Undercover Investigations Expose Brutal Wildlife Killing Contests

Katie Stennes

You would really have to try hard to find anything more depraved than a wildlife killing contest, which targets coyotes, foxes, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons, crows and even wolves and cougars in some states, for the sake of a prize that could range from cash to hunting equipment. These contests are responsible for the mindless killing of an inconceivable number of animals, all under the guise of sport.

Contests like these should be relegated to history books; instead, these events still take place in nearly all of the 42 states where wildlife killing contests are legal and result in the killing of thousands of animals every year.

Participants in these events, billed as family-friendly and often sponsored by bars, churches, firehouses and other local groups, compete with each other for prizes for killing the largest or smallest animal or the highest number of animals. Hundreds of animals may be slaughtered during a single contest. After the bloody piles of animals are weighed, prizes are awarded and the celebration ends, the bodies of the dead animals are often dumped like trash. Contestants frequently use cruel electronic calling devices to lure animals in for an easy kill and then shoot them with high-powered rifles—including AR-15s.

Referring to a custom-built rifle, a competitor in the De Leon Pharmacy and Sporting Goods’ Varmint Hunt told an investigator from my organization, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), that these rifles, “they’re like a .22-250 on steroids.” He had just used the rifle to gun down animals during the 21-hour contest that culminated in the pharmacy’s parking lot on a January morning in Texas. The rifles are “not very fur-friendly,” he added as he stood over a row of bloody bodies he had killed. “I wouldn’t use something like that if you want to save the fur.” To illustrate his point, he nudged a coyote, bragging, “I shot this one up here in the throat from high up and it blew out the whole bottom of his chest.”

Other participants at the contest unloaded more dead animals from the trucks, which were outfitted for prime killing with raised decks, cushioned chairs and gun mounts. A team of three men, who called themselves “Dead On,” won the event, killing five coyotes, two bobcats, a fox and a raccoon. Contest organizers handed out more than $3,000 in prize money.

At another killing contest in December 2020 that took place 1,000 miles north of Texas, an HSUS investigator saw firefighters helping to drag dead coyotes to the weighing station in the parking lot of the fire department in Williamsport, Indiana. The grand prize went to those who killed the five heaviest coyotes, with side pots awarded to those who killed the greatest number of coyotes, the “big dog” and the “small dog” (referring to the size of the coyotes). The winning team, which had all its teammates dressed in matching jackets, killed about 16 of the roughly 60 animals lined up for display when the contest ended. One competitor told investigators from the HSUS that he used an AR-15 rifle with night vision, adding, “I enjoy it.”

Other undercover investigations by the HSUS—in Maryland, New Jersey, New York (in 2018 and 2020), Oregon and Virginia—showed similar chilling images of contests, including children playing among dead bodies of animals.

Some of these contests are high stakes. At the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest in January, participants vied for $148,120 in prize money. The jackpot for “Most Grey Fox” killings went to a four-man team that killed 81 foxes in 23 hours.

Competitors spend thousands of dollars on equipment to achieve an almost absurd advantage. Electronic calling devices amplified across a field by a loudspeaker lure unsuspecting animals into the open using the sounds of dependent young in distress. These animals can hardly be expected to compete with a team of people armed with spotlights and AR-15-style weapons fitted with precision thermal night vision scopes that “troll” habitat areas, obliterating anything that comes their way.

Killing contests have a cousin in the old-school pigeon shoots—another contest based on indiscriminate animal slaughter. At a pigeon shoot, the birds are stuffed into spring-loaded boxes, thrust into the air at the shooter’s command and then shot from a short distance—all for thrills and prizes. Only one state—Pennsylvania—still openly holds these pigeon shoots.

Just like pigeon shooters, participants in wildlife killing contests spout false claims that they’re doing some act of service for society by ridding the landscape of animals they deem as “varmints” and “pests.” But it is a fact that these events are for fun and games and serve no legitimate wildlife management purpose. The best available science shows that randomly killing animals, especially coyotes, creates problems where there were none.

It sounds counterintuitive but killing coyotes causes them to proliferate. In an unexploited coyote pack, typically only the dominant pair reproduces. Kill off a few members, and the pack splinters apart to find other mates. More breeding pairs means more coyotes—and this adds yet another wrinkle. While most coyotes avoid livestock and prefer to munch on rodents, more pups mean more mouths to feed, forcing adult coyotes to find easier targets like sheep just to survive.

It’s a “paradoxical relationship”—kill more coyotes, lose more livestock. Haphazardly removing coyotes who haven’t been proven to threaten livestock before leaves voids that may be filled by coyotes who are more likely to prey on livestock. Most coyotes can even serve as “guard coyotes” for ranchers, keeping other carnivores at bay.

Native carnivores like coyotes and foxes provide a range of free ecological services to our communities—including controlling rodent and rabbit populations, indirectly contributing to the boosting of plant and bird biodiversity, and scavenging animal carcasses, which keeps our environment clean—and removing them en masse upsets the natural balance of our ecosystems.

We can’t make wildlife management decisions based on anecdotes or intuition or cater to misinformation that competitors use to justify their actions—we must follow the science. State wildlife agencies recognize that ethics must come into play, too. The Arizona Game and Fish Commission outlawed these killing contests in 2019. When the commission was still considering the ban, its chairman, Jim Zieler, who is also a hunter, was quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “There has been a lot of social outcry against this, and you can kind of understand why. It’s difficult to stand up and defend a practice like this.” Sportsmen and state wildlife agency professionals and commissioners across the country have echoed similar sentiments, and some have noted that these contests are damaging the reputation of hunters and jeopardizing the future of hunting. It’s a reasonable fear—society’s values about wildlife are shifting in favor of greater harmony with nature.

Making matters worse, the pandemic has added another element: virtual competitions where the killing persists but the judging and participation are online. Contestants living anywhere in the United States can submit videos of the animals they have killed nearby, and in these videos the contestants are seen shaking the bodies of the dead animals to show that they have been killed recently. These virtual competitions have also led to new prize categories like “best video of a kill.” People from more than 40 states have joined these contest websites, including from states where the contests have been banned. These virtual events take place nearly every weekend.

We certainly can’t let this continue without challenge, especially since many hunters share the growing public disdain for wildlife killing contests. They understand that no animal’s life should be taken in this cruel manner, and like countless other Americans, they believe that there are limits to what we should permit when it comes to the treatment and use of animals.

The good news is that bills and regulations to prohibit wildlife killing contests are emerging at both the federal and state levels. The reasons to ban these events are supported by overwhelming evidence, and those who oppose these contests will have increasing opportunities to register their viewpoints and convictions about this senseless killing of American wildlife, in letters to Congress and to state legislatures and state wildlife management agencies (contact your HSUS state director to find out what’s happening in your state), and to their local government. Wildlife is important to everyone, and our public policies and practices should reflect that.

Holding Onto the Cold War

Melvin A. Goodman

The United States cannot escape the consequences of the Cold War.  The Cold War has shaped our political culture, our political institutions, and our national priorities.  The Second World War ended 75 years ago, but we still outspend the entire global community on defense; control an overseas military infrastructure with more than 700 bases and facilities; and allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to nuclear forces.  Now add the absurdity of the Space Command.  The Cold War divided Europe; engulfed the Third World (our briar patch); inspired a reckless arms race; and created chronic geopolitical tensions.  As a result, the United States has become a national security state relying on military power and use of force, despite having the most secure geographical boundaries of any major power.

Recent events in Haiti that culminated in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise is one more reminder of our Cold War policy of supporting authoritarian leaders around the world in order to advance U.S. interests.  Biden supported Moise despite warnings about his increasingly autocratic rule.  U.S. presidents throughout the Cold War emphasized the importance of democratic government and “rules-based internationalism,” but these bromides were typically observed in the breach.

No American president has been willing to tackle the problem of our national security state, although some presidents have done better than others. Presidents Eisenhower and Carter could claim no significant battlefield casualties on their watch, and Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan opposed the Pentagon in their pursuit of arms control and disarmament.  But no president since Eisenhower has understood the military.  Several were intimidated by the military (Clinton and Obama) and others too willing to yield to the military (the senior Bush and the junior Bush).  Biden has the advantage of a half-century of exposure to our militarization of national security policy.  He even warned Barack Obama not to get “boxed in” by the military, thereby earning the ire of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who—like too many secretaries— was “captured” by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But six months into his presidency, Biden has not addressed collective and universal solutions to foreign policy; instead, he trades on Cold War tropes, particularly with regard to Russia and China.  Biden’s efforts to challenge both Russia and China is particularly counterproductive in view of the close Sino-Russian relationship that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have forged.  They have ended a sixty-year period of discontinuity that included struggles over aid to North Vietnam; warfare on their border;  and differences over military aid and geopolitical rivalries.

Biden’s diplomatic foray into Europe in June and his summitry with Germany’s Angel Merkel in July produced ample evidence of the kind of “old thinking” that has dominated U.S. policy and diplomacy even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which created an opportunity for “new thinking.”  Biden’s European thrust revolves around the relaunching of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including expanding its scope to deal with a challenge from China.

Biden’s national security team believes that the United States can isolate and contain China.  For the first time, a NATO document included China in the list of security threats for the alliance, which probably produced a good deal of head scratching in Beijing.  The key European states signed on reluctantly; they prefer not to be part of the Sino-American differences that were worsened by the Trump administration.  Meanwhile, Russian President Putin may be taking satisfaction from NATO’s firm stance against China, which was designed in part to compensate for the lack of a firm stance against Russia.  Germany’s defense of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and Franco-German interest in coordinating policy with Russia point to the absence of any lasting success for Biden’s diplomacy in Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel clearly and succinctly said with regard to U.S. and European approaches to the problems of Russia and Ukraine that “We’ve come to different assessments.”  Merkel made no specific response to Biden’s interest in countering China.  France and Italy appear to be aligned with Germany on these key bilateral issues. Similarly, many Asian nations don’t want to choose between the United States for reasons of security vs. China for reasons of their own prosperity.

Instead of reversing the decoupling policies of the Trump administration toward China, Biden has appointed a national security team that is committed to more aggressively countering and containing China in East Asia.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are China hardliners.  Sullivan’s deputy is Kurt Campbell, who developed the policy of a “pivot” toward China ten years ago; Campbell’s senior aide in the National Security Council is Rush Doshi who recently published “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.”  Sullivan has placed another hardliner, Ely Ratner, as a special adviser to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.  These appointments suggest the problem of classic groupthink on China, our greatest diplomatic challenge, relying on the Cold War principle of negotiating from a position of strength.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military-industrial-congressional community is taking advantage of Sino-American differences over the South China Sea and U.S.-Russian tensions over Ukraine to campaign for greater defense spending.  The defense community particularly is fixated on the issue of China as a major threat, and appears to have no understanding of possible constraints on policy toward China.

At the same time, there is a bipartisan consensus in Congress that China constitutes the central threat to the United States.  The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act attracted a bipartisan majority by emphasizing the importance of challenging China in Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing.  The often hyperbolic charges in the Congress and the mainstream media against China have led to “xenophobic rhetoric” against Asian-Americans, according to leaders of the congressional Asian Pacific American caucus.

The Biden administration believes that the development of state-of-the-art weaponry will discourage China from more aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea.  U.S. actions in the South China Sea revolve around quasi-Cold War measures that include deployment of aircraft carriers in freedom of navigation operations.  U.S. actions vis-a-vis Ukraine are aimed at creating a “strategic relationship” with Kiev, and challenging the Russian sphere of influence in the Black Sea.

The Biden administration is wrongly trying to present Russia and China as existential threats to Western democracy.  Too many pundits and the mainstream media describe Iran and North Korea similarly.  These countries are problems for U.S. diplomacy, but the existential problems for the United States are a world with too many nuclear powers; a pandemic; a climate crisis; and cybersecurity.  These problems demand a collective and cooperative approach, and the United States is best placed to lead the way in making Russia and China stakeholders on these issues.  Unfortunately, Biden and his national security team don’t appear to be willing or even witting.

Precarity of Migrant Labour in Punjab’s Textile Industries

Akashleena

Punjab faces a severe power crisis in the literal and metaphorical sense. Unprecedented shortage in power supply, power thefts and rise in power demand has turned it into a power-starving state. Facing an acute shortage of power supply amidst soaring demand of power from the agricultural sector. Gap between demand and supply traces to increase in consumer demand and shut down of the power plants. This crisis led to power regulatory restrictions in the state. Ranging from prolonged power cuts to restrictions on industries, the power crisis enhances the political power crisis in Punjab slated to go for elections in the next year..

This power crisis neglects the workers’ question on the policy table. Punjab is highly dependent on migrant labour for agricultural, industrial and construction based activities. Legal literature and policy discourse lack adequate provisions for protection of workers. Amendments in Labour laws pertaining to negligence  by the state and the market, refocusing attention towards the workers in the informal economy should form the need of the hour.

Political power play involves the usual blame game tactics between the Congress ruled government and opposition parties of Shiromani Akali Dal and Aam Aadmi party. Punjab is not producing power in accordance with the demand as shutting down of government owned plants in Bathinda and Ropar along with Private TSPL owned power plant in Talwandi Sabo reduces the power utility supply. Power regulatory restrictions were imposed on industries such as textile, chemical and spinning mills to compensate for the demand of paddy transplantation. Delayed onset of monsoon adds to the existing power crisis for agriculture. Despite resumption of generation at one of the power stations, the power crisis ceases to exist. Punjab has not enhanced its transmission capacity and faces severe fund crunch

Among the largest producers and exporters of yarn and cotton, Punjab is home to the textile and apparel industry of India. Labour intensive in nature, it provides a huge source of employment to skilled workforce in the form of contractual employees and low-skilled workforce as daily and monthly wage workers.  Wage workers in such industries lack adequate social security schemes, protection nets, low income resulting in instability and insecurity guaranteed by the nature of work.

 Despite the introduction of developed machinery, textile and other garment industries remain labour intensive and labour dependent on the low skilled workforce. In this case, labour dependence leads to over-exploitation and extraction of cheap labour at minimal cost through daily and monthly wage workers.Profit and production in industries is dependent on the extraction and exploitation of the toil of workers. Gender lens provides an interesting insight as often women wage labourers are paid lesser than the male counterparts.

Socio-economic inequalities worsened in the pandemic best illustrated through the devastating pictures of migrant workers on their way back home. Migrant workers live through the worst working conditions, denied the opportunity of decent work and paid below the minimum wages set in the policy documents. In the informal sector/unorganised economy, uncertainty, insecurity, rampant exploitation and oppression marks the lives of workers. Most of the textile industries fall under this category opening up spaces for exploitation with cheap, available surplus labour migrating from the Bimaru states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The adverse effects of the pandemic in the textile and apparel industry reduced the production demand. Despite production of PPE kits and masks, restriction of exports and lock downs and shut downs affected production, demand and supply in these sectors. However the small scale set ups and demand in general reduced leading to layoffs. Amidst low demand, unprecedented power cuts and diversion attempted to provide relief to agricultural requirements. Weekly offs and shut downs forced the daily and monthly wage labourers to sit idle, salary cuts and job suspensions. Power crisis hit the production capacity of the industries while the workers bore the brunt of it.

Legislations on labour include recent amendments and introduction of codes such as Industrial Relations Code, Social security code, Occupational Safety, Health and Working conditions code revisiting the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, Factories Act, 1948 and Contract Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970 and the InterState Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 defended by the narrative of ‘ease of doing business’. Laws target Limiting the ambit of applying labour laws, laying off and notice period of, dilution of labour laws framework, close down the units. Labour laws to protect the workers facilitates their exploitation by supporting the employers rather than employees. In situations of emergencies and calamities, these welfare provisions fail to trickle down to the lowest rungs of the society. These concerns have been raised in several protests conducted by workers in other sectors such as Transport, sanitation and anganwadi work in Punjab

Workers remain in a precarious situation despite reverse or counter migration. Reports from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar indicate the poor implementation of schemes and policies such as Jan Dhan Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Gram Awas Yojana forcing people to fight for basic sustenance and survival needs. Shrinking healthcare systems and poor infrastructure provides no respite to workers and their families.

Power crisis in Punjab should bring the workers’ question back to the table. Workers’ protests in sectors of sanitation and construction focus on registration of the workers and families and regularisation of work. Even the informal sector should have some provision for formation of unions for raising the voices of the workers. Necessary amendments in Labour laws should pave the way for guaranteeing the right to life, dignity and decent work for the workers in these industries especially in times of crisis.

 Let’s hope that history does not repeat itself in the third wave!

Mobilising Against the Corporate Hijack of Agriculture and the UN Food Systems Summit

Colin Todhunter

The UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), including a ‘pre-summit’, will take place in September 2021 in New York. The Italian government is hosting the pre-summit in Rome from 26–28 July. The UNFSS claims it aims to deliver the latest evidence-based, scientific approaches from around the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through coalitions of action and mobilise new financing and partnerships.

Despite claims of being a ‘people’s summit’ and a ‘solutions’ summit, the UNFSS is facilitating greater corporate concentration, unsustainable globalised value chains and agribusiness leverage over public institutions. As a result, more than 300 global organisations of small-scale food producers, researchers and indigenous peoples will gather online from 25-28 July to mobilise against the pre-summit.

The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) for relations with the United Nations Committee on World Food Security is working to eradicate food insecurity and malnutrition. According to the CMS, the UNFSS – founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) – is disproportionately influenced by corporate actors, lacks transparency and accountability and diverts energy and financial resources away from the real solutions needed to tackle the multiple hunger, climate and health crises.

The CMS argues that the UNFSS is not building on the legacy of past world food summits, which resulted in the creation of innovative, inclusive and participatory global food governance mechanisms anchored in human rights, such as the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS).

Promoting industrial agriculture

It seems the UNFSS is now dominated by corporate front groups and corporate-driven platforms, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the International Agri-Food Network, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the EAT Forum as well as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation. The President of AGRA, Agnes Kalibata, was even appointed as UN Special Envoy for the summit.

According to the CMS, those being granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health.

The industrialised food system that these corporations fuel does not even feed the world, despite corporate claims to the contrary. For example, the 2021 UN Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition indicates that the number of chronically undernourished people has risen to 811 million, while almost a third of the world’s population has no access to adequate food. Furthermore, the Global South is still reeling from Covid-19 related policies which have laid bare the inherent fragility and injustices of the prevailing food system.

Those who contribute most to world food security, smallholder producers, are the most threatened and affected by the corporate concentration of land, seeds, natural and financial resources and the related privatisation of the commons and public goods.

And these processes are accelerating: the high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants in a quest to impose a one size fits all type of agriculture and food production on the world. Digitalisation, artificial intelligence and other technologies are serving to promote a new wave of resource grabbing and the restructuring of food systems towards a total concentration of power.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also heavily involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, funding and promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Under the guise of saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers and feeding the world, what Gates and his corporate associates are really doing is desperately trying to repackage the dispossessive strategies of imperialism wrapped in the language of ‘sustainability’ and ‘inclusivity’.

Through various aspects of data control pertaining to soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, and land use, for example, and e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy, patents, synthetic food and the undermining of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty, global agricapital seeks to gain full control over the world’s food system.

Smallholder peasant farming is under threat as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, genetically engineered (GE) soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies. The model being promoted desires farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GE seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.

The CMS notes that these are false ‘solutions’ that seek to bypass and undermine the peasant food web which currently produces up to 70% of the world’s food, working with only 25% of the resources. Moreover, these false solutions do not address structural injustices such as land and resource grabbing, corporate abuse of power and economic inequality. They merely reinforce them.

Towards food sovereignty

More than 380 million people belong to the movements protesting against the UNFSS. They are demanding a radical transformation of corporate food regimes towards a just and truly sustainable food system. They are also demanding increased participation in existing democratic food governance models, such as the UN Committee for World Food Security (CFS) and its High-Level Panel of Experts. The UNFSS threatens to undermine CFS, which is the foremost inclusive intergovernmental international policy-making arena.

There is an intensifying fight for space between local markets and global markets. The former are the domain of independent producers and small-scale enterprises, whereas global markets are dominated by increasing monopolistic large-scale international retailers, traders and the rapidly growing influential e-commerce companies.

It is therefore essential to protect and strengthen local markets and indigenous, independent small-scale producers and enterprises to ensure community control over food systems, economic independence and local food sovereignty. With this in mind, the CMS is calling for a radical agroecological transformation of food systems based on food sovereignty, gender justice and economic and social justice.

Agroecology is practised throughout the world. As numerous high-level (UN) reports have argued over the years, this approach improves nutrition, reduces poverty, contributes to gender justice, combats climate change and enriches farmland. With no need to purchase proprietary inputs (chemicals, seeds, etc) and its outperforming of industrial agriculture, agroecology represents a shift towards genuine food sovereignty and thus a direct threat to corporate agribusiness.

During the online mobilisation against the pre-summit, participants will share small-scale food producers and workers’ realities and their visions for a human rights-based and agroecological transformation of food systems. In doing so, they will highlight the importance of food sovereignty, small-scale sustainable agriculture, traditional knowledge, rights to natural resources and the rights of workers, indigenous peoples, women and future generations.

Genesis of Right Wing Islamic Activism

Syed Akhtar Ehtisham

The US believed that Muslims between Greece and China, The Arc of Islam would function as fire wall against the USSR, and might even incite the restive Muslims inside the USSR to open rebellion.

The U.S. and other Western countries and Israel have in turn befriended, manipulated, double crossed and cynically used the Mujahideen as cold war allies. After the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan, they disdainfully ditched the fighters and must accept a major share of responsibility for the emergence of Islamist terrorism.

In the 1950s, the prime nationalist enemies were Nasser of Egypt and Mossadegh of Iran. The US and Britain used Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser, and funded Ayatollahs during the US sponsored coup in Iran in 1953.

In Islam, religion and state are not separate. But the initial Islamic state followed an egalitarian policy. No holds barred Islamism, a more recent political creed, is in fact a perversion of the religious faith. The US supported, organized and funded it. It is variously represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, Ayatollahs, Saudi Wahhabis, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jihadis and Al-Qaida.

9/11 shook Washington to realize that if you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind. The pace of Islamist regression since 9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq has accelerated; extremism, fundamentalism and fanaticism increased immeasurably in the Indian sub-continent and Muslim countries.

During the cold war, the USSR was only an emblem of the enemy of the capitalist society. Nationalism, humanism, secularism, and socialism were also enemies. Muslim fundamentalists collaborated with the West because they too were scared of liberal and secular ideas.

In spite of all the effort of the imperialists and their satraps, Arab socialism and left wing nationalism grew during the 1960s. The US forged an alliance with Saudi Arabia and with Wahhabis, and joined hands with the former in pursuit of an Islamic bloc. Saudis founded the Islamic Center of Geneva (1961), the Muslim World League (1962) and the Organization of the Islamic Conferences (1969).

After the death of Nasser whose image had been tarnished by the 1967 war with Israel, the US actively supported the ascension of Anwar Sadat to unchallenged authority in Egypt. The US funded religious opposition of Bhutto in Pakistan. General Zia of Pakistan could not have gotten away with killing Bhutto without US connivance. Hasan Turabi of Sudan could not have risen to power without the help of the US ally, the Islamic Brotherhood.

The 1979, Iran revolution should have taught the US and its allies that fighting against a nationalist tide was counterproductive. But they went on to spend billions on Afghan jihad. The US looked on as Jordan and Israel aided terrorists in Syria, and Israel helped found HAMAS.

To undermine Carter’s bid for reelection, the neocons even made a deal with Iran not to let the hostages go before the polls. They again made secret deals with Iran in the 1980s.

With the U.S.S.R out of the way, the US and its allies felt that they could sit on their laurels. Political Islam was not regarded as an existential threat. But to keep their hand in, instead of supporting democracy, they favored the army crackdown in Algeria. To keep the satrap Mubarak in line in Egypt, the US covertly supported the Islamists. In Afghanistan they watched unconcerned as the relatively liberal factions were wiped out by the Pakistan supported Taliban.

Post 9/11 Bush panicked. His handlers held his hand and told him that Al-Qaida, which the U.S had nurtured, could be taken care of easily. World public opinion was with the U.S.

The window of opportunity thus opened up had potential. But instead of using it to consolidate support for the anti-terror campaign, they used it to invade Iraq. Iraq was sitting on vast oil reserves. Its Arab allies had gone back on their word to fund the aftermath of the disastrous war with Iran. The US had implicitly given Saddam the go ahead to capture Kuwait. 4. An excuse to invade the country had to be found. It had a secular government so an Al-Qaida link would not be credible. WMDs had to be invented and the support of the Islamic right and Iraqi Shias, who were supported by Iran, had to be garnered.

Post WW I, when the Ottoman Empire finally crumbled, the U.S had actually started casting covetous glances on the Mid-East.

In 1945, FDR went east in search of oil, and met with the king of Saudi Arabia, Ibne Saud on board his ship, which was denuded of all females for the encounter. That started a long lasting relationship.

The U.S academia started launching departments and centers for Middle Eastern studies (discussed in detail elsewhere in the narrative).

Americans believed that the religious fanaticism of Arabs would make them natural enemies of atheistic communism. Islam seemed a better bet than secularism. *But it never dawned on them that the Islamists were qualitatively different from the comprador clerical establishment.*

The advent of the cold war and Founding of the state of Israel empowered the Zionists in the U.S establishment and Middle East scholars found themselves in the backbenches. The U.S was deprived of the insight the scholars could offer.

In the late 1970s, Timothy LaHaye formed California Alliance of Churches, Jerry Falwell launched Moral Majority, and the two dominated the discourse in the Council on National Policy, the Christian Coalition. Pat Robertson’s broadcast empire and James Dobson’s Focus on Family

reinforced the emergence of the religious right as a potent force. Texas and Midwest oil barons lavished funds on the Christian Right.

Islam had been a dominant force for a thousand years. Though there were dissenting voices like Ibne Tammiyya, the religious establishment collaborated with the ruling class. Wahhab was a voice in the wilderness, accepted only by a tribe on the fringe. Wahhabis joined hands with the British and French agents sent out to undermine the Ottoman Empire.

Looking for ways to revive the fortune of Islam, Jamal al-Afghani had created the Pan-Islamic movement in the late 1880s. Hassan al-Banna in 1928 and Maududi in 1940 respectively, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamat e Islami in India.

The Nasserist wind of change was blowing hard across the whole Arab world. It was an existential threat to the Arab rulers. Oil satraps of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf opened their coffers to the Muslim Right. They were deemed natural partners by the Right Wing in the USA. The partnership matured in the Reagan years.

Blinded to irrationality by their hate of secular nationalism, the fundamentalist Christian Right and fanatic Zionists happily threw their whole hearted support behind the fanatic Taliban in Afghanistan.

The biggest hazard is the regression of Muslims, especially the younger individuals, not only in all Muslim countries but also among the Muslim populations all over the world. They are highly vulnerable to the lure of the fantasy land of an after-life surrounded by blooming gardens, with springs of wine, masses of delectable food and seventy two nubile virgins. Women are not offered an equivalent deal.

But the scarcity of suicide bombers in the gender is not just due to their pleasure being restricted to husbands. They are treated as little more than serfs in the tribal-feudal mode prevalent in Muslim countries.

The reaction of the US to 9/11 in Afghanistan was fast, effective and widely applauded. But it morphed into an agenda of colonization of abstract space, encirclement of Iran, and control over the oil in the Mid-East and the former Asian Soviet Republics and keeping a close eye on China.

* Ideas can be combated only with ideas. The term war on terror is a misnomer. It is akin to the British conquering all of India because a few of its soldiers had been killed in an ambush. War in Iraq was akin to FDR attacking Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor.*

Terror is a product of conflict of ideology and a profound feeling of victimization.

The Continued War (in the 12th year end of 2013) in Afghanistan did not destroy Al-Qaida or the Taliban. It only weakened the government, left the general populace at the mercy of marauders of all kinds. They have little choice but to support the resurgent Taliban.

The adventures have dealt a severe blow to the U.S. economy. The Afghan and Iraq wars were tailor made for the Bush policy of empire building and pre-emptive war, and allowed the administration to construct a huge political-military enterprise from East Africa to Pakistan.

The U.S must deal with grievances that push angry Muslims to such organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S must join the U.N.O, E.U and Russia to help settle the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a two state solution and by withdrawal of Israelis from illegally held lands to pre-1967 borders. That would pull the rug from underneath the feet of the Islamic right.

The U.S must abandon its imperial pretensions, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, dismantle its bases in mid-East and elsewhere (at the last count some 9,000), sharply cut training mission and visibility of its navy and arms sales.

The U.S must refrain from imposing its preferences on the region. Its call for democracy is taken as (and is) a pretext for greater U.S. involvement in the region. The countries have to find a political system they can live with. The US must stop propping up satraps in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

The U.S must give up its tendency to make bellicose threats to nations such as Iran, Syria and Sudan. The true emancipation of the Mid-East will only come from secular and liberal forces, which will offer education, freedom of expression and religion and modernization. Fundamentalism of whatever variety-Islamic, Christian or Jewish, is always a reactionary force.

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The book “God, Government and Globalization”, defines the germination and evolution of the concept of faith, the evolution of government through multiple stages of human civilization and emergence of capitalist corporation domination. The central theme of this book is that religion, except in its pristine stage, has always supported establishment and the ruling elite, whether it be a monarchy, aristocracy or corporations. All religions have advocated aggression against the other, ostensibly in the name of faith, but actually to acquire land and assets. Islam’s early colonization and the crusades are just two examples from history. Capital has changed its essential character from being national to multinational and with the advancement in technology, has ceased to pay even lip service to the working class.

Pegasus Rides Again: The NSO Group, Spyware and Human Rights

Binoy Kampmark

They keep insisting they don’t do it. But companies such as the Israeli NSO Group are global vendors for regimes, whatever stripe or colour, for surveillance tools to spy on those they deem of interest.  The 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden that exposed the warrantless world of mass surveillance by entities such as the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ caused a global rush towards encryption.  Governments, left groping in the dark, sought out private providers of surveillance devices in an unregulated market. Not only could they get effective spyware; they could do so at very affordable prices.

The NSO Group was one such provider.  It sees its mission was a noble thing, marketing itself as a creator of “technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.”

The company also emphasises their mission to target those “terrorists” and “criminals” who have gone dark.  “The world’s most dangerous offenders communicate using technology designed to shield their communications, while government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies struggle to collect evidence and intelligence on their activities.”  The group insists that its “products help government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies use technology to meet the challenges of encryption to prevent and investigate terror and crime.”

Forbidden Stories, a network of journalists with a mission “to protect, pursue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”, sees things differently.  One of the topics that figures prominently in the ranks is the Pegasus project, a collective journalism effort of global proportion coordinated by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International’s Security Lab.  Its primary purpose: to expose the depredations of the Pegasus spyware, the golden child of the NSO Group.

Pegasus is a rather vicious thing, enabling those deploying it to access a phone’s contents and remotely access its microphone and camera functions, turning into a surveillance device.  It was given a gloss of notoriety in 2018 when it was revealed that Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz had been one of its victims.  Abdulaziz claimed that communications with journalist Jamal Khashoggi, butchered by a Saudi squad of assassins in Istanbul in October 2018, were intercepted by the Saudi authorities because of the spyware.  His lawyers argued that the hacking “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr. Khashoggi.”

On July 18, Phineas Rueckert of Forbidden Stories revealed that some 180 journalists had been selected as targets by some 10 NSO customers across 20 countries.  He begins with the Azerbaijani investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, whose phone was “regularly infected with Pegasus” for almost three years.  Ismayilova was baffled on realising how the security of her phone had been compromised.  “I feel guilty for the messages I’ve sent.  I feel guilty for the sources who sent me [information] thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure and they didn’t know that my phone is infected.”

Details are then supplied.  Both Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a leak of more than 50,000 records of phone numbers selected by NSO clients for surveillance reasons.  The clients are a varied bunch, from those of the autocratic flavour – Bahrain, Morocco and Saudi Arabia – to the more democratic ones, such as India and Mexico.  The NSO Group, in a letter to Forbidden Stories, claimed it could not “confirm or deny the identity of our government customers” for “contractual and national security considerations”.  Rueckert admits that identifying instances where the specific phone number was compromised would be difficult short of actually analysing the device.  But, with the assistance of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, “forensics analyses on the phones of more than a dozen of these journalists – and 67 phones in total – [revealed] successful infections through a security flaw in iPhones as recently as this month.”

The Pegasus project is significant for revealing the sheer scale of espionage.  The Guardian, a participating media outlet, promises to reveal more details about targets that “include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.”  At this writing, a rather juicy detail has come to light: the potential targeting of French President Emmanuel Macron by Morocco using Pegasus.

The NSO response to the Forbidden Stories report was snootily dismissive. The account was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources.”  The company ducks the issue by suggesting that the information gathered on the individuals in question could have been obtained via other services.  “The claims that the data was leaked from our servers, is a complete lie and ridiculous since such data never existed on our servers.”

As for the murder of Khashoggi, old defences are resurrected.  “We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry.  We previously investigated this claim, which again, is being made without validation.”

For an outfit such as the NSO Group, such rebuttals have proven to be meaningless.  Twin lawsuits against NSO filed in Israel and Cyprus by a Qatari citizen and by Mexican journalists in 2018 revealed extensive evidence of the company’s complicity in illegal surveillance.  NSO also failed to get the lawsuit by Abdulaziz dismissed, and was ordered to pay his legal costs, with the judge Guy Hyman calling the case “broad, especially in matters of the roots of constitutional values and fundamental rights”.  In 2019, WhatsApp brought an action against the company, claiming that Pegasus had been used to target 1400 user accounts.  For WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart, the Pegasus project reporting revealed “what we and others have been saying for years; NSO’s dangerous spyware is used to commit horrible human rights abuses all around the world and must be stopped.”

The Pegasus project has shed more light on the government revolt against encryption, one facilitated by private enterprise.  Left unregulated, the NSO Group and its competitors can operate with vigilante disdain and amoral proficiency.  David Kaye, former UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has wisely called for a moratorium on the sale of such spyware, describing an industry “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sort of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.  Control, accountability and constraint have never quite featured in the NSO Group operations manual.

Washington forces reshuffling of Haitian regime

Bill Van Auken

Haiti’s acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph, who claimed power after the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, announced Monday he will surrender power to Washington’s choice, Ariel Henry. Henry had been nominated by Moïse to succeed Joseph, but his installation was interrupted by the early morning raid on Moïse’s private residence in the wealthy Petionville suburb of Port-au-Prince that ended in the death of the president, who was shot 12 times and had his eye gouged out.

In the immediate aftermath of the killing, both the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, Helen La Lime, and the US State Department recognized Joseph as Haiti’s head of state, but on Saturday, the so-called Core Group, comprised of the US, France, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the European Union and representatives from the United Nations and the Organization of American States, pulled the rug out from under him.

Police patrol the street around the Primature in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

The Core Group issued a statement Saturday that failed to mention Joseph’s name, while urging the formation of “a consensual and inclusive government,” adding, “To this end, it strongly encourages the designated Prime Minister Ariel Henry to continue the mission entrusted to him to form such a government.”

Joseph, Henry and others in Haiti’s ruling kleptocracy of US puppets swiftly responded to their master’s voice. Joseph told the Washington Post that he had agreed on Sunday to step down “for the good of the nation,” adding, “Everyone who knows me knows that I am not interested in this battle, or in any kind of power grab.”

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Joseph announced that he was in control, declared a nationwide state of siege and called for the United States to send in troops.

For his part, Henry issued a pre-recorded message to the Haitian people on Sunday, claiming power and congratulating the population for its “political maturity in the face of what we can call a ‘coup d’état.’”

Finally, Joseph Lambert, the president of the Haitian Senate, which has ceased to function because all but 10 of its members’ terms expired as Moïse blocked elections, dropped his own claim to be the rightful successor to the president. He openly admitted that he had received phone calls from both the US Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the State Department telling him to “stand down.”

In other words, Henry is the hand-picked puppet of Washington. As for the claims that he is forming a “consensual and inclusive government,” he is being installed without the consent of the Haitian people. His claim to office is based upon his appointment by Moïse, who had maintained himself in power in defiance of his constitutional term limit, ruling by decree, having gutted the legislature, local government and the judiciary.

Henry has assembled a cabinet that is controlled by operatives of Moïse’s right-wing ruling P.H.T.K., or Bald Head party. Joseph, whom he accused of carrying out a “coup,” retains his post as Haiti’s foreign minister. Incumbents are also remaining in the ministries of finance, justice and health.

A French and US-trained neurosurgeon, Henry is a trusted servant of imperialist interests in Haiti. He earned Washington’s confidence serving as vice president of the so-called Council of Wise Men, a body formed by the US and its allies to legitimize the US-backed 2004 coup in which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed and flown to Africa aboard a US military aircraft, with 1,000 US Marines invading the country the next day. The council presided over the creation of an unelected government headed by Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, a right-wing talk show host from south Florida, who oversaw a reign of terror against Aristide supporters and ruled with the backing of a United Nations “peace-keeping” force known as MINUSTAH. This force occupied Haiti for 13 years, quelling unrest in the slums of Port-au-Prince and spreading a cholera epidemic—the first in modern Haitian history—which claimed some 10,000 lives.

Henry subsequently served as minister of interior in the government of President Michel Martelly, overseeing repression of a series of mass protests against price hikes, corruption and crooked elections. A former singer known as “Sweet Micky,” with close ties to Haitian police, ex-military and former members of the hated Tonton Macoutes, the murderous secret police of the Duvalier dictatorship, Martelly was brought to power in 2011 through fraudulent elections engineered by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Moïse, Martelly’s hand-picked successor, also installed with US backing through fraudulent elections, earned Washington’s loyalty by backing the US campaign for regime change in Venezuela.

The bringing to power of the un-elected Ariel Henry is only the latest in the long line of US imperialism’s colonial-style interventions in Haiti, dating back to the 1915 invasion launched by Woodrow Wilson, on the pretext of maintaining order following the country’s last presidential assassination. That invasion was followed by a 30-year occupation and savage repression of popular resistance, the creation of a Haitian army to continue this repression and then the 30-year dictatorship of the Duvaliers, which was supported by Washington until 1986, when the US Air Force flew “Baby Doc” out of the country to escape a mass popular revolt.

The details surrounding the assassination of Moïse, the pretext for the latest political machinations orchestrated by Washington, remain far from clear.

While Moïse’s political successors have tried to attribute the killing to Colombian mercenaries, 18 of whom are in custody, with five allegedly still being sought, Haitian authorities have been compelled to arrest five Haitian police officers, including Dimitri Hérard, the chief of Moïse’s security, who had traveled to Colombia at least five times this year. Questions have been raised as to how Moïse’s assassins were able to evade security checkpoints on the road leading up to his villa, and why not a single member of his security detail suffered a scratch in the attack.

The nexus between US imperialist operations and the assassination is also evident. The Pentagon has acknowledged that an undisclosed number of the Colombian mercenaries were US-trained, while one of the Haitian suspects arrested was a principal FBI and DEA “asset” in Haiti. The firms that recruited the Colombian mercenaries and financed the operation are both based in south Florida, while the individual in charge of recruiting the alleged assassins, Antonio Intriago, has been tied to the February 2019 provocation on the Colombia-Venezuela border involving an attempt to force through a fraudulent aid convoy. He has been linked to prominent right-wing US politicians like Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as well as to Colombian President Iván Duque, Washington’s closest ally in the region.

Colombian television news channel Noticias Caracol has reported gaining access to statements made by the Colombian mercenaries arrested in Haiti in which they recounted being brought into the country under diplomatic status and escorted by police special forces units. They also testified that Claude Joseph, who assumed power after the assassination, had given the order for the assassination. They said that they had been assured his protection, and therefore had not had a plan for escaping the country after the killing.

While the Biden administration dispatched FBI and Homeland Security personnel to Haiti with the ostensible purpose of aiding in the investigation of the assassination, there is no doubt that Washington will facilitate whatever cover-up is required to consolidate a regime subordinate to US imperialist interests.

The US attempts to cobble together a new puppet government have no support whatsoever in the Haitian population. They will only inflame the mounting social anger of masses of workers and poor against the existing social conditions and political setup in the poorest country of the Americas and against the imperialist powers that stand behind them.

German federal and state governments did nothing despite warnings of flood catastrophe

Elisabeth Zimmermann

The number of confirmed fatalities in the floods in Germany and Belgium has risen to over 200. In Ahrweiler district in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, at least 122 people lost their lives. Many remain missing. In the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, at least 48 people died. In Belgium, the number of dead stands at 31. Hundreds of people remain unaccounted for.

The extent of the devastation produced by the worst flooding disaster in Germany since the storm flood on the North Sea coast in 1962 is horrendous. Since the weekend, areas in Bavaria, Saxony, and Austria have also been hit by serious flooding.

Completely flooded villages on the Ahr

Leading politicians who have visited the disaster zones over recent days have hypocritically declared their sympathy. They repeatedly state that the extent of the disaster and the speed with which relatively small rivers like the Ahr and Erft were transformed into raging torrents could not have been foreseen.

These claims are being exposed as lies by internationally-renowned scientists. The high number of fatalities is a direct product of the criminal inaction of governments at the federal and state levels. Although they were informed in advance, they did nothing to warn the people and save lives.

The British Sunday Times newspaper reported that the first indications of the approaching catastrophe were provided nine days in advance by images from a satellite. A team of scientists sent “the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by ‘extreme’ flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena,” noted the newspaper.

Four days prior to the floods, the European Flooding Alert System (EFAS) then warned the German and Belgian governments about floods on the Rhine and Meuse rivers. Although these warnings stated quite precisely more than 24 hours in advance which districts would be affected, nothing happened.

The warnings of extreme rain storms were simply not transmitted to the people in the relevant areas by the responsible governments, authorities, and media outlets. Virtually no precautionary or protective measures were taken, and no evacuations of the worst-affected areas were ordered.

Pictures of destruction in the district of Ahrweiler

Germany got its preparations “badly wrong,” Hannah Cloke, a professor for hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK, told the Sunday Times. “A monumental failure of the system” led to one of the deadliest disasters in Germany’s post-war history.

“When I woke up [on Thursday] morning and saw how many people had died, I just thought: you can do better than this,” said Cloke. “I’m disappointed that particularly in the cities you had people washed away. That suggests that lots of things are going badly wrong.”

There was “certainly time” to have warned larger cities and communities and prepared evacuations. “People should have been receiving warnings; people should have understood the warnings.”

“We should not be seeing this number of deaths from floods in 2021,” Cloke said in an earlier interview. “It’s just unacceptable. There’s something going wrong with the system.”

The former president of the German Firefighters Association, Hartmut Ziebs, levelled serious accusations at the federal government. The government failed to sufficiently involve the population in national disaster protection plans, because they did not want to “burden” the people.

In an open letter cited by the Bild newspaper, he stated, “The federal government has carried out exercises under the name ‘Lükex’ for years. The unthinkable was played out and analysed. Lists of recommendations were prepared. Results? Virtually nil! Can’t happen, won’t happen, we can’t explain it to the population, costs too much money, the list of reasons for rejection was almost never-ending.”

Similar comments were made by Wolfgang Clemen, professor of information systems at the Institute of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. As a member of the so-called protection commission, Clemen advised the federal government for many years on matters of national security and disaster prevention.

“Almost all exercises and scenarios ended with us putting our heads in our hands,” he said, according to Der Spiegel. “When it really comes down to it in Germany, the population is left to fend for itself.” Infrastructure to provide warnings has been dismantled, while warnings and reform proposals from experts have been ignored.

The World Socialist Web Site pointed out in a previous article that the resources for disaster protection were cut back severely over recent years. Neither the necessary measures to tackle climate change nor flood protection systems were financed, even though serious flooding has repeatedly occurred. Instead, hundreds of billions of euros were made available to the banks and corporations, and military spending was increased dramatically.

Social media is full of comments condemning a class that is prepared to sacrifice human lives to secure its class interests. Under the hashtag #Laschetwusstees (Laschet knew it, Armin Laschet is Minister President of North-Rhine Westphalia) and #Dreyerwusstees (Dreyer knew it, Manuela Dreyer is Minister President of Rhineland-Palatinate), people have vented their outrage against the heads of the two worst-affected states.

“Imagine how many people could have been saved if the warnings had been listened to, the population immediately informed, warned, and evacuated. Unfortunately, what we have here is a monumental system failure,” wrote one user. Another with the Twitter handle ShadowFax added, “Not a single warning system worked. Not one. This incredible ignorance towards science runs through all levels of political decision-making. Monumental system failure at all levels.”

The ruling elite has already demonstrated its indifference towards human life during the coronavirus pandemic. In Germany alone, more than 91,000 people have fallen victim to their “profits before lives” policy. The same criminally irresponsible behavior is shown with regard to climate and disaster protection. Scientists and their warnings are ignored. Thousands of workers and their families pay the price for this with their health and even their lives.