drug to stimulate antibody production. But an antibody is not the whole story of immunity. There are no routine long-term before-and-after tests for adverse effects; most are limited to a few days or weeks. There is no routine double-blind placebo testing, except using a previous vaccine as a placebo. There is no testing for the possible synergistically adverse effects of administering a mixture of multiple pathogens and adjuvants all at once. These differences in testing are acknowledged, and are defended on the grounds that vaccines are a public health necessity. Current legislation is actually seeking to loosen testing requirements. I think the safety testing of vaccines should be strengthened, and should be at least as strict as that of any other drug.

I certainly think the regime of liability-free profit mongering instituted by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (NCVIA) is outrageous and should be changed. It gives vaccine manufacturers absolute immunity from lawsuits resulting from any damage caused by their products. The government absorbs all the liability, via the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), funded by a $0.75 excise tax on all vaccines. It forces injured parties to take their grievances to a special master in what’s known as vaccine court. This is not really a court, but a closed (no public or reporters) administrative review that does not require the pharmaceutical companies to show up, lacks a normal discovery process that might reveal incriminating documents, and is notoriously slow to take up cases and pay complainants’ lawyers. All the costs and all compensation are paid by the public, not the vaccine manufacturers.

So, one of the most profitable industries in the world—an industry that spends tens of millions in campaign contributions ($51 million in 2012 and $32 million in 2014), and hundreds of millions in lobbying ($273 million from 1998 to 2009), and whose CEOs take home hundreds of millions of dollars a year—has been handed, by law, the opportunity to make any number of profitable products, which the government will virtually force people to take, with no risk whatsoever of paying damages for the harm they may cause. And liberals and lefties and filmmakers have nothing to say about this except to tell anyone who questions it to shut up. Because when it’s vaccines they’re selling, Big Greedy Pharma becomes Humanity’s Selfless Servant.

Defenders of the system will say this is all necessary for the public health. The drug companies wouldn’t make vaccines otherwise. Let’s pretend not to notice that this could be said of any product that carries a risk of harm; and that the need for such radical impunity for this product implies that it is a product that carries much more risk of harm than any other—a product that is, as the Supreme Court has said, “unavoidably unsafe.” Let’s instead suggest an alternative leftist response: If vaccines are so important, such a public health necessity, and the drug companies won’t make them without having us limit their risk to zero, then we should damn well limit their profits, too. How about a million dollars a year per vaccine? Why not zero, the same as their liability? Reimburse them for costs, for their important contributions to public health. And if they don’t like that, why doesn’t the government take up the responsibility of making and distributing this public health necessity? It seems to me those are things leftists should be saying about this enterprise, rather than: “Shut up, stupid.”

And what is the likelihood, if we did any of that, if we took the unlimited profit out of it, that we would have nearly 300 vaccines in the pipeline, every one of which, if history is a guide, will be hyped as absolutely, no discussion permitted, necessary for the health of our children (and adults!) and put on the mandatory vaccination schedule?

Now, you can agree or disagree with any of those suggestions, and, really, I am open to arguments that might change my mind about them. But I vehemently deny that anything about them is anti-vaccination, anti-scientific, or reactionary. Rather, I charge those who insist that we must not discuss these issues—indeed, must not allow them to be discussed—with taking a position that is patently, and dangerously, anti-scientific and authoritarian. That is the path to the corruption of the scientific method itself.

As it happens, these four points—let Thompson testify; make separate M, M, and R vaccines available for parents to choose; require the same testing for vaccines as for other pharmaceuticals; and abolish the liability dispensation given to Big Pharma by the NCVIA—are the entire point of Vaxxed. They are listed on the final screen as the desired take-away. The film supports them with the strong prima facie evidence of Dr. Thompson’s revelations. Again, there’s nothing remotely anti-science or anti-vaccination about it.

My main beef here is with the censorship of Vaxxed. Whether these points, and Thompson’s evidence, should be accepted or rejected is a fair subject of discussion. The impediment to such a discussion is never the evidence and data (of which there is too much) or the logic and arguments (which are kind of elementary), it is always the ideologically-driven—in this case, self-righteous—refusal to see them. In this case, too, what must be refused is some kind of command that you must not see them.

I urge those who are not fixed in that refusal, or intimidated by that command, and are disturbed by the horrific, unprecedented epidemic of autism in American children, and who want to know if there really was data showing a 300% increased risk among African-American boys, to see Vaxxed (and Trace Amounts, which explains why autism affects boys more than girls). Autism rates among American children have increased steadily from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 68 (or 1 in 45) in thirty years. We should not be forbidden reasonable inquiry into what could make that happen, in every region of the country, at a rate of 6-15 percent a year. An MIT Researcher in the film plots that, at today’s rate of increase, by 2032, 50% of children, and 80% of boys will be on the autism spectrum. Find that incredible? Pick your slightly less horrific projection.

Nobody, including the CDC, claims to have an answer to this, and nobody can claim the right to shut down debate about it. We should certainly not be satisfied with the insulting suggestion that it’s not happening, that it’s a semantic problem: there’s no increase in autism, we diagnose more things now—with the implication that scientifically-illiterate parents, before they started reading stupid stuff on the internet, just didn’t notice their children suddenly—overnight!—becoming non-verbal and repetitively banging their heads against the wall.

Going for the liberal-guilt jugular, Penny Lane charges that “very possibly people will die as a result” of anyone showing this move. Well, if you’ve known anyone who’s had a child—not possibly, but actually—regress to an autistic state within hours of an MMR shot, if you see this happen in before and after video, as you can in Vaxxed and Trace Amounts, and you see the heart-wrenching, lifelong, ordeal this puts families through—tens of thousands of families a year—then you, and every one of those parents, and every one of their doctors, has the right to see and examine all the evidence and ask all the questions s/he damn well wants about how this happens, and about what and who may be responsible for that.  And nobody, not even Penny Lane, has the scientific, political, or moral authority to shut that inquiry down.

Notes

1 H. Bruce Franklin, “The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire,”

College English Vol. 31, No. 6 (Mar., 1970), pp. 548-557.

2 Quotes from: Timeline of Events in the #CDCwhistleblower Scandal, The Thompson Transcripts: Shocking Revelations by the CDC Whistleblower - The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, and the documentary film Trace Amounts.

3 Before Vaxxed came out, I was in the process of writing a long post on vaccinations, with the adamant intention of never mentioning Andrew Wakefield. The Wakefield story revolves around that 1998 Lancet article, which (you might be surprised to know) did not say that the MMR vaccine caused autism, but suggested the matter be studied further. The Lancet later retracted the paper after it was attacked by journalist Brian Deer. The whole affair is much more complicated than the standard media narrative has it, and it would take a long exegesis to do it justice, which I have no interest in doing. The most relevant piece in this context is Vaxxed producer Del Bigtree’s statement on Wakefield. Google will get you everything else.

[thepolemicist]

Mad Cow Disease Blights Human Rights Festival

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Je Suis Elsie Goldie

The Wanted 18 is a funny and serious documentary by Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan and Palestinian multimedia artist Amer Shomali. It’s showing today at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York.

The film is about an episode of creative, constructive, and non-violent resistance in Beit Sahour, a Christian town near Bethlehem during the First Intifada.1 In 1988, activists in the occupied town wanted to boycott Israeli milk, and instead produce it on their own. They went to a “peacenik farmer” on a nearby kibbutz, and bought 18 cows, one of which was named Goldie. Then they sent a local student to the United States to learn the arcane techniques of dairy farming, and began to produce their own milk.

Which caused the Israeli occupation authorities to, yes, Have a cow.

Why? Because, for Israel, it is anathema for Palestinians to create any –  even the most elementary – institutions that would support their self-sufficiency and independence, and undermine their subjugation to Israeli authority. Think that’s an exaggeration. Here’s what the Israeli military governor said:

We had a strict directive on dealing with those who formed the neighborhood committees with all the necessary force, and all legal means at our disposal in order to control them so as to prevent the possibility of their setting up an administrative apparatus which was ultimately designed to replace our own.

And the cow project had indeed created a sense of accomplishment and energized the Beit Sahour community.  As Jalal Qumsieh, who bought the cows, said: “The moment I saw the cows at the farm, I felt as if we had started to realize our dream of freedom and independence.” The colonial authorities can’t have that. Qumsieh recalls, “word-for-word,” the Israeli military response: “These cows are dangerous for the security of the State of Israel.”

Cut to today, where the Palestinian filmmaker, Amer Shomali, who had been to many festivals throughout the world, is prevented by Israel from getting a visa to attend the premier of his film, because he, like the cows, is a “national security threat."2  Gotta keep him penned in.

There are just so many security threats that must be denied to Palestinians, like 4G phone service and digging a well:

And it’s crazy, but 'til today, all of those insane things happening in Palestine under the label of security, security threat—for example, …we’re not allowed to have 3G network on our mobiles. The Israelis have 4G; we are not allowed to have 3G. … because they said having frequency for the Palestinians is security threat. So everything can be a security threat, like digging a well to water natural reserve in the Palestinian cities is security threat. Everything can be labeled as a security threat...

So Amer took a more circuitous route, going to Amman to get a visa from the American Embassy there. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get one there, either, because their “visa machine was broken” or something. Though Amer suspects “there’s a kind of coordination” between Israeli military and American diplomatic authorities regarding visas, he believes the Americans have the best intentions, and will give him a visa in time to get to Los Angeles for the next screening on June 19th. When asked what the “technical difficulties” in the Amman embassy were, he said: “I have no idea. Something with the system, system collapse. I don’t know. I have no idea. But they were smiling when they said that, so I have—I believe they have good intention.”

Amer does not think this “system collapse” is a cowardly and despicable ruse by the Americans to hide their connivance with Israel in preventing a real Palestinian from accompanying and amplifying the real story of creative resistance his film tells to American audiences.

Amer is a more trusting soul than I. We’ll see.

La Vache Qui Fait Rire

As Julia Bacha, Brazilian filmmaker and impact producer of The Wanted 18, says:

We really want communities, particularly here in the United States, to start thinking about what are the stories that we are hearing from the region and what are the stories about resistance that arrive to us. I think historically we have been told that Palestinians only used violence to achieve their aims, when in fact there’s a very long history of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, which this film is one example of. And for Amer to be able to tell this story with some humor, we hope we’ll be able to attract more people to join.

That, the Israeli authorities and their American accomplices know, is a real threat to their ongoing enterprise of milking sympathy for Israel by demonizing and erasing Palestinians.

Did I mention it’s the Human Rights Watch Film Festival he was prevented from attending?

Cowabunga.

________________ Sources and Notes

The Wanted 18: Israel Blocks Palestinian Filmmaker from Making NYC Film Premiere About Intifada Cows | Democracy Now!

The 18 Palestinian Cows That Threatened Israel’s Security | The Nation

1 I hate to emphasize that word, but I think it’s unfortunately the case that many Americans need to be reminded that all Palestinians are not Muslims, and Muslims are not the only victims of, and fighters against, Israeli colonialsm.

2 He was actually refused permission to travel from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where he would get a visa from the American Consulate. Travelling from the West Bank is very complicated, and very strictly controlled by Israel.

Here's how Amer tells it: 

Basically, I applied for an American visa at the American Consulate in Jerusalem. And in order to get to Jerusalem, you need to cross a main checkpoint blocking the road between Ramallah, where I live, and Jerusalem, where the American Consulate is. And to get that permit, you need to apply for the Israeli army. And my permit was rejected for security reasons. And it’s not a special case, like there’s tens of thousands of Palestinians, young Palestinians, who are labeled as a security threat to the state of Israel. And it’s quite frustrating. Jerusalem is just 25 minutes away from here. From this studio, it’s like 10 minutes. But you still can’t reach there. The American Embassy in Jerusalem does not offer any facilities for Palestinians who can’t get there. And they even ask you, even if you thought of sneaking to Jerusalem illegally, without a permit, to attend your interview, they will ask you, "Where is the Israeli permit?" as if there’s a kind of coordination. Anyway, I missed my appointment—

[thepolemicist]

The SYRIZA Moment: A Skeptical Argument

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Mehran Khalili/http://www.redpepper.org.uk

The victory of Syriza in Greece is an important moment.1 Indeed, I think it is going to be a historic turning point for Europe and the world, for better or for worse. Syriza defines itself explicitly as “as a party of the democratic and radical Left,” and radical it is. It’s comprised of “many different ideological currents and left cultures,” “has its roots in popular struggles for Greek independence, democracy and labour and anti-fascist movements,” and includes serious and influential socialist, marxist, and generally anti-capitalist currents.2 As Catarina Príncipe remarks: “The success of Syriza is the success of the Left that refused compromises with liberalism.”3 Thus the rise of Syriza corresponds to the collapse of Pasok [acronym for Panhellenic Socialist Movement], the Greek “Socialist”--i.e., liberal capitalist—party, which went from the largest party in Greece to 13% of the vote (2.6% among 18-24 year olds). It’s a sudden and dramatic shift of working-class voters to the left. To put this in American terms, imagine the Green Party winning the next election, with the Democrats reduced to 20% of the vote.

Everyone understands, then, that Syriza’s victory represents the Greek people’s rejection of the devastating austerity program that has been imposed on Greece and Europe by all the major capitalist-to-the-core political parties, no matter what name they go by.

In a wide-ranging interview with Jacobin (which I recommend to everyone), Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of Syriza’s Central Committee and its Left Platform, emphasizes Syriza’s radicalism thusly:

[W]hat Syriza is putting forward has very little to do with any agenda of any European social democratic party today. It is an agenda of really breaking with neoliberalism and austerity. Syriza appears as bringing a type of political culture that is linked to a social, political, and even ideological radicalism still very much inscribed in the DNA of the party….

Syriza is an anticapitalist coalition that addresses the question of power by emphasizing the dialectic of electoral alliances and success at the ballot box with struggle and mobilizations from below. That is, Syriza and [its component] Synaspismos see themselves as class-struggle parties, as formations that represent specific class interests.4

So there we have Kouvelakis’s portrait of the radical Syriza as a new type of political movement that will use a synergistic dialectic of electoral victories and popular mobilizations to break with neoliberalism and austerity.

Syriza’s 40-point program from 2012 reflects this radicalism, with demands that include: nationalization of the banks, audit of the public debt and renegotiation of interest, suspension of debt payments, restoration of the minimum wage to pre-austerity levels, a 75% income tax on incomes over €500,000, a tax on financial transactions, re-nationalization of privatized public services and utilities, a 30% mortgage subvention for poor families, demilitarization of anti-insurrectional troops and prohibition of police firearms or masks during demonstrations, ending military cooperation with Israel, cutting the defense budget, and the closure of all foreign bases in Greece and withdrawal from NATO.5

This is the Syriza everyone on the left is hoping for, and, given the depth of the crisis and the breadth of popular support, the potential for it is there.

We don’t need a guarantee of success. There is no such thing. We don’t need the fulfillment of all demands at once. We all know that the anti-capitalist left has not yet won hegemony. But we do need to see a definitive break from the capitalist TINA (There Is No Alternative) consensus, and determined moves toward building a new social order. We need to see a political movement that will embrace the possibilities inherent in a generalized crisis of capitalism that is pissing everybody off, and that opens new opportunities for real, systemic change.

If Syriza realizes its potential, if it fights the battle using the new strength it has won, with determination and conviction, it will energize populist left forces elsewhere in Europe, starting in Spain, where Podemus has already been energized by Syriza’s victory. As Kouvelakis put it, a fighting Syriza “will provoke an enormous wave of support by very large sectors of public opinion in Europe, and it will energize to an extent that we cannot imagine the radical left in countries where you have the potential for it to intervene strongly.” It’s easy to imagine the momentum moving quickly to Italy, and possibly soon thereafter to France.  A fighting Syriza, a Syriza that inspires the working people across Europe to reject the capitalist management of their lives, can change the balance of class forces in Europe radically and quickly, and make it possible to build the alternative that is not supposed to be possible.

It is for better or worse, this decisive turning point.  It’s an historical point that will change European politics for a long time, and from which the whole of Europe will move either strongly left or strongly right. Per Frederick Douglass: “It must be a struggle.”

As Principe says, the generalized crisis “has heightened the tension between left- and right-wing ideas: the rise of the Left has been accompanied by the rise of fascism.”  And, as Kouvelakis remarks, speaking of Greece, but describing the whole of Europe: “If Syriza fails then the prospects for the country will be very reactionary and authoritarian,” and “people are aware, over a much broader spectrum of forces now, that this is the only real possibility, and that, if we are defeated, then this will be a defeat for a whole forthcoming historical period.” Syriza’s election victory has created a “Syriza moment” that now is the game for radical left populism, and if the Greek and European left do not build and extend on that, decisively and militantly, toward a new socialist alternative, radical right populism will move into the vacuum. The left will have been setback, again, “for a whole forthcoming historical period.”

In their 40-point program, Syriza quipped that “The exit from the crisis is on the left.” But there is what looks like an exit on the right also--Marine Le Pen is turning the knob--and the battered working classes might well take it if the door on the left is never opened.

That is why the very worst defeat here would not be to fight and “lose” (whatever they could mean), but not to fight at all. If Syriza ends up accepting some kind of slightly modified neo-liberal austerity program, the result will signal to people throughout Europe that the purportedly new radical left still believes There Is No Alternative to the bankster capitalist plutocracy that is ravaging their lives. If, despite its pretensions, Syriza in power becomes another version “of any European social democratic party,” it will demoralize whatever real left remains, and leave the field open for a powerful tide of right-wing, neo-fascist populism that will sweep across Europe.

To be fair, we have to recognize that there is no good choice for Syriza or for Greece. Defying the Troika (the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank), rejecting its financial diktats, means bringing the full wrath of international capital down upon Greece. Proclaiming that you will refuse to pay unpayable debts, take more “extend and pretend”” loans, or enforce austerity and privatization policies, means nothing if it is not backed by a willingness to defiantly exit, or accept being rudely ejected from, the Eurozone, if that’s what it takes. Such an outcome--the dreaded “Grexit”--will bring enormous pain to the Greek people. It may well, in the short run, be at least as bad as the austerity policies. So, sure, we have to give the Syriza leadership some room to obfuscate, dissemble, defer, and ambiguify with their various powerful interlocutors.

But time for that is running out very quickly. Bills are due, and the capitalist powers-that-be are cracking the whip.  In response, Syriza’s immediate tactic is to get a six-month “bridge loan” unencumbered by austerity conditions, allowing time for further negotiations. Sounds to the Troika (and to me) like: “Give us another six months to try and talk you out of the austerity agenda once and for all.” I guess Syriza’s theory is that kicking the can down the road for that short a time doesn’t count as “extend and pretend.”

But the Troika isn’t buying.

As Yves Smith points out, in a Naked Capitalism post titled “Eurogroup Ministers to Syriza: Drop Dead,” German Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says that, if Greece doesn’t want the final tranche of its bailout on the ECB’s austerity terms, “it’s over,” and ECB Governor Jens Weidmann has rejected Greek efforts to get some kind of six-month bridge financing as “a non-starter.”6

Angela Merkel and the German and French bankers—the real Eurozone authorities—seem to “prefer to take the hit from default rather than concede Greek demands for debt relief and fiscal spending without any Troika-type conditions.” As Michael Roberts notes: They “do not want to show that their fiscal probity can be breached by a ‘profligate’ Greece led by a ‘rabidly leftist’ government. And they do not want the likes of Portugal, Spain or Italy to get similar ideas …. So they may opt for Grexit if the Greeks do not back down.”

Of course, the Eurozone powers face their own considerable risk:

On the other hand, Grexit could lead to the unravelling of the whole Euro project if it confirms to an increasingly sceptical electorate that the Euro project is not a union of equals but really a Franco-German imperialist project (which it broadly is, of course). The precedent would be set that member states could leave or be thrown out and Euroscepticism would get renewed strength.7

The prospect of the dissolution of the Eurozone, and possibly the EU, also unnerves the uber-imperialist power on a number of levels. As one of Yves Smith’s correspondents notes:

A Greek implosion would derail U.S. recovery, send the USD to the sky … and make Putin the happiest man on the planet. Putin’s plans and ambitions, long term, would get an incredible boost if/when the EU starts to unravel.

And, sure enough, as the New York Times reports, Syriza has started toying with this card:

To keep their financial options open, Greek officials have been courting Russia and China. The overtures appear intended to put pressure on European creditors to make the kinds of concessions the Greeks have been demanding to avoid letting Moscow or Beijing drive a wedge between Athens and the rest of the European Union.8

Thus, we now see various proposals, including from Bernie Sanders, for the US Federal Reserve to step in, and provide relief for Greece with some kind of end-run around the ECB, in a way that might embarrass Merkel & Co’s presumed authority over the Eurozone.

But, hey, there is a pecking order to imperialist authority. Undermining the Euro or the ECB is one thing, but undermining the imperialist order itself…well, turns out, it’s the same thing. It’s Obama, not Merkel, who’s the big dog, and who has overall responsibility for the hegemony of Euro-American capitalism and US/NATO imperialism. This is something to keep in mind when we see the current frantic negotiations between Merkel and Obama (and Merkel and Holland and Putin) over Ukraine. You know, the Ukraine where, last Spring, Jack Rasmus (and I) pointed out: “an IMF bailout would almost certainly replicate the still continuing Austerity crisis in Greece.”9 A circle jer, er, game.

The economics are, as always, the politics as well. The problems of Syriza, Greece, the Euro, Ukraine, bailouts, austerity, and civil war are all the same capitalist crisis--today’s version of the generalized crisis that the capitalist system recurrently and inevitably engenders, throwing the world into chaos and war. Thus, what happens in Greece is a matter of geo-strategic significance for the masters, and the minions, of that system.

Thus, too, whatever Syriza, Merkel, or Obama do in Greece will not stop the ongoing crisis. As Yves Smith points out: “This pitched battle [in Greece] is a symptom that the failure to address the fundamental contradictions of the Eurozone cannot be delayed much longer. Even if Syriza capitulates in the next few days, the even bigger threat of Marine Le Pen looms.” (We won’t even get into the threats that are looming in Ukraine.)

But if Syriza cannot stop, it can change the course of how this crisis develops. After all the proclamations, promises, and posturing, Syriza is going to have to be, as the man said, as radical as reality. Or not. End of day—which means in a week or two?—Syriza will have to choose confrontation or capitulation. It will either subordinate the demands of the Greek people to the primacy of the Euro and the institutions of European capitalism, or take another, radical and, in the short-term at least, painful path. And it will be quite clear which it has chosen. Syriza will either upend the established capitalist European order, or it will submit to it—and watch some other force do the upending.

Cassandra

We do not know how this is going to turn out. Everybody’s platforms and promises are going to give way to real decisions based on a shifting balance of force. Because of the potential it represents, I think Syriza deserved electoral support. I think it can, and I hope it will, move quickly and decisively in the direction of building a political and social alternative for Europe. We will see.

I have to say, however, that I am not optimistic.

Here are some reasons why:

Syriza is not the definitively “anticapitalist coalition” that Kouvelakis describes above. It is, as we might expect of a recently and quickly formed electoral coalition, an unstable, conflicted, even contradictory political alliance, a house divided against itself in many ways.

First of all, it is divided on the institutional level, with the leadership prone to act in ways that ignore or undercut the expressed will of the base--which means undercutting the whole, very important, notion of “the dialectic of electoral alliances … with struggle and mobilizations from below.” Kouvelakis himself tells us this, in the course of the full Jacobin interview (really worth reading), and emphasizes its “serious risk.” He recounts, for example, the “Platform of the Fifty-Three,” signed by fifty-three central committee members and MPs representing “the left of the majority,” which

strongly criticized [party leader Alex] Tsipras’s attempts to attract establishment politicians, and for leading a campaign that didn’t give a big enough role to social mobilizations and movements, for developing a campaign style that was very centered on him as a person and structured around PR techniques and tricks, and also for softening some crucial edges of the program — more specifically on issues such as the debt, the nationalization of the banks, and so on.…

According to Kouvelakis, this tendency plays out a number of ways in the party:

Unfortunately, the majority of the leadership has autonomized itself yet further from the party and disregarded the party decisions. I’m not here talking about some kind of simple divide between the base and the leadership — I mean autonomous from the party as a whole. And that is, of course, a very serious risk for the future.

[I]t is more and more the case that crucial decisions are made in a very opaque way,…

[The] political …[of] Tsipras or the majority of the leadership during this last period tended to give a much more limited role to social movements and mobilizations.

Tsipras and the party leadership, it seems, have cultivated the art of speaking with forked tongue:

[T]he discourse of the party became a kind of double- or triple-level discourse. Tsipras or the leadership of the party have developed many levels of discourse.

The two main economists of the party — and they are the real representatives of the most rightist tendencies within Syriza, Giannis Dragasakis and George Stathakis, … — developed their own distinctive approaches to the economic issues, which were systematically different from the decisions of party congresses or the official position of the party.,,,

[They] made statements that a Syriza government would never move unilaterally on the position of the debt, but the decision of the party congress explicitly says that all weapons are on the table and that nothing can be ruled out…

The two of them have been unclear at times, depending on the interlocutor or the audience they had in front of them, even about the issue of canceling the memorandums or whether Syriza was demanding a write-off of all or just part of the debt…

So … when [Tsipras] went to New York and spoke at the Brookings Institute, he made repeated references to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt. When he went to Austin, TX he said that Syriza would never abandon the euro, whereas the position of the party — and also what he himself also said later — was that we do not want to stay unconditionally in the euro…

All this created the impression that on the very crucial, strategic issues Syriza is not completely clear, and that it has different levels of discourse, thus provoking skepticism about the real intentions of Syriza and how determined it is to resist the pressure which every sensible person is aware a Syriza government will have to face.

Uh-oh. Not sounding good.

Being cagey and evasive in Troika negotiations, as long as you can, is one thing, but within its organization and with its popular base, Syriza cannot have anything but clear, transparent lines of authority and debate. Its political positions have to flow upward, from constant interaction with its working-class base, which has to help determine—and certainly to know, with complete confidence—who is speaking for them and what they are saying

So I get itchy, I get the feeling that we’ve seen this film before, when I read Kouvelakis description of Alex Tsipras’s leadership tendencies. And I positively break out in hives when I read what’s being said about, and by, Syriza’s star left-wing economist, and Greece’s new Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis.

If Tsirpras is the political face of Syriza, Varoufakis is its intellectual voice. As such, he provides the clearest indication of what Syriza stands for, and where we can expect it to go. Yanis Varoufakis writes the song of Syriza.

Varoufakis is an Australian-born, British-trained economist who holds dual Australian-Greek citizenship. He has a long career that included a stint as an advisor to the Pasok government of George Papandreou. He resigned that post in 2006, becoming Pasok’s “staunchest critic” because “Papandreou’s party…. presided over the most virulent neoliberal macroeconomic policies.” In Veroufakis’s own words, his academic and political career “does not have a whiff of Marxism in it,”” but he did “come out” in 2013 as an “erratic marxist,” attesting that “Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day.”10

During the Greek election, this “confession” made him the bête noire of the Right, and even of Pasok, who tried to use his association with the M word to scaremonger Greek voters and the Western political and media elite about Syriza. Clearly, that didn’t faze Greek voters. As for the Western political and media elite, now that Varoufadis is the Finance Minister and Greece’s official interlocutor in crucial European negotiations—well, the reaction is, I do not think I exaggerate, astounding.

Really. Take a look at: “Greece's Varoufakis becomes unlikely heartthrob in Germany.” Reuters reports on how the German magazine Der Stern “gushes: about how: “He rattles around Athens on a big, black motorcycle, never tucks his shirts in and radiates a sort of classical masculinity that you only usually see in Greek statues.” German public TV channel ZDF compares him to “Hollywood tough guy Bruce Willis…Visually, he's someone you could imagine starring in a film like ‘Die Hard 6.’” Even the host of a ZDF parody show, in the course of “ridicul[ing] his ‘lovestruck’ colleague …admitted: ‘He is an incredibly attractive man.’” Fashion magazine Stylebook proclaims: “His cool style is something you can't miss,” in a story entitled “poor but sexy.” The conservative German newspaper Die Welt raves that “A star is born,” as “the economics professor is shaking up the suits in Europe with a casual appearance and cool stare.” Die Welt describes how “his balding head, cool style and muscular Yamaha motorcycle” are, as the headline puts it, “What makes Yanis Varoufakis a sex icon.” He’s even been enshrined as the hero of a video game (Syrizaman vs. Dr. Troika). To make sure everyone understands, he English-language magazine, The Week, proclaims flatly: “Yanis Varoufakis is the most interesting man in the world.”

Astounding.

The first thing to say here, as an erstwhile member of the tribe, is: Kudos to Yanis for achieving a status aspired to by every Marxist professor: sex icon.

Second thing is: As much fun as busting his chops about this is, we cannot blame Varoufakis for the image our media culture makes of him (until and unless he signs the contract for the reality show with Kim and Kanye).

Third thing, getting more serious, is: Wow! Take a moment to marvel at the absorptive power of our contemporary ideological apparatus, at the omnivorously voracious maw of a celebrity culture that does not shrink from trying to ingest and digest any figure who comes along, no matter how seemingly oppositional—as long as s/he has, or can be made to project, the right looks, style, memetic cues, i.e., production values. All this is what we used to call co-optation or what Marcuse called “repressive tolerance,” on viralizing electronic steroids. Just Wow.11

Fourth thing to say is that this co-optative mediazation drive is happening because Vaouflakis does got talent. He is a very smart, world-class economist and social thinker with a seriously left-marxist intellectual formation and a mastery of mainstream economics. This is a species of public intellectual who is normally kept way out of the media frame. As the Finance Minister of a key European country, however, he cannot be simply rejected or ignored. He foresaw the potential for co-option in that posture: “I know that I run the risk of… indulging a feeling of having become ‘agreeable’ to the circles of ‘polite society.’” They’ve got to make something “agreeable” of him that distracts from the real intellectual and political challenges he might pose. So he anticipated the flattery, and we’ll see how he reacts to that.

More important than his fate as a celebrity, however, is the intellectual-political position he has crafted, and what that, as the cornerstone of the Syriza government it now clearly is, portends for the prospects of radical progressive change in Greece.

www.marxist.com

There’s no question that Varoufakis derives a lot from Marx.12 Still, in his academic career he “largely ignored Marx.” He dedicated himself, rather, to a thorough understanding of mainstream capitalist economics. His radical intellectual strategy us what he calls “immanent criticism,” which “accept[s] the mainstream’s axioms and then expose[s] its internal contradictions.” Actually, he insists that he’s done this not “despite” but because of, Marx’s influence, since, as he correctly points out: “This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British political economics.”

With this grounding, Varoufakis gives a trenchant analysis of the problems Greece and Europe are facing.  He insists correctly that there is no “Greek” crisis; there’s a European crisis. Greece would not have the problems it does if it were not in the Eurozone, and if the Eurozone were not organized around the financial hegemony of Germany. Europe, he says, wants to fix local blame and avoid confronting what is a European-wide systemic crisis like that which, after 1929, “unloosed forces that destroyed” the continent.

Varoufakis is particularly shrewd when speaking to the French. He points out that France itself is suffering from the “vassalization” of France to the Bundesbank, with the French Socialist Party making itself an “accomplice” of what he calls a “post-modern Vichy.” Evoking the looming threat from right-wing populism, he insists that Syriza is “the last chance for François Hollande” to change a situation that will “only profit the National Front.”

He goes further, situating the Eurozone’s problems in the context of the world since the United States destroyed the Bretton Woods regime in 1971. As Varoufakis puts it, the U.S. “reorganized the world capitalist economy around its deficits” and the recycling of dollars to Wall Street. The European economy, centered on Germany, became a sub-zone of this financial process created to make sure the big dog was happy. He even writes a book around a nice metaphor of America as a Minotaur feeding off the surpluses of other countries. Until the day when Theseus (The post-2008 crisis? Syriza?) comes along to slay the beast.

Greece, Varoufakis says, is “not big enough to change the world, but…can force Europe to change.”13

So, cool and smart. Varoufakis certainly has an intellectual formation, and an understanding of the Greek-European crisis, that goes way beyond your normal neo-liberal Finance Minster or Eurocrat.

He also has a perspective on the solution to that crisis that is quite clear and quite limited.  Here it is, in short: “to retain in our sights capitalism’s inherent ugliness while trying to save it, for strategic purposes, from itself.”

And here, slightly elaborated:

[T]he Left must admit that we are just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapsing European capitalism will open up with a functioning socialist system, one that is capable of generating shared prosperity for the masses. Our task should then be twofold: To put forward an analysis of the current state of play that non-Marxist, well meaning Europeans who have been lured by the sirens of neoliberalism, find insightful. And to follow this sound analysis up with proposals for stabilising Europe – for ending the downward spiral that, in the end, reinforces only the bigots and incubates the serpent’s egg. Ironically, those of us who loathe the Eurozone have a moral obligation to save it!14[His exclamation point.]

Crystal clear.

For Varoufakis: “[T]he current indefensible European socio-economic system” is “indefensible …anti-democratic, irreversibly neoliberal, highly irrational, [with] next to no capacity to evolve into a genuinely humanist community within which Europe’s nations can breathe, live and develop.” It is “everything a radical should admonish and struggle against:” And yet, he is “tirelessly striv[ing] in favour of schemas the purpose of which is to save that system.” He would “much rather be promoting a radical agenda whose raison d’être is about replacing European capitalism with a different, more rational, system – rather than merely campaigning to stabilise a European capitalism at odds with my definition of the Good Society,” but he cannot, because his “agenda [is] founded on the assumption that the Left was, and remains, squarely defeated.”

In such a conjuncture, “it is the Left’s historical duty…to save European capitalism from itself and from the inane handlers of the…crisis.” As much as Varoufakis has the mission to persuade the Troika to change their austerity policies, he has another mission, which is “to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest European capitalism’s free-fall in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative.” [His italics.]

He’s an ironic Marxist. How po-mo.

Please note that, according to Varoufakis’s logic here, Syriza’s maximum program, beyond which it cannot, and must not try to, go, is some kind of partial restoration of Old Europe’s social democracy. What good-hearted European banker can’t get behind that? Especially when it means concretely, according to Varoufakis, a program like—I kid you not—Food Stamps!

In the U.S., food stamps (bons d'alimentation) have allowed hundreds of thousands of household to get out of poverty. Why not use the profits of the Eurosystem, the network of central banks in the Eurozone, to finance such food stamps in Europe?15

While we’re at it,  maybe we replace the public healthcare systems the banksters are destroying with EurObamacare.

So Tsipras’s forked tongue reflects Varoufakis’s “contradictory mission,” and all of it reflects not just a cagy discourse for negotiations with the Troika, but a deliberate ambiguity about what the political objectives of the party are, and a simmering contradiction between the “defeat” the leadership of the party has already assumed, and the momentum of the class forces who are not in this to lose yet again, and are not going to be satisfied with food stamps.

On the one hand, Syriza thinks it will persuade the Troika do give up the substance of its austerity agenda once Varoufakis “demonstrates of the internal inconsistency of their own models,” which is for him “the only thing that can destabilise and genuinely challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists.”  He will say, in his words: “I shall not contest your assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logically flow on from them,” and German Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, ECB Governor Jens Weidmann Merkel, IMF Head Christine Lagarde will say: “Wow, I never thought about it like that before. You are right. We’ll do things your way. We’ll get right on the phone with Angela and Barack, and let them know.”

Varoufakis really does seem to think going into the Eurozone negotiations is like entering a colloquium, where collegial rationality rules the day, and “immanent critique” works like a charm. He is certain that he will make an argument that is, in their own economic terms, better than any of the Eurocrats’. And I am sure he will. And I’m sure they won’t give a damn. Because it is not about right, but power. Not about what’s the better policy, even in their own economic terms, but about who controls power and wealth. The point isn’t who has the best argument; the point is who gives the orders. Hey, Yanis: You’re right and we don’t care.

Patrick L. Smith puts it nicely: ”It is not about a logical way out of the euro-crisis, which is perfectly possible. It is about the neoliberal war against alternative thought and the elevation of the market above all other values, including democratic process and ordinary decency. The commanding generals in this case are headquartered in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin.”16 Nobody, not even Syrizaman can “force Europe to change” by force of argument.

In fact, Syriza already has given the Eurocrats a proposal that is “immanently” better than their policy. As Jack Rasmus points out, with a proposal to make loan payments dependent on economic growth, “Varoufakis and Syriza have cleverly turned the Troika’s formula of more austerity in exchange for more Troika loans on its head. Now it’s end austerity if you want any repayments of debt!” There would be some relief in that arrangement, even though it sounds to me like “extend and pretend,” part deux. Let’s see if they’re persuaded.17

If it’s going to be anything more radical than a committee of social democratic beggars, however, Syriza will need a strategy about what to do if negotiations with the Troika fail, a strategy that wide segments of their political base understand, have helped to formulate, and are prepared to defend advance, knowing full well the dangers that it entails. Syriza cannot be the new type of political movement it presents itself as, and cannot win any of its substantial demands from the Eurozone banksters, except on the basis of this kind of energizing, trustworthy, dialectic with mass movements.

Syriza needs an “or else.” If Syriza is not willing to take the Greece out of the euro, they are all bluff. Varouflakis himself has said: "Simple logic dictates that if you cannot even conceive the possibility of leaving a negotiation, then it is preferable never to enter one."

So Varoufakis talks tough one minute, rejecting the EU’s €240bn bailout plan of Monday, February 16th as "absurd" and "unacceptable." But he goes on to say that he is “prepared to agree a deal but under different condition,” and expresses confidence that "Europe…will pull a good agreement or an honourable agreement out of what seems to be an impasse.” And he tells the BBC when asked if Syriza would really write off half of Greece’s debt, as previously proposed: “No, no, no, there is a lot of posturing before every negotiation…there has been a bit of posturing on our side.”18 After all, as Syriza’s  foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, put it: the party is “in the mainstream…not the bad boy,.” (Did I mention that Syriza has hired U.S. investment bank Lazard to advise it on debt negotiations with the troika?)

In his New York Times Op-ed of Monday, Varoufakis, known for his research in game theory, insists that he is not engaging in “bluffs [and] stratagems,” and that “The lines that we have presented as red will not be crossed. Otherwise, they would not be truly red, but merely a bluff.” Those lines are? Modified, as shown in bold and italics in the following sentences: “The ‘extend and pretend’ game…will end. No more loans — not until we have a credible plan for growing the economy in order to repay those loans, … No more “reform” programs that target poor pensioners and family-owned pharmacies while leaving large-scale corruption untouched.” So some form of extended loans (with all the pretend-upayable principal intact?), and some form of “structural reform” (with food stamps for pensioners?) will be OK? Red lines fading to pink? The Syriza government is “not asking our partners for a way out of repaying our unpayable debts,” just for “a few months of financial stability that will allow us to embark upon the task of reforms that the broad Greek population can be persuaded to swallow own and support, so we can bring back growth and … pay our dues.” We do not have “some radical-left agenda,” and our “major influence” is the other “German philosopher”—definitely not Karl Marx, who taught that history is class struggle, but “Immanuel Kant, who taught us” about reason and freedom and “doing what is right.” After all, we’re all “honorable” people, who can “dissolve the creditor-debtor distinction in favor of a pan-European perspective [that] places the common European good above petty politics “19

Is this a powerful statement of principle, or more old-fashioned posturing-cum-wishful thinking post-modern “erratic” Marxism. Maybe I’m being too cynical and snarky, and I will absolutely delight in finding that to be so, but I think this is all bluff, and I do not trust this guy as far as I can throw his motorcycle. We’ll know soon enough.

Empiricus

My skepticism also derives from what Syriza is actually already doing, when it’s not talking tough about radical demands and red lines.

Disarming police during demonstrations? The first day in office, the Interior Ministry announced: “The police will have weapons at protests.” Demilitarization of anti-insurrectional troops, reigning in defense spending, and withdrawal from NATO? In his first statement, the new Defense Minister, Panos Kammenos of the right-wing Independent Greeks Party (ANEL), “pledged to find funds for new armaments programmes, maintain current ones and review new threats to security.” Mortgage subvention, restoration of the minimum wage, restoration of public health serrivces? “There would be no explosion in public spending by the new administration,” Varoufakis “pledged” to the Financial Times.

Don’t dismiss police and defense issues as not-so-relevant to the urgent anti-austerity agenda. First of all, they are quite important for the political situation in Greece. Brining right-wing party like ANEL into the governing coalition is troubling in its own right, and, as one commentator notes: “The implications of a right-wing figure like Kammenos overseeing the military—in a country where, as recently as 1974, a CIA-backed military regime was in power—are ominous.” Maintaining militarized police, in a country where 40-50% of police officers are thought to vote for the fascist Golden Dawn party is also not very comforting.  But defense-related issues are also directly relevant to any anti-austerity agenda. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “Greece…is the largest importer of conventional weapons in Europe — and [i]ts military spending is the highest in the European Union as a percentage of gross domestic product. That spending was one of the factors behind Greece’s stratospheric national debt.” The Defense Ministry has been involved in a multi-billion dollar bribery scandal involving secret payoffs to the former Defense Minister.20

But perhaps the most troubling indication of where Syriza’s money is in relation to its mouth involves the pledge to stop and reverse the privatization of Greece’s national assets. As Patrick L. Smith remarks, praising what Syriza promised:

Among the more rigorous conditions required by the EU and the IMF is the privatization of numerous state-held assets, including airports, rails and the entire port of Piraeus. Naturally (or otherwise), Athens is supposed to divest of the most profitable of these first. Tsipras and Varoufakis refuse. They have already begun dismantling the program.

But Michael Roberts reports, via the WSJ, what Syriza has done:

Greece's new government is backtracking on its plans for Greece's ports, according to The Wall Street Journal. Syriza, which won Greece's election in late January, had promised to stall the Port of Piraeus' privatisation, but it will now go ahead.

Here's The Journal:

Selling the state's 67% stake in the Piraeus Port Authority is one of the biggest divestments of an ambitious privatization plan agreed to by the previous conservative government with the so-called troika of creditors…

[Piraeus is] the de facto home of Greece’s giant shipping industry and is one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean.

"The Piraeus sale is on. It will proceed as planned," a senior finance-ministry official told The Wall Street Journal.21

So, Syriza’s 40-point program? Never mind. There’s a lot of posturing, you know.

No one was expecting socialism in one country, but a lot of people were led to expect some decisive moves in a socialist direction that would energize a movement throughout Europe, and open radical new possibilities. I tend to think that public ownership of key industries, and especially of banks, would need to be part of such a program. So, OK, Syriza didn’t want to go there right now. But couldn’t they at least have stuck with the anti-privatization agenda they did promise?

As Stathis Kouvelakis advises, the “moderate” position within Syriza, the cagy, ambiguous discourse, “is understandable up to a certain point,” but “the problem is that it doesn’t prepare the people in society for what will inevitably come … namely that decisions to implement completely [Syriza’s] program will turn out to be very confrontational, both internally and with the rest of the European Union.” Does it look like Syriza has much stomach for that confrontation?

In the coming days, Syriza will either become the new type of political movement “really breaking with neoliberalism and austerity” that it claims to be, and the world left wishes it to be, or it will become just another European social democratic party.

What’s ahead for Syriza and the Greek populace, what they are in right now, is a social battle, not an economics colloquium. Smart analyses, logical arguments, and shrewd rhetoric in negotiations are necessary and important weapons, but this is a battle that will be won by force, not logic. If the Eurocrats concede on austerity in any significant way, it will be if and only if they fear effective power mobilized in the street, not because they were persuaded by brilliant economic arguments in a conference room.  And “street” means the Athens, Madrid, Rome, Paris, European, street.  Syriza and every other would-be revolutionary party of the left need to adopt the ex-slave’s still indispensable advice: “It must be a struggle,” because the masters of capital “will concede nothing without a demand. They never did and they never will.”

To put it another way, there’s a choice between, on the one hand, a strategy that sees the intellectual skills of your smartest cadres as your primary strength, capable of persuading your interlocutors to give you what you want, if supported by carefully-managed mass mobilizations, and, on the other, a strategy the understands mass mobilizations as the primary source of a power capable of forcing your elite enemies to concede what you demand, if carefully supported by smart and determined leaders. The choice: Negotiators support the people, not vice-versa.

One does not have to succumb to a “great man” theory of history to recognize that leaders are important, that differences in the quality of leadership can change the course of a movement.  (Whatever one thinks of Trotsky vs. Stalin, a lot of important things would have gone very differently.) Leaders gotta lead. They have the responsibility to get out in front, to make important decisions that will affect the course of a struggle. In the relationship between leaders and the popular base of a movement, ideally reciprocally-reinforcing but always imperfect, leaders will, and must, have a strategic perspective that may conflict with the day-to-day perceptions and actions of various popular forces. This is an inevitable tension that will never, anywhere, by any formula, be finally resolved. So let’s give considerable slack to leaders who have been crucial to advancing such an important political movement. Still, it’s a good guiding principle for a left, democratic party: Negotiators support the people, not vice-versa.

Indeed, one thing that undercuts the “great man” theory, highlighting all the other pesky contingencies (cultures, ideologies, etc.) in play, is that history seems to show us that it’s easier for bad leaders to derail a movement than for good leaders to set it right.

SYRIZA: Greek for TINA?

Unfortunately, insofar as Yanis Varoufakis is the voice of Syriza’s leadership, it does not just lack, but refuses on principle, to have a fighting strategy even to try “replacing European capitalism with a different, more rational, system”—because any such attempt is defeated in advance, and will inevitably lead to the victory of the even-more-fascist right.

We know this, according to Varoufakis, because it has happened before: “What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Mrs. Thatcher’s neoliberal trap? Precisely none.”

Let’s do some immanent critique of Varoufakis’s logic.

Of course, Varoufakis could be right in his prediction: a determined fight for a socialist alternative could end up losing to right-wing forces. In any situation of social crisis, however, that will always be the case. This idea that you should not fight for socialism until and unless you know you can win is politically ridiculous. There are no guarantees in politics.

To say—in a crisis-ridden Greece where the people have just made an unprecedented choice for the left, with a movement that is, as so many in his party and the world are saying, energizing left forces throughout Europe, where socialist programs are an urgent practical necessity—to say in such a conjuncture that we should presume such a struggle would inevitably lose to the right is…well, in Varoufakis’s own words, there is “more than a kernel of truth” to the charge that he is “defeatist.”

More certain, I think, is the obverse point, which Stathis Kouvelakis and others on the left make: Not fighting for a radical left alternative will ensure the ascendancy of the radical right.

Varoufakis, and those who accept his argument should acknowledge that they are really giving up altogether on building “a functioning socialist system, …capable of generating shared prosperity for the masses.”  For them, that battle is always-already lost. It’s a perfectly circular argument that goes like this: The working classes will not move toward socialism while living in a relatively prosperous social-democratic capitalist economy; on the other hand, if there’s a real social struggle in a crisis-ridden capitalist economy, they will inevitably be seduced by the radical right. Since you can never know that you will win, there is never a propitious time to fight for socialism, and we are always limited to stabilizing and improving capitalism. It comes down to TINA.

It’s true that Marx is a master of the poignant, dialectical irony of history. It’s also true that the constant repetition of “It’s only because I’m so committed to socialism that I’m telling you we must—we have the ‘moral obligation,’ the ‘historical duty’—to save capitalism!” quickly becomes a poor parody of that masterful irony. I concur with Michael Roberts: more erratic than Marxist.22

If Syriza saves capitalism from itself, the result won’t be to make socialism more possible. It will be to ensure the “indefensible …anti-democratic, irreversibly neoliberal, highly irrational” rule of capital for a very, very long time.

And in a worse form. The idea that you’re going to talk the commanding generals of neo-liberal capitalism back into social democracy is… well, the pipe dream of a nostalgic social democrat. It certainly ignores the history of the last thirty years. Wasn’t neo-liberalism in Europe precisely a war on social democracy? Wasn’t it carried out, as Varoufakis himself says, with the connivance of the social democratic parties, of Pasok in Greece, the Socialist Party in France, etc.?  Once the masters of capital did away with whatever post-capitalism the USSR represented, did they not turn to administering the coup de grâce to European social democracy? Who, of the neo-liberal executioners Syriza will be talking to, is about to let any of it back from the grave they put it in? The only thing that will incline them to that, in fact, is precisely some real threat of left socialism. It’s not: “If you want socialism, fight for capitalism,” but: If you want some kind of revived social democracy, fight militantly for a more radical socialist alternative.

Do you think you’re going to persuade the liberal—i.e., center-right—capitalists by scaring them with the specter of the radical right? They will never fear and reject the right as much as the left, precisely because they figure (perhaps incorrectly!) that the right is pro-capitalist, or at least controllable with money. These are the people who put Nazis into power in Ukraine! (And with what economic rationality!) Would they have considered supporting any insurrection, anywhere, that was half as radical on the left? The only people you’re going to scare with the bugaboo of the right are your educated liberal—i.e., center-left—academic colleagues.

So, regarding Syriza and Messrs. Tsipras and Varoufakis, sure, nothing is inevitable, and I’ll give it as long as it takes, but I am withholding my enthusiasm.

Ah, yes, I remember it well!

We have seen something like this before. Here is a front page from May 10, 1981 in France. the day François Mitterand was elected President, with an absolute majority for his Socialist Party:

“Socialism’s Time Has Finally Come”

http://flipbook.archives-socialistes.fr/index.html?docid=12127&language=fra&userid=0

(Or not.)

Look at that photo! It was not staged. The joy on those faces is real. I remember vividly my French girlfriend at the time showing me this headline, with a glowing smile like that on her face. I withheld my enthusiasm.

Thirty years later, under the pull quote “I remember it like it was yesterday,” Le Monde did a retrospective on that day, which still burns in the memory of a whole generation in France as a moment of great hope. One guy named Olivier recounts how he was the first passenger on a bus that day. When he boarded, the driver asked: “So?” and he responded: “Mitterand!”—at which point the driver pulled out a bottle of champagne and said “Tell me where you’re going and I’ll take you there!” Which he continued to do with every passenger. It was a long, celebratory bus ride.

“Thus began one of the most beautiful nights of my life,” Olivier said, thirty years later. “When I think of all the disappointments that followed, I remember that bus driver’s face, his look of happiness, the symbol of a ‘today, everything is possible’ – which, sadly, only lasted a short moment.”23

We all know what happened. Mitterand became the best bud of Reagan and Thatcher, and turned the Socialist Party of France into one of the midwives of neo-liberalism in Europe.

Today, many people in Greece, Europe, and even the United States, are greeting the victory of Syriza in Europe with, not the same (we all know too much), but a similar sense of hopeful, if not quite joyful, expectation. What will they be thinking thirty years from now?

Messrs. Tsipras and Varoufakis: You have a grave responsibility.

BBC

_______________________________

[1] ZYRIZA is an acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left, and, as such should be all caps, but I find that annoying and will dispense with it.

[2] ΣΥΡΙΖΑ Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς

[3] Catarina Príncipe, First Days, First Decisions | Jacobin

[4] Sebastian Budgen with Stathis Kouvelakis, Greece: Phase One | Jacobin

[5] Greece: SYRIZA’s 40-point program | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

[6] Eurogroup Ministers to Syriza: Drop Dead | naked capitalism

[7] Greece and the Euro face-off | Michael Roberts Blog

[8] Eurozone Finance Ministers Hold Emergency Meeting on Greece Bailout - NYTimes.com

[9] The Ukraine Economic Crisis » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The Polemicist: Good for the Gander:Ukraine's Demise Accelerates

[10] Confessions Of An Erratic Marxist In The Midst Of A Repugnant European Crisis | Yanis Varoufakis

[11] Varoufakis himself does some cultural critique. In his “Confession,” he riffs nicely on The Matrix and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Seeing this mediazation of him, I think of the “15 Million Merits” episode of the fine new series (on Netflix), Black Mirror, which is a haunting take on the power of cultural appropriation in celebrity culture.

[12]I’m not happy with all of his interpretations, but he describes nicely Marx’s key argument that wealth is not “privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation,” as standard capitalist ideology would have it, but “collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights” that depend precisely on that capitalist ideology for their reproduction. [His emphasis.]

He also understands that “Marx was adamant” in insisting that “the problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation and unemployment and even turns capitalists into angst-ridden automata.” We might prefer to say “not just that it is unfair”; there’s no need to counterpose justice and rationality. But Varoufakis is correct in emphasizing Marx’s critique of capitalism’s systemic irrationality, against all those, Left and Right, who mistakenly think that Marxism is an altruism.

[13] «La Grèce peut forcer l’Europe à changer» |  La Tribune. My translations. Varoufakis’s book is: Le Minotaure planétaire - L'ogre américain, la désunion européenne et le chaos mondial, Editions Enquêtes & Perspectives (2014)

[14]Confessions, op.cit.

[15]«La Grèce peut forcer l’Europe à changer», “Aux Etats-Unis, les bons d'alimentation ont permis de sortir de la pauvreté des centaines de milliers de ménages. Pourquoi ne pas utiliser les bénéfices de l'Eurosystème, le réseau des banques centrales de la zone euro, pour financer de tels bons en Europe? »

[16] Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy - Salon.com

[17] Syriza vs. the Troika » CounterPunch

[18] BBC News - Greece bailout: Varoufakis ‘willing’ as talks collapse, Syriza Hands Greek Defence Ministry to Right-wing Nationalist | Global Research, BBC News - Profile: Yanis Varoufakis, Greek bailout foe

[19] Yanis Varoufakis: No Time for Games in Europe - NYTimes.com

[20] Greek debt, austerity and past military contracts | Workers World, Syriza Hands Greek Defence Ministry to Right-wing Nationalist | Global Research.

[21] Greece government port Piraeus privatisation EU commission - Business Insider

[22] Yanis Varoufakis: more erratic than Marxist | Michael Roberts Blog

[23] 10 mai 1981 : "Je m'en souviens comme si c'était hier"

[thepolemicist]

A Joke In November

On the way home from his successful fund-raising meeting, a powerful US Senator, drives his car into a tree and dies. His soul arrives at the Pearly Gates, and is met by St. Peter.

"Welcome to heaven," says St. Peter. "Before you settle in, we have a special protocol for a person of your stature, to make sure that you are given appropriate accommodations.“

"No problem, says the Senator. “Just let me in and we’ll work it out."

"Actually,” St. Pete says, “our process requires that you spend one day in hell and one in heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity."

"Not necessary. No need to waste my time. I've made up my mind. I want to be in heaven," says the Senator.

"I'm sorry, but those are our rules, and there can be no exception," says St. Peter, who escorts the Senator to the elevator and hits the “Down” button. The Senator gets anxious as the elevator wooshes waaaay dooooown.

The elevator stops abruptly, the doors open, and the Senator steps out into the middle of a lush resort. The sun is shining, there’s a beautiful beach, tennis courts, golf courses, yoga studios. At the main lounge, he finds all of his old friend and colleagues who greet him enthusiastically—everyone as healthy and charming as the day he met them. Also present is the devil, who turns out to be a very friendly guy, and who welcomes the Senator warmly. The Senator passes the day with the lot of them, frolicking in the sun and surf, and in the evening he joins his companions in a gourmet dinner, followed by drinks and dancing.

Before he realizes it, the day has passed, and he finds himself in the elevator, going up, up, up. When it stops, the door opens, and St. Peter greets him, saying: "Now it's time to visit heaven." So the Senator passes the next 24 hours with a small group of contented souls, going from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing his favorite Beatles’ songs. He has a good enough time, which passes quickly, and before he realizes it, another day has gone by, and St. Peter returns.

"Well, then, Senator you've now spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Choose your eternity."

The Senator thinks for a minute, then answers: "Well, I never thought I would say this, but, although heaven has been delightful, I think I would rather be in hell."

So St. Peter puts him in the elevator and he goes back down to hell.

Now, when the elevator opens, the Senator is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage, reeking of the foulest odors. He sees all his friends, covered in shredded rags, scrounging in the muck for offal. The devil himself comes over to him, puts his arm around his shoulders, and says: “Welcome to eternity.”

"I don't understand," stammers the Senator. "Yesterday I was here and there was a beautiful beach, and beautiful people, and great food, and fun and dancing. Now there's just a horrid wasteland full of miserable, tortured souls. What happened?"

The devil smiles at him and says: "Yesterday we were campaigning. Today, you voted."

[thepolemicist]

The Irish Widow and the Liberian Fiancé: Ebola, CEO Disease, and the Public Good

Go to source

  Outbreak

The Ebola crisis highlights the absurdity of pretending that a private, for-profit health system can do what a real public healthcare system must.

Remember the deadly-Ebola-like-virus movie where Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo and Morgan Freeman and a whole state-of-the-art medical team, along with a small army (There’s always an army!) swoops in to quarantine the sick, catch the monkey, whip up a vaccine, and save the country?

Keep dreaming. That’s a fantasy. In reality, there is no public healthcare system. There is no serious publicly-funded and publicly-managed infrastructure, institution, or set of resources devoted to healthcare as a public good.

As the Washington Post said: “The hospital that treated Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan had to learn on the fly how to control the deadly virus.” The CDC? It runs a web site and holds press conferences. The medical professionals are all in private hospitals, now mostly folded into large private healthcare conglomerates, that do whatever the MBAs who manage them dictate—which is what the MBAs who manage the private for-profit health insurance companies are willing to pay for. As Rob Urie points out: “Missing from this ‘process’ that now finds Mr. Duncan dead, two nurses who attended him with Ebola themselves, the American health care system revealed as wholly unprepared to deal with what at present seems a moderately communicable disease, is any notion of a public interest.”

  Here’s Juan González, talking to Karen Higgins, to co-president of National Nurses United:

The executive director of your union, RoseAnn DeMoro …, specifically raised the fact the CDC has no control over these individual hospitals, that in the privatized hospital system that we operate in here in the United States, the CDC can only offer guidelines, and it’s up to individual hospitals whether they’re going to enforce those guidelines, practice those guidelines. And, in fact, the CDC said yesterday…that they have no plans to investigate what happened at Texas Health Presbyterian, that that’s the responsibility of the local Department of Health in Texas. 

Karen Higgins: I think, you know—unfortunately, I think she’s right, as far as what powers the CDC has. … And what happens is then CDC makes recommendations, guidelines, and then it falls apart, because what you do with it as an individual hospital, because every hospital is pretty much individual, is where it starts to fall apart.

When we look at what happened to “index patient” Thomas Eric Duncan at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas hospital (known as “Presby”), we see concretely how the interest of the patient and the public starts to fall apart.  National Nurses United union co-president, Deborah Burger recounts what happened:

When Mr. Thomas Eric Duncan first came into the hospital, he arrived with a temperature that was tested with an elevated temperature but was sent home. On his return visit to the hospital, he was brought in by ambulance under suspicion from amongst his family he had Ebola. Mr. Duncan was left for several hours, not in isolation, in an area where other patients were present. Subsequently, a nurse supervisor arrived and demanded that he be moved to an isolation unit, yet faced resistance from other hospital authorities. Lab specimens from Mr. Duncan were sent through the hospital tube system without being specifically sealed and hand-delivered. The result is that the entire tube system, which all the lab specimens are sent, was potentially contaminated.

There was no advance preparedness on what to do with the patient. There was no protocol. There was no system. The nurses were asked to call the infectious disease department. The infectious disease department did not have clear policies to provide either. Initial nurses who interacted with Mr. Duncan wore generic gowns, used in contact-droplet isolation, front and back, three pairs of gloves with no taping around the wrists, surgical masks with the option of an N95 and face shields. Some supervisors said that even the N95 masks were not necessary. 

In defiance of the hospital management’s threat to fire anyone who spoke to the press, Briana Aguirre, a nurse at Presby, told reporters about the “extreme chaos” in the treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan:

“The nurses were throwing their hands up and saying this is unbelievable,” she said of the isolation ward. 

Aguirre also said the protocols from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were confusing and not clear. When Aguirre was given personal protective equipment that left her neck exposed, she was horrified. 

“We were told, ‘You take our guidelines and you do with it what you will,’” said Aguirre of CDC guidelines.

Aguirre also said that “suspected Ebola patients were wheeled around the hospital without protection and that doctors were told it was acceptable to move between rooms without disinfecting.” She also confirmed Deborah Burger’s observation that: “Our infectious disease department was contacted to ask 'What is our protocol?’ And their answer was, 'We don’t know’. There were no special precautions, no special gear. We did not know what to do with his lab specimens.”

The CEO Disease

Be aware that this hospital—part of the Texas Health Resources (THR) conglomerate, which describes itself as “one of the largest faith-based, nonprofit health care delivery systems in the United States, and includes 17 hospitals”—is not a rinky-dink operation. In fact, as one patient said to the New York Times, it has “always been considered the Neiman Marcus of hospitals, because a lot of wealthy people came here” (adding: “Now we wonder if it’s going to become the J. C. Penney.”). Its Margot Perot maternity wing is named for the wife of billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, and the board of its parent company, Texas Health Resources, is chaired by Anne T. Bass, the wife of the another billionaire, Robert M. Bass.

On the other hand, Presby’s emergency department is strictly J. C. Penney, rated below state and national averages.  In 2013, when Dwain Williams showed up in the emergency room coughing up blood, the doctors sent him home with antibiotics. Two weeks later, in Los Angeles, after having exposed his family, a few dozen airplane passengers, and who knows how many others, Dwain got diagnosed correctly, with tuberculosis. Sound familiar?

Upstairs, Downstairs, healthcare edition. At “faith-based” Presby, as with medical care throughout the USA, Margot gets her personal shopper at Neiman’s, while Dwain and Eric get the checkout line at Penney’s.

It’s also important to understand that, though the hospital (along with its parent THR conglomerate) is “non-profit,” that does not mean it can’t make or be run to make a profit. In fact, it is thoroughly imbued with a capitalist business ethic and management strategy, as its board of billionaires might suggest, and as is typical of the increasingly concentrated and corporatized healthcare “industry.” 

In a post at Naked Capitalism, Roy Poses, MD, Professor of Medicine at Brown University, talks about the “huge problems with concentration and abuse of power,” including “leadership of health care organizations that is ill-informed, incompetent, unsympathetic or hostile to health care professionals’ values, self-interested, conflicted, dishonest, or even corrupt[,] and governance that fails to foster transparency, accountability, ethics and honesty.” He lambasts “hospital CEOs and other top executives making millions of dollars a year based on their supposed ‘brilliance,’ or ‘visionary’ capacity, at least according to the board members … and the public relations people they hired....[even though] Most such ostensibly ‘brilliant’ hospital executives had no direct experience in clinical care, public health, or biomedical science.” He explicitly includes Doug Hawthorne who just retired as CEO of Texas Health Resources in September, 2014, after being inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame as a “healthcare visionary”—even though he has “no direct patient care experience, public health experience, or biomedical or clinical science experience.”

Hawthorne “was among the most highly compensated not-for-profit CEOs in the region,” with a 2012 base salary of about $1 million, and another $1.1 million bonus. He’s now taken a position on the board of the LHP Hospital Group Inc, a definitely for-profit “privately held company established to provide essential hospital capital and expertise to not-for-profit hospitals and hospital systems, with which it forms joint ventures.” Glimpsed here is the way American healthcare has become a complex web of symbiotic non-profit/for-profit relationships, overseen by “disconnected, unaccountable, self-interested,” careerist MBA managers who, suffering from what Dr. Poses calls this the “CEO Disease,” “feel entitled to make more and more money regardless of their or their institutions’ performance,… [and] may be particularly willing to countenance suppression of any facts or ideas that might raise doubts about their brilliance.” 

They know that, whatever any particular “non-profit” hospital they are working in is supposed to be doing, their job is to make sure it obeys logic of private capital, and feeds the very profitable pharmaceutical, insurance, medical equipment, and “essential hospital capital” industries in which it is enmeshed.  As the man said, Missing from this ‘process’ is any notion of a public interest.

So when we hear that, faced with a potential Ebola infection, a man with high fever and stomach pains, who said he had recently been in Liberia, was released with some antibiotics and Tylenol, should not we demand to know exactly why he was released. And when we hear that, on this patient’s second visit, with his family specifically warning about Ebola, a nurse supervisor “face[d] resistance from other hospital authorities” when s/he wanted to move the patient to an isolation unit—when we hear all this, should not every voice be raised, with urgency and anger, to ask: Which “hospital authorities”?! What kind of resistance?!

Why is every US media outlet not hounding every executive (including MDs with executive responsibility) of Texas Presbyterian and Texas Health Resources (Has any media outlet even identified the latter parent entity?) for the answer to those questions? How can I watch hours of news coverage, including PBS, and not detect any urgency about getting those questions answered, and remarkable complacency about the fact that every answer the hospital administrators have given has turned out to be misleading at best, or an outright lie at worst?

Again, we have a media spectrum running from rabidly right-wing coverage that irresponsibly stokes fear-mongering for the benefit of Republicans, to moderately right-wing coverage that treats dangerous, literally deadly failings of a healthcare system, and the real imminent danger of Ebola, with a great big yawn, so as not to overly discomfit the Democratic administration.

What’s In Your Wallet?

The reason we don’t hear the questions is because everybody knows the answers, and nobody (in the media) wants to call attention to them. Thomas Eric Duncan’s nephew, Iraq War veteran Josephus Weeks, knows why his uncle was released with a Tylenol: because “he was a man of color with no health insurance and no means to pay for treatment.” Counterpunch writer Rob Urie knows why “hospital authorities” resisted putting Duncan in isolation: because he “risked hospital bills in the tens of thousands of dollars that he reportedly didn’t have. The hospital ‘risked’ providing expensive treatment to a man who likely couldn’t have paid for it.”

Is there a sentient adult in the United States who does not know these answers?

The problem is: What are we going to do about them?

Everybody knows the first question at the hospital is “What’s health insurance do you have?”—i.e., Who is going to pay your bill?  What we do know from watching the news, and seeing hospital bills, is that the cost of treating just three patients so far has to be over a million bucks. Of course, that’s in American medical billing funny-money, but, hey, that’s the game, isn’t it? In our best-in-the-world capitalist healthcare system, someone has to pay those inflated bills, or write them off. If the current few become thousands or tens of thousands of domestically-infected Americans, what are we going to do—that is, who is going to pay for them? 

And it goes beyond the hospital. The friend in whose apartment Thomas Eric Dyson was staying was trying for days to figure out on her own what to do with the sheets and towels he had been using. It was not until the television audience heard her talking about this with Anderson Cooper that “officials” were publicly embarrassed into taking responsibility for getting the apartment—potentially deadly for the five people living in it, and the whole community—cleaned up in some kind of medically professional manner. As USA Today reports, the state-of-the-art protocol followed was for these “officials”—From where? The hospital? The CDC? The city of Dallas? Who exactly is responsible here?—to call around and beg local cleaning companies to take the unprecedented and dangerous job. As might be expected, “One after another, the companies declined,” until The Cleaning Guys, a Fort Worth company, stepped up.

This is a job that took “15 workers in hazmat suits stripped the northeast Dallas apartment, ... tearing up carpets, mattresses, furniture, ‘everything not bolted down,’” triple-bagging everything and “cramming” it into 140 55-gallon drums, getting permits “specifically for Ebola transport,” and driving the drums 400 miles to an incinerator.

And let’s not forget the people who were living in the apartment--Duncan's fiancée, Louise Troh, her 13-year-old son, and her two nephews in their 20s. For their mandatory quarantine, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and County Judge Clay Jenkins had to arrange for a friend, or friend of a friend, to give Louise and family a decent place to live for the duration of the quarantine.

Just out of quarantine, Louise has lost the deposit she had put on a new apartment before the drama began, and is now, for lack of money and other reasons, having a hard time finding new, permanent housing with her “Ebola family.” As her pastor says: “There is a lot of concern and fear out there in the rental property community.”

Hospital care, on the fly. Cleanup, on the fly. Housing, on the fly. It’s nice that a local cleaning company, and the mayor’s friend with a spare house, pitched in. The USA Today article previously cited is entitled: “Ebola fight takes a community-wide response,” and it lauds such gestures. But depending on the kindness of strangers to prevent the outbreak of one of the world’s nastiest communicable diseases is not—is the opposite of—a public health system.

A public health system would be funded, provisioned, trained, and ready to mobilize and intervene instantly and comprehensively, without having to call on The Cleaning Guys. An effective “community response” requires permanent institutions backed not only by sufficient funds and skills, but, most importantly, by a deeply-entrenched social ethic that understands and embraces things like the public good and the common welfare. Unfortunately, our political and media culture is dominated by a “Laissez-faire and such like,” enrich yourself, CEO-diseased ideology that worships private wealth and denigrates public interest, and precludes us having a real public health system. We’re left to hope that The Cleaning Guys answer the phone, because Dustin Hoffman isn’t coming.

All of the resources and activity mentioned above had to be mobilized for one patient.  How’s it going to work if we end up with thousands of tens of thousands? Are all the private health conglomerates that now run most of the hospitals in the US, and all the private, for-profit health insurance companies that pay all of the bills, going to forgo their profit-seeking until everybody who might have Ebola is thoroughly taken care of? Is the dreaded “government” going to pay those bills? Or will we just throw the Ebola-infected moochers out on the street? Why should those sick people get a free ride, when everybody else, even children with horrible diseases, have to pony up?

Why, indeed? Why, in the world’s wealthiest country, should anyone who is seriously ill be denied medical care because s/he doesn’t have enough money? 

Nobody’s talking about this because the media don’t want to go there. People might notice that the worst infection in American hospitals isn’t Ebola; it’s CEO disease. They might notice that the only way we can deal with a real epidemic danger like this is to effectively suspend the private for-profit healthcare system, and jigger up an ersatz public healthcare system on the fly. With the hope that no one will ask: “If that’s what we need, why don’t we just have it?” Let’s talk about everything else.

Who’s WHO

This is not just an American problem, either. Tariq Ali remarks, in his interview with Allyson Pollock, professor of public health policy at Queen Mary University of London:

[T]he entire world capitalist system as it functions is basically not in favour of public health services, they are in favour of privatised solutions, privatised facilities which means that in most countries increasingly you have a two or three tier system; you have very good quality hospitals for the rich and people who can afford them, you have a second tier for more middle class people who also have to pay but not so much and their facilities aren’t so good and then you have public hospitals, not just in Africa but in countries like India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which are a total complete disgrace and nothing is done about it on a global level at all because this is not a priority.

Allyson Pollock remarks how even formerly Social Democratic Europe is infected by CEO Disease:

European health care investors need to find new markets and they are busy attempting to penetrate and open up the health care systems of Europe.  And of course the biggest trophy for them is the United Kingdom NHS because it was for a long time the most socialised of all the health care systems.. …[T]he NHS has now been reduced to a logo and what the government is now doing is accelerating a break up of what remains of the national health service under public ownerships, so closing hospitals, closing services and privatising or contracting out. …

The government in England …wants to reduce the level of services that are available publically, create a climate of discontent with the NHS, forcing people who are in the middle classes, that’s like you and me Ali, to go privately and pay either out of pocket or with our healthcare insurance, so that we desert, we exit what is left but at the same time the government is reducing all our entitlements because there is no longer a duty to provide universal healthcare. 

Margaret Kimberely, in a must-read article at Black Agenda Report, reveals who has WHO—the whole wide World Health Organization—in his hands:

The largest contributor to the WHO budget is not a government. It is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which provides more funding than either the United States or the United Kingdom. WHO actions and priorities are no longer the result of the consensus of the world’s people but top down decision making from wealthy philanthropists.... 

Privatization of public resources is a worldwide scourge. Education, pensions, water, and transportation are being taken out of the hands of the public and given to rich people and corporations. The Ebola crisis is symptomatic of so many others which go unaddressed or improperly addressed because no one wants to bite the hands that do the feeding....

The WHO and its inability to coordinate the fight against Ebola tells us that public health is just that, public. If the CDC response to Ebola in the United States fails it may be because it falls prey to the false siren song of giving private interests control of the people’s resources and responsibilities.

Professor Pollock elaborates on this point:

[W]hen Western governments and the US come in, they tie [aid] to conditionalities, which is usually around the Bill & Melinda Gates priorities and not around the essential public health priories and the WHO has its hands tied. …[W]e are talking about democratic deficits that are happening when large global funds like the Gates Fund or the Buffett Fund can actually determine what the world priorities are and so distort what the priorities should be for public health because it is tied to the economics, they need to industrialise, they need to medicalise and they need to pharmaceuticalise. …. [O]ne of the big problems is that because of this huge amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Fund have, is that the technicians, like myself, the public health tribes, have been captured because of their success in predicated upon getting jobs, or research, tied to the interests of the Global Fund. 

As Pollock emphasizes, ensuring public health “doesn’t need magic potions or millions of dollars spent on genetics and the laboratories, it needs very, very basic things, but they are essential because they are what the public health infrastructures are built on.” It needs, she reminds us, “re-building public health infrastructure and that includes putting in community primary health care, community health systems, infection control units at community level, putting in hospitals and training nurses and doctors.” These kinds of basic services are what ensure the health of a population, and stop an infectious disease from getting out of control. Yet they are precisely what capital-oriented NGOs, the vectors of CEO Disease, undermine:

[B]ecause a few doctors and nurses are there, they want to leave …, or they want to work in the private sector or they want to work for these NGOs because the money is much better and so the whole public health system is completely hollowed out.  And this is a real problem because the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates, do not believe in the public sector, they do not believe in a democratic, publically owned, publically accountable [healthcare system]. 

Remember the deadly-Ebola-like-virus movie where Marion Cotillard, playing a WHO scientist, teams up with Laurence Fishburne of the CDC to quarantine the sick, defeat the Chinese extortionists and the evil conspiracy blogger, whip up a vaccine, and save the world? Fuggetaboudit. Marion’s not coming either. But Bill Gates has some gadgets to sell.

Contagion

In a previous post on Obamacare, I evoked the conservative 19th-century essayist, Thomas Carlyle, who trenchantly criticized the insurgent capitalist ethic of “Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire and such like,” insisting that “Cash payment is not the sole nexus of man with man.”  I present it again, because it’s spot on here, his example of an incident that perfectly illustrated for him, and should for us, the utter folly, certainly when it comes to health and disease, of putting private profit over public interest:

A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City…referred from one to the other, helped by none; "You are no sister of ours; what shadow of proof is there? Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to be ours, and you to have no business with them. Depart! It is impossible!"

—till she had exhausted them all; till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of fever there in consequence. The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you … she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills them: they actually were her brothers, though denying it!  Had human creature ever to go lower for a proof?  [Slightly rearranged. Carlyle’s emphasis.] 

Yesterday’s Irish Widow is today’s Liberian Fiancé. The resemblance is uncanny. Rob Urie puts it in a discourse that might resonate even with those susceptible to CEO Disease: From typhus to Ebola, from 19th-century Edinburgh to third-world Monrovia to red-state Dallas, it remains the case that, regarding “stopping the spread of communicable diseases in the public interest, the profit ‘motive’ that in theory supports capitalist efficiency is the antithesis of social efficiency in the public realm.”

How much lower do we have to go for proof?

______________________

Links

Outbreak (1995) - IMDb

F.T.C. Wary of Mergers by Hospitals - NYTimes.com

Ebola, Capitalism and the Idea of Society » CounterPunch

Infected Workers, Slow Deployment, No Vaccines: Ebola Response Shows Pitfalls of Privatized Health | Democracy Now!

As Second Dallas Nurse Diagnosed with Ebola, Are U.S. Hospitals Failing Healthcare Workers? | Democracy Now!

Texas Nurse Says Hospital Should Be ‘Ashamed’ of Ebola Response - ABC News

Whistleblower nurse describes ‘chaos’ at US Ebola hospital - Telegraph

Downfall for Hospital Where Ebola Spread - NYTimes.com

Will Ebola Vanquish the MBAs Who Run Our Hospitals? | naked capitalism

Exclusive: Ebola didn’t have to kill Thomas Eric Duncan, nephew says | Dallas Morning News

Ebola fight takes a community-wide response

Ebola Fears Stymie Home Quest for Quarantined in Dallas - Bloomberg

The Origins of the Ebola Crisis » CounterPunch

Freedom Rider: Privatized Ebola | Black Agenda Report

The Polemicist: Who’s the Boss? The Obamacare Deception

Contagion (2011) - IMDb

[thepolemicist]

Gaza Calling: It’s the Colonialism, Stupid!

Go to source

On how Gaza lays Zionism bare, in eight bites.

nakba 4 by sameer-kH

Subjugate, expel, exterminate

This summer’s Israeli assault on Gaza was a horror show. Whole families killed, whole neighborhoods levelled, schools and hospitals attacked, electricity, water, and waste treatment facilities destroyed, about 500 children killed, 3000 injured (1000 with lifelong disabilities), and 1500 orphaned – utter devastation.  We’ve all seen the pictures. I’vewritten about it. I’m not going to go over the specifics again.1

I share with many the conviction that this deliberately disproportionate carnage constitutes a despicable crime. It has certainly forced everyone to confront the deep disparities and injustices embedded in what’s called the Israel-Palestine conflict. The incessant waves of death and destruction visited on Palestinians for decades have challenged even those Westerners predisposed to “liberal Zionism” to question more radically what they think the Jewish state, and the Zionist project, is, was, or could be all about.

    Conversely, the aftermath of the Gaza carnage has seen the defenders of Israel become ever more frantic and adamant in asserting the absolute righteousness of the Zionist project—not just refuting, but wherever possible refusing to allow any fundamental questioning of its legitimacy. Ask Stephen Solaita.

    Yet, casualty figures and atrocity photos are not really what the argument is about. We have to remember, as Miko Peled points out, that: “Israel began attacking Gaza when the Strip was populated with the first generation refugees in the early 1950s.”2 This summer’s Gaza carnage helps reveal the problem, but it is not itself the fundamental problem.

    The fundamental problem is colonialism. You know, that thing where a group of people, who want the land somebody else is living on, take it. By subjugating, expelling, and/or exterminating the indigenous population.

    The  fundamental argument here between Zionists and non- or anti-Zionists is not about civilian casualties, but about colonialism. It is not about how many civilians the IDF (or Hamas) killed last month, but about the ongoing colonialism-in-progress that necessarily produces these casualties. It’s colonialism that provides the context which gives the facts and events their ethico-political meaning.

    This needs to sink in. Israel is a colonial-settler state. Zionism is a colonialist project.

    Forty years ago, when Maxime Rodinson pointed this out in a small book, nobody in the West wanted to hear it, and he was therefore cast into oblivion by Western intellectuals for  saying it.3 Today, largely because the internet has made it impossible to hide the relevant facts and research, as well as the shredded bodies and demolished neighborhoods, no  serious-minded person can deny it: Zionism is colonialism. Israeli historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe) have verified this, and honest “liberal” defenders of Zionism (Avi Shavit, Peter Beinart) acknowledge it. As Anthony Lerman says: “Both liberal Zionism and the left accept the established historical record: Jews forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the establishment of a Jewish state.”4

    The shunned “colonialism” analysis of forty years ago is now so unavoidable that the New York Times has seen fit to acknowledge its legitimacy, by publishing an op-ed from Palestinian political scientist Ali Jarbawi, entitled “Israel’s Colonialism Must End,” which flatly  proclaims that: “The Israeli occupation of Palestine is one of the only remaining settler-colonial occupations in the world today.” 

    To be sure, the NYT only published Jarbawi’s piece in its international edition—American eyes being too sensitive, I guess—and only because Jarbawi discreetly refers to the last “47 years” of occupation, but, just as everybody can read the NYT “international” website, everybody can understand that “Israel’s colonialism” did not start in 1967. Zionism has been a colonialist project, in principle and practice, since day one.5 And Israel’s devastation of Gaza this summer can only be understood as one element of an overall colonial project: the elimination of the Palestinian people as an obstacle to the formation of a Jewish state in historic Palestine (what Zionists call Eretz Israel).

    The point: There are still a lot of people (especially Americans) who are ignorant of the facts and history, and there will always be a few holdouts who will stubbornly refuse to admit this, but, by and large, liberal-minded, intellectually-honest supporters of Israel and Zionism know that it is no longer possible to deny that Zionism is colonialism and Israel is a colonialist state.

      Reasons to Believe

  Still, most staunch defenders of Zionism today want the discussion not to be about  colonialism. They want to frame their discourse in a way that avoids colonialism, an issue of political principle, much preferring to debate about important but contingent issues—civilian casualties, human shields, self-defense, etc. Even though they are on extremely weak ground regarding these issues as well, at least this discourse allows for dueling statistics and anecdotes. Forced to engage the issue of colonialism, Zionists are on the considerably more uncomfortable ground of asserting either 1) Zionism is not colonialism, or 2) So what? It doesn’t matter if it is.

    As indicated above, I think the first argument is virtually impossible to make today with any intellectual honesty. The variants of the second argument—It doesn’t matter if it is  colonialism—are of more interest.

    There is, of course, the religious version (God gave us the right to colonize this land.), but that’s not one that secular Western liberals are likely to embrace.

    An argument that secular Zionists are more likely to snap out, as if it’s a killing rhetorical blow, packed with irrefutable historical realism, is some version of: “So what, you’re a colonizer, too. American Indians!” Gotcha! QED.

    It baffles me that anyone thinks that’s an effective argument.  My reply, after confirming that the speaker is unambiguously admitting that the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs today is ethico-politically analogous to that between European settlers and Native Americans from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, would go something like the following.

    Yes, the U.S. and virtually every nation-state that came into being before the mid-twentieth century rests on a legacy of war, conquest, and injustice. And, yes, it’s hard to think of a worse colonial genocide than that visited on Native Americans from the fifteenth to the  nineteenth century. Those facts are hardly enough to support the analogy as intended,  however. First of all, being historically realist and all, we have to recognize that, tragically, over those four centuries, the Native American population was so completely ravaged that it now constitutes less than 1% of the population. If Native Americans were now the majority of the population in North America under white settler control; if they were engaged in a fierce resistance struggle in order to prevent being expelled or exterminated; if they had the support of hundreds of millions of their neighbors, as well as of populations and powerful governments throughout the world, as well as of an established international ideological and legal framework that forbade and denounced the colonial project the white settlers were still trying to complete (while demanding that everyone recognize America as the White Man's State)—then you would have a relevant analogy.

    Furthermore, it’s not the fifteenth-to-nineteenth, but the twentieth-into-twenty-first century that we’re talking about. My country was also, as I recall, founded on centuries of slavery, a practice that was acceptable to many Western minds for centuries.  Does any liberal-minded Westerner today think it would be OK to establish or perpetuate a polity based on slavery?  To let just one more slip by, because, well, so many people have done it before and this is the last one, promise?

    Sorry, but It doesn’t matter because someone else did it at some other time is a shallow, specious historicism. Isn’t what we learn from history, precisely, what should never happen again? I can’t stop the slave ships, or give the island I am living on back to the Manhattoes, but I can learn from history that it’s necessary to support today’s struggles against the New Jim Crow in my country, and the fight against the ongoing, unfinished colonial subjugation of Palestine that my country is enabling. That, I think, is how to historicize.

    So, yes, there are historical lines that are often drawn under past injustices that cannot be reversed. The point—what Gaza shows—is that the fate of the Palestinians is not one of  them; it is an ongoing struggle-in-progress that is nowhere near finished, and that calls on  us to take responsibility, not excuses, from history.

    A more contemporary justification for Zionism is the explicit or implicit argument that Israeli Jews are essentially more secular, tolerant, and modern than those crazy beheading Muslims, and therefore their just-like-us colonial enclave deserves our support. Of course,  you’d have to ignore the religious-nationalist settlers mentioned above, like this modern  family,6 who have created what many Israelis see as an increasingly “fascist” political atmosphere, filled with chants of “Death to Arabs” and “Death to leftists.”7 You’d have to forget that Israel’s state-supported rabbis issue statements like: “In any situation in which a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a  righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created…There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”8 You’d also  have to ignore that, in order to buttress its “we’re the only sane ones around here” image, Israel itself is promoting the crazy jihadism in the region—giving jihadis in Syria, for example, medical and military support in exchange for their promise not to challenge Israel’s confiscation of the Golan Heights.9 Because when you notice these things, Israel’s claim to be the anchor of secular rationality weakens considerably.

      SVU

  But the last redoubt of Zionist apologetics, often backstopping all the other arguments, is something like salvation. Sometimes this is stated explicitly; sometimes it’s a sub-text that turns discussions that are ostensibly about other issues into sterile cross-talk. While non-Zionists are talking colonialism, Zionists are talking about salvation. While non-Zionists are saying Israelis a colonial state, Zionists are saying Israel is the place that saves the Jews.

    In this deeply-entrenched paradigm, Jews, who have been undeniably persecuted—most egregiously in the advanced modern countries of Europe —cannot, unlike other historically-persecuted groups (homosexuals, for example) be expected to rely on securing their rights in a diverse polity. They must have a state of their own, a kind of global safe room, to protect themselves.

    This is Zionist lifeboat ethics. Jews are unique and eternal targets, Israel is the lifeboat, and tough luck for whomever they throw out to save themselves. Damn right, we deserve to be in it more than Palestinian Arabs. If you were drowning, wouldn’t you throw them out, too? Your refusal to recognize this proves that you really hate us. And want to drown us.

    Irrespective of any ostensible topic of rational discussion, non- and anti-Zionists are often seen and felt as implicitly harboring at least a disregard for the existential safety of Jews, and probably a secret desire to pounce on them once their safe room is unlocked.

    Frankly, this is an ideological position nearly impervious to rational discussion. If one believe the real position of Jews in the world’s polities is that they are and always will be uniquely and ubiquitously unprotected by the laws, institutions, ideologies, and practices that all other religious and ethnic groups depend on for their rights and security; if one believes that they are and always will be constantly on the verge of mass pogrom, even where they are an integral part of the social fabric, firmly embedded in its political, economic, and cultural elite and regarded as its most respected religious group;10 then one inhabits an impenetrably defensive ideological armor. And one takes a stubbornly offensive stance: That’s what gives us the right, the need, to colonize. Zionists who have that position should say it, to forestall irrelevant debate.

    From this perspective, Zionism--developed, as James Brooks explains, within a paradigm of essentialist “ethnic nationalist fervor that swept Europe for several decades before and after World War I”11—sees Israel, and the ultimate  separation  of Jews from non-Jews it represents, as the solution to the unique and eternal “Jewish question.”12 Non- and anti-Zionists see it as a contingent historical formation of a recognizable type, a colonialist enterprise that, this time, happens to be run in the name of Jews. One just has to decide which seems the more relevant secular paradigm.

    No matter how it’s reframed, however, Zionism rests on the same kind of essentialist tribal supremacism as any other colonialism: It doesn’t matter because the people being colonized do not matter as much (whether because not as civilized or not as victimized) as the people doing the colonizing. This colonialism is OK because it’s our colonialism and because it’s visited on those people.

        Criminal Intent

    Here’s the thing, and it’s the principal thing: Colonialism is, in principle and practice, a crime. It’s a crime because, well, colonialists must subjugate, expel, or  exterminate the colonized indigenous population.

    In international legal terms, I would contend, and I think most secular, liberal-minded people would agree, that colonialism—like slavery, torture, genocide, apartheid, and wars of aggression and “territorial aggrandizement”—is  criminal under jus cogens—the preemptory, compelling norms of international law. These are fundamental principles governing international relations that supersede any treaty, agreement, or claim of sovereignty, and “from which no derogation is ever permitted.” These norms are subject to universal jurisdiction, which means the perpetrators of such acts—whether states or individuals—can be investigated and prosecuted anywhere, and are considered hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.13

    Now, I neither want to dismiss or overstate the importance of international law. Palestine’s accession to the ICC, and its ensuing complaints against Israel, based on jus cogens and other arguments, are weapons in the Palestinian politica  arsenal that Zionists are rightly afraid of. We can be sure, however, that the US will exert enormous pressure on any international institution on Israel’s behalf. Jus cogens itself is an unwritten law, based on “near-universal” international  consensus, and there is disagreement about what specific practices it covers. End of day, this issue won’t be settled in court. No colonial struggle is.

    Besides, even written, codified, treaty-ratified international laws (regarding, for example, torture and aggressive war) are routinely flouted and ignored by Israel and its patron, the United States—a dynamic duo that has pretty thoroughly undermined the post-WWII architecture of international law and institutions. So, sure, some supporters of Israel and Zionism—certainly the more reactionary and/or religious fundamentalist Zionists—might say that colonialism is not prohibited under jus cogens or any other international legal standard, or that they don’t give a damn whether it is. But liberal-minded, intellectually-honest supporters of Israel and Zionism in America and Europe will be loath to discredit themselves by exempting colonialism from the international legal sanction they know very well it deserves. If they do, let’s make them say so explicitly.

    Whether or not colonialism contravenes any institutionally-enforceable law, it is a crime against humanity, a politically and ethically illegitimate and disgraced  practice that has been cast into the historical ignominy it deserves, and is now abhorrent to the conscience of humanity. Whatever the lawyers say, colonialism is, as Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson said of “aggressive war,” the kind of “supreme international crime [that] contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” 

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Because, again, colonists must subjugate, expel, or exterminate the indigenous population, colonialism “contains within itself”—in some combination, at some levels of intensity—a web of necessary supportive crimes like apartheid, genocide, aggressive wars, and wars of territorial conquest.  Thus, colonialism also “contains within itself,” and bears the prime responsibility for, the violence that arises from the the colonists’ attempts to impose, and from the indigenes’ anti-colonial resistance to, that subjugation, expulsion, or extermination.

    “Prime” does not equal “all” or “only”; in the Palestine-Israel context, it does mean colonialism is the master crime from which the moral meaning of Gazas past, present and future derives, and around which sides are chosen. It means there is, indeed, no moral equivalence between the force used to enforce colonial rule and the force used in anti-colonial resistance.

    So Much Older Then

  Zionism has the particular distinction of being the last major initiation of a blatant settler-colonial project. At the end of WWII (1945-8), it was still possible to sell that as a legitimate project to the “international community” of the day—i.e., the victors of World War II.

    It was possible because racism and ethno-supremacist colonialism were still integral parts of the Western worldview.

    It was possible because Zionists had, for decades, worked diligently on the imperialist powers, from Balfour to Truman. The culmination of this historic lobbying effort came at the at the crucial moment in 1948, when the American diplomatic corps was opposed to Palestine partition plans that ignored the Arab population’s consent, because such plans, which “recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state,” were “in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [UN] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.…such principles as self-determination and majority rule,” and because they “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” 14 At that crucial moment, as Steve Smith, Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law, recounted: “Two million dollars went aboard the Truman [campaign] train in a paper bag, and that’s what paid for the state of Israel.”15

    It was possible because a large number of displaced European Jews who had been the targets of Hitler’s exterminationist policy were shepherded into Palestine by the Zionist movement. Although Zionist leaders at the time clearly understood that, “Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the Second World War…. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe…Zionism would still be an imperative necessity,”16 they also insisted that the only way for the victorious  powers to express their great sympathy, and assuage their great guilt, for the Jews who had suffered under European fascism, was to enable the forcible ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs. (See previous post on the “Exodus-effect.”)

    At the time, it wasn’t so hard for the great world powers to blithely consider the lives, land, and humanity of an Arab population as dispensable—secondary both to the aspirations of the largely European Jews who formed the Zionist vanguard and to the guilty consciences of European gentiles. It was compensatory colonialism, with the compensation paid by an expendable third(world) people. (Arguably just would have been a Jewish state in Bavaria, but nobody would dare suggest doing to Europeans what was, and is still being, done to Palestinian Arabs. Not throwing any White Europeans out of the lifeboat.)

    In those historical and ideological conditions, from 1946-8, it was possible for Zionists to carry out an abrupt and brutal ethnic cleansing of least 726,000 Palestinian Arabs—enough to secure, for a good while, at least, a Jewish-majority “Jewish State” on most of the territory of historic Palestine. (By 1948, Zionists had seized 78% of the territory, up a bit from the 6% owned by the Jewish population in 1947.)17

    In that context, Zionism had the further peculiar distinction of being able to conjure about itself an aura of virtue that effectively occluded the blatant injustice of the colonialism it is. Thanks to the consistent and intensive Zionist influence on Euro-American political, media, and cultural institutions, that aura has enshrouded Zionism for Westerners’ eyes for 65 years, long past colonialism’s sell-by date. That aura of Zionist virtue is, I think, what makes the break-up with Zionism so hard to do for so many to this day.

    Of course, in the late-1940s, colonialism was approaching its event horizon, on the verge of being decisively defeated and disgraced. Ten years before, the Zionist conquest would have been impossible because the imperialist powers would not have permitted it and world Jewry was against it. Ten years later, it would have been impossible because colonialism was in full retreat, and no Western liberals were imagining there was any virtue in it.

    Today, in the 21st Century, I do not think any person of a modern, secular, liberal cast of mind would deny that the abolition and rejection of colonialism is one of history’s irrefutably progressive milestones. To attempt a colonial conquest on the planet earth today is a crime against history itself.

  Yet that is exactly what Israel is doing. Israel is exactly that attempt.

        Only Just Begun

    “Attempt” is an important word here. Liberal Zionists like to speak as if, whatever crimes were committed in order to make it possible, the nasty, colonial work of establishing Israel, which occurred in the ancient times of 1945-8, is over.

    This attitude is epitomized by Israeli reporter Ari Shavit, who, in his much-fȇted (by American Zionists) book, My Promised Land, speaks forthrightly about the brutal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that made Israel possible. Shavit uses the massacre and expulsion of the inhabitants of Lydda (now the Israel town of Lod) as an example. Lydda was a town of some 70,000 Arabs lying outside the area set aside for the Jewish state by the UN Partition Plan, which was attacked by the most-moral Zionist army in July, 1948, resulting in, as the New York Herald Tribune correspondent put it: "the corpses of Arab men, women and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge." Light-unto-nations Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered that all surviving inhabitants “be expelled quickly without attention to age."18

    The murder of at least 250 and expulsion of about 70,000 Arabs: an important, emblematic victory for the Zionist colonial project, as Shavit acknowledges. 

    Shavit is “sad,” even “horrified” by the conquest and “cleansing” of Lydda, and knows very well it’s only one example among many. Here, for example, is the testimony of a Zionist soldier, published in a leftist Israeli union paper, regarding events in the Palestinian village of Duelma in 1948:

Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better.19

There’s a nasty coda to these massacres, that’s just come to light in research by Salman Abu Sitta and Terry Rempel, based on ICRC (International Red Cross) records, as reported in Al-Akhbar. It seems that all the Palestinian survivors of Lydda and other village cleansings were not immediately expelled. Instead, Israel imprisoned thousands of them in at least 22 forced-labor camps, for years (some until 1955), doing “public and military work” in “conditions described by one ICRC official as ‘slavery.’” Here’s how the authors present an interview with one such prisoner, Marwan Iqab al-Yehiya:

“We had to cut and carry stones all day [in a quarry]. Our daily food was only one potato in the morning and half dried fish at night. They beat anyone who disobeyed orders.” This labor was interspersed with acts of humiliation by the Israeli guards, as Yehiya speaks of prisoners being “lined up and ordered to strip naked as a punishment for the escape of two prisoners at night.

  “[Jewish] Adults and children came from nearby kibbutz to watch us line up naked and laugh. To us this was most degrading,” he added.

Another prisoner recounts how, “Anyone who refused to work was shot," and the study finds that detainees were “routinely shot on the pretense that they had been attempting to escape.”

  A UN report talks plainly about “a Jewish concentration camp,” and Abu Sitta can’t help but notice: “It is amazing to me, and many Europeans, who have seen my evidence, that a forced labor camp was opened in Palestine three years after they were closed in Germany, and were run by former prisoners – there were German Jewish guards.”

  Only after Israel extracted this forced labor from them, were these people thrown out of their own country—“expelled across the armistice line without any food, supplies, or shelter, and told to walk into the distance, never to return.”

    Of course, the ICRC's and other organizations' protests about these camps at the time, "were simply ineffective as Israel ignored its condemnations with impunity, in addition to the diplomatic cover of major Western powers."20

    Civilians captured during the fall of Lydda and Ramle around the time of July 12, 1948 and taken to labor camps. (Photo: Salman Abu Sitta, Palestine Land Society)

  An honest liberal Israeli like Shavit recognizes—and if he does, his liberal Zionist confrères in America and Europe must—that carnage like this was “an inevitable phase of the Zionist revol.” Knowing this, he nonetheless “stand[s] by the damned” ethnic cleansers, because, if it wasn’t for the “horrifying” work of the Zionist armed forces in 1948, “If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born. They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.”21

Revolution?  Note the surreptitious, and pathetic, rhetorical attempt to melodize the screech of Zionist history for sensitive liberal ears: “The fewer Arabs the better” is the slogan of a racist colonialism, not the rallying cry of a progressive “revolution.” With all of this history available to anyone who wants to find it, liberal Zionists find it hard to deny that the violence of the Zionist “revolution” of 1945-48 that created Israel was anything more than colonialist ethnic cleansing. And they know very well that if such a project were to be proposed today, everyone, including themselves, would denounce and reject it—no ifs, ands or buts.

  It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over.

Which is why they are wont to think, and talk as if, all that “dirty, filthy work” is in the distant past. However integral it was to creating the Jewish state, Israel now stands as a finished product: a liberal democracy filled with juice bars and tech startups—which would be stable and progressive, if only the fanatical Arabs/Muslims would leave it alone.

And yeah, OK, maybe if it gave back all most some of the occupied disputed territories it captured in that war of territorial aggrandizement self-defense that took place in early modern period of 1967 (when, some Zionists grudgingly acknowledge, colonial aggression was certainly past its sell-by date). Anyway, these are territories Israel (except the Prime  Minister and Defense Minister, who have just made clear the Israelis have no intention of leaving the West Bank) has really always wanted to give back, if only those crazy Arabs would calm down.22

Gaza 2014 puts the lie to that, again. Israel—what Uri Avnery calls “the ‘Nation state’ of the  Jews” and Max Blumenthal aptly dubs “the Jewish State In the Levant” (#JSIL)23 —is not finished or stable. The colonial project is ongoing, with all its inevitable “dirty, filthy work.” This time with Twitter—i.e., too many real-time reports and images, unfiltered by Zionist-friendly editors and producers. All the colonial violence, all "the corpses of Arab men, women and even children strewn about in the wake of the ruthlessly brilliant charge," are in our face, and Avi Shavit, and every American, is in the middle of it, walking over those bodies every day. The hegemonic lives of Ari Shavit, his daughter, and his sons are secured not just the by corpses of the Arab sons and daughters murdered in Lydda in 1948, but also by those of the 500 children killed in Gaza this summer. The fewer, the better is still the colonial rule, and the ongoing project.

What we’ve seen in Gaza this summer of 2014 is the continuation of Gaza in 2012, and in 2008-9, and in Gaza and Lebanon in 2006, and in Lebanon in 1982, and in Lydda and Duelma and Deir Yassin in 1948.  After this summer’s slaughter, “Then it was ‘dirty, filthy’ ethnic cleansing; now it is ‘self-defense’” rings hollow. To be intellectually and ethically honest, everyone who supports the completion of the Zionist colonial enterprise, has to accept that then is now, and to embrace, to do, the continuing, unfinished work of the damned that is yet to be done.

As Saree Makdisi says:

Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza’s hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman.24

It’s not hard to figure out that the loaded question Does Israel have a right to exist? really means: “Do you agree that it was right for Zionists to establish a colonial-settler Jewish State, ‘dirty, filthy work’ notwithstanding?” The question, in other words, is really demanding Palestinians (and the world) to ratify the ethico-political legitimacy of their own ethnic cleansing. But the critique of the question has to be more thorough than that. The question is also asking: “Do you agree that it is right for Zionists to be establishing a colonial-settler Jewish State, ‘dirty, filthy work’ and all?” Are you going to sign on for that?

The “right to exist” question is posed by Zionists so insistently precisely because it is an unsettled question about the future. It’s not about past events—whether Zionists back in the day had the right to establish the colonial entity they did, but about a present, aspirational practice—whether they now have the right to establish the colonial entity they would like to. The question, really—and Zionists know it—is: Will Israel exist?

This is so because the Palestinians are not defeated and have not surrendered. Too few of them have been exterminated; they have not been expelled far enough away; they have not been thoroughly enough subjugated. The existence and resistance of Palestinians put the lie to the idea that Israel is a stable, finished state and that the dirty work of Zionist colonialism is in the past. As the rallying cry of many Zionists in Israel today has it, they still have to “finish ’48.”25  Gaza 2014 is an illuminating moment in the ongoing, unfinished colonial project of slaughtering the colonial subjects into submission.

Israel will only be finished and stable if it achieves that. One can argue that it’s almost there or that it’s a long way off, but done it ain’t. In fact, I think it can be said that both perceptions are true, just as ’48 is both in the past and right here and now. Therein lies the danger and opportunity.

I share the sense of many in the Palestinian solidarity movement that the exhaustion of the phony “peace process,” the dwindling possibility of any two-state solution, the discrediting of the Palestinian Authority, implacable demographics,26 and the accelerating de-legitimization of Zionism through its own actions and through movements like BDS, all open up new possibilities for a just, democratic, and de-colonized polity for Palestinian Arabs and Jews in the territory of historic Palestine. Politically and ideologically, Israel lost in Gaza this summer, contributing to its own discredit and jeopardizing its future.

I also recognize the persistent weaknesses of the Palestinians, who suffer constant, horrendous, human and material losses at the hands of a Zionist war machine granted impunity by the “international community.” Though it may seem a distant possibility in our historical conjuncture, I do not think it is impossible for Zionism to defeat the Palestinians in some effectively final and irreversible way, as it keeps trying to do. Since 1948—since, that is, colonialism’s disgrace—Israel has been constrained to pursue its ethnic cleansing in a fitful series of measures, with levels of brutality adjusted according to particular political and ideological circumstances, but it has not ceased to probe those limits. Israel is working very hard to compress political time and make it suddenly possible to exterminate, or more thoroughly expel, enough Palestinians (we’re talking at least tens of thousands) to stabilize Israel for most of a century. That’s one of the things Israel’s, and its American patron’s, support of jihadi chaos in the region is all about.27 The fat lady hasn’t sung, but the orchestra is in full swing.

Ali Jarbawi recognizes:

The longer any colonial occupation endures, the greater the settlers’ racism and extremism tends to grow. This is especially true if the occupiers encounter resistance; at that point, the occupied population becomes an obstacle that must either be forced to submit or removed through expulsion or murder.

Liberal Zionists like to imagine ’48 is finished in some democratically acceptable way; militant Zionists know they still have to finish ’48 as ruthlessly as possible; principled anti-Zionists—that is, principled anti-colonialists—have to work very hard to see, precisely, that ‘48 ends in failure, and that Israel never becomes the finished colonial project it wishes to be.

  Gaza Calling

Why is this our responsibility as Americans? Because, as Noam Chomsky reminds us:

In 1958, South Africa’s foreign minister informed the US ambassador that although his country was becoming a pariah state, it would not matter as long as US support continued. His assessment proved fairly accurate.28

The other thing that Zionism thought was taken care of once and for all, that one thing Zionism needs to persist—American, especially Jewish-American, support for Israeli colonialism—turns out to be still a work-in-progress, too. Though it’s hard to see in mainstream media, where it is being fiercely held at bay, a sea-change is underway in American cultural ideology toward Zionism, especially among youth, and, importantly, within the Jewish community.

To be clear (and to dismiss a canard), though most American and Western Jews may now be (they were not before WWII) at least casually Zionist, the vast majority of Zionists in America (and the world) are not Jews, many of the most effective critics of Israel and Zionism have been Jews, and many of the most fervent proponents and enablers of Zionism have been anti-Semites. There is no necessary correlation between one’s religion or one’s attitude toward Jews and one’s embrace of Zionism.

Despite its being kept in the cultural shadows, many Americans have some awareness of the critical tradition toward Zionism and Israel, from Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein. Anyone who’s politically aware today cannot avoid confronting the fearless critiques and new cross-identity alliances we see in the work of actors like Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah (Electronic Intifada), Philp Weiss (Mondoweiss), Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the BDS movement. On American campuses today, Zionism is losing the all-important ideological battle, and the effects of that will radiate throughout the culture.

One can imagine, for example, that one day, not because of any principled change of heart, but—as in the South African example—through a combination of domestic and international ideological, economic, and political pressures, the United States will start acting in the Middle East in ways that, without the confusion of its support of Zionism, more effectively serve its own imperial interests. On that day—and not one second before—an Israeli government may start to seriously negotiate a two-state solution, accept ’67-ish borders, etc. And it will be two seconds too late. Because that day will only come once the movement for a democratic polity incorporating Jews and Arabs as equal citizens has gained too much momentum to stop.29

Per Chomsky’s point about South African apartheid, Israeli colonialism hangs by the thread of American support. It’s time for principled American anti-colonialists to pull it.

I’ll leave the last word to Miko Peled, former IDF Special Forces soldier, whose grandfather signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence and whose father was a well-known general who served as military governor of Gaza—someone, in other words, who knows whereof he speaks. Peled describes Israel succinctly as a state in which “half of the population lives in what it thinks is a Western democracy while keeping the other half imprisoned by a ruthless defense apparatus that is becoming more violent by the day,”30 and he challenges us to take the lesson of what we saw with our own eyes this summer:

Gaza is being punished because Gaza is a constant reminder to Israel and the world of the original sin of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the creation of a so-called Jewish state. …

Israel is an illegitimate creation brought about by a union between racism and colonialism. The refugees who make up the majority of the population in the Gaza Strip are a constant reminder of this.

Ending the insufferable, brutal and racist regime that was created by the Zionists in Palestine is the call of our time.

__________________________________

Notes and Links

[1] A War on Gaza’s Future? Israeli Assault Leaves 500 Kids Dead, 3,000 Injured, 373,000 Traumatized | Democracy Now!  Gaza, Israel, and America: Crime and Demolishment

[2] Miko Peled, Gaza reminds us of Zionism’s original sin | The Electronic Intifada

[3] Israel: A Colonial-Settler State Pathfinder Press: 2002 (first published 1973).

[4] Israel’s Move to the Right Challenges Diaspora Jews - NYTimes.com

[5] “Zionism” throughout refers to the political Zionism we see in the Israeli state since 1948. The other, and interesting, strain of “cultural Zionism” associated with figures like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt has been rendered historically moot, and is beyond the scope of this discussion.

[6] Radical Young Israelis and the Price Tag Attacks: Rockets and Revenge (Dispatch 7) - YouTube

    [7] If it walks like fascism and talks like fascism Israel News | Haaretz "Are You a Fucking Leftist?"

Part 2: Former Israeli Soldier Eran Efrati Speaks Out About Documenting IDF Abuse in Gaza, West Bank | Democracy Now!

How Israel Silences Dissent - NYTimes.com

[8] Who is funding the rabbi who endorses killing gentile babies? Israel News | Haaretz

Settler Rabbi publishes “The complete guide to killing non-Jews” | Coteret

[9] Turkey and Israel Are Directly Supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda Terrorists In Syria Washington&apos;s Blog

M of A - Israel Introduces Iran Bogeyman To Cover Up Its Military Help For ISIS JAN

IDF Builds Field Hospital in Golan Heights - Defense/Security - News - Arutz Sheva

Did Israel help US by downing Syrian jet? | Jonathan Cook&apos;s Blog

Israel Joins The Fighting, Shoots Down Syrian Warplane Which Acted In "Threatening Manner" | Zero Hedge

[10] How Americans Feel About Religious Groups | Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project

[11] Out of Europe, Out of Time » CounterPunch

[12] The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Jewish State, by Theodor Herzl.

[13] Peremptory norm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jus cogens | Wex Legal Dictionary / Encyclopedia | LII / Legal Information Institute

[14] Alison Weir, History of the US-Israel Relationship, Part I : Information Clearing House

[15] The Money and the Power - Sally Denton, Roger Morris - Google Books, also referred to in: So Harry Truman Wasn’t So Big on Israel, After All « LobeLog and The Row Over the Israel Lobby » CounterPunch, where it’s a suitcase, rather than a paper bag.

[16] Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, President of the Zionist Organization of America, quoted in, Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953).

[17] If Americans Knew: Maps of Israel and Palestineaps

[18] Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - Middle East History: Expulsion of the Palestinians—Lydda and Ramleh in 1948, 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[19] Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism: A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary, and other documents, Foreword by Noam Chomsky,Third Edition 

[20] The ICRC and the Detention of Palestinian Civilians in Israel's 1948 POW/Labor Camps | Institute for Palestine Studies

On Israel's little-known concentration and labor camps in 1948-1955 | Al Akhbar English

[21] All Shavit citations from Jerone Slater’s brilliant take-down of Shavit, at: Jerome Slater: On the US and Israel: Unforgivable: Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land and Its Acclaim in the United States

[22] Netanyahu says there will never be a real Palestinian state – Mondoweiss

Ya’alon rules out notion of West Bank withdrawal | The Times of Israel

[23] The Future of Israel as Nation State» CounterPunch, Activists seek to rebrand Israel as ‘JSIL’

[24] Saree Makdisi, What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel? » CounterPunch

[25] Max Blumenthal at New America Foundation on Israeli polices to ‘finish 48’;

[26] Jews Now Minority in Israel and Territories – J.J. Goldberg – Forward.com

The Jewish majority is history - Features Israel News | Haaretz

Israel Exploring Ways to “Lower Birthrate” of Palestinian Bedouins | Global Research

Here are Goldberg’s (conservative) numbers:

Palestinian Arabs, West Bank: 2,676,740

Palestinian Arabs, Gaza Strip: 1,763,387

(Total Palestinians, Israeli military-administered territories: 4,440,127)

Israeli Arabs (citizens): 1,666,800

Total Arabs under Israeli sovereign administration: 6,106,927

Israeli Jews: 6,056,100

[27] Turkey and Israel Are Directly Supporting ISIS and Al Qaeda Terrorists In Syria Washington’s Blog

[28] Noam Chomsky - Outrage

[29] Note to all sincere two-staters: Start criticizing actual Israel policy, start denouncing all AIPAC-like fealty demands, and start participating in activist groups protesting Israeli occupation and aggression—including BDS, which takes no official position on one or two states—now, if you want to retrieve a chance for your preferred outcome.

[30] Miko Peled | Tear Down the Wall…

[thepolemicist]

Israel’s “Human Shield” Hypocrisy: The Early Days

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Down those meme streets

In 2001, Edward Said called Leon Uris's 1958 novel Exodus: “The main narrative model that [still] dominates American thinking” about Israel.1 As a Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston put it more recently (2012), in an article entitled “The ‘Exodus’ effect: The monumentally fictional Israel that remade American Jewry,” Uris’s narrative “Tailor[ed], alter[ed] and radically sanitize[ed] the history of the founding of the State of Israel to flatter the fantasies and prejudices of American Jews.” Burston quotes American Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg, who served in the IDF as a prison guard, to the effect that "Exodus … made American Jews proud of Israel's achievements. On the other hand, it created the impression that all Arabs are savages.” And he quotes none other than David Ben-Gurion: "As a literary work it isn't much…But as a piece of propaganda, it's the best thing ever written about Israel."2 Of course, even more Americans owe their education in Zionism to Otto Preminger’s 1960 movie version of the book, which has been “Widely characterized as a ‘Zionist epic’ [that was] enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States.” It was Exodus, the movie, that really viralized (as we say now) the “Exodus-effect.”3 The film stars Paul Newman as Haganah militant Ari Ben Canaan.4 Newman provides the perfect image of what Burnson calls “the wiry, wily, can-pass-for-Christian New Israeli Jew - exactly [what Uris’s] literary engineering had intended.” Gleaming blonde Eva Marie Saint plays the love interest, Kitty Fremont, a volunteer American and Presbyterian nurse who starts out all pacifistic and ends up riding off into battle as Ari’s shiksa comrade. It was an iconic package that was, as Jerome A. Chanes, writing in New York Jewish Week in 2010, said: "just what we needed at the time - the Americanization of Zionism and Israel.”5 Burston and Chanes are nicely describing the production of an ideology – in this case, the American ideology of Zionism – through a fiction that creates a sympathetic identification of the reader/viewer with characters and situations that reinforce Americans’ acceptance. Zionism becomes a self-evident norm for Americans, not because the case for it has been so well argued, but because Paul and Eva are so obviously “right” in the narrative terms that every American preconsciously understands. “Literary engineering” is a particularly apt phrase because it evokes recently-coined jargon for what I call ideological production – “memetic engineering.”6 Memetic engineering refers to the careful placement and arrangement of memes – bits of meaning, carried in ubiquitously-recognizable words, phrases, and images that carry and transmit bits of meaning throughout a culture – in ways that are all the more powerful because they work on a preconscious, “unthinking” level. Whatever you call it, for Exodus and its viewers, Zionism is to America as Ari/Paul is to Kitty/Eva – you can’t have one, you can’t have one, without the other. The plot of the moviecenters around Newman/Ben Canaan’s attempt to smuggle 611 Jewish refugees into mandate Palestine in 1947 on a ship named Exodus. The British have the ship blockaded in the harbor in Cyprus, and Ben Canaan organizes a hunger strike among the refugees on the ship to try to force the British to let them sail to Palestine. Given the power of this film in setting a positive image of Zionism for a whole generation of Americans, one might wonder why it’s never shown on any of the 500 cable movie channels, or anywhere else. In fact, you never even hear it mentioned. It’s virtually disappeared from the cultural conversation. Now one reason for that is surely because the damn thing is three-and-a-half hours long. But doesn’t the Godfather trilogy play on cable every few months? Other factors are at work, I think, that make the film much more problematic as a vehicle for promoting Zionism today, and therefore unlikely to be shown. The articulate Jewish-good-guys vs. “savage” Arab-bad-guys scenario may be a little too stereotypical for contemporary audiences – especially educated liberal audiences. Maybe. But a worse embarrassment, I think, derives from the nastier elements of the Zionist strategy itself that the film does not shy away from portraying, probably because the filmmakers at the time could not imagine that anything would undermine the audience’s sympathetic identification with Paul and Eva and their extended Zionist family. Thus, for example, the film can be quite upfront with the character of Dov Landau, played (in an Oscar-nominated performance) by Sal Mineo, a young Zionist radical who joins the Irgun and bombs the King David Hotel. Making a sympathetic character out of the perpetrator of what still ranks as one of the deadliest “terrorist” attacks in the Middle East (91 killed, still celebrated in Israel), might not play so well with a contemporary American audience primed against “terrorism.”7 It might even start a few viewers thinking about the Zionist freedom-fighters/terrorists Sal Mineo’s character is based on (Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir), who became Prime Ministers of the most moral state, and one of whom (Shamir) wrote a forthright defense of his own and other Jewish radicals’ deadly activities in an article forthrightly entitled “Terror,” saying:

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war…We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle….First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.8

We wouldn’t want Americans starting to historicize their understanding of who the “terrorists” are, now, would we?

King David Hotel, After Menachem Begin's Bombing

Does the vulgarity of it shock you?

More to the point for our discussion of the how the “human shield” meme is used with mendacious hypocrisy by Zionists today, however, is this telling exchange between Aria and Kitty on the good ship Exodus, with Kitty trying to persuade Ari to end the hunger strike:

(<2 minutes)

Yes, I think that, in the face of the images from Gaza and the campaign of scurrilous and false “human shield” accusations against Palestinians, Paul Newman’s argument for 600 telegenically dead9 Jewish men, women, and children as a publicity stunt to gain the sympathy of the world might not go over as well for the Zionist cause as it did in 1960. Those who saw this movie in 1960 and thereafter, and who still carry around the sense, endorsed by critics like Stanley Kauffmann, that it’s a “powerful instrument of contemporary truth,”10 might find it impossible not to see the hypocrisy of Israel’s current attempts to demonize the Palestinian resistance. With all we now know and have seen, a movie like this makes it uncomfortably clear that the charges Zionists level at Palestinians are all too often projections of Zionists’ own actions and intentions. In fact, the images and tropes of a movie like this, which were once successfully engineered for an American audience into a heroic imaginary version of Zionist armed struggle (both offensive and sacrificial), now seem disturbingly more relevant to the real struggle of Palestinians for their “native land.” (“The only weapon we have to fight with is our willingness to die.”) The memes have gone off the rails. And that, at least as much its length, is why you never see Exodus anymore. Stranger than Fiction Lest anyone be tempted to dismiss all this as irrelevant because it’s dealing with a fiction – anyone, that is, who still does not understand that imaginary narratives like Exodus are much more powerful in establishing and maintaining Zionist ideology in the United States than are historical treatises – we can remember that Leon Uris was basing the fictional Exodus on real events, well-known to the world at the time. here was a ship called Exodus 1947 that attempted to bring Jewish emigrants from France to Palestine in July of 1947 that was seized by the British navy, which sent all the passengers back to Europe.11 More to the point of the movie, however, is the fate of the SS Patria in 1940. The Patria was carrying 1800 Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe whom the British authorities refused entry into Palestine and were sending to Mauritius. While the Patria was in the port of Haifa, it was blown up and sunk by the (official, “non-terrorist”) Haganah, which did not want Jewish refugees going anywhere but Palestine. At least 267 people were killed. The Haganah put out the story that the passengers had blown up the ship themselves – a story that lasted 17 years, nourishing the imagination of Leon Uris.12  

SS Patria, After Haganah Bombing

These incidents were part of the horrible plight of Jewish refugees from Nazism during the war and the holocaust (Patria, 1940), and of the Jewish population of the Displaced Persons (D.P.) camps in Europe in the years immediately after the war (Exodus, real and imaginary). Americans, and the Hollywood audience globally, should be aware that the attitude of Zionism to the “refugee” issue throughout this period was more complicated than we might have been led to imagine. As Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, President of the Zionist Organization of America emphasized in 1946:

Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the Second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe, and were there free opportunities for Jewish immigration in other parts of the world at this time, Zionism would still be an imperative necessity.13

There is ample evidence that Zionists resisted efforts to give safe haven to Jewish victims of Nazism anywhere but in Palestine. For just one example: In the United States, the Stratton Bill, introduced in Congress in 1947, which would have allowed 400,000 Displaced Persons “of all faiths” into the country, was met with tepid support by Zionists (11 hours of testimony by Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish organizations). On the other hand, the Wright-Compton resolution, which called for a “Jewish Commonwealth,” elicited 500 pages of supportive testimony by American Zionist organizations.14 Among the other stories of skewed Zionist refugee priorities, I’ll mention briefly the one told by Ben Hecht in his book, Perfidy, regarding Hungarian “fanatical Zionist” Rudolf Kastner, who, according to the testimony of Adolf Eichmann: “agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation -- and even keep order in the collection camps -- if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine.”15 Prominent American Jews noticed, and fiercely criticized, Zionist priorities regarding refugees. A Yiddish paper said:

by insisting that Jewish D.P.'s do not wish to go to any country outside of Israel; by not participating in the negotiations on behalf of the D.P.'s; and by refraining from a campaign of their own—by all this they [the Zionists] certainly did not help to open the gates of America for Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living people—their brothers and sisters who went through a world of pain—to the politics of their own movement.16

Louis Finkelstein of the Jewish Theological Seminary complained that: “if United States Jews had put as much effort into getting D. P.'s admitted to this country as they put into Zionism, a home could have been found in the New World for all the displaced Jews of Europe. None other than the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, insisted that:

plans to move Jews to Palestine should be but part of larger plans to empty these camps of all refugees, Jew and otherwise…[W]hy in God's name should the fate of all these unhappy people be subordinated to the single cry of Statehood? I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the unfortunate Jews of Europe's D. P. camps are helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only ransom.17

At this crucial moment in history, it was Zionists who practiced the original “human shield” strategy, holding the victims of Nazism “hostage” to the Zionist “statehood” project – as even the New York Times recognized. Ari Ben Canaan/Paul Newman’s willingness to blow up 600 Jewish refugees on the imaginary Exodus represented a principle actually followed by the Zionist movement for years, and enunciated quite clearly by its “mainstream” leader, David Ben-Gurion, as early as 1938: “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter.”18 Not to open up that whole can of Zionist worms: Another reason we don’t see much of Exodus today. It’s important that we notice, as most in the American audience could not in 1960, this historical use of “human shields” in the Zionist conquest of American minds and Palestinian lands. It is also urgently important that we recognize how we are still being played, and Palestinians ravaged, by Israel’s memetic, and actual, engineering of human shields today. Really, it’s time for Americans to wipe from their minds the narrative model conjured by a “literary engineer” like Leon Uris, which still dominates American thinking, and pay heed to the accounts of a witness like Max Blumenthal, who describes what happened to 19-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said of Rafah when Israeli soldiers in invaded his family home on July 14th: After ordering the family to evacuate the house under the shelling their army had just initiated, the soldiers called for Mahmoud’s father, Abdul Hadi El Said. As soon as he appeared at his doorstep, they shot him in the chest, leaving him to die. …[T]he soldiers grabbed Mahmoud and refused to allow him to leave. Mahmoud said the Israeli troops dragged him back into his house, blindfolded him and wrapped him in a blanket on the floor as they began to blow holes in the walls to use as makeshift sniper slits — what US troops in Afghanistan called “murder holes.” Then the soldiers stripped Mahmoud to his underwear, handcuffed him, slammed him against a wall and began to beat him. With an M-16 at his back, they forced him to stand in front of open windows as they hunted his fleeing neighbors, sniping directly beside him at virtually anything that moved.> When they were not using him as a human shield, Mahmoud said, the soldiers left him alone in the room with an unleashed army dog who was periodically ordered to attack him.19 And, yes, it’s time to wipe from our minds the image of charmingly masculine, “wiry, wily” Paul Newman acting up the Hollywood Haganah meme, and be captivated instead by the more important visage of Ramadan Mohamed Qdeih, telling us what sixty-five years of Zionist-American memetic engineering has wrought:    

(<4 minutes))

See previous post on this topic: Israel's"Human Shield" Hypocrisy

___________________________________

Notes and Links

1Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Propaganda and war Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 6 - 12 September 2001, Issue No.550 2 The ‘Exodus’ effect: The monumentally fictional Israel that remade American Jewry Israel News | Haaretz, By Bradley Burston | Nov. 9, 2012 3 Exodus (1960 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 4 The Haganah was the main, “official” Jewish army in mandate Palestine. Its offshoots, the Irgun and the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi), were more radical, and were considered “terrorist” organizations even by the Zionist Congress and the Jewish Agency. As indicated below, however, their actions were at least ultimately embraced by the mainstream Zionists, and two of their leaders – self-acknowledged “terrorists” – went on to become Prime Ministers of Israel. 5 Cited in Brunson. Chanes was reviewing M.M. Silver's 2010 book, Our ‘Exodus’: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story. 6 Memetic engineering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, On Memetics: Memetic engineering, Wired 4.05: Memetic Engineering 7 Israel celebrates Irgun hotel bombers - Telegraph King David Hotel bombing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 8 International Terrorism: Image and Reality, by Noam Chomsky 9‘Telegenically Dead’: Israel’s crumbling media war 10 Jacob M. Victor, Politics, Cinema, And The Middle East: Reconsidering Exodus | New Society. This is an article from a Harvard student, who, in 2008, admired the film’s idealism and “optimistic and meaningful vision,” or something like that. 11 SS Exodus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 12 Patria disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Munya Mardor, the militant who planted the bomb, revealed that it was a Haganah operation in 1957, and claimed the intention was to disable, not sink, the ship. 13 Quoted in, Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953) 14 Lilienthal 15 ‘To Sum It All Up, I Regret Nothing, Ben Hecht, Perfidy The Kastner story is complicated and contentious, and includes Kastner’s role in testimony that acquitted some Nazis at Nuremberg. Hecht, an ardent Zionist himself, takes to task not only Kastner, but the Jewish Agency executive, including Ben-Gurion. For a more complete picture of these issues, Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and 51 Documents are indispensable. 16 Quoted in Lilienthal 17 Advises Reversal Of Zionist Policy - Sulzberger Says Advocates of Jewish Statehood Put It Before Haven for Displaced - Article - NYTimes.com Once Upon a Time, The Times Debated Israel and Divided Jewish Allegiance – Mondoweiss Also quoted in Lilienthal 18 Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 - Benny Morris - Google Books Ben-Gurion’s Zionism - New York Times 19 Gaza Residents Share Allegations of Abuse, Claim Israeli Soldiers Used Them as Human Shields | Alternet

[thepolemicist]

The Dogs of Hell: An Original Jihadi Trashes ISIS

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In my last post, I treated ISIS as a phenomenon that serves imperial interests—the latest character in an ongoing tragedy of the opportunist use of jihadi players by hegemonic powers, which went into production in Afghanistan in 1979, and which has been on the road throughout the Middle East since, with the script frequently re-written as some members of the original cast and crew drop out, and new faces take on the challenge. One of the keys to its long run is the improvisational skill with which the producers adapt to the new talent that jumps on the well-financed and outfitted stage they have provided.

Thus, I have argued that ISIS, like other jihadi groups, has been effectively armed and nourished by American interventions in the region, and that its dramatic appearance and antics are of the If-they-didn’t-exist-we’d-have-had-to-invent-them genre—particularly, at this particular conjuncture, in regard to the grand plan for Syria. I am not, however, arguing that it was deliberately created by any particular country to do so. That’s not impossible, but I’ve seen no dispositive evidence of that. ISIS is just as likely, and no less perniciously, the product of the benign inadvertence of those who set and supplied the stage.

I do find it understandable, however, that many in the region, who doubt the possibility of coincidence—especially serial coincidences, especially serial coincidences that always end up promoting the urgent necessity for imperial powers to intervene in a particular group of Arab and Muslim countries for ostensibly non-imperialist reasons—will tend to favor notions that ISIS in Syria (and Iraq) is a deliberate creation of the foreign powers meddling in the region.

To get a glimpse of the kind of thinking that is prevalent in the region, and prevalent even among fellow jihadis, about ISIS, I strongly suggest that you look at the remarkable interview with Nabeel Naiem on Syria News below. (Bear with the rocky translation from Syria News.) I don’t endorse his theories about ISIS, or anything else he says, but if you’re interested in the dynamics of jihadism and jihadi thinking in the region, and of how even the most militant Islamists detest ISIS, you’re unlikely to find anything like it.

I’ve included the full transcript below. Here are some highlights:

Naiem was the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and claims to be an original jihadi, a pal of Bin Laden, and especially Al-Zawahiri, since Afghanistan.

Regarding ISIS, he says, not surprisingly, that Baghdadi is basically a U.S. agent: “It is known that the USA released him from prison and he spent 20 to 30 million US Dollars to establish these ISIS groups and the first ISIS camps were established in Jordan…These camps were supervised by the Marines, and the arming of ISIS is all American.” Furthermore, as of the time of the interview, he notes: “ISIS did not kill a single American. The opposition fighting Bashar Al-Assad fiercefully [sic] for 3 years did not shoot a single bullet against Israel.”

On Obama’s claim that he was surprised to find that American weapons were leaked to Nusra:

Didn’t Obama say that? Leaked?! You discovered it was leaked after 2 years war?! Nusra Front fighters are 10,000 and ISIS fighters are another 10,000, all 20,000 fighters using American weapons, and Obama claims after 2 years he discovers his (American) weapons are leaked to them?! Are you thinking we are fools?

His real fury, though, is directed against the turn taken by jihadi groups like the post-Afghan Al Qaeda under Zawahari, al-Nusra under Zarrqawi, and ISIS under Baghdadi. He characterizes them as takfir—meaning, essentially, that they indiscriminately label fellow Muslims (both Sunni and Shia) and other believers as infidels, and kill them for it. The takfir ideology, he says, is particularly “spread among the Muslims in Europe and it’s spread in Saudi because Wahhabism is the closest to Takfir than others.”

His take on Al-Qaeda: “The organization deviated, they became Takfiris, they are killing Muslims…. After Osama Bin Laden’s death Al-Qaeda was bought by the Qatari Intelligence”

He denounces ISIS in the strongest Islamic terms, saying: “It fights both Sunnah and Shiites, when ISIS entered Sammerra [it] killed a thousand Sunni in cold blood… and it kills Shiites and kills Christians and kills whoever it faces, ISIS considers all people infidels and their bloods are free.[sic]…[T]he prophet PBuH called them Dogs of Hell.”

Regarding their fight in Syria, he says to jihadi acquaintances: “Who will replace Bashar [al Assad]?... [Y]ou are going to fight in favor of America and Israel, will you be the one to rule Syria?... If you were the one who will rule Syria I will come and fight on your side …But …you are being used to remove Bashar, and then [Ahmad] Jarba [Leader of Syrian National Coalition], Salim Idress [former Chief of Staff of Free Syrian Army], Issam Hattito [Head of Syrian Muslim Brotherhood} will come, all of those are being raised in the spy nest in London, it’s not you who will rule.”

His general view of what jihadi groups like al-Nusra and ISIS are doing to the region:

This is the work of agents (spies), exposed and debunked, and we don’t want to fool ourselves and hide our heads in the sand, the region is under a conspiracy and it’s to drag Iran to a war of attrition.. It’s required to clash Saudi and Iran in the 100 years’ war, an endless war …This is what we should understand, fight and stand against.  [T]he efforts of all Islamic countries, Sunnah and Shiites, must combine, to eradicate these groups, because these groups are the claws of colonialism in the region, it’s not on religious bases, there are members of ISIS who do not pray, so in Al-Qaeda, there are members who didn’t pray a single kneeling, there must be a combination of the countries efforts to organically eliminate these groups by security and by intellect, disprove their ideology.

Watch it. You won’t be sorry:

Transcript:

With us here in the studio Sheikh Nabeel Naim former founder of Jihad Organization & expert in Islamist groups, welcome..

Noting that you were in Afghanistan with Osama Bin Laden & Dr. Ayman Zawahri, in accommodation and also in prison with Dr. Ayman Zawahri, can we say now you retired from Al-Qaeda?

Nabeel Naiem: Not really, they are the ones who deviated, we went there to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and there was almost a unanimous agreement among Islamic clerics that time on that (Jihad against Soviets), and after that they deviated and turned their activities against Islamic and Arabic countries, and they committed the prohibited which is killing Muslims, and at the same time after the death of Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda turned into a mercenary (group)..

- You are one of the founders of Jihad in Egypt, and you were at the beginning times of Al-Qaeda so to speak, can a member of that rank distance himself from Al-Qaeda, leave the organization? Will the organization leave him? Some say it is not accepted in the ideology of the organization.

Nabeel Naiem: No, the organization deviated, they became Takfiris, they are killing Muslims.. Am I fighting Jihad (holy war) to go to hell or seeking heaven?!

What is the cause of Jihad? (whoever kills a believer intentionally – his recompense is Hell, wherein he will abide eternally, and Allah has become angry with him and has cursed him and has prepared for him a great punishment) [Quran 4:93]

- Did they call you a Kafir (non-believer) now?

Nabeel Naiem: The high ranks, like Ayman, no they did not, but the small lads they’re the ones who consider me Kafir.

- The natural question one would ask: Why wouldn’t some who consider you Kafir try to assassinate you?

Nabeel Naiem: No, I’m a legend.. I have a history those same boys are astonished with my history, and they wonder why I changed, I was the cloud above those boys..

I was a solid warrior and I fought and have a horrible history whether inside Egypt or outside it, I’m not just a lad, or someone who just joined, I was everything in the organization..

I mean now after the Takfiri ideology (labeling people as Kuffar – non-believers) why nobody tried to liquidate you with this Takfiri ideology?

This is with God’s grace upon me, and then I have a history.. When they get to know my history.. none of them have achieved the history I did.

- Back to the questions I understand you’re telling me the main structure of Al-Qaeda does not exist anymore.. Are we talking now about schism? Can we say that (Daesh) ISIS is part of Al-Qaeda?

Nabeel Naiem: No, the old commanders have left the whole organization, only Ayman is left and around him a few we call them mentally retarded or crazy, Takfiri people.. But all the founders have left, some died and the others just left..

As for ISIS, it follows the ideology of Al-Qaeda organization, which was found by Sayyed Imam Sherif and put it in his book Al Jamei Fi Talab Al-ilm Al Sharif (Bible of Seeking Honorable Learning), & it’s one of the most dangerous books circulated in the world, and it’s translated to all languages by the way, Kurdish, Urdu, Persian, Turkish.. etc.

- You say that ISIS is a branch of Al-Qaeda?

Nabeel Naiem: It adopts the ideology of Al-Qaeda. ISIS was established in 2006, we created Al-Qaeda since 1989.

- Explain to me now the position of Dr. Ayman Zawahri from ISIS and Abu Bakr Baghdadi (head of ISIS), what do they consider him?

Nabeel Naiem: He (Zawahri) asked Abu Bakr Baghdadi to pledge allegiance to him (as the Emir..) but Abu Bakr Baghdadi, since he’s basically a U.S. agent, told him: we are the people of cause, the cause of liberating Iraq, Syria and so.. You’re the one who should pledge allegiance to us, Ayman (Zawahri) refused so there was a dispute and a fight between them.

- How he is an American agent? Explain to us how?

Nabeel Naiem: It is known that the USA released him from prison and he spent 20 to 30 million US Dollars to establish these ISIS groups and the first ISIS camps were established in Jordan, and Jordan doesn’t allow camps for charity, when Jordan establish camps to train terrorist groups, it doesn’t do that out of good will and charity, these camps were supervised by the Marines, and the arming of ISIS is all American.. and how do they arrange their expenses? I was in charge of a camp for 120 men, we were spending thousands of thousands (of dollars).. food, drinks, weapons, munition, training..

- Excuse me, you’re talking about ISIS? You were in charge of an ISIS camp?

Nabeel Naiem: No, I am telling you I was once in charge of a camp of 120 men and we were spending that time thousands (of Dollars), imagine how much this ISIS is spending?! Let me tell you something.. The wounded from ISIS during (terrorist) operations, are they being treated here in Lebanon? No, neither in Syria, nor in Saudi nor in Egypt, where do they go? They go to Israel. Now as we speak there are 1,500 of ISIS & Nusra (Front) are in Tel Aviv hospitals.

- From where this information?

Nabeel Naiem: Where are their wounded? Don’t they have wounded? Where are they being treated? This is well known..

- They have field hospitals, and it’s remarkable that they have a number of doctors in their ranks, even doctors from European countries..

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, the field doctor would only give first aid until you reach the hospital.

- You mentioned an important point about financing, I read for your a lot actually when at the beginning of Al-Qaeda when talking about Osama Bin Laden you were talking about self-financing..

Nabeel Naiem: Osama was spending by himself, but before Osama there was the International Islamic Relief Organization and the connection between us and them was Dr. Abdulla Azzam, then we had some issues with Adbulla Azzam so he cut off from us the money and expenses so we replaced him with Osama Bin Laden, and the brothers in Al-Qaeda, mainly from the GCC countries called him Emir of Arabs.

- You just mentioned that 120 members required thousands, we are talking about a structure spread worldwide, could this be understood in the context of self-financing reaching ISIS today? I’ll read what the British Independent Newspaper said, it reveals there are a number of donors from Saudi who played an essential role in establishing Jihadist groups since over 30 years, that’s why I ask you about the beginnings as you were there then.. It’s a CIA report and it’s after September 11 attacks and it suggests Al-Qaeda had relied on middlemen who collected money from Saudi & other GCC donors..

Nabeel Naiem: This is ‘crab’ what the Independent says, these are foolish people, a fool journalist who doesn’t know what to say. First of all, the donations of GCC citizens to the Jihadist groups in Afghanistan was known and done publicly and it was advertised in newspapers and on TV, what this Independent guy adding?

I’m one of the people who took more than a thousand free air tickets from the International Islamic Relief Organization

- Please explain what are you aiming at with the International Islamic Relief Org.?

Nabeel Naiem: It was paying our expenses while we were in the Afghani Jihad, bring weapons, ammunition, training, food, drinks.. all of this we were getting from the Islamic Relief Org.. they were spending..

- This is what I meant, Islamic Relief Org. is specialized in collecting Zakat (charity) and it’s in Saudi (Arabia)..

Nabeel Naiem: These are fools.. Prince Sulaiman Bin Abdul Aziz was in charge of it, it was not running loose you grab what you want and go on.. It was Saudi Intelligence and Prince Sulaiman Bin Abdul Aziz was in charge of it, it wasn’t a loose charity you fill your pockets and walk, No.

Secondly, there was a hospital called Kuwaiti Crescent Hospital, it had 250 beds, it had all kinds of operations, and it had doctors employed there, money (budget), medicine, used to spend millions, it was under Kuwaiti (Red) Crescent.

So what new this Independent is telling? USA itself was supporting Hikmatyar, Who brought Stinger missiles to the Afghani Mujahideen? The missiles which badly hurt the USSR? It was brought by the USA..

- This is the point you mentioned when talking about Al-Qaeda, USA supported Al-Qaeda because it was fighting Russia, today when we come closer to this region, who supports who in favor of who? ISIS works for who?

Nabeel Naiem: Look, there’s nothing constant in these matters, take for example after Russia was defeated (in Afghanistan) the Americans wanted to get rid of the Arab Afghanis, and in fact the Arab Afghanis were arrested, deported and some like us were jailed, so Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was struck by September 11 attacks and after Osama Bin Laden’s death Al-Qaeda was bought by the Qatari Intelligence, and I tell you during the International Conference of Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) in Istanbul, Qatar decided to create a fund to sponsor Free Egyptian Army and paid 1 billion dollar for it, and the person in charge of this fund is Ali Kurrah Zadah, Muslim Brotherhood official in Turkey, this is the finance, not like someone says 1 sheikh is donating..!

- This is one side, what’s important to know is what ISIS wants from Iraq? Is it the issue of borders? The borders strategy? Borders war? But this ideology is trans-borders it seems, how did ISIS expand from Syria into Iraq? What does it want exactly from Iraq?

Nabeel Naiem: No dear, ISIS started in Iraq, and Ibrahim Abu Bakr Baghdadi is Iraqi (national), and after that they were given camps to train in Jordan and they smuggled into Syria from Jordan and they were defeated in Syria then they moved back into Iraq once again.

As to what’s happening in Iraq, it’s bigger than ISIS, Mosul city has 4 million residents & it’s second largest province, in Iraq there’s a problem between the Arabs in Anbar and (Prime Minister) Maliki, and ‘Maliki Army’ who handed over their weapons had Shiite commanders, so nobody would argue ISIS and Shiites, those commanders handed over their weapons to Arab tribes but ISIS is in the headlines.

ISIS has something called Management of Savagery, a book titled Management of Savagery..

- We have shown some details about this book on our channel..

Nabeel Naiem: Abu Bakr Muhammad Maqdisi in this book has taken the same policy of Genghis Khan, thanks God they didn’t claim they derived their policies from prophet Muhammad, because God said: ‘There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent pattern for anyone whose hope is in Allah and the Last Day and [who] remembers Allah often.’ [Quran 33:21].. So their ‘excellent pattern’ was Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan used to enter a village and annihilates all living in it, even animals he’d slaughter it, and burn down the houses, so the next village hears that Genghis Khan is coming they flee away and this is what ISIS is doing in Iraq, and what’s the goal of ISIS? When ISIS entered Samerra they killed a thousand Sunni, and now killing Shiites, and this is the American policy.

Henry Kissinger wrote a memo in 1982 or 1984, don’t remember exactly, it’s titled The 100 Years War. When asked where this 100 years war will occur? He said in the Middle East when we ignite the war between the Sunnah and the Shiites.

So they’re working on igniting the war between the Sunna and the Shiites, just like what Abu Mussab (Zarqawi) used to blow up Sunnah mosques then blow up Shiite mosques, to start the sectarian war in the region; and this is of course an American plot, and I tell you ISIS didn’t kill a single American.

ISIS didn’t behead a single American and didn’t play football with his head, they beheaded Muslims and ate livers of Muslims and didn’t kill a single American though it’s established since 2006..

- You’re talking about ISIS’s brutality and ideology but it finds popularity among the youth.. and popularity among many sides and it practices the highest level of violence and brutality, can you explain to us what makes all these groups with all its diversities to join this organization?

Nabeel Naiem: It’s the Takfiri ideology, the problem with this Takfiri ideology it’s widely spread among the European Muslims, why?

I sat with them.. The European Muslims denounced everything they saw in Europe..

- But they also come from GCC countries and Islamic countries even..

Nabeel Naiem: I’m with you, it’s spread among the Muslims in Europe and it’s spread in Saudi because Wahhabism is the closest to Takfir than others. And when I sat with them I found out they have a single-sided Takfiri thinking, like when I spoke with Sayyed Imam in the judgment against the ruler’s assistants, where he said there’s no ruler who can rule by himself, he must have the support of the police and army thus the police & army are all also Kuffar (infidels) like him, so I asked what about who goes to the polls to elect the ruler? He replied: He’s a Kafir (infidel).

I told him: you have labeled the Army, police and the people as Kuffar (infidels), you’re a Takfiri..

The religion (Islam) is not so strict, it includes prevention excuses like ignorance, circumstances, causes.. they didn’t study all this, for them the ruler is an infidel that means all of those with him are infidels.. Bashar (Assad) is a Nusairi then all of those with him are Nusairis, although that the Syrian Army 90% of it is Sunni, because that’s the Sunni percentage of Syrians.

But they are one-sided thinking and they’re ignorant..

- Ignorant in what sense?

Nabeel Naiem: Ignorant of the religion (Islam). I was living with Ayman (Zawahri), Ayman is ignorant, he wasn’t saying anything without consulting me first..

- In spite that you mentioned that Ayman Zawahri was refusing at one stage of time to accept the Takfiris (in Al-Qaeda)..

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, we were the ones who didn’t allow them. I told him: If your brother Muhammad joins the organization we will dissolve it because your brother is Takfiri. So he agreed until we entered jail and we’re separated, his brother came in and took over the whole organization, and his brother is retarded actually, he’s Takfiri and retarded, if you talk with him you feel you’re talking with someone who is brainless..

- That’s what’s strange as I mentioned we’re talking about different segments of societies from different countries and even from different education levels, we see PHD holders, how do you call all of these ignorant?

Nabeel Naiem: Ignorance in religion is something and being a doctor is something else.. I’ll give you an example. If I’m a doctor in a clinic, and with me is a nurse, and for 30 years he will be with me, will he become a doctor after 30 years? Will this nurse become a doctor after 30 years being a nurse?

- This is as a description, right?

Nabeel Naiem: They’re like this, they educate themselves by themselves, they’re like the nurses, they’ll never become doctors. I am specialized in Islamic Sharia, for me he’s ignorant, ignorant in the religion, he doesn’t understand the religion.

- We should explain, you’re talking about Jihad? Salafist Jihad or Takfiris? These are the segments?

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, they’re ignorant..

- All of them?

Nabeel Naiem: I argued with their top sheikh (cleric) – Salafists, Salafist Jihadist and Takfiris, these are 3 different samples, all of them are ignorant?

They’re not different they’re all ignorant, I was living with Sayyed Imam Sharif, he’s the international founder of the whole ideology spread in the region from Jakarta to Nouakchott (in Mauritania), he wrote them a book titled ‘Al Jamei Fi Talab Al-ilm Al-Sharif (Bible in Seeking Honorable Learning), this book is the manifest and ideology of all the Takfiri groups like ISIS, Nusra Front, Ansar Bet Maqdas (Jerusalem House Supporters), Salafist Jihadist, and all of those you can imagine, and nobody wrote after the book of Sayyed Imam (Sharif).

I debated with Sayyed Imam and debated with him about a lot of matters, he told me in the next edition of the book he will rectify & mention the comments I said, he didn’t, he re-issued the book as it is.

I also argued with someone a Takfiri just for sins, a sin is infidelity, like the one committing adultery doesn’t do so and he’s a believer thus he’s a Kafir (infidel), so I argued with him: the punishment for the believer who becomes a disbeliever (leaves Islam) is death, and the adulterer’s punishment is flogging, how does the punishment differ (when committing a sin only)?

The differ in ideology and thinking is long since the beginnings, after Osama Bin Laden (era) between (Ayman) Zawahri & (Abu Bakr) Maqdisi, which resulted in the schism among other organizations, but when we talk now about ISIS, if we compare them with Al-Qaeda, there’s an essential difference between them..

There’s no difference in ideology, only organizational difference..

- Then what is the future of ISIS based on?

Nabeel Naiem: As long as the youth are convinced with the Takfir ideology, ISIS will continue.

Secondly, ISIS is playing on 2 levels: Bashar Assad (Syrian president) is a Nusairi infidel & should be fought, and they use the Fatwas (religious judicial opinion) of Ibn Taymiyyah in regards with the Nusairi sect..

- Depending on feeding these thoughts will ensure its continuity, and maybe other interests..

Nabeel Naiem: And oil.. All sorts of feeding: intellectual, money, gears, munition, all of that. .As long as there are sources feeding this ideology ISIS will continue..

Bernard Lewis founder of Fourth-Generation Warfare said so, he said: we do not need trans-continent armies that would awake nationalism and they return to us as bodies like what happened in Afghanistan & Vietnam, but we should find agents inside the (targeted) country who will carry out the task of the soldiers, and we need a media tool to falsify truths for the people, and money to spend on them..

This is the Fourth-Generation Warfare, agents instead of soldiers..

- This is an alternative army, a war by proxy?

Nabeel Naiem: Yes of course.

- Between who (this war)? We are talking about armies on the ground, Al Qaeda and all what branches out of it, these armies work for the account of which battle and between who?

Nabeel Naiem: It works for the US Intelligence (CIA).

- Who it fights?

Nabeel Naiem: The regimes, they put a plan in 1998 called Clean Break (PNAC)..

- In Iraq, who is it fighting? Is it fighting Nouri Maliki (Iraqi PM)?

Nabeel Naiem: It fights both Sunnah and Shiites, when they entered Sammerra, Sheikh Ali Hatimi, head of Anbar Tribes said: ISIS entered Sammerra and killed a thousand Sunni in cold blood.. and it kills Shiites and kills Christians and kills whoever it faces, ISIS considers all people infidels and their bloods are free.

Who killed Imam Ali appropriated his blood, who slaughtered Hussein wasn’t he a Muslim and from a sect claims they’re Islamist?

All these have a shameless historic extension, the prophet PBuH called them Dogs of Hell, the prophet said: ‘if I meet them I will kill them the same killing of ‘Aad and Iram of the Pillars’, those are the ones behind these ideologies, the ideologies of Khawarij (outlaws in Islam) who the prophet warned of them, and these will continue, as for ISIS, ISIS did not kill a single American. The opposition fighting Bashar Al-Assad fiercefully for 3 years did not shoot a single bullet against Israel..

- What makes the close enemy, so to speak, in the ideology of these groups, the close enemy is these countries and its leaders, geographically speaking, this term as close enemy and far enemy exists in Al-Qaeda, you mentioned Israel which is not far geographically, what makes it far for them?

Nabeel Naiem: No, they don’t say this, they say: fighting an apostate is a more priority than fighting the original infidel, close and far that’s an old saying.. The apostate is us now..

- As per their understanding?

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, we are apostate, the Arab rulers are apostate, the Arab armies are apostate, thus fighting the apostate is a priority over fighting the original infidel, the Jew.

For instance, Issam Hattito, head of Muslim Brotherhood responsible for leading the battles against Bashar Assad, where does he reside? Is he in Beirut? Riyadh or Cairo? He’s residing in Tel Aviv.

Ahmad Jarba, does he stay in Riyadh, Cairo or Tehran? He’s moving between New York, Paris and London, his employers, who pay his expenses..

When Obama was exposed and it was learned that he’s arming ISIS and Nusra Front with American and Turkish weapons said: ‘We will stop the arming because the American weaposn were leaked to Nusra..’ Didn’t Obama say that?

Leaked?! You discovered it was leaked after 2 years war?!

Nusra Front fighters are 10,000 and ISIS fighters are another 10,000, all 20,000 fighters using American weapons, and Obama claims after 2 years he discovers his (American) weapons are leaked to them?! Are you thinking we are fools?

This is a conspiracy against the region, and I told you Netenyahu & Dick Chenney put the Clean Break plan in the year 1998, and it’s destroying 4 countries, they start with Iraq, then Syria then Egypt then Saudi Arabia. It’s called Clean Break plan (PNAC), well known.. Using radical groups in the region.

The legal case (former Egyptian president) Mohammad Morsi is being tried for, the case of communicating (with the enemy) and contacting Ayman Zawahri was an assignment of Issam Haddad by Obama in person on 28 December 2012, he was at the White House in a meeting with the CIA, he says in his confessions when interrogated by the public prosecution in the case..

- How did you get it?

Nabeel Naiem: These public prosecution confessions are published and are available.. Obama entered (the meeting room) and gave the CIA team a paper and left, they read it and told him: it’s required by the Muslim Brotherhood to contain the radical groups in the region starting with Hamas & Al-Qaeda, so he called Ayman Zawahri through Rifa’a Tahtawi, head of presidential court, who happens to be Ayman’s cousin from Rifa’a Tahtawi’s phone.

Ayman (Zawahri) talking to Mohammad Morsi and Morsi says to him: Peace be Upon You Emir (Prince) of Believers, we need your people here in Sinai, and I will provide them with expenses, food and water and prevent security from pursuing them..

This was recorded and sent to the public prosecutor and this is what Mohammad Morsi is being tried for.

If you ask how I got to know this? I was in Channel 2 of Egyptian TV, and with me was General Gamal, 1st secretary of Egyptian Intelligence, who recorded the call and written it down and based on it the memo was written and handed to the Public Prosecutor.

The TV presenter asked him: Is it allowed for the Intelligence Services to tap the telephone of the president of the republic?

He replied: I’m not tapping the president’s phone, I was tapping Ayman’s (Zawahri) phone and found the president talking to him, telling him Peace be Upon You Emir of Believers, so I wrote down the tape, wrote a report and submitted to the head of intelligence..

She asked him: Did you inform the president? He replied: It’s not my job, I do not deal with the president (directly), I deal with the head of intelligence and that’s my limits.

She asked him: What did you write in your investigations and your own report, what did you write after you wrote down the tape (contents)?

I swear to God he told her, & I was in the same studio,: I wrote that Mr. Mohammad Morsi Ayyat president of the republic is a danger for Egypt’s National Security.

So the ignorant should know why the army stood by the side of the people on 30 June, because the president is dealing with Al-Qaeda organization, and it’s recorded, and he’s being on trial for it now, and head of intelligence wrote that the president of the republic is a danger on Egypt’s National Security.

This is the task of these groups in the region. When Obama said he supported Morsi’s campaign with 50 million (Dollars), and when (Yousuf) Qaradawi said: Obama sent us 60 million Dollars for the Syrian ‘Resistance’, God bless you Obama, and we need more..

Did Obama convert to Islam or America became a Hijabi (wore a burqa, veil)?

I ask Qaradawi: When Obama supports the Syrian opposition, is it to establish the Caliphate? And return the days of the Rashideen Caliphates? Or Obama converted to Islam or America became a Hijabi to support the Syrian opposition?

This is the work of agents (spies), exposed and debunked, and we don’t want to fool ourselves and hide our heads in the sand, the region is under a conspiracy and it’s to drag Iran to a war of attrition..

The first statement ISIS announced after the fight with Maliki it said: ‘We will head to Najaf & Karballa and destroy the sacred shrines’, they dragged the legs of Iran (into Iraq).

Iran said they’ll defend the sacred shrines, it has to, it cannot (not defend them), this is what’s required,

It’s required to clash Saudi and Iran in the 100 years war, an endless war, it exhausts Saudi resources and its monies, and it exhausts Iran resources and its monies, like what they did during the days of Saddam in Iraq (with Iran). This is what we should understand, fight and stand against..

- You mentioned Egypt, Syria and Iraq, we see in all of it similar activities, and you also mentioned Saudi, is it in a coming phase Saudi will be targeted?

Nabeel Naiem: It was meant when Muslim Brotherhood lay their ground in ruling Egypt, problems would start in Saudi in 2016 and in the whole Gulf (GCC), this is not my words, this what the head of national security in United Arab Emirates Dhahi Khalfan said, he arrested those who confessed.

From where did Dhahi Khalfan get this? They arrested cells which confessed in details: If Muslim Brotherhood settles in Egypt, they’ll start exporting problems to the Gulf (GCC) through their existing cells, and destabilize the security of the Gulf, and this is what Dhahi Khalfan, head of national security in UAE said, not what I say.

- The circumstances and factors we saw in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, in the countries: Syria, Egypt and Iraq, there was a security vacuum and repercussions of so called Arab Spring, what vacuum we are talking about in Saudi Arabia? Where to find the circumstances and factors that would allow these organizations to enter the (Saudi) kingdom? Opening gaps? Where?

Nabeel Naiem: Look, they have a book being circulated in London titled The Rule of Al Saud, in this book they called the Saudi family as Kuffar (infidels), and that it is unjust, and it steals the monies of the Saudis, and it’s an infidel doesn’t rule by God’s commands, and only applies Sharia law on the weak while the strong and the princess no law being applied on them, a book to educate the Saudi youths abroad to fight a war against the Saudi government, they also say: we call on the kingdom to become a constitutional monarchy, ie. the king doesn’t rule, like the British queen, and this trend is being supported by America and Britain and the people working on this are residing in London, the nest of spies, all the spies of the world reside in London..

Their goal is to divide the region in order to achieve Israel’s security.

Israel is a weak and despicable state, by the way, geopolitical, Israel is not a state, like Qatar, is Qatar a state? Qatar is only a tent and a man sitting it with his money and that’s it..

There are countries like Iran, Saudi and Egypt, in geography it exists until the end of times, and there are countries called the Satanic Shrubs, it’s just found you don’t know how, like Israel and Qatar, it can vanish in one day and you won’t find it..

So for Israel to guarantee its existence, all the surrounding entities around it should be shredded.. Kurds to take one piece, Sunnah take one piece, Maliki takes one piece.. each sect has their own piece just like Lebanon they keep fighting between each other, once they finish beating each other they drink tea then go for a second round beating each other..

- I want to get back to the factors in regards with the Saudi Kingdom, you mentioned what is planned for based on this ideology, and you know better, you have experience and you talk about examples and evidences, but how they will enter?

True there was a statement by the Saudi ministry of interior in last May claiming they dismantled a cell that follows ISIS of 62 members, as they stated, but how they’ll enter (Saudi), what are the factors they’ll be depending on to enter?

Nabeel Naiem: I’m telling you they are preparing for the revolution against the ruling family, that it’s a corrupt family, this family steals the money of the Saudis, talks about the roots of the family..

- From inside the kingdom?

Nabeel Naiem: From inside the kingdom, and there are strong Takfiri members inside the kingdom, because as you know the difference beteween Wahhabi and Takfiri ideologies is as thin as a single hair, thus there are a lot of youths who follow this (Takfiri) ideology, add to it the feeding against the kingdom and its government and against the ruling family, it’s very easy for him to blow himself up with anything..

- So it will be only based on these factors, we don’t want to disregard an important point that groups of the ISIS are from the Gulf countries, and there are reports that the (governments of GCC) are turning a blind eye away from recruiting a number of them and sending them to fight in Syria and in a number of other countries including Iraq, as per these reports, could there be recruiting to use inside the kingdom? To move inside the kingdom?

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, yes, most are Saudis & the move will be like that but they were hoping for the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt to settle in power, that’s why when (Saudi) king Abdallah supported the 30 June revolution (in Egypt), he did so based on the information he has of what will happen in the region

Why did he stand against the Muslim Brotherhood? Saudi was always containing the MBs, and if the MBs (Muslim Brotherhood) ever made money, it was from Saudi, and Mohammad Qotb, the father of all Takfir in the world, spent 40 years of his life in Saudi, he wrote a book called The Ignorance in the Twentieth Century, and he claims we’re living in an ignorance more than the one in the days of the prophet PBuH, and Saudi hosted him and he was teaching in the university.. What made them go against them (MBs)?

Because the Muslim Brotherhood have no religion, no nation, not safe to be with them, they’ll betray anyone.

- On the other hand, how to deal with such an organization and such an ideology?

Nabeel Naiem: The voices of the Islamic moderation very low, throaty, so to speak..

- We do not hear that loud voice who would stand against them, is it not convincing? Or need mediums?

Nabeel Naiem: No, the sapien voice doesn’t have a vim, they’re employees, they’d say let ISIS burn out with who brought it..

It doesn’t have the vim to respond, doesn’t feel the danger, secondly, Azhar in Egypt, which was leading the movement of religious enlightenment, is absented for the past 40 years, the reason for its absent for 40 years is the oil boom, and the voices of the Saudi clergy becoming higher than the Azhar clergy. Salafism was found in Egypt just to fight Azhar (Islamic University), then, the scholars duty is to respond to the ideology of ISIS, detail it and respond to it, scholars should come and say this is what ISIS is saying and the right respond is this.. and I sat with people who came from London to fight in Syria, they sat with me and thanks to God they went from Egypt back to London.

They came to ask me, and I told them, let’s assume that Bashar (Assad) died in the morning, would I be saying: Why God did you take Bashar while the war is not over yet? Who will replace Bashar?

They replied: (Ahmad) Jarba..

I said: Jarba is worth of Bashar shoes only.. They said: true. And they went back.

I told them you are going to fight in favor of America and Israel, will you be the one to rule Syria?

If you were the one who will rule Syria I will come and fight on your side, I swear by God I’ll come and fight on your side..

But are you going to rule Syria after Bashar? He said no, I told him you are being used to remove Bashar and then Jarba, Salim Idress, Issam Hattito will come, all of those are being raised in the spy nest in London, it’s not you who will rule.

- How can we differentiate between religious commitment and the national responsibility? Is there a problem in combining both?

Nabeel Naiem: Yes, yes, of course, there is a strong fault between the national responsibility and the religious commitment. I’ll tell you what the General Guide (leader) of (Muslim) Brotherhood said? He said Toz (B.S.) with Egypt. This is their vision of the national responsibility.

And when the MBs ruled Egypt.. I’ll give you one evidence for their despise to the nation (Egypt), in the last interview done by the Consular Adli Mansour, the interim president of Egypt with Mrs. Lamis Hadidi, the last question she asked him was about the background picture of the map of Egypt behind him, she asked him to tell her the story about this picture behind him..

He said: this picture was done by King Fouad a 100 years ago, we know that first was King Fouad, then King Farouq then Abdul Nasser, Sadat then Mubarak. He told her since King Fouad did this photo a 100 years ago and it’s hanged there, it was removed for 1 year only, when the Muslim Brotherhood ruled Egypt. They removed it and put in the stores..

And they were working on a plot to concede 600 square kilometers to Hamas to resolve the Palestinian cause..

There is a link between the national responsibility and the religious commitment, and this contradicts with the understanding of the Salafists clerics, and I’ll tell you the political theory of imam Ibn Taymiyyah, who people consider him the most strict imam, Ibn Taymiyyah was asked: if the nation’s interest conflicts with applying Sharia, if we apply Sharia will lose the country, what to do?

He said: Maintaining the homeland is a priority over applying Sharia, because if you lose the country, where will you apply Sharia?

I’ll give you an example to make it clearer, if someone is naked and will fall from the 10th floor, will you rescue him or get him something to wear?

Thus, to preserve the country is more important than to apply Sharia if there’s interest conflict.

- And the interest now?

Nabeel Naiem: To preserve the nation.

- And in fact this is the most absented side between the politics, we called the national responsibility and..

Nabeel Naiem: This is because of ignorance, not knowing what’s the national responsibility, there’s no conflict between national responsibility and religious commitment, it’s because those are ignorants the conflict is happening between the nation and the belief.

- This topic needs more discussing, especially in regards with the relations with regional countries, western countries, in regards with the nature of these countries, its backgrounds and its beliefs, we see relations are allowed with India and China, and when we talk about countries like Iran then the religious backgrounds are mentioned and this also might require further`` research if possible we can get a comment from you on it?

Nabeel Naiem: What I want to tell you, the efforts of all Islamic countries, Sunnah and Shiites, must combine, to eradicate these groups, because these groups are the claws of colonialism in the region, it’s not on religious bases, there are members of ISIS who do not pray, so in Al-Qaeda, there are members who didn’t pray a single kneeling, there must be a combination of the countries efforts to organically eliminate these groups by security and by intellect, disprove their ideology..

There must be a response to these groups and explaining its ideology is a stray ideology, contrary to the Islamic Sharia, and this is the ideology that the prophet warned from when he said about Khawarij (Outlaws in Islam):

‘Newly in the religion, ribald in their aims, they go through the religion like how an arrow goes through the bow, if I meet them I will kill them the way Iram and A’ad were killed, they’re the worse killers under the skies, blessed who they kill or who kills of them..’ and he called them: ‘the dogs of hell.’

- Thank you a lot sheikh Nabil Naiem, our guest here in the studio, founder of Jihad Organization formerly, and expert in the Islamist groups. –

[thepolemicist]

America, ISIS, and Syria: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them

Got to source

Artelligence Inc.

Does it take more than one full minute of thought to see what’s going on here?

The short version:

ISIS is the product of years of American military intervention in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. ISIS is the creature of an imperial enterprise—a global effort to bring down the Syrian state using jihadi proxies that included the U.S and its allies--Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and Israel, at least—that could only have proceeded, “at the bidding of,” and managed by, the imperial center. It was by surfing the American-directed “cataract” of weaponry and funds directed against Syria that ISIS became an international jihadi movement surpassing Al-Qaeda itself. Without that American intervention, there would be no ISIS.

In this regard, ISIS is only the latest in a series of worst-ever takfiri groups that has been cooked up in the stew of jihadi proxy fighters the U.S. and its allies have been serving up since the its holy war in Afghanistan in 1979—the one where Zbigniew Brzezinski told Bin Laden’s jihadis, “God is on your side.”1 As Gilbert Mercier quipped, “Just like al-Qaeda, ISIS is the secret love child of United States imperialism and the kings and sheiks of the Gulf states.”2

  An American (“coalition”) military attack on Syria will not destroy ISIS, and will not have the primary purpose of destroying ISIS; it will target and degrade the Syrian military, and its primary purpose will be to destroy the Syrian state’s capacity to resist the onslaught of jihadi rebels, including ISIS—a “rebellion” which hasn’t been going so well recently. The Obama administration knows, and says, that an American military attack will not defeat ISIS. It also knows, and says (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, depending on the audience), that its main objective will be to help the jihadi onslaught succeed. “A­ssad must go” is still the prime directive; the jihadis are still the most effective instrument for that. ISIS changes nothing, except to help sell military intervention to the Western publics. In a number of ways, ISIS has intervened to save the jihadi rebellion from defeat. It’s the reverse of the Vietnam rule: We have to bomb the jihadis in order to save them.

For those who want the details, the long version:

  I started this blog two years ago, on August 23, 2012, with a post on Syria, and have written eight posts touching on the Syrian situation. My penultimate post on Syria, was on August 30 of last year, in the midst of the “Syrian chemical weapons attack” hysteria.  Donning his best rhetorical Sunday suit of moral outrage, and in full warpaint, Obama was ready to do a Libya on Syria. Just before I published, the British parliament had voted against joining the attack, but I still felt 100% certain that Obama would proceed, with or without Congress, within a few days.  In my last Syria post, on September 11, I was happy to have been wrong about that absolute certainty and that timing. It was clear by then that the American people overwhelmingly opposed intervention, and, just as I was publishing that post, the Russians came up with the plan to destroy Syrian chemical weapons. It seemed that the path to war on Syria was becoming more complicated than Obama and the whole bipartisan, neocon/neoliberal humanitarian/military interventionist complex (i.e. the imperialist U.S. government) had hoped, but I still held that there was a 95% probability that the United States would attack Syria.

  Since then, I have sat on my itchy fingers regarding the subject. It was clear to me that there were now serious impediments to launching an American military attack on Syria. There was too much popular resistance, in Europe and America, against another expensive, wasteful, and seemingly (from the perspective of political rationality) pointless war; there was too much knowledge about the increasingly jihadi, and increasingly savage,3 Syrian “rebels” (including their almost certain responsibility for the “chemical weapons” attack Obama and Kerry so self-righteously blamed on Assad); there was too much awareness that the overthrow of the Syrian government by American intervention would have the same disastrous results as Iraq and Libya: replacing a coherent, if authoritarian, polity with a field of rampaging sectarianism and jihadi violence.  On the other hand, the U.S. and its allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel—never gave up on supporting the Syrian and not-so-Syrian “rebels,” and on their insistence that “Assad must go.” And it should be clear to everyone that they do not care if Syria becomes a chaotic jihadi playground—that, in fact, that is the goal. (See those eight posts.)

  Not for a second, during the past year, was I tempted to put my lips together and whistle the happy tune that Obama had really, truly, turned the corner into his real, true, progressive non-interventionist self. As a conscientious steward of imperialism and Zionism (the latter, as indicated below, being a lot of what any Syrian policy is about), the Obama administration cannot renege on the policy commitment it has so forcefully and repeatedly made (In whose interest?) to destroy the Syrian state. Obama is smart enough to realize that, in order to avoid the shitstorm of resistance in Europe and America that he encountered last year, and to maintain not further shred the threadbare ethio-political credibility of the U.S. in the world, any outright American attack on Syria will require something that can pass (for the happy tunesters, at least) as an urgent, inescapable, “humanitarian” justification. The “chemical weapons” pretext that the Russians so rudely snatched from his trigger fingers last year is gone and, revealed as completely phony in the first place,4 ain’t coming back. What’s a poor, lost liberal imperialist to do?

  Cue ISIS.

  What better enemy could we hope for? Seeming (to deliberately mis-informed Americans) to appear suddenly out of nowhere, led by a mysterious Rolex-wearing Islamic fundamentalist villain, armed and financed to the teeth, not only fanatic but disciplined and well-trained—ISIS has been rampaging through Iraq and Syria, defeating conventional armies, seizing town after town after military base, proclaiming—and establishing credible authority over—an Islamic caliphate covering more territory than Great Britain, and, all the while, butchering anyone who stands in its way.5 Fair game for ISIS execution are all Shia and any other Muslim who deviates from its strict Sunni takfiri dogma, anyone who is of another faith, anyone it considers an “infidel”—hell, anyone at all it feels like killing. Along the way, it proudly advertises its exploits and its brutality in well-produced social media spots. All of this culminating—for Americans and Europeans, in the same month our ally Saudi Arabia beheaded 19 people, and our ally Israel killed 500 children—in the brutal beheading of two American reporters.

  Hell, who wouldn’t want to destroy these guys? I sure do.

  And that is exactly what Obama is counting on: Now, I can go to the people, now I can go the Congress, and show them the evil we must eradicate. It has an easy-to-remember/catchy name; it has a violent TV show; it has an ugly, bearded face; It has the head of James Foley in its bloody hands. Everyone will understand. This evil, we must eliminate. We just must. We must bomb them in Syria, where they have established strong bases of operation, as we are now doing in Iraq.

  In a cute bit of political alchemy, “chemical weapons” have become ISIS.

    It Depends on What IS is

  Might we pause for a moment, however, to consider where these guys came from? Because they did not appear out of the desert sand a month ago. And ISIS sure qualifies as one of those “if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it” phenomena.

  Starting with Iraq, let’s remember that the American invasion of that country destroyed a coherent, secular, relatively advanced Arab state, and gave rise to a previously unseen Sunni-Shia sectarianism—including, predictably, a previously unseen al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In 2010, after the Americans had killed off most of the leadership of that organization (that hadn’t existed before the American intervention), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had been a deputy in AQI, emerged from five years in an American prison to become its new leader.6

  Seeing the opportunities provided by the Syrian civil war, al-Baghdadi established a Syrian Al-Qaeda franchise, Jabbat al-Nusra. When tensions broke out with al-Nusra, al-Baghdadi rebranded AQI as ISIS (or ISIL, now IS)—an international jihadi movement that would seek to subsume or defeat all other Syrian jihadi groups (including al-Nusra).

  As the civil war in Syria heated up, ISIS was nourished by the U.S.-directed (by CIA Director David Petraeus and “senior White House officials”) “cataract” of weaponry, funds, and radical Islamist fighters that poured into the Syrian civil war through the good graces of the Gulf States and Turkey. Not to mention England and Croatia. (Croatia?! Arms were pouring in from everywhere.) The Telegraph described just the little-known Zagreb hub of this effort thusly: “The United States has coordinated a massive airlift of arms to Syrian rebels from Croatia with the help of Britain and other European states, despite the continuing European Union arms embargo,” an enterprise “paid for by Saudi Arabia at the bidding of the United States.”7

  Oh, and don’t forget Libya, where the real Benghazi backstory was about the re-gifting of arms supplied to the jihadis there to those in Syria. Retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney says, flat out: “Some of those weapons from Benghazi ended up in the hands of ISIS. So we helped build ISIS.”8 And Israel, which, you might think, would recoil from supporting such crazy Muslims, actually runs field hospitals for jihadi rebels in the Golan Heights, where the Golani Brigade “maintain[s] heavy security around the Syrians in order to maintain their anonymity and thus ensure their safe return” (to combat, of course).9

  So claims that the American-managed flood of weaponry, money, intelligence, etc, only went to properly “vetted,” “moderate,” only kinda-sorta-jihadi rebels in Syria are patently ridiculous. No matter how good the initial “vetting,” who can stop the Free Syrian Army “good rebel” who has been armed and trained by the CIA in Jordan from walking across the wadi—alone or with his whole brigade—to officially join the ISIS “bad rebels,” alongside whom he has been fighting already, and who are now winning all the battles? Nobody has,10 and nobody will.

  Further, as William Engdahl reports, citing “informed Jordanian officials,” “key members of ISIS” may have been “trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, … the secret US training camps in Jordan and elsewhere have trained perhaps several thousand Muslim fighters in techniques of irregular warfare, sabotage and general terror. The claims by Washington that they took special care not to train ‘Salafist’ or jihadist extremists, is a joke. How do you test if a recruit is not a jihadist? Is there a special jihad DNA that the CIA doctors have discovered?”11

  Fact is, in Syria, as veteran reporter Patrick Cockburn knows, the U.S. and its allies “claim they are training and funding a ‘moderate’ military opposition but this no longer exists in any strength on the ground.”12 Obama himself has complained about the “difficulty [of] finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels.” saying it’s “always been a fantasy” that any such force would defeat Assad.13

  As for the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is supposed to be that secular alternative—well, it’s more of a Captive American Army: “The leadership of the FSA is American,” says [a] veteran officer …“The Americans are completely marginalizing the military staff.” It’s also demoralized and in disarray, it’s arms-length Syrian commanders afraid of “Going ‘back to Syria,’ as [Chief of Staff Gen. Abdul-Ilah al Bashir]  calls the plan,…If air cover is not provided by the United States and its allies,…[because] they will be targets for Assad’s air force.” So the West’s hand-picked secular leaders are afraid to set foot in their own country except under the umbrella of American bombs. The Caliph don’t get no air support. Yet there he is, in thick of it. Who do you think will end up winning “on the ground” if Assad goes?14

  As one Syrian rebel, who had, unsurprisingly, fought in Afghanistan, said: “Syria . . . will be an Islamic and Sharia state… We will not accept anything else. Democracy and secularism are completely rejected.”15

  Regarding its unique sources of arms and financing: Until recently ISIS has been getting its weapons and money from the same source as every other Syrian rebel group. And, if ISIS now has tons of advanced American weaponry taken from the pride of the new Iraqi army, hundreds of millions of dollars taken from Mosul’s banks (a city that was “handed over” to ISIS by Iraqi army commanders), and a cadre of experienced officer’s from Saddam’s army, all of which provide significantly more fighting power and financial autonomy—well, that’s the fruit of American democracy-building invasion, too, is it not?16 Since June, Obama, so concerned about radical Islamists, has been asking for another $500 million17 for Syrian “rebels,” a significant chunk of which, any fool knows, is going to end up at the disposal of ISIS.

  Earlier this year, before ISIS’s sudden and dramatic capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, caused the Western media to notice, the UN special envoy to Iraq stated the obvious: that the civil war in Syria was "affording terrorist networks the occasion to forge links across the [Iraq-Syria] border and expand their support base."18 It’s thanks to the determination of the United States and its allies to destroy the last bastion of secular nationalism in Syria that, over the past eighteen months that ISIS has been able to inexorably absorb or defeat most of the other jihadi groups fighting against Assad, and, concurrently, win and hold towns and territory in both Syria and Iraq, with the ambition of creating a new Caliphate encompassing the entire “Levant.”

  Understanding all this, after about a minute of thought: “it should be evident to even the most uninformed, that US meddling in the Middle East has led directly to the regional chaos now unfolding, and that the last possible option for defeating jihadism in the region is for the US to continue meddling.”19

  And after another half minute, it should be obvious the ISIS is not the primary target of proposed American military attacks in Syria.

  http://landdestroyer.blogspot.dk/2014/06/natos-terror-hordes-in-iraq-pretext-for.html

  Isn’t it amazing that, during the past two years, al-Baghdadi has been able to move his forces freely back and forth between Iraq and Syria, wheeling around the deserts in long convoys of white pickups, obtained below-invoice from Petraeus Toyota, the only dealership in town? He was able to capture important territory, from oil fields in Syria to Fallujah in Iraq—a city that was the scene of the most high-drama, high-carnage battle of the American invasion. He was able to command and televise the beheading of legions of Syrian and Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Did all of this pass unremarked by state-of-the-art American satellites overhead, and surveillance stations all around? Was the NSA too busy listening to Americans’ phone sex chats?  And the American media, too busy watchdogging the Kardashians? There was certainly no alarm raised from the U.S. government and press about the evil “beyond anything that we've seen…. an imminent threat to every interest we have,…anywhere.”20

  And there was no threat of American military action, during any of this, not even when ISIS took control of Syrian oil-producing areas, and profited from selling oil to all takers, including the Syrian government. It was only when Erbil and the Kurdish oil fields were threatened by ISIS—and not primarily to save the Yazidis, who were mostly rescued by Syrian Kurds—that the U.S. began bombing ISIS forces in Iraq.21

  It’s important to note that, during the last two years, the Syrian army was engaged in fighting and winning its war against other jihadi groups. Don’t take my word for that: In March, the Washington Post headlined: “Assad is steadily winning the war,” and in June 6—four days before ISIS seized Mosul—the Times of Israel headlined: “Syria's Assad Has Won Civil War,” noting that he had secured control of “70-80 percent of essential Syria.”22 Only after its recent string of brutal conquests of Syrian military bases, does ISIS now fully control Raqqa province (the Syrian government still controls all others), and threaten the strategic city of Aleppo.23 ISIS to the rescue.

  In Iraq, much has been made, rightly, I think, about the extreme Shia sectarianism of the al-Maliki government, which certainly has been a factor that led Sunni officers to join, and Sunni towns to welcome, ISIS forces.  Of course, the growth of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq was a predictable—and, arguably, deliberate—result of the American-enforced “regime change,” and Maliki was the preferred American candidate eight years ago. Nor is it clear that the new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, “the United States’ preferred candidate since late June,” who is from the same Shia Islamist party as Maliki, will be any less sectarian. It may be more important to note that Maliki—who spent his years in exile in Syria, Jordan, and Iran—had encouraged Iraq’s rapprochement with Iran (also a predictable result of "regime change"). Extremely wary of the possible spillover effects of the jihadi war in Syria to Iraq, he also, much “to U.S. dismay,” tolerated the flow of arms to the government of Syria.”24 Regarding Abadi, who spent over twenty years in exile in London, where his family still lives, “Iran was said to be worried about his Western background, and Iranian leaders have not had the close working relationship with Mr. Abadi that they have had with other Iraqi Shiite leaders over the years.”25

  The point: Whatever the U.S. says it is doing with its military attacks in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is not the primary enemy. Syria and Iran are.

  If ISIS, or the fanatical jihadism it represents, were the main enemy, the most effective strategy would be for the most powerful countries in the world to simply stop arming and funding jihadi armies, starting in Syria. If the United States were more interested in stopping the rampage of ISIS than in destroying the secular Syrian state, it would, as the imperial power, order the other countries that do its bidding to close the pipeline that is feeding the beast. It would coordinate its efforts with the countries in the region—Syria, Iran, and Iraq—best situated to mount an effective military, political, and social offensive against the takfiri jihadism that threatens them most of all.

  It does not take too many minutes of thought to figure this out.

  But the U.S. will not do that, because defeating jihadism is not the American priority.

    The Deep Policy

  So we now get what seems a ludicrous mishmash of contradictory initiatives, designed to attack worst-ever-imminent-threat-to-everything ISIS in one spot, while continuing to support their fight in another. Patrick Cockburn accurately describes it this way: “In Iraq, the West supports the government in Baghdad and its counterparts in … Kurdistan … in their battle to stop Isis. But in Syria Western policy is to weaken and displace Assad, though his government is the only force in Syria capable of battling Isis successfully.” And we have what David Stockman calls the “odd/even day plan” to bomb both sides in Syria, as reported by The Onion AP: “In an effort to avoid unintentionally strengthening the Syrian government, the White House could seek to balance strikes against the Islamic State with attacks on Assad regime targets.”26

  To non-Hobbesian reasonable minds, who might think America’s goals in the region are something like removing fanatical jihadi groups like ISIS, and promoting peace and stability, this all seems barking mad.

  But there is a logic at work here, though it’s based on entirely different priorities. One understands nothing about ISIS, Syria, Iraq, or Washington, D.C., unless one understands the genealogy, and consistency, of the policy in play.  We’ve mentioned America’s “God is on your side” policy in Afghanistan, where, in order to defeat “godless communism,” the U.S. created a jihadi army with global ambitions. This army was the original ancestor of all significant jihadi movements since. It’s children are seeded through every one, and are the fathers of most. Afghanistan begat Al-Qaeda, which begat Al Qeada in Iraq, which begat Al-Nusra in Syria, which begat ISIS.

  Closer to the present, we can see an upgrade of America’s policy of jihadi instrumentalism, now targeted at destroying states throughout the Arab and Muslim world that are resistant to the hegemony of the United States and its various allies. This is the policy that, in his important 2007 article, Seymour Hersh called  “the redirection” (though, by that time, it was really a recommitment)—namely, the United States’ turn to “bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.” The U.S., he emphasizes, has adopted the position that “the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies,” and has committed to “clandestine operations that are intended to weakenHezbollah,” and are “aimed at Iran and its ally Syria.” Hersh attributes this strategic redirection to “the Saudis and some in the Administration,” calling it “a victory for the Saudi line.”27

  Now Hersh is surely correct that the Saudis encouraged this embrace of Sunni radicalism—which they no doubt assured the Americans they would help pay for and control—as the “lesser evil” to Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. But sentient political beings, looking at that list of “greater evils,” will understand that “some in the Administration” were much more likely promoting the “line” of another country than Saudi Arabia.

  Here, for example, is the Israeli line, as given by its outgoing ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, last year:

“The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” he said.

This was the case, he said, even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated to al-Qaida. 

“We understand that they are pretty bad guys,” he said, adding that this designation did not apply to everyone in the Syrian opposition. “Still, the greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc. That is a position we had well before the outbreak of hostilities in Syria. With the outbreak of hostilities we continued to want Assad to go.28

And here  are excerpts from an article quoting from Sima Shine, of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs:

“Israel’s main strategic threat is Iran. … Therefore, strategically, Israel should examine things from the perspective of what harms Iran and what serves Israel’s agenda in confronting it. If Bashar remains in power, that would be a huge achievement for Iran…”

Those sentiments echo the outlook sounded by former defense minister Ehud Barak, who in an interview with CNN in May 2012 said that Assad’s fall would deal a severe blow to his allies Iran and Hezbollah. … 

“Bashar Assad must not remain in power. Period. What will happen later? God only knows.” 

“The alternative, whereby [Assad falls and] Jihadists flock to Syria, is not good. …. But Assad remaining along with the Iranians is worse. His ouster would exert immense pressure on Iran.”29

The Saudi line is the Israeli line is the American line. You decide which of the first two “won” the third.

  Of note, regarding the Israeli field hospitals mentioned above: Shine also “hoped the Syrian rebels were being assisted, though was cautious in admitting Israel was indeed providing any such aid….In an event, Israel would not publicly admit assisting the rebels for fear of harming their domestic posture. [She said] ‘That would be bad for the rebels themselves. They do not want to be perceived as being supported by Israel, which — as the occupier of the Golan Heights — is the enemy.’” And it’s equally important for Israel that it not be perceived (By whom?) as anything but the enemy of jihadis.

  The net result: The U.S. and its allies prefer the jihadis, with all of their chaotic brutality, to the “greater evil” stable secular state of Syria—and to a list of players who just happen to be the most resistant to Israel. (Please don’t trot out “democracy” or “humanitarian.” Did I mention Saudi Arabia?)

  It may be that, with ISIS, the U.S. is now confronting a crisis within this strategy—if not, finally, its inevitable breakdown. I do not think that the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia control as much of this game as they think they do, and ISIS is a dangerous player. Still, I suspect they remain arrogantly (and overly) confident that they can control it, or crush it if need be—and that the Sunni radicalism that ISIS represents remains a “lesser evil,” and a useful vehicle for their deep policy goals.

  If those goals involve, as the principals state, the destruction of the remaining coherent states and movements that have enough regional political and military power to significantly resist the particular monarchical-Islamist agenda of Saudi Arabia and the particular Zionist colonialist agenda of Israel, one might well ask why the hell the United States is playing with this fire. Even as an imperialist power, the U.S. could surely come up with a strategy for protecting its influence over the region and its resources that doesn’t require creating failed states. Syria, for example, went right along with the American invasion of Iraq in 1991, and was quite helpful in receiving and torturing rendered “terrorism” suspects on America’s behalf after 9/11.

  Saudi Arabia and Israel might have their reasons for wanting jihadis to replace Assad, but what are ours? Do you think it’s because our government consistently adopts the Saudi line? Perhaps the ISIS horror will reveal, to a few more people who think on these questions, how particularly pointless and dangerous it is for America to be playing this game, whoever’s it is.

  To evoke yet another stated policy for which today’s jihadis are conveniently helpful, we should recognize that ISIS is finishing off the destruction and breakup of the Iraqi state that the U.S. began with its invasion in 2003. In Iraq, ISIS is executing an American plan, proposed by Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb in 2006, and endorsed by the U.S. Senate in 2007, to split into three parts—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.30

  That plan is itself uncannily similar—pure coincidence, I am sure—to an Israeli plan, The Yinon Plan of 1982, which “stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states….[and] called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states.” Which also means ISIS is executing an Israeli plan. Yinon-to-Biden-to-Baghdadi, a triple play in which there’s no Chance for Iraq.31  Remember that the U.S. sat back while ISIS put the finishing touches on the Sunni-Shia split in Iraq, and only intervened when ISIS threatened the already effectively-independent Kurds—who are very close allies of the U.S. and Israel.32

  Once Iraq is, like Gaul, divided into three parts, the jihadis can move on to help with the Syrian extension of that plan, “Syria’s fragmentation into provinces,” as gleeful predicted by former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, who also suggested that “the Arab world is passing through a phase that will restore it back to the way it was before World War I ….[ruling] out the possibility of the emergence of an Arab alliance that would stand in opposition to Israel in the next 10 to 15 years.”33

  So, if ISIS has overturning Sykes-Picot on its agenda, it’s finishing off what the U.S. and Israel started. Justin Raimondo catches the point well: “We abolished Sykes-Picot by effectively putting an end to Iraqi statehood…. ISIS didn’t blast Sykes-Picot to pieces: we did, and now we must live with the consequences.”34

    Wake-up Call?

  We’ll see soon what the U.S really wants, whose program it’s really following.

  In Iraq, if the U.S.is interested in defeating ISIS (and in preserving some semblance of unity), it will support a cooperative endeavor that includes the neighboring regional power—Iran—that, everyone knows, would be the most capable and effective weapon against ISIS. On the other hand, if the U.S. prefers a weak and divided Iraq—even partly overrun by ISIS, as long as it’s by all means kept out of a partnership with Iran—then the U.S. will use its own bombs. It will do this, even knowing it cannot destroy ISIS, but at best keep it within bounds, and knowing that, as ISIS “blends in” with the population, its Western bombs will inevitably “include[e] the possibility of high civilian casualties,” and inevitably create more anti-American jihadis. If it does this, it will be because, for somebody, ISIS is preferable to Iran.35

  If the U.S. is truly horrified of ISIS, and wants to destroy it in Syria, it will stop the flow of arms and funds to the Syrian rebels, implicitly acknowledging that this aid inevitably feeds ISIS and other jihadi groups and that jihadis are now the backbone of the Syrian opposition. It will coordinate whatever it does with the Syrian government, which is the most powerful weapon against ISIS, and which has already indicated it is willing to cooperate with the U.S. in fighting ISIS. Nothing would be more effective, and everybody knows it. If, on the other hand, continuing on the Saudi/Israeli “redirection” line, the U.S. prefers jihadis to the Assad government, it will carry out its own military attacks in Syria. These will be directed against both ISIS—again to contain but not destroy it—and against Syrian military targets, in order to make the Syria state more vulnerable to jihadi attacks. Not only will the U.S. play the odd/even day bombing game, it will also pour even more arms and money into the Syrian jihadi rebellion. That is actually what’s presented as the preferred, bipartisan, “tough-guy” solution of the American political and media elites. (Because they follow the Saudi line?)  All of this will hasten the day that Syria devolves into a jihadi playground, and everybody knows it.  And it will turn out that ISIS emerged to save the rebellion from defeat.

  The possibility of the United States doing the right thing here—that is, the most effective thing for the purpose of defeating ISIS and reinforcing the stability of the region, is virtually nil. It would require implicitly admitting that the whole strategy of America’s fomenting the jihadi feeding frenzy during the past four years was not only a crime, but an error—an error that Western military attacks would only compound. It would involve at least implicitly partnering with Syria and Iran, and breaking sharply from that Saudi/Israeli-jihadi/Zionist line. Not likely.

  Most liberal-minded Americans think they know what the Saudis want, and recognize its dangers: the elimination of secular Arab nationalism and republicanism, the defeat of Iran and the crushing of the organized Shia community in the region, and the ascendance of their brand of fundamentalist, Wahhabi Islam. ISIS and the jihadis serve those purposes well, and the Saudis are convinced they can control their spigots.

  Most liberal-minded Americans still don’t want to recognize, to perceive, what the Israelis are after: 1) The destruction and “balkanization” of every state in the region that materially supports the Palestinian struggle and is capable of putting up effective resistance to Zionist colonialism, and 2) The continued support of the Western, and especially American, liberal-minded publics for that colonialism, whose past and present savagery is becoming more apparent. Being surrounded by increasingly brutal gangs of jihadi beheaders, to whom they can associate the Palestinian people, serves that purpose well. It will, they hope, allow for the increased ethno-supremacist violence—the killing and/or forced expulsion of not hundreds, but tens of thousands of Palestinians—that Israel thinks will bring its colonial project to a settled finish. Israel is not after jihadis; it is after your perception. As the Association of Arab-American University Graduates said, commenting on the Yinon plan, “the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation.”36

  For Israel, all kinds of policies that create and support these jihadis serve these purposes very well. Israel knows what kind of radicalism the young of Gaza, who saw their families blown apart around them, might be prone to. And Israel knows that the American bombing of Syria, and the overthrow of the Syrian state, is inevitably going to mean even more “jihadists flocking to Syria.” And that’s fine with them. They really think they can control that with their, and our, weapons of destruction and distraction.37

  Because at least one of these “lines” has a tenacious grip on our foreign policy in the region, it is very likely that any American actions against ISIS in Syria—almost inevitable, at this point—will involve military attacks, launched without even the implicit consent of the Syrian government—acts of war, designed to degrade the Syrian army and undermine the coherence of the Syrian state.

This time I won’t give a percentage, and I still hope I am wrong, but I don’t think enough Americans have yet gotten the wake-up call.  Working the magic that “chemical weapons” couldn’t, ISIS, I’m afraid, will be the excuse for escalating the war we are already waging on Syria, and will produce the same result American interventions have produced time and time again in the region.  Unfortunately, American foreign policy has been aptly summed-up by the other villain of the day: "No matter where the US gets involved, they always achieve the same result: Libya."38

  ____________________________

Notes and Links

  1 The Polemicist: God Is On Their Side: No Regrets for America's Jihad Wars

  2 The Rise of ISIS » CounterPunch

  3 Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West - NYTimes.com

  4 Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels · LRB 17 April 2014

  5 Patrick Cockburn · Isis consolidates · LRB 21 August 2014

  6 Patrick Cockburn, Who is the Jihadi Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? » CounterPunch

  7 The Polemicist: The Road to Syria: "It all depends on what America says"

 Arms Airlift to Syrian Rebels Expands, With C.I.A. Aid - NYTimes.com

CIA begins weapons delivery to Syrian rebels - The Washington Post

US and Europe in ‘major airlift of arms to Syrian rebels through Zagreb’ - Telegraph

Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels · LRB 17 April 2014

  8 Daya Gamage, US smuggling weapons to Syrian rebels: The real Benghazi story | Asian Tribune

Benghazi attack could have been prevented if US hadn’t ‘switched sides in the War on Terror’ and allowed $500 MILLION of weapons to reach al-Qaeda militants, reveals damning report | Mail Online

Gen Mcinerney “We Helped Build Isis”

    9 IDF Builds Field Hospital in Golan Heights -Arutz Sheva (IsraelNationalNews.com)

  10 IRBIL, Iraq: ISIS’s victories may win it recruits from rival Syrian rebel groups | Syria | McClatchy DC

1,000-Strong Syrian Rebel Brigade Defects to ISIS -- News from Antiwar.com

  11 ISIS in Iraq Stinks of CIA/NATO ‘Dirty War’ Op, William Engdahl.

  12 Isis makes further advances in Syria while West vacillates over Iraq - Middle East - World - The Independent

  13President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman About Iraq, Putin and Israel - NYTimes.com

  14 Tense relations between U.S. and anti-Assad Syrian rebels -  MiamiHerald.com

  15 Al- Nusra, a Jihadist brigade that scares Syrian rebels - Asia News

  16 Military Skill and Terrorist Technique Fuel Success of ISIS - NYTimes.com

Exclusive: Top ISIS leaders revealed - Al Arabiya News

Iraq crisis: Generals in army 'handed over' entire city to al-Qaeda inspired ISIS forces - Telegraph

  17 President Obama Asks For $500 Million To Arm More Terrorists In Syria | FDL News Desk Obama wants $500 million to train Syrian rebels. Now what? - The Washington Post

  18 UN warns of Syria spillover into Iraq - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

  19 Tony Cartalucci, Land Destroyer: US Begins Selling "Syria Intervention" Using ISIS Pretext

  20 Islamic State threat ‘beyond anything we’ve seen’: Pentagon | Reuters

  21 Activist Post: Syrian Kurds, Not U.S. Military, Rescued Trapped Yazidis In Iraq

U.S. Attack on Islamic Militants Is All About Iraq's Oil | New Republic

  22 On third anniversary of Syrian rebellion, Assad is steadily winning the war - The Washington Post

Syria's Assad has won civil war, Israeli diplomatic official says | The Times of Israel

  23 ISIS seizes last Syrian regime base in Raqqa province | News , Middle East | THE DAILY STAR

  24 Flow of Arms to Syria Through Iraq Persists, to U.S. Dismay - NYTimes.com

  25  Next Leader May Echo Maliki, but Iraqis Hope for New Results - NYTimes.com

Exclusive: Inside Obama’s Push for Regime Change in Iraq - The Daily Beast

  26 David Stiockman, Bombs Away Over Syria! Washington Has Gone Stark Raving Mad   : Information Clearing House - ICH 

Possible airstrikes in Syria raise more questions - The Washington Post

  27 Seymour M. Hersh, The Redirection - The New Yorker

  28 ‘Israel wanted Assad gone since start of Syria civil war’ | JPost | Israel News

  29 'Iran needs 18 months to produce the bomb' | The Times of Israel 

  30 Iraq to split in three: So why not? - CNN.com

  31 Basebal’s Sad Lexicon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  32 “The Israeli Dream”: The Criminal Roadmap Towards “Greater Israel”? | Global Research

Iraq: Why Bomb Now? by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com

  33 Ayalon Predicts Syria’s Fragmentation and for Lebanon to Suffer Same Fate — Naharnet

  34 The ‘Sykes-Picot’ borders ISIL wants gone - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

ISIS: Made in Washington, Riyadh – and Tel Aviv by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com

  35 As Islamic State fighters begin to blend in, defeating them no easy matter - Yahoo News

  36 The Zionist Plan for the Middle East

  37 As I said in my first post, it is virtually impossible to think the United States would have undertaken such a radically destabilizing campaign in Syria without assuring Israel that it would have a free hand in to deal with whatever threats it perceives in post-Assad Syria.

  38 The Vineyard of the Saker: Novorussia: independent, associated or (con)federated?

[thepolemicist]

"Holy Bejeezus!": I Know What We Did This Summer, In Gaza

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We’re now learning that “senior U.S. military officers” were “stunned” at the scale of the Israeli army’s “indiscriminate” shelling that demolished the Shujaiya neighborhood in Gaza on July 21st. A Pentagon report found “11 Israeli artillery battalions — a minimum of 258 artillery pieces …pumped at least 7,000 high explosive shells into the Gaza neighborhood… during a seven-hour period at the height of the operation.“

“Holy bejeezus,” exclaimed retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard when told the numbers of artillery pieces and rounds fired during the July 21 action. “That rate of fire over that period of time is astonishing. If the figures are even half right, Israel’s response was absolutely disproportionate.” 

Another Pentagon senior officer said: “Eleven battalions of IDF artillery is equivalent to the artillery we deploy to support two divisions of U.S. infantry…That’s a massive amount of firepower, and it’s absolutely deadly.” And a retired American artillery commander, who thought the Pentagon’s report “might well have underestimated the firepower the IDF brought to bear on Shujaiya,” said:  “This is the equivalent of the artillery we deploy to support a full corps...It’s just a huge number of weapons.”

A third senior U.S. officer made the point: “The only possible reason for doing that is to kill a lot of people in as short a period of time as possible.”

It’s nice that “senior Pentagon officers” make these professional military judgements known to the American people anonymously, through al-Jazeera correspondent Mark Perry. (Has this been reported anywhere in the American media?) It would be nicer, and make more of a difference, if one of those brave soldiers would go on the record publicly. Perhaps they don’t because senior American military and intelligence officers met “twice daily” with the IDF during all these operations, and the U.S. supplied “a considerable portion” of the weaponry used.

It would be even nicer if senior American political officials would speak publicly about this indiscriminate carnage whose only possible purpose is to kill a lot of people as quickly as possible. (John Kerry’s open-mic “It’s a hell of a pinpoint operation” remark was apparently spurred by this report.)  But, again, they are too busy supplying the weaponry, and the political support, necessary for Israel to devastate whole neighborhoods with impunity.

The Israeli assault on Gaza, of which this deliberate destruction of the entire neighborhood of Shujaiya was one part, was nothing less than an attempt to slaughter the Palestinians into submission, one more attack in a 65-year ongoing series of savageries that has not yet achieved the level of subjugation required by Israel’s strict standards. It—the whole thing—is a crime against humanity, and those senior American officers and politicians, acting in the name of all of us, are fully complicit in it.

Here’s an astounding time-lapse video (just over a minute) of what happened in one hour of that “seven-hour period at the height of the operation.”  Watch what we did this summer:

I dare you to be OK with that.

And here’s a video of one little thing that happened in the aftermath, among those death-crazed Muslims. Watch the truly terrible beauty, that we made, being born:

I don’t know about you, but all of this scares the bejeezus out of me. Related posts: Gaza, Israel, and America: Crime and Demolishment Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy

[thepolemicist]

Gaza, Israel, and America: Crime and Demolishment

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Shejaiya Neighborhood in Gaza/Mahmoud Hams (AFP)/Getty Images

The Israeli army is one of the most powerful in the world, usually ranked around fourth in firepower. It can deploy a half a million troops with a panoply of state-of-the-art weaponry—from body armor, integrated electronic communications and control, and sniper rifles, to tanks, artillery, air power, drones, ships, and submarines—and, of course, an arsenal of nuclear weapons that have been in development over fifty years. It is backed by the most powerful armed force in the world, which continuously supplies it with whatever arms, cash, intelligence, and political and diplomatic support it needs—an effective guarantee of military (though not political) victory.

There are a few thousand militants armed with light infantry weapons and homemade rockets among the 1.8 million people in Gaza, one of the most densely-populated territories on earth. Those 1.8 million people have been locked into that territory by Israel (abetted by its Egyptian ally, and backed by its American patron), which controls the entry and exit of every person and particle, making Gaza what even British Prime Minister David Cameron (who helps to enable this policy) calls a “prison camp.” This siege has been Israel’s way of punishing the 1.8 million people of Gaza for, among other things, having freely and fairly elected leaders that Israel doesn’t like.

What we’ve been witnessing in Gaza for the past month is this Israeli-American war machine relentlessly pummeling those captive 1.8 million fish in a barrel people, and deliberately destroying their social infrastructure, on a scale that is almost unimaginable. The Israeli-American war machine has used all its modern weaponry to blow up homes, schools, hospitals, water and power plants—demolishing and depopulating whole neighborhoods, and killing any number of civilians and children (at least 380) that it pleases. When it’s the equivalent of gatling guns vs. arrows, when the civilian casualty rates are 4% on one “side” and 86% on the other, it’s not a war, it’s a massacre.

Self-defense? Puhlease. Rob Kall, of opednews.com, speaking of a previous Israeli massacre, gives a gruesomely apt image: “I told my son it would be like him throwing a balled up piece of paper at me and me coming back with a hammer smashing him in the head and face repeatedly.” Just like, if you’ve seen the picture I included in a previous post.

The arguments about Israel defending itself, doing its best to avoid civilian casualties, having the most moral army in the world, etc., would be risible if they weren’t so despicable. It’s important, for those who claim to care about such things, to point out that Israel’s intentional, deliberate, announced plan has always been to create as much suffering as possible for the 1.8 million people in Gaza. Further, its announced war strategy is that, faced with any resistance from any population it decides, in its moral wisdom, to target and/or subjugate, it will inflict disproportionate violence on the civilian infrastructure and whole population. Such a strategy is meant both to prove Israel’s will and capacity to force compliance, and to uphold the Israeli ethic is that it’s right and fitting to destroy an entire Arab neighborhood—civilians be damned—in order to protect, or revenge, the life of one Israeli soldier.

This is, for those who claim to care about such things, a policy of war crime. This policy rests on three indisputably criminal pillars, which I’ll describe briefly: diet, lawn-mowing, and Dahiya.

Diet: As one Israeli official proudly proclaimed, Israel is deliberately keeping the 1.8 million people of Gaza “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As Noam Chomsky points out, Israel calculates, “precisely how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare survival, while also depriving them of medicines and other means of decent life.” This is the deliberate, sadistic, ongoing punishment of a whole population trapped in a ghetto. A crime.

Lawn-mowing: In addition to the ongoing siege and starvation of those 1.8 million people, every couple of years, Israel undertakes what it calls “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. As Chomsky says, this is “Israel’s cheery expression for its periodic exercises of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a ‘war of defense.’” This is Israel’s periodic dis-maintenance, which ensures the Gaza polity will never be able to stand on its own two feet, and, Israel hopes, reminds the people of Gaza that resistance is futile. Another sadistic crime of collective punishment.

Dahiya: Named after the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, which Israel destroyed in one of their previous massacres in 2006. This strategy, which has been elevated to a general military doctrine, involves deliberately targeting and destroying a civilian neighborhood by air and artillery, rather than risking the precious lives of Israeli soldiers looking for armed adversaries. As an Israeli general laid it out:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. ….This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.

The plan. Approved. Although you won’t hear that on CNN. It’s a war crime, announced in advance.  For those who claim to care about such things.

We all know—Israel certainly does—that this is possible only because Israel is granted impunity for these war crimes by the United States government and media.

But, let’s leave the slaughter of thousands of civilians aside for a moment. The other tiny little thing we might notice, as the people of Detroit are being deprived of water, is that all of this deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure and neighborhoods at Israel’s whim is only possible because Israel knows that the United States of America will pay for the destruction and (along with Europe) for the rebuilding—up to the point, of course, that Israel decides will not “make them [Gazans] die of hunger.” And the U.S. will pay again, for the next round, ad infinitum (unless we act with determination to stop it). Mow, rake, repeat.

What a deal! This is beyond impunity. Israel may be having a hard time bringing the Palestinians to heel, but it sure has the Americans well-tamed.

  Notes and links

Related Polemicist posts:

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy

Murder at a Discount: Pricing Lives in Israel

Dropping a DIME: Max Blumenthal and the Erosion of Liberal Zionism

David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’ theguardian.com.

Children paying a terrible price in Gaza - Washington Post.

Not in My Jewish Name | OpEdNews.

The Polemicist: Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy

Jewish Law*: One Israeli Soldier Worth More Than 1,000 Palestinians | loonwatch.com.

Israel-Gaza conflict: Israel takes brutal revenge on Rafah for the loss of a soldier - Middle East - World - The Independent.

Israeli Army Whistle-Blower Gets Arrested After Posting ‘Israeli Troops. Killed Gaza Civilians in Revenge’ on Facebook · Global Voices.

Human Rights In Palestine And Other Occupied Arab Territories: Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

IDF plans to use disproportionate force in next war | Haaretz.

Five Israeli Talking Points on Gaza—Debunked | Noura Erakat The Nation.

[thepolemicist]

Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy

Go to source

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much…”– Joseph Conrad “Heart of Darkness” [h/t William A. Cook]

The Israeli-American (Let’s never forget this is a team effort!) slaughter in Gaza is so horrifying that I’ve been at a loss to find the words to comment on it without letting anger get the better of me. The media coverage of what’s happening, dominated by the ridiculous notion that Israel is “defending” itself, is so grotesquely mendacious, hypocritical, and racist (imbued with colonialist ethno-supremacism) that it is hard to know where to begin critiquing it—without, again, becoming enraged.

For the moment, I’ll focus on one particular, insistent meme, constantly being promoted by Israel and its apologists, namely that Hamas is using civilians as “human shields.” The idea is that for Hamas to place any kind of military personnel anywhere in or near a civilian neighborhood constitutes using all the civilians in that neighborhood as “human shields.” Furthermore, it makes of that neighborhood a legitimate “military” target for devastating Israeli attack, absolves Israel from any culpability for the scores of resulting dead, blown-apart civilians including children, and places all moral and legal responsibility for those victims on the Palestinian resistance fighters who dared appear anywhere near civilians.

So, for example, the personal homes of Palestinian political and military leaders, construed as “command and control centers,” are legitimate military targets. If a Hamas functionary lives with his family of five children in an apartment building of 8 stories with 4 apartments per floor, it is perfectly legitimate to bomb that building and kill all 32 families—“human shields,” after all—in  order to destroy that “command and control center.” 

This “human shields” argument is what allows Israeli officials, as Noura Erakat points out, to “openly admit that they are deliberately and systematically bombing the family homes of suspected militants,” killing whole families. It suggests an ethic that supposedly justifies an Israeli offensive which produces 75-80% civilian causalities, 33% of which are children, among the Palestinian population (and somehow renders insignificant the contrasting fact that almost 100% of Israeli casualties from Palestinian resistance operations are military). To hear it in the American media, poor, anguished Israel actually becomes the victim of all these “telegenically dead,” deliberately sacrificed, Palestinian “human shields.”

American political “leaders” and media pundits universally endorse this pretense of an ethic, or at the least, let it pass unchallenged.

Of course, anyone with an ounce of intellectual or moral honesty would have to accept that such an ethic was universally applicable: Kill by that ethic, die by that ethic.

As Amira Hass points out, “the [Israeli] Defense Ministry is in the heart of Tel Aviv, as is the army’s main “war room.” [These are real “command and control centers”] And…the military training base at Glilot [is] near the big mall… And the Shin Bet headquarters [is] in Jerusalem, on the edge of a residential neighborhood.” If Israel’s claimed ethic were anything other than the flimsiest excuse for its presumed ethno-supremacist license to kill, Israel and its supporters would have to accept that Hamas has at least as much right to fire its crude rockets in the general direction of the Israeli Ministry of Defense as Israel does to blow up homes, schools, and hospitals with its precision weapons—civilian casualties be damned. By Israeli logic and ethic, are not the Israeli civilians near these military facilities “human shields”? When they get killed, should we not sympathize with the anguished Hamas rocketeers who were forced to kill the civilians that Israel cleverly placed in dangerous neighborhoods?

[Actually, unless one is comfortable with colonialism, it’s arguable that Hamas has every right  to its attacks, and it’s inarguable that Israel has no right to theirs.]

We all know, of course, that there is no intellectual or moral consistency here, only the ethic of ethno-supremacist, colonialist “exceptionalism.” Can you imagine the moral outrage and gnashing of teeth on the part of the oh-so-tough-minded American political and media personalities who accept the Israeli “human shields” argument if anyone tried to apply it to hundreds of dead Jewish children? If this were the scene, day after day, for Israeli Jews:

The father is saying: “Wake up – I brought you a toy.”

مختلفون mo5talfoon/addictinginfo

But we need to take a step back to see how Israel is deliberately and dishonestly confusing a specific definition of “human shields” with a more general notion of something like “collateral damage” in a way that tries to justify the viciousness of its current massacre in Gaza.

As Brad Parker, of Defence for Children International Palestine, points out:

the use of civilians as human shields is prohibited under international law and involves forcing civilians to directly assist in military operations or using them to shield a military object or troops from attack. The rhetoric continually voiced by Israeli officials regarding "human shields" amounts to nothing more than generalisations that fall short of the precise calculation required by international humanitarian law when determining whether something is actually a military object.

Israel is using the “human shield” argument in a way that dilutes is specific meaning in international law, and turns it into another catchall bugaboo, used to hinder careful thought and justify the unjustifiable. Israel finds “human shields” everywhere there are civilians in the way the U.S. government now finds “weapons of mass destruction” anywhere there’s “an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce.”

It’s particularly brazen for Israel to be raising and confusing the “human shields” issue because  it is Israel itself which has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as “human shields” to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, along with the torture, solitary confinement, and threats of sexual assault toward detained children, Israel is guilty of the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants." The report, issued last year, cites14 cases in 3 years.

We’re not talking here about some vague notion of endangering children by allowing them to live in a dangerous town. Nor are the accusations limited to namby-pamby UN Committee that no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to. We’re talking about specific practices, identified and denounced by the High Court of Justice in Israel, “like the 'neighbor procedure,' whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man's house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped.” Here’s a picture, from The Guardian in 2007, of Sameh Amira, 24, who—along with his15-year-old cousin Amid, and an 11-year-old girl, Jihan Dadush—was forced to act as a human shield to search homes in Nablus during a search for bomb-making labs. They were forced them to enter apartments ahead of the soldiers, and to search the houses, emptying cabinets and cupboards, in order to protect the most-moral IDF boys from getting hurt.

The Guardian

And here’s a picture of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy lashed to the front of an Israeli armored vehicle to prevent stone throwers from… What? Damaging the clearcoat?

Daily Mail

These are human shields, in the strong and specific sense, and it is Israel that has a history of using them.

And, according to a report in Mondoweiss, there is evidence that Israel is using these explicit human shield tactics in the present conflict.  One resident of Khuza, Ayman Abu Toaimah, reports that: “As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields." Another, Abu Saleem, 56, says: “Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields– how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It’s them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza’a and Shuja’iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses.” And a third, Abu Ali Qudail, said: “When the ICRC told us that ambulances are waiting us at the entrance of the village from the western side, about 1,000 people rushed to leave their homes, some of which were used as a hideout for Israeli forces.”

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Every nasty tactic that Israel accuses the Palestinians of using is one that they are actually the masters of. It’s called projection, and you’ll be understanding the world a lot better if you consider that most of the accusations Israel (as well the United States) makes against its enemies are projections of its own faults and crimes. Do you think for a second that, if there were one piece of evidence as clearly dispositive of Hamas’s use of human shields as the pictures above, you would not have seen it all over the news every day?

Corollary question: With all the constant chatter about “human shields,” why does none of this factual evidence about Israel’s use of the human shield tactic ever enter into the media discourse?

Because American politics and media are in complete collaboration with the colonial savagery that is Zionism, and they do not want to disturb the American public’s acquiescence to that. This is a stance that must be refused, with contempt. As Congress approves unanimously and Obama supplies the weapons, no American can think s/he stands in a neutral space, shielded from the nasty effects of the decision s/he is making—whether by resting silently complicit or by speaking up in protest.

Links and Sources

Israel’s Heart of Darkness » CounterPunch:

US rearms Israel as its war crimes mount in Gaza - World Socialist Web Site

Photos: A Gaza funeral for 26 members of one family | +972 Magazine

Eight Members of One Family Killed in Their Home as Israel’s Attack on Gaza Continues | The Nation

In Gaza, 11 members of a Palestinian family are killed in a single strike - The Washington Post

Netanyahu’s ‘Telegenically Dead’; Comment Is Grotesque but Not Original - The Intercept

No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense In International Law Against Occupied Palestinian Territory, By Noura Erakat

Are Hamas Rocket Attacks Illegal? | Norman G. Finkelstein

Israel showed restraint in Gaza before attacking? You must be kidding / Amira Hass]

Weapon of mass destruction charge, explained - Salon.com

U.N. report accuses Israeli forces of using Palestinian children as human shields, abusing children in custody - CBS News

Four Year Old Palestinian Has Brains Blown Out By Israeli Military (Graphic)

B’Tselem: IDF using ‘neighbor procedure’ despite court order Israel News | Haaretz

Israel accused of using Palestinian children as human shields | World news | theguardian.com

Survivors of massacre in Khuza’a say Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields

What’s not a target for Israel? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

[thepolemicist]

"Without America this cannot happen." Jewish Grandmother Shows the Way

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On July 12, three Israeli teenagers disappeared. The Israeli government and most of the media say they were “kidnapped,” although there have been no ransom demands. If they were taken by one of the five previously-unknown groups that claimed responsibility (including, apparently, a branch of the now-ubiquitous ISIS), that group would probably say that they were “captured.” Some Palestinians have described the teenagers as "soldiers" or "soldier-settlers," or "armed settlers." Israel denies they were soldiers (probably true, especially for the two 16-year-olds), but at least one of them lived in an illegal West Bank settlement, where carrying arms is common.. However these particular teenagers have served the Israeli state and its settlement enterprise, in order to understand the motivation of whoever might have taken them, it’s worth remembering the policies that teenage Israeli soldier boys carry out on the even-younger boys of the illegally-occupied population:

At any rate, in response this disappearance/kidnapping, for the past two weeks, the Israeli government has been carrying out what its own minister describes as a “wide-reaching operation against the civilian population” of Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, as Chris Marsden points out, the Israeli government hasproudly announced it is engaging in a blatant form of collective punishment—a war crime, illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israeli tactics have included raiding thousands of homes (sometimes blowing their way in with explosives), abducting hundreds of people, cutting off electricity, and killing about six Palestinians so far, including a 13-year-old boy. Amnesty International and Israeli human rights groups have denounced the operation, saying that the army’s actions “raise serious concerns of unwarranted infringement on basic rights and collective punishment.” The United States, of course, blocked a statement of concern at the UN.

There was a demonstration in Union Square on Thursday against this collective punishment, and, in the course of it, Philip Weiss, of the fine website Mondoweiss, filmed the following interview with Tzvia Their, a 70-year old former resident of Israel, and formerly Zionist, Jewish woman.

In this interview, Ms. Their describes how the Palestinians are “oppressed" in a "terrible" way: "They are tortured. They are imprisoned for no reason. Their land is stolen. What is going on there is a pogrom. They just destroy everything they can.”

She insists on our responsibility as Americans: “Only if American people would wake up, this terrible thing can stop…Without America this cannot happen. It’s American money, American weapons…And without America, it won’t happen.”

When asked by Weiss whether her outreach is targeted at American Jews, she says: “This is the main target, American Jews, because they do such a harm…They don’t understand they are fooled by the Zionists. There is no connection between Judaism and Zionism. The Zionists just use Jews. Jews are so naïve. They think they protect Israel. They don’t know what Israel is. Israel is a monster.”

This interview is a must-see for every American—especially liberal Americans, who can be all wrought up about whether and how to criticize Israel. It’s way past time to cut to the chase: “It is colonialism.” If Tzvia can say it, without fear, so can we. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, or Wiccan, no apology needed. Just stand with Tzvia.