Catalan separatists indicted for rebellion, facing jail for up to 25 years

Alejandro López

On Friday, Spain’s public prosecutor filed its written accusation against Catalan secessionist leaders in pre-trial detention for their role in the Catalan independence referendum last year and the unilateral independence declaration that followed.

The referendum was deemed illegal by the Popular Party central government in Madrid and utilized to carry out brutal state repression in Barcelona and throughout Catalonia.

Public prosecutors are seeking a 25-year prison term for former deputy, regional vice-premier and leader of Left Republicans of Catalonia (ERC) Oriol Junqueras and to bar him from holding public office for the next 25 years. Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart, former heads of the Catalan National Assembly and Òmnium Cultural, face 17-year jail terms and a 17-year ban on holding public office, as does former Catalan Parliament Speaker Carme Forcadell. Former regional ministers Joaquim Forn, Dolors Bassa, Raül Romeva, Josep Rull and Jordi Turull, are facing 16 years in prison.

They are all charged with rebellion for using “the necessary violence to ensure the criminal outcome sought”—organising an unauthorised secessionist referendum. The crime carries a 30-year maximum sentence. For the three former regional ministers not in pre-trial jail, Carles Mundó, Maritxell Borrás and Santi Vila, the requested sentence has been dropped to seven years on embezzlement charges.

In a separate court case, the National Court is investigating four officials in charge of the Catalan police last year. Prosecutors announced they are asking for 11 years imprisonment for the former regional police chief, Josep Lluis Trapero.

Both trials are expected to begin in early 2019.

During the Catalan crisis the real violence came from the Spanish state, which deployed 16,000 police who violently assaulted voters, including the elderly, with over 1,000 injured. It then proceeded to jail Catalan nationalist politicians in pre-trial detention and impose an unelected government on the region. At the height of the crisis, the PP central government threatened direct military intervention.

Last year, 120 jurists, most openly hostile to the Catalan secessionist cause, signed a manifesto describing the rebellion and sedition charges as a legal fraud. The manifesto stated, “Only if violating legal principles very seriously can it be affirmed that the accused, in view of the facts that have been attributed to them, could have carried out this crime, or that of conspiracy for rebellion that requires a joint agreement to carry it out with violence.”

Courts outside Spain have also rejected the charge of “rebellion.” Earlier this year, the German High Court in Schleswig-Holstein ruled that former Catalan regional premier Carles Puigdemont, who fled last year to avoid arrest, could not be extradited to Spain on the equivalent German charge. The court argued that “violent clashes with the Civil Guards or the National Police did not reach a point where the constitutional order was under threat in Spain.”

A month later, a Belgian court ruled that the three Spanish European Arrest Warrants for three exiled former Catalan ministers, Meritxell Serret, Antoni Comin and Lluis Puig, were “irregular.” Since then, Spain’s High Court has withdrawn all the European Arrest Warrants against the Catalan separatists who fled Spain to avoid more embarrassing rulings.

June saw the installation of a minority Socialist Party (PSOE)-led government, backed by the pseudo-left Podemos and the Catalan and Basque nationalist parties. However, though Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has urged dialogue with the separatists to solve the crisis, repression against the Catalan leaders continues.

On the same day the Public Prosecutors office laid its charges against the secessionists, state attorneys, representing the Sánchez government, called for the defendants to be charged with sedition. This is a lesser charge for suspects accused of subverting the Spanish state or constitution, but still carries a 15-year sentence. This epitomizes the supposed “progressive” agenda of the PSOE—holding political prisoners for 15 years instead of 30!

In addition, to placate rightist accusations that the government was “appeasing” the Catalan nationalists, Justice Minister Dolores Delgado stated, “This is not an issue of gestures [towards the separatists]. It’s a judicial and technical issue of applying the law in a professional manner.”

Catalan premier Quim Torra has accused Sánchez of missing “a golden opportunity to remove the Catalan conflict from the courts and put it back in the political arena, which is where it belongs.” He added that Sánchez had “decided not to act, which amounts to complicity with repression.”

The separatist parties have announced they will now not back the government’s budget in the Spanish parliament. Without their support, the budget will fail to pass as it faces opposition from the right-wing parties, Citizens and the PP.

The political right, including the far-right VOX, is nevertheless mounting a political offensive, utilizing the PSOE’s bankrupt posturing and refusal to mount any genuine defence of democratic rights to prepare its social base for a renewed offensive against the working class.

Attacking the decision of Sánchez to drop the rebellion charges as treachery, PP leader Pablo Casado tweeted, “Months ago Sánchez argued that the separatists committed a crime of rebellion. He now uses state law to do Catalan leader Torra a favour. A hostage of the coup leaders, he is too discredited to continue presiding over the government and must call elections.”

Citizens Secretary General José Manuel Villegas accused Sánchez of “acting like the defence attorney for the coup plotters” in an interview with radio station SER.

Editorials of the main right-wing newspapers also attacked the government. El Mundo called for snap elections “as soon as possible,” stating that “the serious institutional crisis opened by this irresponsible government threatens to undermine the credibility of the judicial power and weaken the action of the state in the face of the most serious attempt to destroy our democracy.”

For El Español “there is no doubt that the executive uses this criminal lawsuit as an element of barter and political marketing with the separatists … though for the insatiable separatists, their gifts are never enough.”

For ABC , “The reaction of Catalan separatism to the indictments … proves to the Prime Minister that the appeasement tactic is sterile against out-of-control separatist coup plotters.”

The pseudo-left party, Podemos, has, as could be expected, registered a polite complaint at the PSOE’s continued prosecution of the separatist leaders, while making clear this will not cut across their collusion with Sanchez.

General Secretary Pablo Iglesias stated that “those of us who defend dialogue have to continue to work for a political solution and put an end to the judicialisation of the conflict. It’s difficult, but it’s possible and we have to continue this path.” He carefully omitted any mention of the PSOE governments’ state attorney’s sedition charges.

The following day, Iglesias made clear that his main concern is the fate of the PSOE government. He framed his remarks as a defence of the government’s budget, which includes a handful of social reforms within a framework of continued austerity that are so minimal they have even been approved by the European Union. He attacked the secessionists for announcing they would not support the budget, asking, “Why do working people have to pay for the authoritarianism of the PP and the lack of courage of the PSOE?”

This pose of concern for workers is a fraud. Sanchez made clear, at an event organised by Reuters September 27, that he is ready to abandon his plans for a minimal increase in spending and abide by the deficit targets set previously by the PP if this avoids a snap general election. “If we are obliged to present a draft with the former commitments we will do it,” he said.

Iglesias is declaring his loyalty to the PSOE to further plans for a place for Podemos in a coalition government following an increasingly likely snap election. In the process he is making clear his party’s readiness to help implement continued state repression and austerity.

German Social Democrats demand right-wing replacement for Merkel

Peter Schwarz

The German Social Democrats (SPD) hope that a right-wing candidate will become the new leader of their coalition partner, the Christian Democrats (CDU), after Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she will not stand for re-election as party leader at the CDU congress in December. The SPD argues that a shift to the right by the CDU would give the SPD the necessary leeway to regenerate and regain support.

Kevin Kühnert, chair of the SPD youth organisation, has called Angela Merkel’s withdrawal from the CDU presidency an opportunity for the SPD. In recent years, many people have had the feeling that the CDU/CSU and the SPD were two wings of a party moderated by Merkel, he told the ARD morning show. That is why he favours a conservative candidate as successor. In this way, the contrast between the two parties would become clearer, he said.

Kühnert would prefer if the CDU/CSU gave a clear signal that it was “returning to conservatism in a broad way.” He said he was convinced that many rank-and-file members of the CDU/CSU want this.

It is hard to say whether the cynicism or the arrogance of this reasoning is more repulsive. A further shift to the right by the CDU/CSU would be accompanied by stepped-up attacks on democratic rights and social programs and would lead to the inclusion of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the government, sooner or later.

The three candidates most likely to succeed Merkel are Friedrich Merz, Jens Spahn and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

Merz embodies the amalgamation of finance capital and social reaction in its purest form. This Catholic from the Sauerland region takes an ultra-conservative stance on socio-political issues and is head of BlackRock Germany, the world’s largest asset manager.

Spahn, together with Alexander Dobrindt, the CSU’s regional group chairman, is striving for a “conservative revolution” modelled on the extreme right in the Weimar Republic. He is friends with Trump confidante Richard Grenell, the US ambassador in Berlin, and with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who governs in alliance with the extreme right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ).

Kramp-Karrenbauer is Merkel’s favourite. If she is elected, Merkel might possibly remain Chancellor for some time and continue the much-hated policies that have been repeatedly rejected by the electorate.

The election of either Merz or Spahn, which would lead to a rapid end to Merkel’s chancellorship, and the continuation of the grand coalition in its present form, would have devastating social and political consequences for the vast majority of the population. But that does not concern the SPD.

It is not interested in “renewal,” but rather in preventing a broader mobilisation against the political shift to the right at all costs. Both Kühnert and other SPD politicians emphasize that the SPD will remain loyal to the grand coalition to the last and that it does not want new elections under any circumstances.

On the ARD morning show, Kühnert, who had led the #NoGroKo campaign against the continuation of the grand coalition in the spring, said, although he did not assume the grand coalition would last its full term until 2021, the question was “who will find a shrewd exit option at some point.”

Sigmar Gabriel, who led the SPD from 2009 to 2017, expressed himself more clearly in a guest article for the weekly Die Zeit. He assumes that Merkel will vacate the chancellery after the European elections in May 2019 at the latest and “clear the way for a ‘Jamaica coalition’ of the CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens.” Nevertheless, Gabriel insists the SPD should not leave the grand coalition of its own volition and should support it until the CDU/CSU has put together a new, more right-wing government.

“Simply running away panic-stricken from the government out of fear of the voters would not make the SPD stronger,” writes Gabriel. He openly admits that this puts the SPD in a “tricky” position: “While the CDU is on its way to personnel and programmatic renewal with the change at the top after 18 years, for the time being, everything must remain the same with the SPD. Keeping the government stable in order to give the political competitor time to renew itself, and then probably be replaced as a coalition partner: That is pretty much the most ungrateful and uncomfortable situation you can get into in politics.”

Nevertheless, Gabriel recommends his party follow this path. The reason is his fear of new elections, which he calls “an existential danger for the SPD.” In other words, the SPD is willing to pave the way for Merz or Spahn to become Chancellor and for the AfD to join the government to prevent new elections.

New elections would allow broad sections of the population to intervene in political events. The SPD, the CDU and all other parties would have to justify themselves for the policies of social austerity, state armament and militarism that they are currently pursuing in a conspiracy behind the scenes. The socialist perspective of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) would be heard. The SPD wants to avoid this at all costs. Not because, as Gabriel writes, it is “afraid of the strengthening of the right-wing populist AfD,” but because it fears a mobilization against right-wing politics, which the SPD not only supported, but decisively advanced.

All the social measures of the past two decades bear the signature of the SPD—Agenda 2010, the Hartz IV labour and welfare “reforms,” the raising of the pension age to 67, etc. The SPD has also played a leading role in the return of German militarism. Gabriel himself pioneered the view that Germany must see the supposed retreat of the USA as an “opportunity” to once again become a world power itself. And in refugee policy, the grand coalition has already adopted the AfD’s line, not least at the instigation of the SPD.

The coming weeks will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the November Revolution in Germany. After the slaughter of the First World War, millions of sailors, soldiers and workers rose up against the Kaiser’s regime. At the time, the SPD under Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske allied itself with the most reactionary forces in the military to defeat the revolutionary workers who aspired to a socialist society. Under the pseudo-democratic guise of the Weimar Republic, the SPD preserved the basis of existence of the finance and big business barons, the landowners and military caste who, 15 years later, then helped Hitler to power.

One hundred years later, the SPD stands just as far to the right. The time when it could combine the defence of capitalism with social concessions has long since passed. But unlike 1918, the SPD no longer has a mass base and is in free-fall. The growing popular repudiation of the SPD can only be mobilized into a struggle against the resurgence of fascism, militarism and war if it is armed with a socialist perspective. This means building a genuine socialist mass party of the working class—the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei.

Europe and America clash over Washington’s economic war on Iran

Keith Jones

Washington’s imposition of sweeping new sanctions on Iran—aimed at strangling its economy and precipitating “regime change” in Tehran—is roiling world geopolitics.

As of today, the US is embargoing all Iranian energy exports and freezing Iran out of the US-dominated world financial system,so as to cripple the remainder of its trade and deny it access to machinery, spare parts and even basic foodstuffs and medicine.

In doing so, American imperialism is once again acting as a law unto itself. The sanctions are patently illegal and under international law tantamount to a declaration of war. They violate the UN Security Council-backed 2015 Iran nuclear accord or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCOPA)—an agreement that was negotiated at the behest of Washington and under its duress, including war threats.

All the other parties to the JCOPA (Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the EU) and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with verifying Iranian compliance, are adamant that Iran has fulfilled its obligations under the accord to the letter. This includes dismantling much of its civil nuclear program and curtailing the rest.

Yet, having reneged on its support for the JCOPA, Washington is now wielding the club of secondary sanctions to compel the rest of the world into joining its illegal embargo and abetting its regime-change offensive. Companies and countries that trade with Iran or even trade with those that do will be excluded from the US market and subject to massive fines and other penalties. Similarly, banks and shipping insurers that have any dealings with companies that trade with Iran or even with other financial institutions that facilitate trade with Iran will be subject to punishing US secondary sanctions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who like US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran and ordered military strikes on Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria, has hailed the US sanctions as “historic.” Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two other US client states, are pledging to ramp up oil production to make up for the shortfalls caused by Washington’s embargoing of Iranian oil exports.

But America’s economic war against Iran is not just exacerbating tensions in the Middle East. It is also roiling relations between the US and the other great powers, especially Europe.

On Friday, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany and European Union (EU) Foreign Policy Chief Frederica Mogherini issued a statement reaffirming their support for the JCOPA and vowing to circumvent and defy the US sanctions. “It is our aim,” they declared, “to protect European economic operators engaged in legitimate business with Iran, in accordance with EU law and with UN Security Council resolution 2231.”

They declared their commitment to preserving “financial channels with” Iran, enabling it to continue exporting oil and gas, and working with Russia, China and other countries “interested in supporting the JCPOA” to do so.

The statement emphasized the European powers’ “unwavering” “collective resolve” to assert their right to “pursue legitimate trade” and, toward that end, to proceed with the establishment of a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that will enable European businesses and those of other countries, including potentially Russia and China, to conduct trade with Iran using the Euro or some other non-US dollar medium of exchange, outside the US-dominated world financial system.

Friday’s statement was in response to a series of menacing pronouncements from Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top administration officials earlier in the same day. These fleshed out the new US sanctions and reiterated Washington’s resolve to crash Iran’s economy and aggressively sanction any company or country that fails to fall into line with the US sanctions.

In reply to a question about the European SPV, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, said he had “no expectation” it will prove to be a conduit for “significant” trade. “But if there are transactions that have the intent of evading our sanctions, we will aggressively pursue our remedies.”

Trump officials also served notice that they will sanction SWIFT, the Brussels-based network that facilitates secure inter-bank communications, and the European bankers who comprise the majority of its directors if they do not expeditiously expel all Iranian financial institutions from the network.

And in a step intended to demonstratively underscore Washington’s disdain for the Europeans, the Trump administration included no EU state among the eight countries that will be granted temporary “waivers” on the full application of the US embargo on oil imports.

Germany, Britain, France and the EU are no less rapacious than Washington. Europe’s great powers are frantically rearming, have helped spearhead NATO’s war build-up against Russia and over the past three decades have waged numerous wars and neocolonial interventions in the Middle East and North Africa, from Afghanistan and Libya to Mali.

But they resent and fear the consequences of the Trump administration’s reckless and provocative offensive against Iran. They resent it because Washington’s scuttling of the nuclear deal has pulled the rug out from European capital’s plans to capture a leading position in Iran’s domestic market and exploit Iranian offers of massive oil and natural gas concessions. They fear it, because the US confrontation with Iran threatens to ignite a war that would invariably set the entire Mideast ablaze, triggering a new refugee crisis, a massive spike in oil prices and, last but not least, a repartition of the region under conditions where the European powers as of yet lack the military means to independently determine the outcome.

To date, the Trump administration has taken a haughty, even cavalier, attitude to the European avowals of opposition to the US sanctions. Trump and the other Iran war-hawks like Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton who lead the administration are buoyed by the fact that numerous European businesses have voted with their feet and cut off ties with Iran, for fear of running afoul of the US sanctions.

The Financial Times reported last week that because they fear US reprisals no European state has agreed to house the SPV, which, according to the latest EU statements will not even be operational until the new year.

The European difficulties and hesitations are real. But they also speak to the enormity and explosiveness of the geopolitical shifts that are now underway.

Whilst European corporate leaders, whose focus is on maximizing market share and investor profit in the next few business quarters, have bowed to the US sanctions threat; the political leaders, those charged with developing and implementing imperialist strategy, have concluded they must push back against Washington.

This is about Iran. But also about developing the means to prevent the US using unilateral sanctions to dictate Europe’s foreign policy, including potentially trying to thwart Nord Stream 2 (the pipeline project that will transport Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea and which Trump has repeatedly denounced.)

As Washington’s ability to impose unilateral sanctions is bound up with the role of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and US domination of the world banking system, the European challenge to America’s sanctions weapon necessarily involves a challenge to these key elements of US global power.

The European imperialist powers are taking this road because they, like all the great powers, are locked in a frenzied struggle for market, profits and strategic advantage under conditions of a systemic breakdown of world capitalism. Finding themselves squeezed between the rise of new powers and an America that is ever more reliant on war to counter the erosion of its economic might and that is ruthlessly pursing its own interests at the expense of foe and ostensible friend alike, the Europeans, led by German imperialism, are seeking to develop the economic and military means to assert their own predatory interests independently of, and when necessary against, the United States.

Those developing the SPV are acutely conscious of this and have publicly declared that it is not Iran-specific.

Speaking last month, only a few weeks after European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had used his State of the EU address to called for measures to ensure that the Euro plays a greater global role, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declared the “crisis with Iran” “a chance for Europe to have its own independent financial institutions, so we can trade with whomever we want.” The SPV, adds French Foreign Ministry spokesperson Agnes Von der Muhl, “aims to create an economic sovereignty tool for the European Union … that will protect European companies in the future from the effect of illegal extraterritorial sanctions.”

The strategists of US imperialism are also aware that the SPV is a challenge to more than the Trump administration’s Iran policy. Writing in Foreign Affairs last month, former Obama administration official Elizabeth Rosenberg expressed grave concern that the Trump administration’s unilateral sanctions are causing the EU to collaborate with Russia and China in defying Washington, and are inciting a European challenge to US financial dominance. Under conditions where Russia and China are already seeking to develop payments systems that bypass Western banks and the future promises further challenges to dollar-supremacy and the US-led global financial system, “it is worrying,” laments Rosenberg, “that the United States is accelerating this trend.”

With its drive to crash Iran’s economy and further impoverish its people, the Trump administration has let lose the dogs of war. Whatever the sanctions’ impact, Washington has committed its prestige and power to bringing Tehran to heel and to making the rest of the world complicit in its crimes. The danger of another catastrophic Mideast war thus looms ever larger, while the growing antagonism between Europe and America and descent of global inter-state relations into a madhouse of one against all is setting the stage—absent the revolutionary intervention of the international working class—for a global conflagration that would dwarf even the world wars of the last century.

Losing Users: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Problems

Binoy Kampmark

His detractors and enemies have been waiting some time for this, but it must have given them moments of mild cheer.  Facebook, the all-gazing, accumulating system of personal profiles and information, poster child, in fact, of surveillance capitalism, is losing users. At the very least, it is falling to that mild phenomenon in business speak called “flat-lining”, a deceptively benign term suggesting that the fizz is going out of the product.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg has been more humble than usual.  The latest figures show that 1.49 billion users hop on the platform daily; monthly active users come in at 2.27 billion.  While both figures are increases from previous metrics, these fall shy of those bubbly estimates Facebook loves forecasting: 1.51 billion in the former; 2.29 billion in the latter.  “We’re well behind YouTube”, he observed; in “developed countries”, Zuckerberg conceded that his company was probably reaching saturation.  While security features of Facebook had improved, there was at least another twelve months before the standard was, in his view, up to scratch.

The user market in North America is flat, while in Europe, FB has experienced a loss of 3 million daily active users.  The process was already underway after 2015.  The moment your grandparents start using a communications product with teenage enthusiasm, it’s time for a swift, contrarian change. But social media, as with other forms of communication, is a matter of demographics and class.

YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat have been beating down doors and making off with users.  A May study from the Pew Research Centre found that half of US teens between the ages of 13 and 17 claim to use Facebook.  But YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are bullishly ahead with usage figures of 85, 72 and 69 percent respectively. To locus of this move is as much in the type of technology being used as behavioural change, with 95 percent of teens claiming to have access to a smartphone. A mind slushing statistic stands out: of those, 45 percent are online constantly in numb inducing ecstasy.

The company, in an effort to plug various deficiencies in the operating systems, has been busy hiring content moderators, a point that has not gone unnoticed by users.  This, in of itself, is a flawed exercise, and one imposed upon the company in an effort of moralised policing.  Various legislatures and parliaments have gotten itchy in passing legislation obligating Facebook and similar content sharers to remove hate speech, extremist subject matter and state-sponsored propaganda.  (Where, pray, is that line ever drawn?).

This raises a jurisdictional tangle suggesting that local parliaments and courts are getting ahead of themselves in gnawing away at the extra-territorial nature of tech giants.  This year, a German law was passed requiring social media companies to remove illegal, racist or slanderous content within 24 hours after being flagged by users or face fines to the tune of $57 million.  Such legislation, while localised in terms of jurisdiction, has international consequences.  Content otherwise permitted by the US First Amendment will have to be removed for offending regulations in another country.

This is a far from academic speculation.  Canada’s Supreme Court in June last year ruled that Google had to remove search results pertaining to certain pirated products.  The natural consequence of this was a universal one.  “The internet has no borders – its natural habitat is global,” claimed the trite observation from the majority.  “The only way to ensure that the interlocutory injunction attained its objective was to have it apply where Google operates – globally.”

This precipitated a legal spat that proceeded to involve a Californian decision handed down by Judge Edward J. Davila, who turned his nose up at the Canadian judiciary’s grant of the interlocutory injunction.  To expect companies such as Google to remove links to third-party material menaced “free speech on the global internet.”  The emergence of a “splinternet” – one where online content is permissible in one country and not another – has been given a dramatic shove.  Police, in other words, or be damned.

By the end of September, an army of some 33,000 labouring souls were retained by Facebook for the onerous task of sifting, assessing and removing errant content.  But this whole task has come with its own pitfalls, a preoccupation of danger and emotional disturbance.  Those recruited have become content warriors with a need for a strong constitution, a point that has presented Zuckerberg with yet another problem.

Former moderator Selena Scola, who worked at Facebook from June 2017 till March this year, has gone so far as to sue the company for post-traumatic stress disorder after witnessing content depicting graphic violence “from her cubicle in Facebook’s Silicon Valley offices”.  Scola, through her legal counsel, claims that the company did not create a safe environment, instead working upon the practice of having a “revolving door of contractors”.  Moderators, according to the legal suit, are “bombarded” with “thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder.”

Facebook ushered in a remarkable form of dysfunction between users, and the actual platform of communication.  This is very much in the spirit of a concept that lends itself to a hollowed variant of friendship, one based on appropriation, marketing and a somewhat voyeuristic format.  If you can’t make friends in the flesh, as Zuckerberg struggled to do, create facsimiles of friendship, their ersatz equivalents.  And most of all, place the incentive of generating revenue and profiles upon them.  Facebook is not merely there for those who use it but for those who feel free to be used.  This point is all too readily missed by the political classes.

Facebook makes everyone a practitioner, and creator, of surveillance, and anybody with a rudimentary understanding of totalitarian societies would know what that does to trust.  Split personalities and hived forms of conduct manifest themselves.  Unhealthily, then, the number of users globally is still increasing, even if it is dropping in specific parts of the world.  Much like the Catholic Church, reliance is placed upon the developing world to supply new pools of converts.

Zuckerberg’s company faces investigations from the European Union, the FBI, the FTC, the SEC and the US Department of Justice.  Such moves are not necessarily initiated out of altruism; there is the prevailing fear that such a platform is all too readily susceptible to manipulation (the horror, it seems, of misinformation, as if this was ever a new issue).  Fake ads can still be readily purchased; campaigns economic with the facts can still be run and organised on its pages.  But to attribute blame to Facebook for a tendency as ancient as politics is another distortion.  Not even Zuckerberg can be blamed for that.

Germany’s Fascism for the 21st Century

 Thomas Kilkauer

Originally invented in Milan in the year 1919 by Benito Mussolini as FasciItaliani di Combattimento, fascism is making a comeback in the 21st century. One recent sign are Germany’s Neo-Nazisholding a rally of about 8,000 in Chemnitz (East Germany) in August 2018. With that, Germany’s newish crypto-Nazi party, the AfD, seems to getcloser to the ‘fascist turn’ it has proclaimed for so long. The Neo-Nazi march in Chemnitz was applauded and cheered by ‘ordinary people’ as violent Neo-Nazis attacked anyone not too German looking. As always, fascism searched for scapegoats. It directs attentions away from the crisis of capitalism. From Germany in 1933 to Chile, to Turkey, to Poland, Hungary and the USA, increasingly capitalist regimes become openly terroristic. In these systems, fascism becomes a mass movement that offers an escape route out of the looming capitalist, neoliberal and environmental crisis.

In Germany, the impact of a more recent economic crisis was handed downwards resulting in severe cuts to welfare provisions. This occurred under a Green and social-democratic coalition government that adjusted Germany’s once mighty welfare state downwards to the ideological dictate of neoliberalism. True to neoliberalism’s main ideology of increasing competition, this shift also reinforced worker against worker competition, spiked with an ‘aggression against the losers of the economic crisis’. Rising fascism is not a break with neoliberalism. Instead, it is a continuation of a ‘gradual down sliding into barbarity’.

The new radical right is breeding the ideological legitimacy needed to sustain the constant downward sliding towards barbarity. It does this by shifting resentment towards ‘racism, cultural conservatism (Social-Darwinism) and –this is central– towards Anti-Semitism’. Much of this is directed against those that the ideologies of capitalism and fascism view as ‘surplus labour’. These are people for whom capitalism has no further use. For them,rising fascism, nationalism and the ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft offers the illusion of security. Challenged by increased competition and neoliberal capitalism, this applies increasingly to the middle class as it is about to be converted into the precariat. The economic onslaught on the middle-class spits this group into two sub-groups. Both can be governed by fear. The first group includes those who have already become part of the precariat (the working poor, the poor, the Lumpenproletariat, etc.) while the second group includes those still inside the relative affluent middle-class but who are afraid of joining the precariat.

This is the key to understanding what mainstream media like to mislabel as populism. Many so-called populist parties are not populist parties. They might use populism’s main idea of setting the pure people against the corrupt elite. If anything, populism is more of a propaganda method than a full blown political ideology. In any case, it is only part of the picture. In reality, the rise of fascism in the 21st century is a reaction to the ever-rising economic insecurity delivered by neoliberalism. This increasingly challenges, if not destroys, the once mighty middle class. The deliberate shifting of wealth from the middle class toward the capitalist class under the ideological heading of neoliberalism is set to shrink, if not annihilate 20th century’s middle class. To re-direct potentially revolutionary energies of this process, 21st century fascism’s forces are called up once again. The hope is that they will deflect forces that might challenge capitalism. In this process, new scapegoats (migrants, refugees, etc.) are invented while old ones are dusted off (Jews).

A key ideology of this is a mythical ‘return to the nation’, hyping up ultra-nationalism. The hope is that this will keep the crisis of capitalism outside of the nation. As a consequence, an idyllic picture of the nation, the homeland, the Volksgemeinschaft is presented. For that, one of older enemies has re-emerged, namely the ‘Jewish World Conspiracy’. In this Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, there is a secret group planning the dissolution of Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, etc. In each country a new kind of ‘Baby-Hitler’ claims to protect its population against the likes of Rothschild, Soros, etc.While all this is on the way, mainstream media are at ‘extreme pains to avoid any association with the pre-fascist period of the 1930s’. BjörnHöcke is the ideological Führer of the AfD. ‘Even someone like him who, as a quasi-Goebbelsdouble, uses outright Anti-Semitic hate speech, is not called a Nazi’.

While Anti-Semitism remains prevalent inside the AfD, it is camouflaged by a pretended pro-Israel policy that aligns the neo-fascist AfD with Bibi Netanyahu’s arch conservatism. Since German Nazism has murdered millions of Jews, the AfD is at pains to divert attention away from its own Anti-Semitism. As a consequence, the its new and by now far more visible enemy is the Muslim refugee. But the AfD’s move towards fascism is by no means plain sailing.

After a speech by the AfD’s court-certified Nazi Slut Alice Weidel, the boss of Siemens had enough. He said that he preferred ‘the headscarves of Muslim girls tothe headscarves of the BDM girls’. The BDM was the Nazi’s youth organisation for German girls. Siemens boss Joe Kaeser also said that ‘the nationalism of the AfD damages the reputation of our country’. Since German capital is part of what is known as a global supply chain and heavily depends on exports, the core of Germany might not agree with the AfD’s ultra-nationalism. In addition, Germany is not facing a strong enemy. Germany’s communists are at the margins, its social-democratic party favours neoliberalism, and its trade unions organise rather than challenge capitalism. With them out of the way, the AfD can freely work towards changing Germany’s political culture towards fascism.

Much of the shift of Germany’s political culture to the right started with what might be called the radical right’s big bang. Typically for a country like Germany, it came with a book. It was the publication of Sarrazin’s book Germany abolishes itself.It is a book that sold millions of copies. It features crude Social Darwinism while hyping up fear of a looming economic decline impacting on Germany’s still large middle class. Like nobody in Germany’s post-war history, Sarrazin installed xenophobic fear into the middle class. Simultaneously, he offered a scapegoat, namely ‘genetic sub-humans like social welfare recipients and Muslims’. It insinuated that those can be ‘transported into concentration camps and that we do not want to know what happens after that’. The book and its ideology stabilised capitalism.

The ultimate historical consequence of such early themes was the death factory of Auschwitz. But 21st century fascism is not there yet, if it ever will. Today, fascism is still at its pre-fascist phase. The second break through for the AfD was its 2017 election to Germany’s federal parliament. But already a month before that, the AfD showed its true authoritarian face in the state parliament of Lower Saxony. It installed a commission to examine left wing terrorism. By this, the AfD means virtually anyone who disagrees with the party itself. This came at time when,

• the Neo-Nazi NSU had just murdered ten people,
• 8,000 Neo-Nazis marched in Chemnitz,
• attacks on refugees are a daily occurrence,
• Neo-Nazis openly hunt anyone not too German looking,
• Neo-Nazis attack a Jewish restaurant in Chemnitz, and
• BjörnHöcke delivers almost carbon copy Goebbels speeches.

This is why one of the founding members of the AfD and former president of Germany’s powerful employer association (BDI), Hans-Olaf Henkel who left the AfD in disgust, said Höcke talks like Goebbels.Perhaps one of the strongest barriers against rising fascism in Germany might turn out to be Germany’s economy and its extreme dependency on exports. This might even prevent a ‘final solution of the refugee question’. What it does not prevent are the calls of AfD supporters cheering ‘drown them, drown them, drown them’ at an anti-refugee rally when told about refugees drowning while crossing the Mediterranean Sea. These are the first signs of fascist fantasies of an impending annihilation of human beings. The AfD calls the open advocacy of fascist terrorism the ‘courage to break taboos’.

All this is linked to AfD slogans like ‘close the border, foreigners out, and forced labour for useless parasites’. This is, of course, extended to ‘scapegoats like southern Europeans, Arabic people, Jews, Russians, and Americans’. Right-wing supporters read about this in their very own echo chambers that have become ‘the digital home of the new right’. Inside their echo chambers, people will never read the truth. They will never read about the ‘concentration camp like conditions in refugee camps in Libya where people are tormented while others simply disappear deemed to be of no further use’. If they get lucky,captured refugees are traded on open slave markets.

If you seek to help refugees,as Germany’s chancellor did in 2015, the AfD abuses you. The AfD’s second in command, Alice Weidel,calls the government a ‘puppet of the Allied Forces’. They are the AfD’s invented enemies, used to collect voters and supporters.Much of this forms the ‘existing fascist potential in Germany’ today with Neo-Nazis dreaming of a ‘clearing storm of steel, blood, sweat, and tears’. Much of the distribution of such right-wing ideologies is financially supported by the businessman ‘August von Finck junior.He is the son of August von Finck senior who was a Nazi party member while stealing Jewish banks in a process called Aryianization’. Today, his son finances the AfD.

Then as today, these people fight Jews. Among them is one of Europe’s number one right wingand Neo-Nazi hate figure, George Soros. By 2018, the merger between Anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism had progressed most substantially in Hungary where one even finds conspiracy theories such as the dangerous hallucination that ‘the Jews are the enforcers of the refugee crisis’. Obviously, this goes hand in hand with the ideological rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators like Miklos Horthy. Being a lifelong Anti-Semite, Horthy is now seen as ‘an exceptional statesman’. Still, Hungary’s right wing and Anti-Semitic Victor Orban appears to be closer to the nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu than to the Hungarian liberal Soros’. Hungary’s extreme right wing strongly believes in an eternal ‘Soros Empire’ as well as dark ‘international forces’ that are behind the country’s current misery. Orban said, ‘we fight enemies that have no homeland…they are cunning, vicious and mean’.

Similar to Hungary’s crypto-fascists, Germany’s very own semi-fascists of the AfD also seek to eliminate virtually all memory of the Holocaust. By July 2017, the Central Council of Jews in Germany made a statement saying, ‘one gets the feeling that the AfD has lost all inhibitions to engage in hate speeches against Jews’. It marked the return of the ‘hallucination of the eternal Jew seen as a parasite’. The imagined Jew is set against the ‘racially pure nation’. Such fascistic ideologies are ‘high on the agenda during times of social and economic crisis and whenever the continuation of the entire structure is in danger’. This marks‘the time of marginalisation, discrimination and ultimately the destruction of entire sections of a population’.

Historically, all this is not new. What is new is that decades after Auschwitz, we know what happened, who did it and who the victims were. Today, we can look back in the knowledge that the assessment made by the New York Times on the 21st of November 1922 was tragically wrong. The NYT wrote,‘Adolf Hitler’s Anti-Semitism shouldn’t be overrated. Anti-Semitism is only used to collect voters. Hitler is just another patriot. Those who carry his swastika flag might not even know themselves what they want’. People believed that nobody could have foreseen the Wannsee Conference of 1942. Who could have thought, in 1922, that barely twenty years later, ‘a small group of irrational madmen and right-wing extremists would actually do what they had preached all along’. Today, many see the AfD as just another populist party. Is the real danger of the AfD to underestimate it?

, ‘the situation in Germany is comparable to the time of pre-fascism during the 1920s and 1930s when increasingly successful reactionary parties were capable of influencing, if not directing, the political situation in Germany’. Even one of the founding members of the AfD (a party member until 2015) has seen the truth behind the AfD’s populism. The former president of Germany’s powerful employer association BDI called the AfD NPD light.The NPD was Germany’s real Neo-Nazi party until the AfD took over. Like the Nazi’s eternal Jew and the Jewish world conspiracy, the AfD also thinks that ‘everything bad comes from outside’ of the Volksgemeinschaft. In slightly different variations, this ideology appears in the Ukraine (Wolfsangel – the fascist wolfs trap,in Poland– ‘Neo-Nazi and clerical fascism’, in Hungary (Pfeilkreuzer), Austria (former Neo-Nazi Strache),etc.

It becomes increasingly more difficult to see the AfD as just another populist party when, for example, in the East German city of Jena AfD supporters shout they will build a new ‘railway from Berlin to Auschwitz’. The sheer volume of Nazi statements coming from the AfD and its surrounding network indicates that the party has long ago left behind the concept of being just another populist party. One of the many examples is the AfD’s Ulrich Oehme. His slogan is ‘Everything for Germany’. This is the very same slogan that was engraved on the dagger of every SA man. After he was told that the use of the slogan is illegal, Oehme declared that he stood by what he said. He reformulated the old SA slogan to ‘have a heart for Germany’. Like the real Nazis, today’s AfD voices mean what they say:

• the AfD’sBjörn Höckeand former Neo-Nazi author (fake name LandolfLadig) believes in Nazism;
• the court found that certified deputy AfD boss Alice Weidel can be called Nazi Slut;
• the AfD’sWolfgang Gedeon thinks the Protocols of the Elders of Zionare literally true;and
• the ‘AfD’s Sebastian Koch was an active Neo-Nazi for many years’.

Conceivably, the AfD is ‘just another normal (Nazi) party’ inside which political staffers like Marcel Grauf can have a ‘closed fascistic worldview’. The AfD’s Grauf also glorifies Hitler and Mussolini. He believes that Germany’s state can solve financial difficulties by ‘taxing the Jews’. Grauf said, I ‘prefer to rape Sophie Scholl rather than Anne Frank’. He dreams of a civil war so that he can piss on the graves of his enemies. Grauf also wants to shoot and kill Germany’s former vice-chancellor and foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel. The AfD man worships the Norwegian Neo-Nazi killer Breivik who killed 77 people in 2011. His AfD boss Andre Poggenburg holds similar views. He believes that the left is ‘a tumorous cancer on Germany’s Volks-body’. Perhaps these (and many more) are not just mishaps. Perhaps they establish a pattern – the pattern of Neo-Nazism.

Not surprisingly, the AfD likes to present itself as just another populist party – a party that fights against political correctness whenever it can. But when challenged, the party goes to court. In one case, it tried to act against those who called ita ‘right-wing extremist party’. The AfD lost in court. The AfD was eager to prevent this because Germany’s political law distinguishes between a right-wing radical and a right-wing extremist party. The former is against Germany’s constitutional state, e.g. democracy, the latter is set to destroy Germany’s constitutional state. It can be made illegal.

Conceivably, all this fits to what the AfD organised in Chemnitz in late August 2018 when 8,000 Neo-Nazis, AfD supporters, etc. marched in the biggest Neo-Nazi show of force seen in Germany since Adolf Hitler’s real Nazis marched in Germany’s streets. The AfD’s Chemnitz march included Neo-Nazis hunting everyone not too German looking, Pogrom-like violence, showing off the Hitler salute, and openly fascist street terror. For the first time in post-war Germany, violent Neo-Nazi militia brought its terror to German streets. AfD boss Gauland later commented it was just a ‘normal reaction’ of the people. As a consequence, Germany’s ‘right-wing extremist forces are getting more confident by the month’. All this might indicate that we indeed live in times of pre-fascism.

42 percent Americans say Islam ‘is incompatible with US values’

Abdus Sattar Ghazali

A large proportion of mainstream Americans think Islam is incompatible with American values, according to a survey by the New America foundation and the American Muslim Institute.

The “Americans’ Views of Muslims Survey” was conducted leading up to the midterm elections in November 2018 – a time period when myths and misinformation about Muslims have figured prominently in some local, state, and federal elections, the New America said adding: “The research provides insight into public perceptions of Muslim Americans at both the national and local levels in Houston, Orlando, Tampa, and the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, where over samplings were done.”

Available data indicates that Americans are increasingly leery of Muslim Americans and that they do not view Muslim communities as part of mainstream society. And since 2015 there has been an alarming increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes across the country.

According to the findings announced on Thursday (Nov 1),  56 percent of Americans believed Islam was compatible with American values and 42 percent said it was not.

About 60 percent believed US Muslims were as patriotic as others, while 38 percent they were not.

The study said that although a big majority of Americans – 74 percent – accepted there was “a lot” of bigotry against Muslims existed, 56 percent said they were concerned about extremism spreading within the Muslim community.

The joint study found that Republicans were more likely to hold negative perceptions of Muslims and Islam, with 71 percent saying Islam was incompatible with American values. About 56 percent of Republicans also admitted they would be concerned if a mosque was built in their neighborhood.

A slight majority of Republicans disagreed with the statement that having more than 100 Muslim candidates in the midterm elections was a positive thing.

Discrimination against Muslims is evident to respondents and skepticism around hate crime reporting is low. A majority of non-Muslim Americans (71%) agree there is a lot of discrimination against Muslim Americans, levels akin to discrimination against Transgender people (68%) and Blacks (67%).

Robert McKenzie, a senior fellow at the New America foundation and one of the authors of the study, said there were a number of factors that contributed the shaping of anti-Muslim sentiment, and that they were not limited to the political right.

Rabiah Ahmed, an American Muslim media relations specialist, told Al Jazeera rising Islamophobia had consequences beyond the Muslim community.

“I think Islamophobia is not just a Muslim problem but an American problem, so it needs to be addressed by all sectors of society,” she said.

Ahmed argued that Muslims could not afford to not engage with other communities, and had a duty to “plug information gaps” to dispel negative ideas about the community.

However, she also said politicians, segments of the media, and religious leaders from other communities had played a role in stoking anti-Muslim bigotry.

“Just as Muslims have a responsibility to lean in, other faith based communities also need to lean in. So when they see their priest preaching divisive rhetoric about Islam, they need to stop that.””Fears of Muslims comes from the acts of extremists (and) it comes from the Islamophobia industry, a very well connected, very well funded industry, which makes it their mission to try to marginalize and disenfranchise American Muslims.

The New America foundation report comes amid a notable rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric in US political discourse and within the media.

Last month, a report by Muslim Advocates found 80 instances of “clear anti-Muslim rhetoric” by candidates running for political office.

That included unfounded claims that Muslims were plotting to establish Islamic law in the US.

US President Donald Trump also used anti-Islam rhetoric in his election campaign, and has introduced executive orders targeting Muslims, such as his  infamous ban on Muslims from several predominantly Muslim countries entering the US.

Rising anti-Muslim bigotry also comes amid a rise in hatred targeting other religious and ethnic minorities.

Within the last week, there has been a spate of far-right violence in the US, with a foiled pipe bomb campaign targeting anti-Trump politicians and media outlets, a racially motivated shooting of two African-Americans in Kentucky, and the mass killing of 11 Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Will Saudi Arabia Survive Unchanged After Jamal Khashoggi

Askiah Adam

While the body of the murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post has not been found, the government of Saudi Arabia has admitted that he is dead, killed during an interrogation gone wrong in their Consulate in Istanbul. But the Turkish President Erdogan insisted that it is a pre-meditated murder, which the Saudi Attorney General owned up to recently.

Interestingly, a recent report in the British daily, the Express, reported that the British Government Command Headquarters (GCHQ)had intercepted communications from Saudi Intelligence some two weeks before Khashoggi’s disappearance, containing instructions for the latter’s capture and forced return to Saudi Arabia, which according to British intelligence sources was left open ended should there be resistance. Apparently they advised Riyadh against it but, as has transpired, the Saudis had obviously ignored them. But the source was at pains to point out they have no idea whether the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohamad bin Salman (MbS), was even aware. The question though is, why was Khashoggi not advised of this threat — apparently Washington too was not in the dark — because in an interview with the BBC Khashoggi’s fiancée said he had not shown any visible signs of fear.

We are told by British intelligence sources that Khashoggi was about to whistleblow on the Saudis use of chemical weapons in Yemen, which means he was viewed as a security menace by the Saudis. This leak, if true, explains the attempted rendition, if not the murder.

But, what is puzzling is the furore caused in Washington and many European capitals, one that has been kept on the boil by mainstream media suggesting that this incident will not go away without costing Saudi Arabia dear, the lack of hard evidence notwithstanding and the blunder of Saudi admission fatal.

And so, what could be the aftermath of the Khashoggi murder on Saudi Arabia?

Top of the list of possibilities is regime change. Many observers, including Washington insiders, argue for possible regime change. That initial reports went out of their way to implicate the Crown Prince would suggest this. One interviewee on Al-Jazeera’s “Inside Story” says that Saudi Arabia will now no longer be considered a reliable ally as long as the Crown Prince runs the country. His track record damns him: he ‘kidnapped’ the Lebanese Prime Minister and forced him to resign; the war on Yemen which he escalated that has turned out to be genocidal in intent; and, the imprisonment of feminist activists.

It is also no secret that the Crown Prince has made enemies from among the Royal princes. He detained the richest among them in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton to shake them down like a Mafia boss, albeit for the country’s treasury. This did not endear him to them. Additionally, in the resulting mayhem two princes were killed. They would want revenge and ousting MbS would be a dream come true, but such decisions belong to the House of Saud’s Allegiance Council, comprising the ruling family’s senior princes, who agreed to Mohamad Bin Salman’s appointment as Crown Prince in the first place.

But the return of self-exiled Prince Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, brother to King Salman, in the last few days, with his safety guaranteed by the Americans and British might yet spell sweet revenge for the Crown Prince’s enemies. Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz, a member of the Allegiance Council was one of the few who did not support Mohamad bin Salman’s appointment. However, he himself was by-passed by the Council for the position of Crown Prince, which opted, instead, for his brother Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud because they deemed him too weak. Nayef’s health it was that opened the way for Mohamad bin Salman.

In standing behind the weak Prince Ahmad doWashington and London then feel he can be asked to do their bidding at will?

Mohamad bin Salman is too valuable to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) because he is instrumental to the further strengthening of the Saudi-Israel relationship. Between Mohamad bin Salman and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, the ground is being prepared for the Kushner proposed Palestine solution which, according to leaks, would be overwhelmingly advantageous to Israel. But might not a Crown Prince completely compliant to American will — the King posing no obstacle because of alleged dementia — achieve the same end and thus eliminate any resistance even by this most powerful Jewish lobby group?

As to the war on Yemen, if this latest manoeuvre works, it can be fashioned at will depending on its primary objective. Whose war is it? Both Washington and London are fuelling it, the former even with boots on the ground. Iran is accused of supporting the rebels. Reports, though denied by Tehran, allege Iran arms the rebels. Saudi Arabia is spooked by the Iranian influence over the Houthis, the rebels. Iran has become an excuse for reinforcing the American role in Yemen which has its own history. And, it is worth remembering the civil war in Yemen has its roots in the 1960s when the foreign powers involved were Egypt and the British. Surely a straightforward civil war is easily solved, but not this one. One doubts, therefore, that a regime change by Washington would alleviate the suffering of the Yemenis.

But is a regime change without challenge? According to the media the Sauds as a family feels that Mohamad bin Salman is too tainted and has injured their image. But they have already decided that Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz is “too weak” to even be a Crown Prince, what more a King, when the time comes. Rumours though, suggest that Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz has gathered support from a few powerful princes.

What of the ulama around whom the family’s stranglehold on the throne has revolved? Can a divided Royal family rely on a fatwa that will support one against the other, if the people are to be placated when Ahmad bin Abdul-Aziz is clearly the choice of ‘infidels’? Furthermore, history has shown how much a strong leader is valued by the family, the reason why King Faisal was able to overthrow his older brother, the easy-going King Saud.

Should Washington and London’s political interference in the Saudi succession fail what other options are left to the Zionist imperialists?

While a revolutionary change in Saudi Arabia is hard to envision, there is talk of establishing a constitutional monarchy. The close cooperation between the Royal household and Islam has always meant that the citizenry is not open to change without a fatwa by the ulama. And, although a binary fission among the ulama class is said to exist both sides are conservative Wahhabis who view democracy as damaging to Islam.

But, is the “unreliable” Mohamad Bin Salman with the absolute power he wields, tempered only by his father, a threat to the American economy? Saudi Arabia, through its leadership of OPEC, is pivotal to the survival of the Petrodollar, the instrument that guarantees the US dollar’s status as the world’s premier reserve currency. It is this that has allowed America to borrow with impunity allowing her to execute a policy of perpetual (imperialist) war. Today the US national debt is over US$20 trillion. A collapse of the Petrodollar then is dangerous, if not fatal, to the US economy.

If Mohamad bin Salman, the undependable, threatens the economic security of the US would Washington decide to invade Saudi Arabia, when left without option? The war of words between the two countries began just before the Khashoggi murder. Furthermore, historical evidence shows that at the height of the oil embargo of the 1970s America had plans to invade but that was averted by the then King’s rabid antagonism towards Communism. The threatened defeat of America at the hands of Communist Vietnam ended the embargo.

Today, the US finds its premier global position threatened. Could this be why the Crown Prince has built strong relations with Russia? President Putin has remained aloof from the hyper-excitement of Washington and Europe with regard the Khashoggi ‘murder’ case saying that he is not privy to information that makes judgment possible. The Russian delegation to the MbS inspired “Davos in the Desert” was substantial. In fact, many think that Russia will benefit most from the Jamal Khashoggi fallout.

Why Pakistan Army Killed ‘Father of Taliban’?

Nauman Sadiq

On Friday evening, Maulana Sami-ul-Haq was found dead in his Rawalpindi residence. The assassination was as gruesome as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He was stabbed multiple times in chest, stomach and forehead.

Sami-ul-Haq was widely known as the “father of the Taliban” because he was a renowned religious cleric who used to administer a sprawling religious seminary, Darul Uloom Haqqania, in Akora Khattak in northwestern Pakistan. During the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, the seminary was used for training and arming the Afghan so-called “Mujahideen” (freedom fighters), though it is now used exclusively for imparting religious education. Many of the well-known Taliban militant commanders received their education in his seminary.

In order to understand the motive of the assassination, we need to keep the backdrop in mind. On October 31, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted a Christian woman, Aasiya Bibi, who was accused of blasphemy and had been languishing in prison since 2010. Pakistan’s religious political parties were holding street protests against her acquittal for the last three days and had paralyzed the whole country.

But as soon as the news of Sami-ul-Haq’s murder broke and the pictures of the bloodied corpse were released to the media, the religious parties reached an agreement with the government and called off the protests within few hours of the assassination.

Evidently, it was a shot across the bow by Pakistan’s security establishment to the religious right that brings to mind a scene from the epic movie Godfather, in which a horse’s head was put into a Hollywood director’s bed on Don Corleone’s orders that frightened the director out of his wits and he agreed to give a lead role in a movie to the Don’s protégé.

What further lends credence to the theory that Pakistan’s security establishment was behind the murder of Sami-ul-Haq is the fact that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close associate of the Taliban’s founder Mullah Omar, was recently released by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and allowed to join his family in Afghanistan.

Baradar was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence operation in the port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding demand of the Afghan government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Furthermore, Washington has been arm-twisting Islamabad through the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to do more to curtail the activities of the militants operating from its soil to destabilize the US-backed government in Afghanistan and to pressure the Taliban to initiate a peace process with the government. Under such circumstances, a religious cleric like Sami-ul-Haq, who was widely known as the “father of the Taliban,” becomes more of a liability than an asset.

It’s worth noting here that though far from being its diehard ideologue, Donald Trump has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement, which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat to America’s security. Trump’s tweets slamming Pakistan for playing a double game in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil reveals his uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.

Many political commentators in the Pakistani media misinterpreted Trump’s tweets as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a fickle US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with tweets, the Trump administration also withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows that it wasn’t just tweets but a carefully considered policy of the new US administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.

Moreover, it would be pertinent to mention here that in a momentous decision in July 2017, the then prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s Supreme Court on the flimsy pretext of holding an ‘Iqama’ (a work permit) for a Dubai-based company.

Although it is generally assumed the revelations in the Panama Papers, that Nawaz Sharif and his family members own offshore companies, led to the disqualification of the former prime minister, another critically important factor that contributed to the downfall of Nawaz Sharif is often overlooked.

In October 2016, one of Pakistan’s leading English language newspapers, Dawn News, published an exclusive report dubbed as the ‘Dawn Leaks’ in Pakistan’s press. In the report titled ‘Act against militants or face international isolation,’ citing an advisor to the prime minister, Tariq Fatemi, who was fired from his job for disclosing the internal deliberations of a high-level meeting to the media, the author of the report Cyril Almeida contended that in a huddle of Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, the civilian government had told the military’s top brass to withdraw its support from the militant outfits operating in Pakistan, specifically from the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.

After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks during the last decade, an across the board consensus has developed among Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing international isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security establishment. Not only Washington, but Pakistan’s ‘all-weather ally’ China, which plans to invest $62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, has also made its reservations public regarding Pakistan’s continued support to the aforementioned jihadist groups.

Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by endorsing the decision of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant outfits operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously guards its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan, and still maintains a distinction between the so-called ‘good and bad’ Taliban.

Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants, the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus. The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.

Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because such militant groups are regarded as ‘strategic assets’ by Pakistan’s security agencies.

Finally, after Trump’s outbursts against Pakistan, many willfully blind security and defense analysts suggested that Pakistan needed to intensify its diplomatic efforts to persuade the new US administration that Pakistan was sincere in its fight against terrorism. But diplomacy is not a pantomime in which one can persuade one’s interlocutors merely by hollow words without substantiating the words by tangible actions.

The double game played by Pakistan’s security agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir to destabilize its regional adversaries is in plain sight for everybody to discern and feel indignant about. Therefore, Pakistan will have to withdraw its support from the Afghan Taliban and the Punjabi militant groups, if it is eager to maintain good working relations with the Trump administration and wants to avoid economic sanctions and international censure.