Egypt: a Breeding Ground for Terrorism

Patrick Howlett-Martin

Destabilized by the supporters of the former regime, as witnessed by the dissolution of an elected Parliament in 2012 where his Freedom and Justice party along with the ultra-conservative islamist Al Nour party had won a majority of seats, and by hostile media campaigns, President Mohamed Morsi, the first Egypt´s democratically elected president (June 24, 2012), was confronted by enormous street protests erupting across Egypt on June 30, 2013 calling for his resignation. The military stepped in three days later to remove him from office.

Following the coup d’état, the pro-Morsi protestors, who quite legitimately decried the flagrant violation of law, were the victims of savage repression (more than 1,000 dead in Nahda and Ramses squares and at the Rabaa al-Adawiyya and Fatah mosques, the great majority killed by bullets on August 14, 15 and 16, 2013, many of them adolescents, such as Asmaa, the daughter of the islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy, and several journalists Michael Deane of Sky News, Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz of Gulf News, Ahmed Abdel Gawad of Al-Akhbar, Mosab El-Shami of Rassd News Network , not to mention the murders of 38 islamist leaders on August 20 as they were being transferred to the Abu Zaabal prison). Female demonstrators were forced to submit, by order of the generals who had seized power, to humiliating tests of virginity. A witch hunt was organized against all the leaders of the movement, who were brought before military tribunals. The great majority of the 25 provincial governors were replaced by generals allied with the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). More than 65 journalists were arrested.

More than 20,000 people were imprisoned. President Mohamed Morsi, held in total isolation since his arrest on July 4, 2013, appeared before the Criminal Court of Cairo in January 2014, where he was held in a soundproof glass cage. The court handed down a death sentence for Morsi and 122 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of them in abstentia, including one of the spiritual leaders of the movement, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, a prolific and well respected author among the Muslim world, who had been living in exile in Qatar for 30 years before returning to Egypt after the fall of Mubarak in 2011. Moderate and respected leaders such as Ahmed Maher, Mohammed Abdel, and Emad Shahin were imprisoned and sentenced to death.

While young protesters were killed, such as 32-year-old Shaima al-Sabbagh as she went to place a wreath of flowers in Tahir Square or abducted and detained, secretary of State John Kerry incautiously declared during a visit to Pakistan the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy in Egypt” and the British government the day after the condamnation of president Mohamed Morsi to death   invited Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to London.

The government dominated by the military since Mubarak´s resignation, was led between between July 2013 and March 2014, by a 79-year-old Interim Prime Minister, Hazem al-Beblawi, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur from France in 1992. Althought he had resigned in October 2011 to protest the killing of 27 Christian demonstrators by the army, an episode known as the Maspero Massacre, he approved the brutal repression carried out by the Egyptian army and police against the protesters from Rabaa Al-Adawiyya and Al-Nahda Cairo´s squares in July of 2013. “These are extraordinary times which must be confronted with brutality,” he said to news correspondent for ABC, Martha Raddatz. The Vice President, Mohammad ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, resigned from the caretaker government set up after the coup d’état and chose exile to dissociate himself from the repression that had not spared journalists from the United States (Mick Deane of Sky News), Dubai (Habiba Ahmed Abd Elaziz of X-Press), and Qatar (Peter Greste, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, and Baher Mohamed of Al-Jazeera, who was sentenced in August 2015 to 3 years in prison on the basis of unjust criteria). According to a prison census conducted by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists on December 1, 2015, Egypt was holding a record 23

journalists behind bars.. This did not stop Germany, acting on a request by Egyptian authorities, from arresting Al-Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour on June 20, 2015 in Berlin. The authorities claimed that he had been sentenced in abstentia in 2014 to 15 years in prison for having “tortured an Egyptian lawyer in Tahrir Square”. The man behind the coup, general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had just made an official visit to Germany, during which the Siemens Group announced the signing of an equipment contract worth 8 billion dollars.

Photojournalist Mahmoud “Shawkan” Abou Zeid, remains in prison more than 900 days after his arrest covering a protest.In April 2016, dozens of foreign and Egyptian journalists were arrested while covering major protests against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government in various parts of Cairo and in provincial cities. Egypt is ranked 159 out of 180 countries in the 2016 Press Freedom Index, according to Reporters Without Borders, a freedom of expression advocacy group based in Paris. Confidential guidelines published apparently by accident by the Interior Ministry in May 2016 aimed to undermine the credibility of the journalists´ union by nominating retired police and military officers inside the mains country´s influential medias.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged 8 billion dollars and Kuwait 4 billion dollars for the new government. This prize for the coup from conservative monarchies that threatened the “Arab Spring” (the Morsi government benefited from financial aid from Qatar, Turkey, and the European Union) and the reluctance of the United States and its allies to take any retaliatory action are an eloquent testimony to the meagerness of hopes for democratization in Egyptian politics. Three months after the coup, President Obama announced that the United States would recalibrate its military aid, suspending, in particular, the delivery of heavy equipment (planes, helicopters, tanks). However, on his visit to Cairo on June 22, 2014, John Kerry provided reassurance to the Egyptians. A large portion of American aid ($1,2 billion each year) goes to financing weapons purchases from major U.S. corporations (e.g. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin). The European Union pledged 90 million dollars in financial aid to the new regime and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, showed incredible poor taste by spending her 2013 Christmas vacation with her family in Luxor while repression was rampant throughout the country.

It was after an official visit to Paris in November 2014 by the new Egyptian president, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, installed after Morsi’s ouster and a sham election, that France announced, in February 2015, its premier trade agreement, worth 5 billion euros, involving the sale of Dassault Rafale fighter aircrafts. The announcement was blazoned on official communiqués, echoing a similar enthusiasm expressed when a deal was made with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after his visit to Paris in December 2007 for 14 Rafale planes, a deal that ultimately came to nothing. It should be noted that the Egyptian Air Force already had 220 American F-16 fighter aircraft and that Egypt is only able to remain afloat economically thanks to financing from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates In September 2015, French President François Hollande announced the sale to Egypt of the two Mistral-class landing ships originally built for the Russian navy but their sale canceled in September 2014 because Russia´s involvement in Ukraine and mounting pressure from NATO to call off the sale.

The military coup, the incarceration of thousands of sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the former president elect,]/ Mohamed Morsi, who was warmly received in Beijing, Tehran (2013), Brasilia, Berlin and Moscow (2013), did not prevent the Conference of Investors from responding to an invitation by the Egyptian president, Marshal Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, to a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh (March13-15, 2015 with 22 heads of state. The meeting concluded with the signing of contracts announced as being worth a total of 34 billion euros. The British BG Group (acquired in April 2015 by Royal Dutch Shell) and British Petroleum both made a commitment to invest $4 billion and $12 billion respectively.

The strongman behind the putsch, General Abdul Fattah al-Sissi, appointed Minister of Defense by President Morsi in 2012, got his education at the Army War College in Pennsylvania. He is a member of a privileged and wealthy caste, rubbing shoulders with the powerful for over sixty years. He now commands an army of 450,000 men with a budget that is no longer under Parliamentary control or scrutiny and administers 40% of the country’s economy. Each year, 500 Egyptian officers receive training in the United States. Despite American aid estimated at 50 billion dollars since 1979, one fourth of the Egyptian population is illiterate.

The Muslim Brotherhood, had been excluded for too long from Egyptian politics though its charity work, hospitals and social programs have done much over decades to improve the social climate in Egypt. Which lessons will be drawn by the islamist groups which were ready to accept democratic rule and those that are dedicated to armed struggle?

The car bomb that killed the Prosecutor General of Egypt, Hisham Barakat, who issued the death sentence against Morsi and the main leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in sham trials, and the resurgence of attacks in the northern Sinai illustrate the perils to Egypt of the repression wrought by Abdul Fatta al-Sissi, who declared his willingness in June 2015 to rework the legal code by means of decree-laws in order to “accelerate the pace of executions”. The aberrant alliance with the army discredits liberalism and secularism in the Arab world. The people will discover at their own expense that it will only serve to reintroduce the same neo-liberal politics and put the same elite back in power, and the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood who do not choose exile and manage to avoid death and incarceration will become radicalized and presented to us in the mainstream press as “terrorists”.

The New Cold War

Farhang Jahanpour

There are many ominous signs that dark clouds are gathering over international relations, from the South China Sea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea to the Middle East, and to Ukraine and the Baltics. We are entering a new and perhaps a more ominous Cold War.

This is something that will affect all our lives and will plunge us into a new era of East-West confrontation that none of us wants and that all of us should try hard to prevent.

Many young people were born after the end of the Cold War or were too young to remember its horrors, and how the world was on a knife’s edge about a possible global confrontation between the two superpowers with thousands of nuclear weapons whose use could have ended human civilization. We, who remember those days, should make sure that we do not see a repetition of that dark period in human history.

Yet, sadly, a Cold War mentality is once again creeping back into political discourse.

The Second World War that killed more than 60 million people and devastated many countries had hardly ended when new hostilities emerged. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not so much the final act in the Second World War as the opening shot in the Cold War. Contrary to the stated justifications for the dropping of the bombs as a means of forcing Japan to surrender, it is now clear that Japan was ready to surrender before the use of those awful weapons.

Many historians believe that the real reason for the use of nuclear weapons was to prevent Japan falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, as the Red Army was poised to take on Japan’s remaining army in Manchuria, thus forcing Japan to surrender to Russia. Furthermore, it was a clear signal of the West’s possession of the new devastating weapons.

For instance, the scientist Leo Szilard who met with US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in May 1945, reported later: “Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war … Mr. Byrnes’ view was that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable.” (1)

Therefore, far from wanting to save lives, the use of nuclear weapons was to demonstrate America’s overwhelming military might, and to issue a warning to Russia.

The war had hardly ended when in a speech in the British House of Commons on 16 August 1945 Winston Churchill referred to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”

It was in view of those ominous events that mankind decided to create international organizations that would “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The Charter of the United Nations aimed “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small” and “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security”.

Yet, despite those lofty sentiments, the world has witnessed non-stop conflict and proxy wars ever since.

Far from establishing permanent peace, the West formed the mighty North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), followed by the Eastern bloc’s Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance (the Warsaw Pact) in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO.

Although the Warsaw Pact was dismantled after the end of the Cold War, NATO has gone from strength to strength. In addition to all the warlike talk about the need to confront Russia, the confrontation has moved beyond words into action.

Recently, the United States switched on the $800 million missile shield, ironically at a Soviet-era base in Romania.

Rightly or wrongly, many Russians believe that Russia is vulnerable to a pre-emptive Western attack that could destroy most of Russian nuclear sites. If the West also builds a missile defence shield against Russian retaliation, the nuclear deterrence, or the concept of MAD (mutual assured destruction), would lose its value and Russia would have no option but to surrender to Western demands.

This may be a mistaken perception, but in politics perception plays a major role.

In response, speaking to his top military officers, President Putin said: “This is not a defence system. This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought onto a periphery. In this case, Eastern Europe is such periphery.” He went on to say: “Until now, those taking such decisions have lived in calm, fairly well-off and in safety. Now, as these elements of ballistic missile defence are deployed, we are forced to think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”

All this sounds very ominous.

There are clear signs of a return to a new Cold War based on false premises. In fact, the dangers of the new Cold War are much greater than was the case with the old Cold War, because at that time there was some form of parity between the two sides, and neither side pushed openly for confrontation, while at the moment, the Warsaw Pact is gone and Russia’s military spending is only 8% of NATO’s spending.

This imbalance creates excessive self-confidence in the West and great apprehension in Russia.

During the Cold War, each side knew the rules of the game and did not transgress them. Each side knew how far it could push before igniting a serious confrontation. Such constraints do not exist at the moment. The proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons is another factor that makes their use more likely, which then would inadvertently result in a full-blown confrontation.

Perhaps the most important factor was the post-World War generation was still aware of the horrors of the war, while at the moment the younger generations fortunately do not have such memories and may not be as sensitive to the use of force.

Recently, former U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel warned that both sides would find themselves “very quickly in another Cold War build-up here that makes sense for neither side.”

As President Obama eloquently said in his speech in Hiroshima: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”

He reminded us: “The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.”

He went on to say: “Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines. The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.”

We must bring about a moral revolution if we do not wish to repeat our past mistakes.

U.S. Elites: the Original Gangsters

Nick Alexandrov

Re-Thinking Organized Crime

Donald Trump is at home in the underworld. Tom Robbins writes that the de facto GOP nominee “has encountered a steady stream of mob-tainted offers that he apparently couldn’t refuse” in his decades in business. He “worked with mob-controlled companies and unions” while building his empire, the Washington Post reports.

So the man has presidential cred. U.S. elites, since the colonial era, have shown contempt for the law: if they weren’t ignoring their own codes, they were violating those of other nations or international statutes, or partnering with avowed outlaws. It’s not clear, in other words, what distinguishes politicians and businessmen from career criminals.

Think of how Europeans occupied North America. The process abounded with illicit activity, officially sanctioned in the end. “The original settlers in the Boston region who settled before the arrival of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were without legal rights in their settlement,” Henry Tatter observed. “Such were also the first settlers into the region later to become Connecticut.”

And colonists farther west: Andrew Cayton writes that Europeans crossing the Ohio River “had no legal right to occupy the land” they claimed. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance’s scheme to admit new states to the Union just “legalized the invasion” underway, D’Arcy McNickle argued.

This advance into Ohio was part of what Gary Nash called “lawless white expansion into Indian lands.” Repeated deceit enabled the takeover. Linda Robyn describes how, in the century after George Washington’s 1778 treaty with the Delaware Nation, “more than six hundred treaties and agreements were made with native tribes and nations of North America. Every one of these agreements was, at some point, broken.” The first president himself “had amassed vast tracts to which his titles were flatly invalid” by the 1770s, according to William Hogeland.

In the Southwest, “literally thousands of Norteamericanos”—“illegal immigrants,” Stewart Brewer dubs them—“began to settle in Mexican territories between Texas and California” in the 19^th century. “By 1823 some three thousand Americans lived illegally on the Mexican frontier,” adds Graham Davis, stressing that “they occupied land to which they had no title,” even when Texas declared independence in 1836.

Next consider slavery, the institution that “produced the wealth that made independence possible” (Greg Grandin) and “made the United States powerful and rich” (Edward Baptist). The U.S. government banned slave imports in 1807. But Michael Woodiwiss points out“international organized criminal activity developed” to maintain the trade. W. E. B. Du Bois determined Washington, in effect, endorsed this piracy: “there was no especial set of machinery provided for the enforcement of this [1807] act,” which “came very near being a dead letter.” There was also regular Antebellum “kidnapping of free blacks for sale as slaves,” Carol Wilson reminds us. The peculiar institution had a criminal core, even by the warped standards of a slave society.

Now look at corporations. The modern firm, Ford Motor Co. VP William Gossett wrote in 1957, “touches every aspect of our lives,” and is today, Joel Bakan observes, “the world’s dominant institution.” Peter Andreas notes Washington’s “state-sponsored theft” spurred the industrialization businesses fought to dominate. The U.S. “systematically stole from [the British] as part of the nation’s early industrialization strategy,” and “aggressively engaged in the kind of intellectual property theft it now insists other countries prohibit and crack down on.”

When Edwin Sutherland studied seventy top U.S. firms in 1949, he found them guilty of “crimes against…consumers, competitors, stockholders and other investors, inventors, and employees,” contending that “the criminality of the corporations, like that of professional thieves, is persistent: a large proportion of the offenders are recidivists.”

Decades later, Russell Mokhiber assessed “the numbers of victims of corporate crime and violence in the United States”: “Almost 800 Americans die every day from cigarette-induced disease,” for example, while some “240,000 people—8,000 per year, one every hour,” would likely “die from asbestos-related cancer” over three decades. James Coleman put the tolls from “unsafe consumer products” at “20 million serious injuries and 30,000 deaths a year,” citing National Product Safety Commission statistics.

And Gregg Barak’s recent Theft of a Nation “explains how the federal government, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, came to dismiss the crimes of Wall Street,” freeing “bankers, mortgage lenders, and associated swindlers”—“networks of criminality”—“from any accountability for their criminally fraudulent behavior.”

Consider finally U.S. foreign policy. Just keeping to the last several decades, we can note, with Alfred McCoy, that “the Allied invasion of Italy” in World War II “returned the Sicilian Mafia to power.” The mob, after the conflict, formed “an awesome international narcotics syndicate,” exporting heroin to the U.S. “in substantial quantities” for over a decade—“without ever suffering a major arrest or seizure.” The operation was so efficient it “increased the number of active [U.S.] addicts from an estimated 20,000 at the close of the war to 60,000 in 1952 and to 150,000 by 1965.”

“One of the most well-known cases of CIA complicity” with drug-running, meanwhile, “occurred during the Vietnam War when the agency enlisted the support of General Vang Pao, the leader of an army of Hmong tribesmen in Laos whose primary cash crop was opium,” Ronald Berger informs us. Tom Feiling recalls that, under Reagan, “the CIA…approved and supported the Contras’ trafficking of cocaine into the United States.”

Other U.S. intelligence crimes ranged beyond drug-dealing: “All postwar presidents have used the CIA for illegal covert actions,” Melvin Goodman affirms. Richard Immerman, reviewing the CIA’s 1954 Guatemala coup, concluded Washington’s strategy was “unquestionably illegal.” “As for that liberal icon John Kennedy,”sneers Carl Boggs, “he…sponsored the illegal Operation Mongoose targeting Fidel Castro,” only one intended victim in the U.S. terror assault on Cuba.

Another onslaught—President Nixon’s 1969-70 “secret bombing” of Cambodia—was also “illegal,” explains national security expert Douglas Borer. Nicole Barrett concurs: it contravened, among other measures, “the U.S. Law of Land Warfare, published in 1956” and which “finds that firing on undefended localities or areas without military significance and causing purposeless destruction violate the law of war.”

Ronald Kramer and Raymond Michalowski argue George W. Bush’s assault on Iraq “was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter and other forms of public international law, making it a state crime of the highest order”—a war of aggression, the Nuremberg Charter’s “supreme international crime.”

And Obama, with his gleaming legal pedigree, backed the overthrow and forced exile of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009. Four School of the Americas alumni helmed the coup. Another graduate involved—a top military lawyer—confessed they’d committed “a crime.” Honduran activists condemn the event for launching a surge in attacks on women. Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State,championed the outlaw regime.

Michael Woodiwiss, in his piercing Organized Crime and American Power, says many today “understand organized crime in a very restricted sense, as being virtually synonymous with super-criminal organizations such as the Mafia,” when in fact “established economic and political power structures” mesh with, often thrive on, illicit activity. This situation suggests the “decent citizen,” as radical pacifist David Dellinger called her, must decide whether she or anyone else “owes one scrap of allegiance…to American law, American custom or American institutions.”

The South Asian Armageddon

Mohammad Ashraf

(Forget the Richter Scale 8 Earthquake; concentrate on avoiding a South Asian Armageddon!)

The most irresponsible and provocative statement of Dr. Qadeer Khan about nuking Delhi has drawn attention to the real possibility of the whole sub-continent along with South Asia going up in a flash! There have been a number of predictions about a possible nuclear holocaust in the sub-continent because of the race going on between the two neighbouring countries to acquire more and more nuclear and thermo-nuclear warheads. Pakistan is supposed to have 110 to 130 warheads while as India is stated to have 90 to 110! The most worrying aspect is the attempt by Pakistan to acquire tactical warheads capable of stalling the India’s cold start thrusts. They are also concentrating on getting submarines with nuclear missiles for acquiring a second strike capability.

About a couple of months back, Atul Singh wrote a detailed article in Fair Observer, titled, “Yes, Nuclear Terrorism is a Real Threat”! According to him, “Paul Ashley, a retired professional from the British Armed Forces, has mused that 2016 could be the year of nuclear terrorism. Many worry about a “dirty bomb” that might combine conventional explosives with radioactive material. Two of the bombers involved in the Brussels attacks appear to have monitored a senior researcher who worked at a Belgian nuclear center”. “A 2014 report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) estimated that “nearly 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials remain spread across hundreds of sites around the globe.” The NTI report points out that some of these sites are poorly secured and that terrorists might have acquired the ability to build a bomb”.

Nuclear Terrorism may be the immediate concern of the western powers but our main apprehension is a sub-continental Armageddon! This has been highlighted by Dilip Hiro in his article “The most dangerous place on Earth” in Caravan Daily. The first para of the article sums up the situation, “Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades, the most dangerous place on Earth has been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. It’s possible that a small spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might — given the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors — lead inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case the result would be catastrophic. Besides causing the deaths of millions of Indians and Pakistanis, such a war might bring on “nuclear winter” on a planetary scale, leading to levels of suffering and death that would be beyond our comprehension”.

According to Dilip Kashmir is the root cause of enduring enmity between India and Pakistan. Three wars have been fought by the rivals on this, “toxic bone of contention”. He quotes President Bill Clinton who called the India Pakistan border in Kashmir as the most dangerous place on Earth! The most worrisome aspect is the Indian Cold Start doctrine involving massive tank thrusts and Pakistan’s response with the tactical nuclear weapons at the disposal of the field commanders. A limited encounter can rapidly escalate and result in a total nuclear exchange. It is a more worrisome scenario than Richter Scale 8 earthquake!

Within the sub-continent, it has been repeatedly asserted by all concerned that the core issue is Kashmir. India has been off and on deviating from its initial commitment of solving the problem in reference to the wishes of the people. In the beginning, Indian leaders including Pandit Nehru had declared that the final status of the State would be determined by reference to the people. Slowly, they reneged from this commitment and came to declare that Kashmir is an inseparable and integral part of India and the only dispute is the recovering of the part under Pakistani control. They not only made a total about turn in their stand but started measures for physical and cultural integration of the State into the mainland India.

Earlier, these measures were taken in a clandestine way but after the installation of the BJP government at the centre, these measures have not only been accelerated but are being taken in a brazen way. The recent events involving certain steps being taken by the Central Government with the active participation of the State Government have been alleged to be a part of a diabolical plan to change the demography of the only Muslim majority state in India. The Sainik Colonies, the Composite Townships for Pandits, the permanent settlement of Pakistani refugees and so on are being viewed with suspicion in spite of clarifications by the State Government. Incidentally, State Government’s explanations are negatived by BJP leaders time and again.

The result has been extreme alienation of the people in general and the youth, being harassed from all sides, in particular. The recent militant attacks show that the youth getting squeezed in from all sides are reacting violently. According to some top security and defence officials, the most worrying aspect is the open support of common people to these new militants, mostly locals and even some deserters from the Kashmir Police. The new Hindutva slanted measures have started uniting the various groups in the “Azadi” camp which had been earlier drifting apart. This attempted Hinduisation of Muslim Kashmir is a fuse not only locally but an invitation for outsiders to join in the “Jihad”! BJP’s failure to bring in Ache Din and the looming elections in some States need a new round of opium for the poor voters. As always, rising Indo-Pak tension posing a threat to “National Security” has been the best bet. However, the authors of this strategy need to think over the ultimate consequences of this dangerous game which, as predicted by many, may end in a South Asian Armageddon!

The Paris Peace Gambit

Ramzy Baroud

In their defense, the Israelis seem to have figured out the whole thing and opted out. But the hapless Palestinian leadership, along with their Arab League partners, joined by the French, EU and UN representatives, and even US Secretary of State, John Kerry, decided to play along.

However, the French peace initiative-turned-conference in Paris on June 3 is nothing but a charade, and they all know it, Palestinians included.

So, why the colossal waste of time?

If you have been following the Middle East ‘peace process’ business in the last quarter of a century, you are certainly aware that the ‘negotiations table’ is nothing but a metaphor for buying time and obtaining political capital. The Israelis want time to finalize their colonial projects in building up illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land; and the Palestinian leadership uses the ‘talks’ to acquire political validations from the so-called ‘peace-brokers’, namely the United States.

The US, in turn, uses the futile ‘negotiations’ to further assert itself as the caretaker of the Middle East, overthrowing regimes while simultaneously brokering peace.

Meanwhile, every other relevant political entity is included or excluded based on its own worth to, or relationship with the United States. Thus, the honor of invitation is bestowed upon ‘friendly regimes’. Others, namely, ‘enemies of peace’ are rejected for their failure to accommodate or adhere to US foreign policies in the region.

While the ‘peace process’ has failed to deliver neither peace to the region nor justice to the Palestinians, the ‘peace process’ industry has been an unenviable success, at least until 2014 when Kerry and the US administration decided to tend to more urgent regional affairs, for example, the war on Syria.

By then, Israel’s rightwing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was too empowered by the anti-peace sentiment in his own society to even partake in the charade. There was little capital for him to be seen with aging Mahmoud Abbas, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. His rightwing constituency, which dominates Israeli society, could not have cared less. They were - and are - still busy confiscating Palestinian land, issuing more racist laws in the Knesset and fighting dissent among their own ranks.

Prior to that date, and since the very first peace conference in Madrid in 1991, the ‘peace process’ has splendidly paid dividends. The Israelis were finally accepted as a ‘peace partner’ and Israel slowly made its way from the margins of the Middle East to the center, without having to concede an inch.

Even Saeb Erekat, the Chief Palestinian Negotiator, has no qualms with this assertion. “In fact, the number of Israeli settlers transferred into Occupied Palestine has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of the ‘peace process,’” he recently wrote in the Israeli daily ‘Haaretz’; “yet Israel continues to enjoy impunity and is not held accountable.”

Considering his ‘chief’ position in the travesty, why did Erekat agree to help maintain the misapprehension of peace considering the price that was paid in lost land, time and lives?

Well, because the Palestinian leadership itself was at the forefront of raking in the benefits of the spurious peace. The ‘peace process’ meant money, and plenty of it; billions of dollars invested in the Palestinian Authority - feeding a dead-end political system that existed with no real authority, and almost always remained on the sidelines as Israel used extreme violence to sustain its colonial enterprise in the West Bank and Occupied Jerusalem.

The PA even stayed aside as Israel battled the Resistance in Gaza, killing thousands of civilians and besieging an already highly-populated and economically-devastated region. Alas, in the last ten years, it seems that Palestinian leadership and factions invested more energy to nurse their own internal strife than to confront the Israeli Occupation.

The French government has its own reasons for taking the lead on reviving the dormant peace talks and, no, those reasons have nothing to do with French desire to create a more equitable platform for talks, as Palestinian officials conveniently allege.

Writing in Israel's ‘Arutz Sheva’, Eran Lerman, explained the French endeavor in more practical terms. “Broad regional security considerations” are driving the French diplomatic initiatives, he contented.

In fact, the logic behind this is discernable. French President Francois Hollande's approval ratings are at an all-time low. As of March, he broke his own record of low approval, sinking to 17 percent. (In October of last year it stood at 18 percent). His country is embattled by violence, massive strikes, terrible foreign policy decisions that resulted in French military involvement in Libya, Mali and Syria.

Leading world leaders in another peace gambit that is helping distract from the US failure on that front is a clever political calculation from the French perspective. It might even help Hollande appear stately and in charge.

The Israelis rejected the initiative right away, without even bothering with a public diplomacy campaign to defend their position, as they often do. Dora Gold, director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry repeated on the eve of the conference what Netanyahu and others have parroted for weeks. The conference will “completely fail”, she said, calling on Abbas to engage in direct talks with no prior conditions instead.

The nonchalant Israeli position can be partly explained in Tel Aviv’s trust in the French government, the very government that is taking the lead in the fight against the pro-Palestine Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

“On more than one occasion, French positions and actions on this subject have been more reassuring from an Israeli point of view than those of our American ally,” wrote Lerman. “For example, France served as the hardline anchor of the P5+1 [in the Iran nuclear talks]. It was France that raised questions about reliability and implementation (even as it was French business interests that were among the first to bang on Tehran's doors).”

The conceited Israeli response to the French conference was paralleled with euphoria among the embattled Palestinian leadership. That, too, is understandable. The PA subsists on this sort of international attention, and since the last major meeting between Abbas and the former, now jailed Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in 2008, Abbas is left on his own, disowned by the Americans and neglected by Arab governments.

“The French Initiative is the flicker of hope Palestine has been waiting for,” wrote Erekat. “We are confident that it will provide a clear framework with defined parameters for the resumption of negotiations.”

Even if - and when - the long-awaited ‘resumption of negotiations’ arrive, nothing good is likely to come out from it, except for political dividends for those who have participated in the 25-year gambit: buying time and acquiring more funds. There is nothing to celebrate about this.

Oceans Are Dying

Deirdre Fulton

(Photo: Daryl Wallace/flickr/cc)

Threatened by climate change, pollution, overfishing, and oil spills, the world's oceans are suffering, scientists warned on Wednesday—the day designated by the United Nations as one to honor the deep blue sea.

From widespread coral bleaching to floundering fish species to garbage stretching across the water's surface and hundreds of feet down, it's clear that human activity is taking its toll on the world's oceans, which cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface.

Indeed, dead coral reefs "are perhaps the starkest reminders—like the melting Arctic—that a thickening blanket of greenhouse gases is irrevocably changing the face of the Earth," Inside Climate News wrote on Wednesday.

And, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch warned in April, those "ghostly underwater graveyards" are only going to grow.

"There's even worse news ahead," Mark Eakin, coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch, told Inside Climate News. "There are a lot of places with similar mortality rates. We've got bleaching going on from the east coast of Africa to French Polynesia. Right now, it's basically covering half the Southern Hemisphere."

A separate study published Tuesday in the journal Nature found that overfishing and polluted run-off from farms and lawns made corals more vulnerable to above-average temperatures.

"Although the research showed that controlling pollution and overfishing can help corals survive in a warming world," John Upton reported on the study for Climate Centeral, "the scientists said curbing pollution from fuel burning, farming and deforestation, which is causing water temperatures to rise, would be the best way to protect them in the long run."

Deron Burkepile, a University of California-Santa Barbara ecologist involved with the research, told Upton: "We have to start controlling carbon emissions and start cooling our planet again for coral reefs to really have a chance in the future."

In fact, Inside Climate News warned that "[a]t the current rate of emissions, the average global temperature is expected to rise at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, a level that would be fatal to nearly all reefs."

Even a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees by 2050 would put 90 percent of coral reefs at risk, said Michiel Schaeffer, a scientist with the Berlin-based research institution Climate Analytics.

Meanwhile, the ocean conservation group Oceana used World Oceans Day to warn of how "rubbish dumping and waste pollution"—the impacts of which it has witnessed during its many expeditions at sea—"is hampering global conservation efforts to protect marine habitats and to restore depleted fish stocks."

The group says it has seen marine litter far below the water's surface, a "worrying problem [that] is often overlooked in reports on plastic pollution, which tend to focus on waste floating on the sea surface or in shallow waters."

"[W]e cannot continue to treat our seas as an out-of-sight, out-of-mind dumping ground," said Lasse Gustavsson, executive director of Oceana in Europe.

As ocean scientist and explorer Sylvia Earle wrote Wednesday at the Daily Beast: "If the ocean is in trouble, so are we. It is time to take care of the ocean as if our lives depend on it, because they do."

Saudi Arabia, UN Black Lists And Manipulating Human Rights

Binoy Kampmark

“It appears that political power and diplomatic clout have been allowed to trump the UN’s duty to expose those responsible for the killing and maiming of more than 1,000 of Yemen’s children.”- Sajjad Mohammad Sajid, Oxfam Director in Yemen, Jun 7, 2016

It is such cases that give the United Nations a bad name. And if heads and decay say something about the rest of the body, Ban Ki-Moon says all too much in his role as UN Secretary General. Always inconspicuous, barely visible in the global media, his presence scarcely warrants a footnote. This has been a point of much relief for various powers who have tended to see the UN as a parking space for ceremony and manipulation rather than concrete policy.

A most sinister feature of the latest UN reversal is the role played by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia behind the move. Other powers have previously attempted to prejudice the various organs, and functions of the UN, exerting various pressures. In March, Morocco made its position clear when it expelled 84 UN staffers from a UN peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara region after Ban deemed the disputed territory “occupied”.

The Kingdom is engaged in an enthusiastically bloody campaign in Yemen against the Shia Houthi insurgents, one that can scant be described as compliant with the laws of war. This was one of the subjects of a 40-page report, written primarily by the UN chief’s special representative for children and armed conflict Leila Zerrougui.

In an expansive document spanning several countries and regions, it was found that the Saudi-led coalition had been implicated in the deaths of some 60 per cent of the 1,953 child deaths and injuries in Yemen last year. A policy of systematic targeting of hospitals and schools was also noted. In Aden alone, six facilities were attacked 10 times.

On Monday, the UN announced that the Saudi-led coalition had been removed from the child’s rights blacklist. This sent a flurry through various diplomatic channels. The Secretary-General found himself red faced and crestfallen. According to Ban’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric, “Pending the conclusions of the joint review, the secretary-general removes the listing of the coalition in the report’s annex.”

Ban expressed a sense of helplessness. Before reporters at UN headquarters, he explained how, “This was one of the most painful and difficult decisions I have had to make.” Before him was the “very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many UN programmes.”

Hoping to salvage tattered credibility, Ban still insisted that he stood by the contents of the report, warning that the coalition might make an ignominious reappearance depending on the findings of an investigation. In UN-speak, those findings can always be tinkered with. Given that Saudi Arabia will front that investigation along UN officials, the result is as good as decided.

The response by Saudi Ambassador Abdullah al-Mouallimi on Thursday gave a true sense of implausible deniability. “We did not use threats or intimidation and we did not talk about funding.” A slew of aggressive calls from coalition countries suggested otherwise. On Tuesday, Foreign Policy reported that the Kingdom had dangled the threat of severing ties with the UN and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in counterterrorism and humanitarian aid if it was not removed from the list.

The Monday warning involved senior Saudi diplomats threatening UN officials with their powers of conviction, stretching across other Arab governments and those in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to similarly sever ties.

What, then, could Ban have done? From the start, the role of the secretary-general was unclear. A US Department of State meeting prior to the Preparatory Commission in London (Aug 17, 1945), recorded that the SG “should be a man of recognized prestige and competence in the field of diplomacy and foreign office experience. He should be between forty-five and fifty-five years of age and be fluent in both French and English.”

In 1985, that noted doyen of international law, Thomas Franck, emphasised that the SG was an official best disposed to fact-finding, peacekeeping initiatives and good offices. He surmised in a Hague Academy of International Law workshop that, till that point, the office had been occupied by those “completely successful in drawing a line between their role and the role played by political organs at the behest of member States.”

All in all, combative, engaged UN secretary-generals remain a distant murmur, one initially built by such figures as Dag Hammarskjöld and Trygve Lie. The last of any note to push the buttons of various powers, notably that of the US, was the late Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who brought a sustained arrogance to the office.

It was, to a degree, a fair call. The Cold War had thawed, thereby providing the body the prospect for a more active role. It was not to be, though Boutros-Ghali became one of the main celebrity hates for US politicians.

What we have gotten since is weak will and pliability, best reflected by Ban’s decision. To be fair, the organisation’s effectiveness has tended to suffer at stages because of an inability to collect back dues, or keeping the line of revenue flowing. The greatest violator of that tendency has been Washington itself. Again, the money card has been played, with all too predictable results. Human rights remain the playthings of the powerful.

After Tel Aviv attacks, Israel launches police-state crackdown

Thomas Gaist

The Israeli government deployed 600 additional combat troops to the West Bank Thursday, seizing on a shooting attack against the trendy Sarona market in Tel Aviv on the previous night to escalate its militarization drive and impose a package of police-state measures both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories.

Hundreds of additional Israeli security forces will patrol Jerusalem beginning today. The government has revoked temporary internal passports for 83,000 Palestinians who sought to cross into Israeli sections of the city to visit relatives, including more than 200 relatives and associates of the suspected gunmen. On Thursday, Israeli courts imposed media bans on further coverage of the attack and its consequences.

In Yatta, the village of the alleged perpetrators of the Sarona attack, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has imposed a general blockade, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, and conducted house-to-house searches. The IDF is now preparing to demolish the family homes of the assailants.

“Life in the Yatta village won’t carry on as usual. A village that has terrorists leaving from its midst will pay the price,” Assistant Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan told media.

Responsibility for the bloodshed in Tel Aviv lies not with the villagers of Yatta, now facing harsh reprisals at the hands of the IDF, but with the Israeli state itself, which is responding to the immense crisis of Israeli society by escalating its decades-long oppression of the Palestinian people, and preparing for mass repression against the Israeli working class.

The shooting is the latest in a wave of violence provoked by the decision, handed down by then Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon in December, not to prosecute or even detain the perpetrators of a firebombing attack against a sleeping Palestinian family in the village of Kafr Duma, despite clear evidence of involvement by the extreme nationalist Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

The attacks launched by Palestinians angered over the government’s response have been seized upon by the Netanyahu regime to implement a brutal crackdown and advance its longstanding agenda of collapsing the Palestinian authority and imposing direct military rule by the IDF over the West Bank.

Ominously, the Sarona attacks are being characterized in US and Israeli media as a “major test” for newly appointed Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a fascistic demagogue with well known links to Israel’s ultra-nationalist milieu.

There can be little doubt that Lieberman, who assured media that he is “not going to settle for just talking,” aims to use the Sarona attacks to implement new and far-reaching repressions against the Palestinian and Israeli working class.

His rise to the highest civilian office within the US-funded Israeli military apparatus is a sharp expression of the ever more fascistic trajectory of Israeli politics, and was calculated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to intimidate opposition throughout Israeli and Palestinian society.

In Israel, as in so many countries worldwide, extreme right figures are increasingly being welcomed onto the heights of power. The presidential candidacy of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of the National Front in France and the ascension of Rodrigo Duterte to the Philippine presidency all give expressed to the same process.

The bourgeois establishment, faced with the growth of social inequality to levels not seen since the early 20th century, sees no other way of defending its privileges than the employment of the most vicious and degenerate social elements.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a July 2014 perspective, “The toxic crisis of Israeli society,” written on the occasion of the burning to death of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy, Muhammad Khdeir in East Jerusalem, by a gang of Israeli ultra-nationalists:

“There is a close connection between the violence being carried out by the Israeli government against the defenseless population in Gaza and the emergence of fascistic elements within Israel capable of such bestial crimes. These events are symptomatic of an immense social and political crisis within Israel itself. The unending and escalating repression of the Palestinian people requires the mobilization of the most reactionary forces.”

The pathological tendencies incubating within Israeli capitalism are so repugnant that they are openly commented upon by the more “liberal” figures within the Israeli establishment. Israeli Defense Force General Yair Golan remarked in May that present day Israel increasingly resembles Germany during the years immediately prior to the Holocaust. Former Prime Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Ehud Barak described Lieberman’s appointment as “a red light for all of us regarding what’s going on in the government,” and warned that Netanyahu’s government is “infected by the seeds of fascism.”

These warning are accurate, but those making them have no solution to offer to the cancerous growth of fascistic forces in Israel and throughout world society. The drive toward openly dictatorial forms of rule and the mobilization of the far-right is the necessary outcome of the domination of society by capitalist oligarchies, a reality that is painfully evident in Israel, where a handful of billionaires rule by means of machine-gun checkpoints and endless miles of razor wire, as in every other country worldwide. Only through a unified movement of the Israeli, Palestinian and international working class, fighting for socialism on a world scale, can the return of fascism and the descent of society into barbarism be averted.