Hundreds of Neo-Nazis riot in Leipzig, Germany

Christoph Dreier

On Monday hundreds of organised right-wing extremists attacked a leftist meeting place, a Turkish restaurant, and homes in the city of Leipzig. The fascist terror took place as members of the far-right Pegida movement held a demonstration in the city.

The riot in Leipzig took place a day after four groups of foreigners were attacked Sunday in Cologne, the police said.

This wave of far-right violence is taking place amid a wave of racist hysteria spread by politicians and the media following alleged sexual attacks by immigrants in Cologne on New Years’ Eve.

What took place Monday evening in the Leipzig suburb of Connewitz, where many students and leftists live, can only be described as an organised pogrom. At least 250 neo-Nazis travelled by car to the district from all over the state of Saxony. According to investigators they had parked their cars in various locations and then gathered together in the city suburb.

Eyewitnesses cited by the Leipziger Volkszeitung (LVZ) spoke of a horde of neo-Nazis “goose-stepping” through the district and then commencing their rampage of violence at the corner of Wolfgang-Heinze Street. “They were carrying large stones, which they had apparently brought along. If was if they had a definite leader who had to give a signal,” witness Steffen told the LVZ.

Another eyewitness said that the mob was armed with baseball bats and axes. They broke numerous windows, stormed into a Turkish restaurant and threw tables and benches through the windows into the street.

Police said dozens of windowpanes were shattered in Connewitz, fireworks ignited, and cars set on fire. The destruction was evidently planned. The windows of a local football club with leftist supporters, “Roter Stern Leipzig” and several nearby bars were shattered. Police arrested 211 participants, and a number of individuals have pressed charges for assault.

A number of violent attacks by Nazis on leftists took place in Leipzig in the 1990s, but according to the historian Sascha Lange in the LVZ the latest riots have to be considered historically. “We have to assume it was the biggest attack by right-wing extremists on shops and houses in Leipzig since the November Pogrom of1938.” Lange is an expert on resistance groups in the Third Reich.

Although the activity by the neo-Nazis had been announced in advance in social networks as “Storm on Leipzig” and was evidently a highly coordinated and organized action, the police only intervened after the damage had been done. When the police came, the neo-Nazis surrendered without resistance, although the police were initially outnumbered.

Links between the extreme right and the state apparatus are particularly pronounced in Saxony. The State Office for Political Education played a role during the past year in building up the right wing extremist and xenophobes of the Pegida movement. Several leading neo-Nazis in Saxony were, and remain on the payroll of the secret services. On Monday it was announced that the fascist NPD party has its own informants in the Leipzig police. The party published internal police documents on leftist activists, including their names and addresses.

Based on the background to the riots in Connewitz it cannot be ruled out that they were carried out with the knowledge of the security forces or were even initiated by them.

At the same time the neo-Nazis were responding to the racist campaign promoted by German political parties and the media following the New Year’s incidents at Cologne Central Station. The far right feel they have wind in their sails following nearly two weeks of officially sanctioned xenophobia.

This was clear on the Legida demonstration, which took place simultaneously with the riots. The right-wing extremists of Legida—an offshoot of Pegida—celebrated the movement’s first anniversary on Monday evening. Pegida sent some of its supporters from Dresden, and others came from Chemnitz to attend the demonstration in Leipzig. There were a total of about 3,000 participants.

Referring to the events on New Year’s Eve, Pegida leader Tatjana Festerling spoke of a “widespread terrorist attack on blonde, white, German women” by “Afro-Arab Sex-terrorists.” Blame rested, she said, with German politicians who had left the German population defenceless by allowing immigrants to enter the country.

The witch hunting of foreigners and refugees is directly linked to the campaign carried out in in recent days by the media. Germany’s most widely read newspaper, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, published a cartoon featuring a black hand grasping at the midsection of a white woman. The magazine Focus featured a picture of a naked white woman on the cover with black handprints all over her body. Die Zeit ran the headline: “The Nightmare—Arab men who grope German women.”

This campaign has deliberately fomented a pogrom-like climate, which has encouraged the right-wing extremists. The population is to be terrorized and intimidated in order to permit the ruling elite to enforce its policy of war and social attacks, for which it lacks any democratic mandate.

To this same end, the right-wing extremist movement Pegida has been consistently promoted by official and media circles. The fascist demagogues at the head of this movements have been given prime time spots on TV talk shows, received premises from the State Office for Political Education and received invitations to participate in discussions from politicians from all of the leading political parties.

This week’s riots in Leipzig are a direct consequence of the legitimization of racism, militarism, and extreme nationalist politics by the political establishment and media.

Obama’s final State of the Union: Lies, evasions and threats

Patrick Martin

The final State of the Union speech delivered Tuesday night by President Barack Obama was a demonstration of the incapacity of the American political system to deal honestly or seriously with a single social question.

Obama evaded the real issues that affect tens of millions of working people in America every day of their lives. He painted a ludicrous picture of economic recovery and social progress that insulted the intelligence of his television audience—and went unchallenged by the millionaire politicians assembled in the chamber of the House of Representatives.

Summing up what he called “the progress of these past seven years,” Obama gave first place to “how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations.” The so-called “recovery” has been a bonanza for corporate profits, stock prices, and the wealth and income of the super-rich. For the working people who are the vast majority of the population, it has been a disaster.

By most social indices, the American people are worse off in January 2016 than when Obama took office seven years ago. The real wages of working people have fallen, social services have deteriorated, pension benefits have been gutted, and cities such as Detroit and San Bernardino have been forced into bankruptcy.

According to a report by the National Association of Counties issued on the eve of the State of the Union address, of the 3,069 counties in the United States, 93 percent are worse off than before the 2008 financial crash according to at least one of four economic indicators: total employment, the unemployment rate, the size of the economy and home values.

In 27 states, not a single county has recovered fully from the 2008 crash and the deep economic slump that followed. These include such major states as Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Obama, however, painted a picture of nearly unblemished economic advance, declaring, “The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world.” He boasted, “We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the ‘90s; an unemployment rate cut in half.”

The president did not acknowledge that the post-2008 “recovery” is the weakest on record, that the vast majority of the new jobs created have been low-wage and many of them part-time, or that the drop in the unemployment rate is primarily due to the withdrawal of millions of people from the work force because they lost all hope of getting a decent-paying job.

He went on, tellingly, to cite the auto industry as a symbol of success, declaring that it “just had its best year ever.” This perfectly expresses the utter blindness, not just of Obama, but of the entire political establishment. The “best year ever” was for General Motors, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler, which enjoyed record profits, not for the auto workers who produced those profits.

Real wages for auto workers have dropped sharply since the Obama White House forced through a 50 percent cut in wages for all new hires as part of the bankruptcy reorganization of the industry in 2009. Mass discontent among auto workers was expressed at the end of 2015 in the rejection of contracts at Fiat-Chrysler and Nexteer, a major supplier, and in widespread demands for strike action, smothered by Obama’s stooges in the United Auto Workers union.

“Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” Obama concluded. The social position of the American working class has, in fact, suffered a dramatic decline, through the combined efforts of the corporate bosses, the unions and the two capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

The president conceded that economic inequality has grown in the United States, but he described it as the outcome of long-term trends such as globalization and automation, as though the policies of his administration—bailouts for Wall Street, budget cuts and wage cuts for workers—had nothing to do with it.

In the seven years since the financial crash, brought on, as he admitted, by “recklessness on Wall Street,” not a single banker or speculator has been prosecuted or jailed. On the contrary, the billionaires have greatly increased their wealth, gobbling up 95 percent of all new income since Obama entered the White House.

Obama listed a few other policy “successes,” claiming that “we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector… we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans.” He was referring, however, to a series of social disasters: the reactionary attack on health benefits for workers and their families known as Obamacare; the devastation of Appalachia and other energy-producing regions; and the abuse of ex-soldiers, wounded in body and mind, by the Veterans Administration.

Obama sought to defend the foreign policy record of his administration from criticism, mainly from the Republican right, where demands are being raised for military escalation in the Middle East and stepped-up attacks on democratic rights at home in the name of fighting “terrorism.”

While he claimed to reject an American role as the world’s policeman, he nonetheless boasted, “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.”

He continued, “Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” winning the bipartisan standing ovation that always accompanies any mention of American soldiers engaged in combat overseas.

Obama indulged in the glorification of killing that has become an essential part of the degraded spectacle that passes for political discourse in America. Describing the US war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he claimed, “With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons.”

He called on Congress to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS, but vowed to wage war with or without legislative approval. The leaders of ISIS, he proclaimed, “will learn the same lessons as terrorists before them. If you doubt America’s commitment—or mine—to see that justice is done, ask Osama bin Laden. Ask the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, who was taken out last year…”

Then he declared, in language that will be noted by nations all over the world, that when it comes to waging war against potential adversaries, “our reach has no limit.”

Obama concluded his speech with an appeal to his Republican opponents to work with his administration and pull back from the extreme anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that has characterized the contest for the Republican presidential nomination.

In a clear reference to Donald Trump, he argued that “we need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This is not a matter of political correctness, but understanding what makes us strong.”

Obama was making an argument, not so much that racism and bigotry are intrinsically wrong, but that they make it more difficult for American imperialism to maintain its dominant world role. “When a politician insults Muslims,” he said, “it makes it harder to achieve our goals.”

The Pathankot Terrorist Attack and India’s Afghanistan Policy

Monish Gulati


The first weekend of the 2016 witnessed two almost simultaneous terrorist strikes on Indian assets. The first was on the Pathankot air base, and the second, on the Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Both attacks were well-planned and the militants executing it, better trained - a hallmark of involvement of Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex.

In the light of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent dramatic visit to Lahore, Pakistan, these strikes have been viewed as an attempt to subvert any normalisation of New Delhi-Islamabad relations. This article argues that the motivation for these strikes by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists lies in the recent upswing in India-Afghanistan relations.

India-Pakistan RelationsOf late, India-Pakistan relations have been more on the ropes than on the rails and nothing significant had been achieved during Modi’s Lahore stopover except either for the announcement that the foreign secretaries of both countries would meet in three weeks time. The intensity and the potential of the terrorist strike on the Pathankot air base suggests that their aim could be more substantial than just to derail the tepid India-Pakistan parleys.

Despite some indications - including those by the JeM themselves during the Mazar-e-Sharif strike that their attacks were related to developments in Jammu & Kashmir, India - the motivation of these strikes are likelier to be the current heightened dynamics of the India-Afghanistan (re)engagement. These attacks sought to underline Pakistan’s existing view on India’s role in Afghanistan, prior to the crucial quadrilateral talks on the resumption of the Afghan reconciliation dialogue that have been held in Pakistan.

Reset of India’s Afghan PolicyOver the past two months, India delivered four Mi-25 attack helicopters, airlifted in the C-17 transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force, to Afghanistan. The attack helicopters have been commissioned in the Afghan Air Force that already operates three Indian-built Cheetal light helicopters. This has been a significant departure from what has otherwise been India’s Afghan policy - one where, despite repeated requests from Kabul, New Delhi had insofar refrained from providing lethal weaponry to the country.

It also comes after India, over the several preceding months, silently watched Afghan President Ashraf Ghani undertake efforts to win Pakistani support for his engagement with the Afghan Taliban. Some of these efforts had pushed India’s role in Afghanistan’s recovery to the background.

One could disregard as a mere coincidence the fact that a few Afghan pilots were undergoing training at the Pathankot air base as part of a group of 23 foreign trainee pilots at the time of the terrorist strike on the base.

A spate of attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Afghanistan has also been witnessed during the period on either side of the timeline of the Pathankot attack. On 21 December 2015, Afghan security forces arrested a would-be suicide bomber and thwarted his plan to attack the Indian consulate in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan. Days later, security personnel arrested two terrorists who had planned to attack vehicles of the Jalalabad consulate with a 30-kg bomb. After the 4 January 2016 attack on the Indian consulate in Mazar-e-Sharif, on 8 January 2016, a vehicle transporting explosives was found near the Indian consulate in Herat, western Afghanistan.

Would one launch a strike on a consulate in Afghanistan to convey a message on Kashmir, when that 'message' was 'conveyed' quite visibly at Pathankot?

Modi in KabulModi visited Kabul on Christmas Day to dedicate to the Afghan people, the centre piece of India’s development assistance to the country - a new parliament building. On the occasion, he delivered a powerful speech than emphasised India’s soft power, and did not mince words while alluding to Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan’s troubles.

Without naming Pakistan, he said, "there are some who did not want us to be here. There were those who saw sinister designs in our presence here. ... Afghanistan will succeed only when terrorism no longer flows across the border; when nurseries and sanctuaries of terrorism are shut; and, their patrons are no longer in business."

On India’s role in the development of Afghanistan , he said "you know that India is here to contribute not to compete; to lay the foundations of future, not light the flame of conflict; to rebuild lives, not destroy a nation." He mentioned the role of "the mysterious Indian consulates" in Afghanistan in this regard. Some analysts saw Modi’s trip to Kabul and Lahore as a winner takes it all move, where he dealt himself a loaded hand; and as one commentator put it, Modi delivered in a one flight from Moscow "guns for Afghanistan and roses for Islamabad (Lahore)."

Quadrilateral DialogueThe inaugural round of the Quadrilateral Coordination Committee involving the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China, at the level of senior officials, on resumption of the reconciliation process  between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban, was held in Islamabad, Pakistan, on 11 January, less than a fortnight after the strikes.

What Pakistan would have hoped to convey prior to this meeting to the concerned stakeholders is that an increased Indian presence in Afghanistan would be at cross-purpose to their objectives of bringing peace to the country, and in the process, rule out any role for India in the Afghan reconciliation.

New Zealand Development Scholarships for African Students 2016/2017

Brief description: New Zealand Aid Programme Scholarships offers the opportunity to people from targeted African countries to undertake development-related studies at tertiary education institutions in New Zealand

Eligible Fields of study: Preference will be given to candidates who apply to study in academic disciplines relating to one or more of the following:

Agriculture development

• Agri-business management, agricultural economics, agricultural systems and management, rural development, domestic supply chains and distribution, Natural Resource and Environmental Management
• Biology, vegetable production, livestock/animal husbandry, crop management, sericulture (silk production), forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, agricultural pest management
• Phytosanitary, bio-security, biotechnology, agricultural trade,
• Food production, food sciences/technology, post-harvest processing, food storage and packaging, food safety

Renewable energy

• Geothermal, solar, hydro engineering and wind energy, renewable energy distribution systems

About Scholarship

New Zealand Development Scholarships (NZDS) give candidates from selected developing countries an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills through study in specific subject areas which will assist in the development of their home country. Awardees are required to return to their home country for at least two years after the completion of their scholarship to apply these new skills and knowledge in government, civil society or private business organisations.

Scholarship Offered Since: Not Specified

Who is eligibility to apply? Applicants must meet the following conditions to be eligible for a New Zealand Scholarship:

• Be a minimum of 18 years of age at the time of commencing your scholarship.
• Be a citizen of the country from which you are applying for a scholarship.
• Not have citizenship or permanent residence status of New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, European Union countries, United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. Have resided in your home country for at least two years immediately prior to commencing your scholarship. Have at least 2 years of work experience (part time or fulltime, paid or voluntary).
• Not be serving military personnel.
• Be able to satisfy Immigration requirements for international student entry to New Zealand or the country in which you will undertake your scholarship (i.e. medical checks, police clearances/character checks, etc.)
• Be academically and linguistically able to obtain an Offer of Place for the proposed programme of study from the tertiary institute where you will undertake your scholarship.
• Not have been previously terminated from a New Zealand Government Scholarship
• Seek a qualification that will contribute to the sustainable development of your home country
• Commit to return to your country for a minimum of 2 years at the end of your scholarship.

Number of Scholarship: Several

What are the benefits? New Zealand has first-rate education institutions that offer world-recognised qualifications. Successful applicants will have access to excellent academic knowledge in quality facilities. The scholarships include financial support for tuition, living costs while in New Zealand, and airfares. The partners of students are eligible for a work visa that allows them to live and work in New Zealand for the duration of their partner’s study.

Duration of sponsorship:

• Masters Degree (1 – 2 years)
• PhD (3 – 4 years)

Eligible Commonwealth countries in Africa include: Botswana,  Cameroon, Ghana,  Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia

Eligible non Commonwealth countries in Africa include: Algeria, Angola, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, Zimbabwe

To be taken at (country): New Zealand

Application Deadline:

15 April 2016 (paper application)
30 April 2016 (online application)

Offered annually? Yes

How to Apply Visit the Scholarship Webpage for details

Sponsors: The New Zealand Development Scholarships are funded by the New Zealand Aid Programme, the New Zealand Government’s overseas aid and development programme and managed by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).

Terror Hub or Empire Of Fear

Mara Ahmed

A wonderful housewarming party the day after New Year’s, in a Rochester suburb covered with bright, powdery snow. A diverse group of guests – musicians, poets and academics, but also physicians and lawyers, neighbors, grandmothers, Indian, Iranian, Russian, Belgian, and of course, everyone soundly American. The hors d'oeuvres are splendid, I assume that the wine is good, the conversation flows.

In the midst of preliminary introductions and stories about work, the subject of terrorism comes up. It’s to be expected. Rochester has just experienced the latest terror plot in which a socially marginalized Muslim man with a history of mental illness was bulldozed by the FBI into planning an attack, and then quickly arrested. New Year’s fireworks were cancelled and Rochester joined the ranks of global metropolises like Paris and New York City. The excitement didn’t last long though, as the sad details of a local panhandler’s entrapment became known.

“Why has Belgium become a terror hub?” someone asks. There is some discomfort, some evasion, but the question is repeated several times. The Belgian guest explains how things have changed over time. We talk about Molenbeek, a municipality of some 95,000 people in the Belgian capital, an area inhabited by Muslims and North Africans, the alleged suburb “at the heart” of the Paris attacks. I express my displeasure at stereotyping entire neighborhoods for the actions of a few. I remember some of my Moroccan and Algerian friends at the Lycée Emile Jacqmain in Brussels. They might have been from Molenbeek. It wasn’t on the radar in those days, not newsworthy enough.

We discuss the social inequities that exist in many European cities, the impossibility for second and third generation, non-white immigrants to be absorbed by the mainstream, the high rates of unemployment and crime, the clustering of poverty, and the geography of racist segregation whereby central Paris becomes a foreign country to those relegated to the banlieues. Disaffection does not need to be imported from abroad, it’s borne of systemic, multigenerational discrimination.

Someone marvels at Europe’s difficulties with immigrants in light of the relative success we’ve had here in the United States. I mention Black Lives Matter and the ongoing war on American black men. But they’re not immigrants, I’m told. Indeed, they’ve been here forever and they’ve built this country, yet the projects look incredibly similar to the banlieues. Could racism be a point of intersection?

In an interview with Bill Moyers, in November 1988, Derek Walcott spoke about the appalling ghettoes of America, about the “colony” which exists within the empire. He said it might have something to do with denying the responsibility of being an empire, not just a global empire but also a domestic one.

This denial of empire creates endless confusion in American political discourse and lends itself to dangerous manipulation. It’s astonishing that the American public, protected by the mightiest military juggernaut in human history, is constantly afraid.

Al Qaeda, and now ISIS, can strike fear into the American heart in a way that is completely out of whack with reality. After all, it’s our military power that continues to flatten countries and kill innumerable people in the Global South, in invisible, largely privatized, open-ended wars, not the other way around.

The discussion at this lively party, organized by a dear friend, leaves me unsettled. I come home to find an article about Molenbeek in the Socialist Worker. It sounds all too familiar. In the piece, dated November 2015, Belgian activist Farida Aarrass describes heavy police presence in the area. There are frequent house raids, blatant profiling and use of racist language. These problematic dynamics with law enforcement remind me of inner city Rochester.

Aarrass explains how every terrorist incident or so-called plot is used to escalate repression. The media join in cheerfully by beating the drum of “jihad” and in the world outside of Molenbeek, there’s steady harassment and Islamophobia. People are frightened. Their fears are legitimate, grounded in a threatening reality, in which their homes and physical sense of security are routinely violated.

Americans, on the other hand, are 353 times more likely to die from a fall, while cleaning their gutters or putting up Christmas lights, than from a terror intrigue. But even those odds are not satisfactory. The policing of thought, preemptive arrests, the profiling of minorities, even the targeting of the mentally ill, are all permissible in the quest for perfect security. The rest of the world knows that such a quest is bound to fail and that fear is a miserable way to live. Let’s hope we catch on soon.

The Sauds' Impunity

Eric Zuesse

No matter how bad the fundamentalist Sunni-Islamic Saud royal family are, America's government still supports them and condemns the countries that the Sauds hate: those are the Shia-led nations of Iran and of Syria.

All jihadist terrorism is Sunni, none of it is Shia; but the U.S. government is anti-Shia, not anti-Sunni. There were no Shia involved in the 9/11 attacks, nor in the Mumbai attacks, nor in the Charlie Hebdo or other Paris attacks, nor in the London bombing, nor in any of the others. All of the terrorism that wracks Afghanistan and Pakistan is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni; Al Qaeda is Sunni. As Sunni fundamentalists, they all hate especially Shia  as “infidels,” because Shia claim  to be Muslims, and Sunni fundamentalists take that very claim to be not only a lie but a personal insult to themselves as ‘real' Muslims, because they ‘know' what a ‘real' Muslim is — they've been taught  it, and it's distinctively Sunni. 

But the U.S. government keeps harping instead against the Shia group Hezbollah, which is at war against Israel because of the barbaric way that Israel treats its Palestinians. But that's not terrorism in anything like the same sense — it's not jihadist, it's not out for global conquest; and it certainly doesn't threaten us. And it's really none of America's business to get involved with, anyway — it is Israel's problem, entirely: and Israel flagrantly violates even the Camp David accords that the U.S. government itself brokered; and, so, for America to be involved on either side there is plain wrong — but the U.S. government donates, from its own taxpayers, over $3 billion every year to Israel, so that it'll buy weapons from U.S. arms-makers. This give-away to the U.S. weapons-industry  is supposed to be ‘humanitarian,' and ‘foreign aid.' It actually aids more in killing than it does in protecting; the sheer hypocrisy of that subsidy to U.S. weapons-makers is obscene. But anyway: Hezbollah is a sideshow in a discussion of terrorism, and it's not at all  jihadist. By contrast, the Saud family fund jihad. And yet the U.S. government considers them allies, if not its top allies. Something's very wrong here.

The Sauds have impunity, at least from the U.S. government. Instead of the U.S. government being against the tyrants who rule Saudi Arabia, the U.S. government overthrows the leaders (tyrants or otherwise) who are allied with Russia — which just happens to be another country that the Sauds are at war against. Thus, the U.S. overthrew Russia-friendly Saddam Hussein in 2003, and Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and our government is allied with the Sauds and other top funders of terrorism, global jihadist Islam — all of whom are Sunnis — to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, because he not only is Shiite but allies with Russia, and because the Sauds hate Russia almost as much as the leadership of America do (so the U.S. is allied in this with the Sunni dictatorships: not only the Saud royals but the Qatar royals, and the Kuwait royals, and the UAE royals, and all of the Arabic-oil royal families are led by the Saudi King, the world's wealthiest person, and the organizer of a new Saudi-run Sunni version of America's NATO alliance against Russia).

The people who control America are lots more anti-Russian than they are anti-terrorist — and any old excuse will serve America's leaders to ‘justify' that priority, to the public whom they treat as their suckers, not as the people in a democracy, who are supposed to own  this government (“We, the People …”), and from whom it has been stolen.

So, something's fishy here. It's the U.S. government, obviously, and it emits the stench of rotten fish. The U.S. government's ulterior motives are constantly reeking. It's the stench of our government's constant lying-to-the-public.

Here's the reality about our Saudi ‘friends':

Ever since 1744, when the gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud and the fanatically anti-Shiite Sunni preacher Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore their mutual oath to one-another, the Sauds have hated Shia and been set upon defeating them. That oath started what we today know as Saudi Arabia: a union of church-and-state (Saudi government with Wahhabist clerics validating that family's authority to rule) that seeks first to exterminate all Shia Muslims, and then to organize all Muslims together into global conquest, to bring every nation under strict Sunni rule. (And anyone who resists will be beheaded and then crucified.) Wahhab hated Shia for their trying to soften the original Islam. (Wahhabism is called “Salafism” when it's being practiced outside the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, but its principles are the same under either name. ISIS is also the same as Saudi, except that it demands the global Islamic leader to be a descendant of the Prophet, which the Sauds are not. In this regard, ISIS poses a real threat to the Sauds. ISIS then is an enemy of the Sauds inside Saudi Arabia, but a useful fighting-oprganization for the Sauds' objectives outside  Saudi Arabia.)

The aggressor in the world isn't Shia; it's Sunni. And the custodians of the two holiest places in Islam — Mecca and Medina — are the extremist-Sunni Saud family, which America's government call ‘friends.' The Saud family won what they have by conquest: to allege they got it by either ‘capitalism' or ‘democracy' would be to insult both. Worse yet: it would be to lie. And they're no ‘friends' of America. But maybe they are our masters. Here's how they managed to grab what they've got:

"Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi [today's Saudi] towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud's forces had established Wahhabism--and with it the Al Saud political authority.”

Furthermore:

“By marrying his son into Al-Wahhab's tribe, Muhammad Ibn Saud broke with custom but initiated a process that led to the unification of disparate tribes under one leader. … In return for their allegiance, Muhammad Ibn Saud offered his followers the prospect of conquest. … In 1746, Imam Al-Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of jihad against all those who refused to share his vision of Unity.”

That jihad continues today, but the U.S. government joins it, instead of repudiates and condemns it. The U.S. government is instead obsessed with conquering Russia. This obsession started just while the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communism was ending. It has dominated U.S. foreign policy ever since.

Inside Saudi Arabia, the Saud family, who financed Al Qaeda, behead some of their own jihadists in order to achieve two objectives: first, to get rid of some of the Sunni extremists who say that the Sauds aren't sufficiently  extreme or “pure”; and, second, to please American and other suckers to believe that, in America's allying with the very same people who provide the funding to jihadists, the U.S. isn't acting against the interests of the American people. Even a beheading can be a PR stunt, in one way or another.

And our government has been doing this since at least 1945, and especially since 1971 when the U.S. went off the gold standard and went onto the oil standard instead: oil would now be priced only in dollars.

The hypocrisy of America's leaders is what stinks enough to make rotting fish smell like fragrance by comparison.

Why isn't even one  U.S. Presidential candidate promising to end the selling of weapons to those jihadist tyrants (the Sauds and the other Arabic oil-potentates — all of the Sunni national leaders), and to organize global economic sanctions against the Sauds and their friends the other funders of jihadism? Let those clans sell their oil and gas, but there should be an internationally coordinated arms embargo against them. Instead, the Sauds are by far the largest foreign purchasers of U.S. weapons (and, unlike Israel, they pay for all of it with their own inherited money, not with money that was donated to them by America's taxpayers).

How else can jihadism be brought to an end in our time? Why isn't the reality behind jihadism even being publicly discussed? Why?

Islam: The War Within

Sazzad Hussain

The severing of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arab and Iran and its following by some other Arab states once again widens the gap between Sunni and Shiite factions within Islam, which has been on since the tragedy of Karbala. However in modern times, it has been a political manoeuvring favouring certain strategic interests which have put Islam to be in war with itself. In a time when the world has been experiencing the dichotomy between Islam and the rest of other faiths because of Islamist terrorism, the Saudi-Iran spat reveals the paradoxes within the so-called Islamic world of the Middle-East and a reality check to the idea of an utopian Islamic world that many Islamists propagate by projecting the faith as an homogeneous entity.

Ever since its formation in 1932 with armed help from British India, the Saudi Kingdom has been officially representing Sunni Islam with its ultra-orthodox interpretation preached by Ibn Wahhab. The possession of the two holiest sites of Islam—Mecca and Medina from the Ottoman rule after World War I enabled the Saudis to propagate Wahhabism to all Muslims of the world because of the annual Hajj. The discovery of oil in the Kingdom in 1939 fastened the then US President Roosevelt to sign a treaty with the Saudis as a partner and this led to the formation of oil company ARAMCO. Since then Saudi Arabia started producing oil with US armed protection in a system that suits the western demands of uninterrupted energy supplies. An absolute monarchy with the Holy Quran as its constitution and the king as the upholder of the faith, Saudi Arabia evolved as a state without any nationhood. Its official Mufti asks the citizens for loyalty towards the king but allowed rebellion (Jihad) abroad through fatwas. The western establishments in the post-World War II scenario was nervous towards the spread of Arab nationalism spearheaded by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt with the prime objective of liberating Palestine from Israel and turning all the oil-rich Arab monarchies and dependencies into socialist republics. At this backdrop, this Saudi stand with Sunni Islam in the forefront suited the west very much which they are still cashing in.

Iran, earlier called Persia, has been a Shiite bastion for the last thirteen centuries. Many Arab lands like the present day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain has Shiite population. Despite the linguistic differences of Arabic and Persian, Shiite Arabs always looked towards the Shiite seminaries of Qom in Iran as their authority. The pro-western Pahlavi dynasty of Iran paused no threat to the Saudi or any other US allies in the Middle-East. But the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, changed the entire course. The Islamic Republic of Iran, under the spiritual guidance of Khomeini set up to diktat terms on Islam which were political moves to counter the growing Sunni power exercised by Saudi Arabia ever since the oil boom of 1974. It was the Shiite Arabs of Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Lebanon who became the first followers of Iran despite the linguistic differences. The eight years Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) was the culmination of that Sunni-Shiite divide which the Saudis and its other Gulf allies backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussain to be a war mongering ruler with tacit approval from the west. The Shiite Iranian outreach in this region was successful in the Lebanese civil war (1976-93) when the Shiite group Hezbollah, succeeded in unifying that sectarian country ending western intervention and pulling out of Israeli troops. Meanwhile among the Palestinians, a Shiite group named Islamic Jihad also gained momentum to fight Israeli occupation during the pre-Intifada era. Iran’s strong stand against Israeli occupation of Palestine, American intervention in the region and overall anti-west campaign has long been made the country an unflavoured one in most of the western capitals. Its nuclear programme has also been a concern for the west. The most striking stand by Iran on Islam so far is the death fatwa issued against British author Sir Salman Rushdie by Khomeini in 1989 for his novel Satanic Verses.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave the Saudis the ample opportunity to export its Wahhabi-Sunni Islam as America started the Mujahedeen war from Pakistan. The creation of Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Taliban etc are all the product of this Saudi-US collaboration. Later when George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, the hitherto secular state became fragmental on sectarian divide between Sunnis, Shiites and non-Arab Kurds (also Sunnis). It was Iran which was immensely benefited from the US occupation of Iraq as its majority Shiites always had an allegiance to them. On the other hand the Saudi-Qatar backed Sunni militias and al-Qaeda mobilized themselves in post-Saddam Iraq which are now metamorphosed to IS. The Saudi sponsored Sunni political outreach provides duel citizenships to all Sunni head of states and provides them asylum whenever necessary. Remember when Nawaz Sharief was deposed by Gen. Musharaf in 1999, he went to Riyadh. The deposed Tunisian president Zain-al-Abedine Ben Ali, former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri all enjoyed Saudi hospitality because of the dual citizenship.

Saudi Arabia has been confronting Iran for supremacy in Lebanon and Syria which has a large Shiite base and political strength. For this simple reason the Saudis are not fighting the IS in Syria and Iraq but bombing the Shiite Hauthi rebels in Yemen. It also sent troops to Sunni ruled Shiite majority Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011 to crush the pro-democracy movements. There have also been reports that the Saudi plans of allowing its airspace to Israeli jets to bomb the nuclear plants in Iran.

The Saudi-Iran spate reflects the century old sectarian rift within Islam which otherwise provide an egalitarian vision for mankind. It is the typical Middle-Eastern paradox to be sectarian which hardly to be found among Muslims elsewhere. But the important fact is that this divide in Islam has put the Sunnis in side with the western hegemonic designs as it has been for the last eight decades and Shiites with the global forces that oppose it—Russia and China.

190 Muslim workers fired from Colorado meatpacking plant

Tom Hall

Around 190 Muslim workers at a meatpacking plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado were fired last month after walking off the job in protest of management’s discriminatory decision to revoke prayer breaks during their shift.

The Colorado plant, operated by multinational food giant Cargill, employs around 2,100 hourly workers. Six hundred of these, or more than one-quarter, are Muslim refugees from Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries, which has been decimated by decades of conflict stoked by American imperialism.

The salah, or praying five times a day, is one of the main pillars of the Islamic faith. The prayers, which generally take no more than five minutes, take place at regular intervals throughout the day, which are determined by the movement of the sun across the sky. The workers involved in the walkout all worked on the plant’s second shift, which falls during sundown prayers.

Management at the plant opened up a small prayer area on the premises to accommodate the workers in 2009. However, workers who have sought to utilize the space during their working hours have reported that they have been subjected to routine threats from management. “This has been going on for a long time,” Jaylani Hussein of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is representing the fired workers in the dispute, told the press. “There have been instances last year and this year where supervisors would literally say, ‘You’re fired, you’re going home,’ if you go to pray.”

Matters reportedly came to a head in December when the new manager for the second shift prohibited prayer breaks during work hours. Ten Muslim workers resigned the following day, followed shortly by a walkout by around 200 more. Cargill responded by firing all of the roughly 190 workers who had not returned to work on December 29, citing a clause in their union contract that provides for summary dismissal after three consecutive unexcused absences.

Mike Martin, a spokesman for Cargill, denied that the company had banned prayer breaks and blamed the walkout on a “misunderstanding.” He told the media the initial resignations came after the company refused a request by 11 workers to leave the production line in order to pray at the same time. Company policy, according to Martin, allows only two or three workers to leave at a time in order to keep the line moving. “While reasonable efforts are made to accommodate employees, accommodation is not guaranteed every day and is dependent on a number of factors that can, and do, change from day to day."

However, the workers say this request was never made. “They told us, ‘If you try [to pray] tomorrow, you’re going to get a write-up or get fired,’” plant worker Mahmoud Hassan told the local ABC affiliate.

However, even by Martin’s own favorable characterization, Cargill’s policy would likely be a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. Under the law, employees’ requests for a “reasonable accommodation” for their religious beliefs must be met as long as it does not place an “undue hardship” on business operations. For example, a worker can request not to be scheduled to work during the Sabbath if it goes against his religious practices.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American Muslims have reported a sharp rise in workplace discrimination. One 2013 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that Muslim job applicants received callbacks for interviews at far lower rates than Christians, especially in conservative states. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also reported a sharp rise in religious-based discrimination cases reported by Muslims after 2001, doubling in 2002 and peaking at 884 in 2011. American Muslims, who comprise two percent of the population, account for nearly a quarter of all such discrimination cases.

Negotiations with the company by CAIR to have the workers re-instated have thus far led nowhere. According to company policy, workers who were terminated are not allowed to re-apply for six months; the CAIR negotiating team is reportedly attempting to have this freeze waived.

Significantly, the union that claims to represent the workers, Teamsters Local 455, has done nothing to defend the victimized workers. The local has not even acknowledged the firings on their web site or Facebook page, and has reportedly refused to talk to CAIR, to whom the workers’ turned after the union’s inaction. Many workers at the plant earn as little as $14 per hour, barely above the official poverty level for a family of four.

David Macaray, a former union bureaucrat who denounced the World Socialist Web Site on the Counterpunch web site for mobilizing opposition against the betrayal by the United Auto Workers in the recent contract struggle, accused the meatpacking workers of demanding “preferential treatment” in a recent column. Evincing filthy “America-first” chauvinism, which is the stock-in-trade of the unions, Macaray asked, “Why have ICE agents chased out undocumented Latinos in these meat-packing plants and opened the door to Somalis? Why aren’t more American-born men and women working these $30,000 a year jobs?”

The mass firings in Colorado are similar to an earlier incident in Nebraska in 2008 when roughly 90 mostly Somali Muslims at a meatpacking plant operating by JBS Swift & Co. were fired after walking off the job in protest after being refused prayer breaks during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represented the workforce at the plant, refused to support the workers, and the local union president falsely claimed to the press that the workers had “quit.”

Far from opposing xenophobic and anti-Muslim agitation, the unions function as accomplices in the efforts by the corporate and political establishment to use the “war on terror” to divide the working class, carry out sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of all workers and justify ever-expanding wars.

Global financial turmoil continues on fears of slower growth

Nick Beams

China’s stock market was closed early Thursday for the second time in four days as stocks plunged as soon as it opened. A key index dropped by 5 percent, forcing an automatic 15-minute freeze. When the markets re-opened the losses continued and the market was shut for the day when they hit 7 percent.

The China plunge came after a day of turbulence in European and US markets on Wednesday, prompted by a further drop in oil prices, rising concerns over Chinese growth and financial stability, and worries over emerging market debt. Reports of a North Korean hydrogen bomb test added to the uncertainty.

In the US, the major indexes fell by more than 1 percent, with the Dow and the S&P 500 ending the day below 17,000 and 2,000, respectively. The US share sell-off followed sharp declines in Japan and other parts of Asia, as well across Europe.

The main factor at work is the deepening trend toward recession in the global economy, which is starting to undermine the financial bubble that has been created by the pumping of trillions of dollars into global financial markets by the US Fed and other major central banks.

Market analysts speaking to the American business channel CNBC cited China and signs of a worsening situation globally and in the US. “It’s pretty much the same story. You’ve got China growth problems,” and “the US manufacturing sector seems to be in recession territory,” one commentator said.

Another commented that the “biggest thing affecting markets” is that “we’re coming in with an assumption that the global economy is slowing more” in 2015 than 2016. “We’re worried about China.”

Another analyst told the Los Angeles Times that markets were “trading on fear that Chinese growth is going to collapse and that… lower oil prices are going to lead to a growing number of defaults in the high-yield bond market.”

Those fears have been compounded by the fall in the price of Brent crude to below $35 per barrel for the first time since 2004, while the price of American crude hit its lowest point in seven years. The falling oil price feeds directly into energy markets via energy-based companies and into the high-yield or “junk” bond market, which saw an infusion of cheap money when oil was trading at more than $100 a barrel barely 18 months ago.

The worsening situation in China is evidenced both in the economy and the financial system. Chinese growth is already down to its lowest levels in a quarter of a century, with manufacturing activity experiencing lower growth for five months in a row and exports down for each of the last 15 months. But a new cause for concern appeared on Wednesday with the news that the services sector had experienced its lowest growth for 17 months. The official policy of the Chinese government is that it is making a transition to a more service-based economy.

Chinese stock market and financial turbulence, which rattled world markets in August last year, has also returned. On the first day of trading, markets were automatically shut down following a drop of almost 7 percent, as the date for the lifting of government restrictions on share trading imposed in August approached.

As in the crisis five months ago, there are concerns about the stability of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. It has now reached its lowest point in five years, as the gap between its value in the more tightly controlled domestic market and the offshore market widens to record levels. The offshore value of the renminbi has dropped by more than 2 percent this week, recalling the events of August, when its surprise devaluation sent shock waves through world markets.

In a research note published on Wednesday, Timothy Moe, Goldman Sachs’ chief Asia-Pacific strategist, wrote: “During our investor meetings in December, the most significant risk that investors were worried about was a substantial devaluation of the renminbi.”

The concerns are two-fold: first, that a significant fall in the Chinese currency will lead to devaluations in Asian and other currencies, sending a new wave of deflationary pressures through the world economy, and second, that it will spark an increase in capital outflows from China that could cause major financial problems.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has been intervening in financial markets in an effort to limit the fall in the renminbi, running down its global currency reserves. At the same time, the PBoC wants the currency to fall gradually in order to improve China’s trade position.

There are concerns that the situation is getting out of the control of financial authorities. Last August, they changed the method of determining the value of the renminbi by deciding to tie it to the previous day’s close. But on Wednesday, this new rule was broken when the PBoC fixed the rate significantly above the close for Tuesday, prompting concerns that the movement in the daily fix would only increase market volatility.

Financial Times commentator Gavyn Davies noted that the risk of large scale devaluation of the renminbi was “again spooking financial markets, which are firmly convinced that this is a very bad contingency for global risk assets in 2016.” Since the start of the new year, “investors have become much more concerned that a larger devaluation may be in the in works, either through the choice of the Chinese authorities, or because the outflow of private capital is getting out of hand.”

Some were even worried that China could be suffering from “a genuine exchange rate crisis, in which its enormous foreign currency reserves could be quickly drained.”

There are also growing concerns about financial stability in other emerging markets, which the International Monetary Fund has estimated are “over-borrowed” to the tune of $3 trillion. The prevailing conventional wisdom is that such over-indebtedness is not the concern it was in the past because most of it has been concentrated in the corporate rather than the government sector, and therefore the risk of a sovereign debt crisis is reduced.

But doubt has been cast on this reassuring assessment by an article published Wednesday in the Financial Times. It noted that more than $800 billion of sovereign debt was being camouflaged by the use of bonds that offer implicit state backing without always appearing on government balance sheets. The article noted that the stock of these “quasi-sovereign bonds” had risen in the past 12 months “to overtake that of all emerging market sovereign debt by the end of 2015.”

In other words, while the official debt to gross domestic product ratio may appear quite low by global standards for countries such as India, Russia and China, the amount of debt they have to cover in the event of a crisis could be much higher than official figures indicate.

The worsening global economic situation was underscored by a World Bank report issued Wednesday that cut the bank’s growth forecast for the third year in a row. It said larger-than-anticipated contractions in Brazil and Russia, combined with lower growth in the world’s major economies, had caused it to downgrade its growth forecast by 0.4 percentage points to 2.9 percent. While this was up slightly from the downwardly revised estimate of 2.6 percent for 2015, the report presented a gloomy outlook.

The World Bank cut its forecasts for developing countries as a whole by more than 0.5 percentage points and warned that this estimate was made on the basis of a smooth Chinese slowdown, a stabilisation of commodity prices, and only a gradual increase in borrowing costs. “All of these assumptions, however, are subject to substantial downside risks,” it stated.

The bank pointed out that it has now downwardly revised growth in the major developing countries for three years in a row, the first time this has happened since the 1980s, and noted that recoveries in the US and Europe were weaker than expected, while slowing world trade was having an impact.

Summing up the situation, the bank’s chief economist Kaushik Basu said: “There are severe fault lines beneath the surface.”