Oh ho! Another wheel has come off the anti-Semitism witch-hunters’ malign clown car, and it couldn’t come too soon. Lee C has posted a little video on twitter of a conversation between David Collier, a member of the Gnasherjew ultra-Zionist troll farm, one of his friends and another man, who appears interested in joining his campaign to root out anti-Semitism. Collier’s mate, a man in the traditional Jewish kippa, tells the prospective recruit how they combat anti-Semitism across society and the political divide, in both Labour and the Conservatives.
Except they don’t. And the supposed recruit knows it. He asks Collier several times what he’s done to expose and combat anti-Semitism in the Tory party without getting an answer. Eventually, when the point has been glaringly made by Collier’s inability to answer the question, Collier tries to excuse his political bias by saying that he’s a member of Labour.
Lee C. comments
David Collier Exposed. The man behind Labour’s antisemitism smear campaign. Never calls it out when it’s from the right because it doesn’t fit his political agenda. It’s always been about removing pro Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn and nothing else.
The Sage of Crewe has written an excellent piece about it, and helpfully describes the conversation in the video, which goes as follows.
‘In the video, Collier, at right foreground, and his colleague at left are in conversation with an individual who they are seeking to persuade to join their campaign. But their potential recruit has a nasty surprise for Collier. First, he calls anti-Semitism “a disgraceful thing”.
Collier’s pal takes it from there. “So will you be an ally and join with me and David in the campaign against anti-Semitism, whether it’s in the Tory Party, whether it’s in UKIP, whether it’s in the Labour Party, will you help us to expose those that express anti-Jewish racism?” Then the potential recruit takes the mic, and it all goes wrong.
“I have a wonderful question for David here. David, can you go through your routine … can you go to your record on exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you, David”. After a pause, Collier responds “Do you think that’s a point?” NO COMMENT.
Back comes the question. “David, would you like to go through your record of exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you David”. Collier’s response this time? “I’m not a member of the Tory Party”. Not going very well, is it? Back comes the question again. Except with a little more pointedness. “Anti-Semitism exists everywhere. If you are here to fight anti-Semitism, you fight anti-Semitism everywhere. You seem to specialise in anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Can you please tell me not why, but what your record is in exposing anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you, David”. Come on Dave!
Next excuse? “Again, your questions are disingenuous. Now if you’ll let me answer …” But the questioner had by now heard enough. “Disingenuous? It is because I asked a very straightforward question. What have you done to expose anti-Semitism in the Tory Party? Over to you David”. Collier bleated “I am a member of the Labour Party”
The questioner’s conclusion? “He says he has done nothing”.
What also makes this exchange interesting is that Collier is friend and collaborator of Rachel Riley’s, as the Sage shows with a few highly illustrative tweets.
Zelo Street makes the point that Collier’s highly selective attitude towards anti-Semitism is simply not acceptable. You fight it wherever it exists, because if you ignore it in one place, it’ll just fester and grow. And Collier has shown he’s prepared to do this. And he also makes the point that you need to think when Riley appears bashing the Labour party again that she appears to share the same attitude. And her selective indifference to anti-Semitism is a frightening prospect to real anti-racists. He concludes
‘Ms Riley’s pal just gave the game away. It’s not exposing hatred. It’s just Labour bashing.’
I think the clip came from a much longer video of Collier, his mate and Depik Rajgor in debate, posted on YouTube by the Israel Advocacy Movement. They seem to think it exposes Mr. Rajgor as ‘an anti-racist, who can’t help being racist’. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t comment, but I suspect their definition of racism is that someone is anti-Semitic, if they’re not prepared to support Israel’s brutal persecution of the Palestinians. Even if they are a fervent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism otherwise.
Of course, Collier’s selective attitude towards anti-Semitism should surprise no-one. It’s embedded throughout much of the pro-Israel movement. Tony Greenstein among very many others has shown that the laughably misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism is far less concerned with anti-Semitism on the right, than it is about it in the Labour party and particularly Jeremy Corbyn.
Meanwhile, anti-Semitism in the Tories gets a free pass. Remember back in the summer when the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis were working themselves into a frenzy because Labour hadn’t signed up to the I.H.R.A.’s definition of anti-Semitism? The same definition, whose Zionist author, Kenneth Stern, had testified to the US Congress it was being used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel? Well, the Tories hadn’t signed it, either. But there were no mobs of angry Zionists waving Israeli flags and screaming that the Tories were anti-Semites and ready to start the Holocaust again outside Tory HQ.
And anti-Semitism has always been much more prevalent on the right. The vicious anti-Semitism and islamophobia of two twitter/ Facebook groups, which respectively supported Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg was exposed a little while ago. The members of these groups were calling for the mass expulsion and murder of Muslims, particularly Sadiq Khan in London. But some of them also believed in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which blames the Jews for the influx of Muslim and other non-White migrants. They’re doing this, according to the Nazis who believe this daft and murderous twaddle, as a deliberate plot to destroy the White race. The Tories have made noises about combating racism in their ranks, and some people have been suspended or expelled, it’s true. But as Matt Hancock’s ‘whitesplaining’ to Sayeeda Warsi about islamophobia shows, they’re not really interested in tackling it.
Meanwhile, David Collier and his ilk smear and libel genuine anti-racist people opposed to anti-Semitism in the Labour party, while ignoring the real anti-Semites on the right and far right.
More anarchism now, this time from the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin violently criticized and rejected democracy because he passionately believed and argued that without economic equality for the workers, it would simply preserve the power of the exploiting classes, including the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital and industry. These would continue legislating for themselves against the workers.
Bakunin wrote
The child endowed with the greatest talents, but born into a poor family, a family of workers living from day to day on their hard labour, is doomed to an ignorance which, instead of developing his own natural talents, kills them all: he will become the worker, the unskilled labourer, forced to be the bourgeoisie’s man-servant and field-worker. The child of bourgeois parents, on the other hand, the child of the rich, however, stupid by nature, will receive both the upbringing and the education necessary to develop his scanty talents as much as possible. He will become the exploiter of labour, the master, the property-owner, the legislator, the governor-a gentleman. However stupid he may be, he will make laws on behalf of the people and against them, and he will rule over the popular masses.
In a democratic state, it will be said, the people will choose only the good men. But how will they recognize them? They have neither the education necessary for judging the good and the bad, nor the spare time necessary for learning the differences among those who run for election. These men, moreover, live in a society different from their own; they doff their hat to Their Majesty the sovereign people only at election-time, and once elected they turn their backs. Moreover, however excellent they may be as members of their family and their society, they will always be bad for the people, because, belonging to the privileged and exploiting class, they will quite naturally wish to preserve those privileges which constitute the very basis of their social existence and condemn the people to eternal slavery.
But why haven’t the people been sending men of their own, men of the people, to the legislative assemblies and the government? First, because men of the people, who have to live by their physical labour, do not have the time to devote themselves exclusively to politics. [Second, b]eing unable to do so, being more often ignorant of the political and economic questions which are discussed in these lofty regions, they will nearly always be the dupes of lawyers and bourgeois politicians. Also, [third] it is usually enough for these men of the people to enter the government for them to become members of the bourgeoisie in their turn, sometimes hating and scorning the people from whom they came more than do the natural-born members of the bourgeoisie.
So you see that political equality, even in the most democratic states, is an illusion. It is the same with juridical equality, equality before the law. The bourgeoisie make the law for themselves, and they practice it against the people. The State, and the law which expresses it, exist only to perpetuate the slavery of the people for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.
Moreover, you know, if you wish to file suit when you find your interests, your honour, or your rights wronged, you must first prove that you are able to pay the costs, that is, that you can lay aside an impossible sum; and if you cannot do so, they you cannot file the suit. But do the people, the majority of the workers, have the resources to put on deposit in a court of law? Most of the time, no. Hence the rich man will be able to attack you and insult you with impunity. There is no justice at all for the people.
Political equality will be an illusion so long as economic and social equality do not exist, so long as any minority can become rich, property-owning, and capitalist through inheritance. Do you know the true definitions of hereditary property? It is the hereditary ability to exploit the collective labour of the people and to enslave the masses.
In Robert M. Cutler, Mikhail Bakunin: From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin’s Basic Writings 1869-71 (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1985) pp. 50-1.
Bakunin’s stance is extreme, obviously, and the educational opportunities open to working people has changed immensely since the late 19th century when he wrote this. The school leaving age in Britain has gradually been extended until it’s 18, and nearly half of all school leavers now go on to university to obtain degrees. But nevertheless, his criticism still remains valid.
The majority of politicians and members of parliament come from the middle and upper classes. There was a book published a few years ago that estimated that 75 per cent of MPs have senior management positions or sit on the boards of companies, so that the majority of them are millionaires. As a result, legislation passed by them has benefited industry at the expense of working people, so that the rich are getting much richer, and the poor poorer. They have attacked employees’ rights at work, introduced the gig economy, which has trapped people in insecure, irregularly paid work without benefits like annual leave, sick pay or maternity leave. At the same time the benefits system has been attacked to create a demoralized, cowed workforce ready to accept any job than starve without state support, due to benefit sanctions and delays in payment. And then there’s the infamous workfare, which is nothing less than the abuse of the benefits system to supply industry and particularly the big supermarkets with subsidized cheap labour for exploitation.
This situation has partly come about because New Labour abandoned economic justice for working people and took over the Neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher. The result was that even when the Tories were ousted with the 1997 election, elements of Thatcherism continued under Blair and Brown. And the Neocons have admitted that while they were in favour of exporting democracy to Iraq, they wanted that new freedom to be strictly limited so that only parties promoting free trade and economic individualism would be elected.
In the US the situation has got worse. Due to political sponsorship and donations from big business, politicians in congress notoriously do not represent their constituents but their corporate donors. Only 19-25 per cent of American voters feel the government works for them, and a study by Harvard University concluded that the country was not so much a democracy as a corporate oligarchy.
Democracy would thus benefit the ruling classes, and provide the illusion of freedom for everyone else.
This has to be reversed. Corporate money and power has to be taken out of politics and ordinary working men and women put in, with an agenda to empower this country’s ordinary people instead of reassuring lies, like the Tories.
It’s why we need Corbyn in government, and the Tories, Lib-Dems and New Labour out.
The Friday before last, former president George H.W. Bush, the father of former president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, finally fell off his perch at the age of 94. Like Monty Python’s parrot, he had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. He was an ex-president, and well and truly. He was buried with due state honours last Wednesday.
And the press and media fell over themselves to praise him to the rafters. If you believed them, you would have thought that America had lost a statesman of the stature of the ancient Athenian politico, Pericles. Or that he combined in himself the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, Maddison and the rest of the Founding Fathers.
He wasn’t. He was the successor to Ronald Reagan and a former head of the CIA, and had been involved with shady dealings, dirty, proxy wars and invasions in Latin America and Iraq, that had cost thousands their lives, while thousands others were tortured by the dictators he supported. And domestically he was responsible for racist electioneering and a highly discriminatory drugs policy that has resulted in the massive disproportionate incarceration of Black American men.
Mehdi Hasan on George Bush Senior
He was a disgusting creature, and Mehdi Hasan wrote a piece in the Intercept describing just how disgusting and reprehensible he was. In the piece below, he also appeared on Democracy Now! to talk to host Amy Goodman about Bush senior and his legacy of corruption, murder and terror.
Bush was elected president in 1990. He was a former director of the CIA, and served from 1981-89 as Reagan’s vice-president. Despite calling for a kinder, gentler politics when he was vice-president, Bush refused to tackle climate change, saying that the American way of life was not up for negotiation, defended future supreme court justice Clarence Thomas even after he was accused of sexual harassment. He was responsible for launching the first Gulf War in Iraq in 1991. During the War, the US air force deliberately bombed an air raid shelter in Baghdad killing 408 civilians. The relatives of some of those killed tried to sue Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, for war crimes. The attack on Iraq continued after the end of the war with a devastating sanctions regime imposed by Bush, and then his son’s invasion in 2003.
The Invasion of Panama
In 1990 Bush sent troops into Panama to arrest the country’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Noriega had previously been a close ally, and had been on the CIA’s payroll. 24,000 troops were sent into the country to topple Noriega against Panama’s own military, which was smaller than the New York police department. 3,000 Panamanians died in the attack. In November 2018, the inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations for what they considered to be an illegal invasion.
Pardoning the Iran-Contra Conspirators
As one of his last acts in office, Bush also gave pardons to six officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. This was a secret operation in which Reagan sold arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, despite Congress banning the administration from funding them. Bush was never called to account for his part in it, claiming he was ‘out of the loop’, despite the testimony of others and a mass of documents suggesting otherwise.
The Collapse of Communism and Neoliberalism
Bush’s period in office coincided with the collapse of Communism. In the period afterwards, which Bush termed the New World Order, he was instrumental in spreading neoliberalism and the establishment of the NAFTO WTO treaties for international trade.
Hasan not only wrote for the Intercept, he also hosted their Deconstructed podcast, as well as a show, Up Front, on Al-Jazeera English.
The Media’s Praise of Bush
Goodman and Hasan state that there is a natural reluctance against speaking ill of the dead. But they aren’t going to speak ill of Bush, just critically examine his career and legacy. Hasan states that as a Brit living in Washington he’s amazed at the media hagiography of Bush. He recognizes that Bush had many creditable achievements, like standing up to the NRA and AIPAC, but condemns the way the media ignored the rest of Bush’s legacy, especially when it involves the deaths of thousands of people as absurd, a dereliction of duty. He states that Bush is being described as the ‘anti-Trump’, but he did many things that were similar to the Orange Buffoon. Such as the pardoning of Caspar Weinberger on the eve of his trial, which the independent special counsel at the time said was misconduct and that it covered up the crime. And everyone’s upset when Trump says he might pardon Paul Manafort. Bush should be held to the same account. It doesn’t matter that he was nicer than Trump, and less aggressive than his son, he still has a lot to answer for.
The Iran-Contra Scandal
Goodman gets Hasan to explain about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan sold arms to Iran, then an enemy state, to fund a proxy war against a ‘Communist’ state in South America despite a congressional ban. He states that it was a huge scandal. Reagan left office without being punished for it, there was a Special Council charged with looking into it, led by Lawrence Walsh, a deputy attorney general under Eisenhower. When he looked into it, he was met with resistance by Reagan’s successor, Bush. And now we’re being told how honest he was. But at the time Bush refused to hand over his diary, cooperate with the Special Counsel, give interviews, and pardoned the six top neocons responsible. The Special Counsel’s report is online, it can be read, and it says that Bush did not cooperate, and that this was the first time the president pardoned someone in a trial in which he himself would have to testify. He states that Bush and Trump were more similar in their obstruction of justice than some of the media would have us believe.
Iraq Invasion
They then move on to the Iraq invasion, and play the speech in which Bush states that he has begun bombing to remove Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential. It was done now, because ‘the world could wait no longer’. Because of Bush’s attack on Iraq, his death was marked by flags at half-mast in Kuwait as well as Washington. Hasan states that Hussein invaded Kuwait illegally, and it was a brutal occupation. But Hasan also says that Bush told the country that it came without any warning or provocation. But this came after the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Hussein that American had no opinion on any border dispute with Kuwait. This was interpreted, and many historians believe, that this was a green light to Hussein to invade.
Bush also told the world that America needed to go into Iraq to protect Saudi Arabia, as there were Iraqi troops massing on the border of that nation. This was another lie. One reporter bought satellite photographs of the border and found there were no troops there. It was lie, just as his son lied when he invaded twelve years later. As for the bombing of the Amariyya air raid shelter, which was condemned by Human Rights Watch, this was a crime because the Americans had been told it contained civilians. Bush also bombed the civilian infrastructure, like power stations, food processing plants, flour mills. This was done deliberately. Bush’s administration told the Washington Post that it was done so that after the war they would have leverage over the Iraqi government, which would have to go begging for international assistance. And this was succeeded by punitive sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. It all began on Bush’s watch.
Racism, Willie Horton and Bush’s Election Campaign
They then discuss his 1988 election campaign, and his advert attacking his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was attacked for having given a weekend pass from prison to Willie Horton, a Black con serving time for murder, who then went and kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping the woman. This was contrasted with Bush, who wanted the death penalty for first degree murder. The advert was created by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, who later apologized for it on his deathbed. This advert is still studied in journalism classes, and until Trump’s ad featuring the migrant caravan appeared it was considered the most racist advert in modern American political history. Atwater said that they were going to talk about Horton so much, people would think he was Dukakis’ running mate. Bush approved of this, and talked about Horton at press conferences. And unlike Atwater, he never apologized. Roger Stone, whom Hasan describes as one of the most vile political operatives of our time, an advisor to Donald Trump and Nixon, actually walked up to Atwater and told him he would regret it, as it was clearly a racist ad. When even Roger Stone says that it’s a bad idea, you know you’ve gone too far. But the press has been saying how decent Bush was. Hasan states he has only two words for that: Willie Horton.
In fact, weekend passes for prison inmates was a policy in many states, including California, where Ronald Reagan had signed one. Hasan calls the policy what it was: an attempt to stoke up racial fears and division by telling the public that Dukakis was about to unleash a horde of Black murderers, who would kill and rape them. And ironically the people who were praising Bush after his death were the same people attacking Trump a week earlier for the migrant caravan fearmongering. It reminded everyone of the Willie Horton campaign, but for some reason people didn’t make the connection between the two.
Racism and the War on Drugs
Hasan also makes the point that just as Bush senior had no problem creating a racist advert so he had no problem creating a racist drug war. They then move on to discussing Bush’s election advert, in which he waved a bag of crack cocaine he claimed had been bought in a park just a few metres from the White House. But the Washington Post later found out that it had all been staged. A drug dealer had been caught selling crack in Lafayette Square, but he had been lured there by undercover Federal agents, who told him to sell it there. The drug dealer even had to be told the address of the White House, so he could find it. It was a nasty, cynical stunt, which let to an increase in spending of $1 1/2 billion on more jails, and prosecutors to combat the drugs problem. And this led to the mass incarceration of young Black men, and thousands of innocent lives lost at home and abroad in the drug wars. And today Republican senators like Chris Christie will state that this is a failed and racist drug war.
This was the first in a series of programmes honouring the dead – which meant those killed by Bush, not Bush himself. The next programme in the series was on what Bush did in Panama.
Dark Rock and Bush: The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Vision Thing’
I’ve a suspicion that the track ‘Vision Thing’ by the Sisters of Mercy is at least partly about George Bush senior. The Sisters are a dark rock band. Many of front man Andrew Eldritch’s lyrics are highly political, bitterly attacking American imperialism. Dominion/Mother Russia was about acid rain, the fall of Communism, and American imperialism and its idiocy. Eldritch also wanted one of their pop videos to feature two American servicemen in a cage being taunted by Arabs, but this was naturally rejected about the bombing of American servicemen in Lebanon. Another song in the same album, ‘Dr Jeep’, is about the Vietnam War.
‘Vision Thing’ seems to take its title from one of Bush’s lines, where he said, if I remember correctly, ‘I don’t have the vision thing.’ The song talks about ‘another black hole in the killing zone’, and ‘one million points of light’. It also has lines about ‘the prettiest s**t in Panama’ and ‘Take back what I paid/ to another M*****f****r in a motorcade’. These are vicious, bitter, angry lyrics. And if they are about Bush senior, then it’s no wonder.
This is another video from the conference ‘Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?’, organized by the American Educational Trust, which publishes the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; and Middle Eastern Policy, Inc. The speaker in this piece is Maria LaHood, a deputy legal director at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who works to defend the constitutional rights of Palestinian civil rights activists in the US. In this clip she describes some of the cases she’s worked on defending Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists from legal attack by the Israel lobby. These includes the case of the Olympia Co-op, Professor Stephen Salaita, and filing Freedom of Information Act Requests to obtain government documents about Israel’s attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza. The speaker also says she works on the Right to Heal Initiative, helping Iraqi civil society and veterans seeking accountability for the damage to Iraqis’ health from the last war. She’s also challenged the American government over the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and Caterpillar over its sale of the bulldozer used to kill Rachel Corey to Israel. Before joining the Centre, she also worked campaigning for affordable housing in the Bay area of San Francisco.
She begins by talking about attempts to harass, prosecute and suppress pro-Palestinian students and professors at US universities.
The first case she talks about is Professor Stephen Salaita, an esteemed Palestinian-American lecturer, who had a tenured position at Virginia Tech University. He was offered a position at the University of Illinois, Urban Champagne on its Native American Studies programme, which he accepted. He was due to begin his new job at the University of Illinois in the summer of 2014. During that summer he watched, horrified, Israel’s devastation of Gaza and tweeted about it. Two weeks before he was due to take up his post, he received an email from the Chancellor telling him not to bother because he would not be accepted by the Board of Trustees. The professor and his family were thus left without jobs, an income, health insurance and a home.
Salaita lost his job due to a self-declared Zionist, who’d been following his tweets. These were published on the right-wing blog, Legal Insurrection. Professor Salaita was also targeted by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Jewish Federation and the Anti-Defamation League. Also, wealthy donors to the uni threatened to withdraw their money. The Chancellor and the Board later stated that they withdrew his job offer based on those tweets, which they considered uncivil, and anti-Semitic. LaHood states that accusations of anti-Semitism is commonly used to silence criticism of Israel. Christopher Kennedy, who led the Board’s rejection of Salaita, was later given an award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
CCR sued the university, the trustees and top administrators. The court found in his favour, and the Chancellor resigned a few hours later the next day, and the Provost resigned a few weeks later. LaHood states that last autumn (2015) Salaita became the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut, and settled his case for $875,000 against the university. LaHood paid tribute to the immense grassroots support for Salaita, with thousands signing petitions, five thousand professors boycotted the university, and 16 U of I departments voted ‘no confidence’ in the administration. The American Association of Professors also censured the university. Salaita went on to talk about his experience to more than 50 unis, and his works on Israel and settler colonialism are more popular than ever.
The Olympia Food Co-op is a local food co-op in Olympia, Washington; a non-profit organization, it has been very involved in social work and political self-determination. It has adopted a number of boycotts, and in 2010 the board voted by consensus to boycott Israeli goods. Five of the co-op’s 22,000 members voted to prosecute the 16 board members, who’d passed the vote, over a year later. Six months before the lawsuit was filed, the Israeli consul general to the Pacific northwest, based in San Francisco, travelled to Olympia to meet the co-chairs of Stand With Us Northwest, the lawyer representing those suing, and some Olympia activists. Stand With Us is a non-profit organization supporting Israel around the world. It is one of the groups trying to suppress free speech on Israel in the US. It maintains dossiers on Palestinian rights activists. The five issued a letter to the board members telling them to rescind the boycott or else they would be sued and held personally accountable. They were accused of violating the co-op’s governing principles, and the board asked their accusers how they had done this, and invited them to put their proposal to a membership vote, according to the co-op’s bye-laws. The accusers refused to do so, and went ahead and filed the suit. After they did so, Stand With Us put it out on their website that they had brought the suit in partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spearheaded by the Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Alon. Alon admitted that the Israelis were behind the lawsuit, and using it to amplify their power.
CCR then sued, using an anti-SLAPP motion. SLAPP stands for ‘Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Half the states in America have legislation to deter the abuse of laws to chill free speech. The trial court dismissed the case as a SLAPP, held the Board had the authority to initiate the boycott, and awarded them each $10,000. The accusers launched an appeal, this was turned down, and they then appealed to the Supreme Court. The Washington Supreme Court turned down the anti-SLAPP motion, and referred the case back to the trial court. The CCR’s motion to dismiss the case again was denied. The case goes on, and the board members, most of whom are no longer in their post, have been subject to discovery and intimidation. The boycott of Israeli foods continues, however.
LaHood states that these are not isolated incidents, but only two of numerous cases where those, who speak out on Palestine are attacked. In September 2015 the CCR and their partner, Palestine Legal, issued a report, The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in US, documenting the increasing attempts in the US to silence and punish advocacy in favour of Palestine and speech on Israel, including BDS. The report details to the tactics and many cases studies, and is available on both of the organisations’ websites. In 2015 Palestine legal dealt with 240 cases of suppression, including false accusations of terrorism and anti-Semitism. 80% of those incidents were against students and professors at 75 campuses, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. She talks about some of these tactics and cases, such as that of the Irvine 11, who were criminally prosecuted for walking out of a speech by the-then Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren. Several schools have been given complaints by the Zionist Organisation of America, claiming that advocacy on campus for Palestinian rights creates a pro-anti-Semitism atmosphere on campus. Even though these complaints are unconstitutional, universities respond by investigating those accused and cracking down on speech.
These complaints are not only brought by the Z of A, but also the Brandeis Centre, the Ampline Centre, Sheriat Hedin, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Anti-Defamation League amongst others. Netanyahu has launched a full attack on BDS, which Israel has declared to be the biggest threat it faces. Movements to divest from Israel across America have been accused of being anti-Semitic. The American Studies Association was received death threats when they voted to endorse the call to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Sheriat Hedin, the Israeli law centre, threatened to sue them if they didn’t end the boycott. Sheriat Hedin admits that it takes advice on which cases to pursue from Mossad and Israel’s National Security Council. Also in response to the ASA’s decision, legislatures around the country voted on bills to withhold state funding from colleges that used any state aid to fund academic organisations advocating a boycott of Israel. Mobilisation of public opinion prevented these bills from being passed, but now 15 states have introduced anti-boycott legislation. Some states have also passed non-binding resolutions against the BDS, but those have no legal effect. Last year (2015) Illinois passed a law demanding a black list of foreign companies that boycott Israel and compelled the state pension fund to divest from those companies. Florida passed a similar bill in 2016, which also outlaws state contracts with such companies for amounts over a million dollars. New York has even worse legislation pending.
The US Congress has introduced legislation to protect these state laws from federal pre-emption challenges, but these cannot prevent challenges under the First Amendment. Anti-Boycott provisions were introduced into the Federal Trade Promotions Authority Law, making it a priority to discourage BDS from Israel and the Occupied Territories. More information can be found about anti-BDS legislation at righttoboycott.org. Anti-BDS isn’t confined to the US. Israel has anti-boycott damages legislation and France has criminalized BDS. And people have been arrested for wearing BDS T-shirts.
She states that these laws are an extension of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. They have no defence, so they attempt to stop the debate. Free speech and free inquiry is essential to the functioning of democracy, especially at universities, and open debate helps shape public attitudes. Campus opposition helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War, Apartheid in South Africa and will eventually do the same against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. The mounting opposition to people working against the occupation and other violations of international law shows how strong the pro-Palestinian movement is, and how it will eventually win.
This week, Trump decertified the nuclear deal with Iran, limiting that country’s development of nuclear technology. The orange maniac did so claiming that the country had broken the spirit of the agreement, by continuing to fund anti-American militant groups along with other policies. He did not, however, take any further action against Iran, pushing this back to Congress.
In this piece from RT America, their reporter interviews the investigative journalist Max Blumenthal, who states that Trump made the decision very much against the wishes of his own foreign policy advisors. They’re also very strongly against Iran, but realise that decertifying the agreement will strengthen the hand of the hardliners within the country, which will make negotiations with them much more difficult.
Instead of his own foreign policy people, Trump is listening instead to a group of neocons, some of whom were responsible for the 2003 Iraq invasion. These have the same goals towards Iran. They want to overthrow its government, and those of other nations that defy American policies. Chief amongst these neocons are Nikki ‘Pancake Queen’ Haley, his UN ambassador and John ‘Bombs Away’ Bolton. These neocons are in turn funded by three billionaires – Sheldon Adelson, who runs a chain of casinos, Bernard Markus and Peter Singer, who are not only viciously anti-Iran, but stand very close to Israel’s far right Likud party. Haley was the author, or rather ostensible author, of Trump’s policy paper on Iran. Blumenthal states that it’s a stretch describing her as the author of anything. She has no foreign policy experience, and he calls her the ‘Pancake Queen’ as her knowledge of foreign policy comes from eating at the same pancake restaurant as various diplomats and foreign affairs politicians while she was governor of Georgia. She is so determinedly against Iran that she has openly called for regime change. Blumenthal himself is so underwhelmed by her intellectual powers that he says that neocons have simply taken over her mind and rented space in her head. As for ‘Bombs Away’ Bolton, he was responsible for wrecking Bush’s negotiations with North Korea. he has even gone so far as to call for the country’s bombing.
Adelson himself has given $40 million to Trump’s election campaign. In 2012 Adelson spent $100 million through his super-pacs (political funding organisations) promoting Mitt Romney in order to wreck the nuclear deal then being negotiated by Obama. This was all on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, whom Adelson has been promoting through his various funding organisations and think tanks for ten years. He is another one so bitterly opposed to Israel, that in a secret meeting he declared that he wanted a nuclear bomb to be dropped on the country.
Bernard Markus is the billionaire behind the American firm, Home Depot. He has funded numerous necon thinktanks, including the Foundation for the Defence of Democracy, which was responsible for crafting Trump’s speech. Markus has denounced Iran as ‘the Devil’.
Blumenthal concludes by stating that these three are not looking at international politics in any rational way. They are putting Israel’s interests above America’s, and the interests of an extreme right-wing party, Likud, above what many Israelis would want. This is an extremely dangerous time.
Today’s Counterpunch has a piece by the radical, progressive Democratic politician, Bernie Sanders, reblogged from the New York Times. In it, Sanders discusses the outrageous scandal that 28 million Americans have no medical coverage, despite the fact that their country spends more on healthcare than almost any other nation. He points out that this is because the insurance-based healthcare system is designed not to give Americans access to decent healthcare, but to enrich the companies’ executives and shareholders. He describes how many Americans cannot afford healthcare, and are forced to cut down on the drugs they need, simply because they cannot pay for them. He argues that the experience of Canada, and the Medicare programme brought fifty years ago, both show that single-payer healthcare is cheap, popular and effective.
He states that he intends to introduce a bill for Medicare for All into Congress next Wednesday, and outlines how he envisages an initial four year transition period from the current American system. He also makes it plain that there will be concerted opposition to his proposal.
His piece begins
This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?
We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be about.
All over this country, I have heard from Americans who have shared heartbreaking stories about our dysfunctional system. Doctors have told me about patients who died because they put off their medical visits until it was too late. These were people who had no insurance or could not afford out-of-pocket costs imposed by their insurance plans.
I have heard from older people who have been forced to split their pills in half because they couldn’t pay the outrageously high price of prescription drugs. Oncologists have told me about cancer patients who have been unable to acquire lifesaving treatments because they could not afford them. This should not be happening in the world’s wealthiest country.
Americans should not hesitate about going to the doctor because they do not have enough money. They should not worry that a hospital stay will bankrupt them or leave them deeply in debt. They should be able to go to the doctor they want, not just one in a particular network. They should not have to spend huge amounts of time filling out complicated forms and arguing with insurance companies as to whether or not they have the coverage they expected.
Even though 28 million Americans remain uninsured and even more are underinsured, we spend far more per capita on health care than any other industrialized nation. In 2015, the United States spent almost $10,000 per person for health care; the Canadians, Germans, French and British spent less than half of that, while guaranteeing health care to everyone. Further, these countries have higher life expectancy rates and lower infant mortality rates than we do.
The state and state-funded healthcare systems of the European countries have contributed immensely to their people’s health and wellbeing, ever since Bismarck introduced it in Germany in 1875 in an attempt to steal working class votes away from the socialist SDP.
And it’s driving the Reaganites and Thatcherites of the corporate sector up the wall, because it denies them so much of the juicy profits that comes from the insurance-driven sector. That’s why the Tories over here have been privatizing the NHS piecemeal by stealth ever since the days of Maggie Thatcher. It’s why the corporate bosses of the big healthcare firms, like the fraudster Unum, came over here at the beginning of New Labour’s tenure in office to lobby Blair to privatize the NHS.
And it’s part of the reason the Blairites, Tories and Lib Dems, and their paymasters in big business and lackeys in the media, including the Beeb, fear and hate Jeremy Corbyn, as the Republicans and the corporatist Democrats around Hillary Clinton despise Bernie Sanders in the US.
Any civilized country has to demand proper medicine for its people, regardless of the demands of the corporatists to keep it the expensive privilege of the affluent. So, go Bernie! And may Corbyn also win in his fight to renationalize the NHS.
A few days ago I posted up a list of the nations in William Blum’s Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower where the US had interfered in its politics to block the election of a left-wing or liberal candidate, have them overthrown, or colluding and gave material assistance to a Fascist dictator and their death squads. As well as outright invasions, such as that of Grenada and Panama under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under George Dubya.
Blum also has a list of countries, where the US has interfered with their domestic politics to pervert their elections. These include
The Philippines 1950s
Setting up by the CIA of a front organisation, the National Movement for Free Elections to promote its favoured politicians and policies, giving finance and other assistance to those candidates, disinformation, and drugging and plotting to assassinate their opponents.
Italy 1948-1970s
Long-running campaigns against the Communist party and to assist the conservative Christian Democrats.
Lebanon 1950s
CIA funding of President Camille Chamoun and other pro-American politicians; sabotaging of campaigns of politicos sceptical of American interference in their country.
Indonesia 1955
CIA donated a million dollars to Centrist Coalition to attack the electoral chances of President Sukarno and the Communist party.
British Guiana/Guyana 1953-64
Campaign to oust prime minister Cheddi Jagan, using general strikes, terrorism, disinformation and legal challenges by Britain.
Japan 1958-1970s
CIA funding of conservative Liberal Democratic Party against the Japanese Socialist Party, allowing the Liberal Democrats to stay in power continuously for 38 years.
Nepal 1959
CIA operation to help B.P. Koirala’s Nepali Congress Party to win the country’s first ever election.
Laos 1960
CIA arranged for massive fraudulent voting to ensure electoral victor of local dictator Phoumi Nosavan.
Brazil 1962
CIA and Agency for International Development funded politicos opposed to President Joao Goulart, as well as other dirty tricks against various other candidates.
Dominican Republic 1962
US ambassador John Bartlow Martin instructs the heads of the two major parties before general election that the loser would call on his supporters to support the winner, and that the winner would offer seats to the loser’s party. Also worked with the government to deport 125 people, including supporters of previous dictator Trujillo and Cuba.
Guatemala 1963
Overthrow of General Miguel Ydigoras, as they feared he was about to step down and call a general election, which would be won by previous reforming president and opponent of American foreign policy, Juan Jose Arevalo.
Bolivia 1966
Funding by CIA and Gulf Oil of campaign of president Rene Barrientos. The CIA also funded other rightwing parties.
Chile 1964-70
Interference in the 1964 and 1970s elections to prevent the election of Salvador Allende, democratic Marxist, to the presidency.
Portugal 1974-5
CIA funded moderates, including Mario Soares and the Socialist Party, and persuaded the other democratic socialist parties of Europe to fund them in order to block radical programme of generals, who had overthrown Fascist dictator Salazar.
Australia 1974-5
CIA funding of opposition parties and use of legal methods to arrange overthrow of prime minister Gough Whitlam because he opposed Vietnam War.
Jamaica 1976
Long CIA campaign, including economic destabilisation, industrial unrest, supplying armaments to his opponent and attempted assassination to prevent re-election of Prime Minister Michael Manley.
Panama 1984, 1989
CIA-funded campaigns first of all to support Noriega, and then against him in 1989, when the CIA also used secret radio and TV broadcasts.
Nicaragua 1984, 1990
1984: Attempt to discredit the Sandinista government by CIA. The opposition coalition was persuaded not to take part in the elections. Other opposition parties also encouraged to drop out; attempts to split Sandinistas once in power.
1990: Funding and partial organisation of opposition coalition, UNO, and its constituent groups by National Endowment for Democracy to prevent election of Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega; Nicaraguans also made aware that US intended to continue proxy war waged by Contras if they elected him.
Haiti 1987-88
CIA supported for selected candidates after end of Duvalier dictatorship. Country’s main trade union leader claimed US aid organisations were smearing left-wing candidates as Communists and trying to persuade rural people not to vote for them.
Bulgaria 1990-1, Albania 1991-2
Interference in both countries election to prevent re-election of Communists.
Russia 1996
Extensive backing and support to Yeltsin to defeat Communists.
Mongolia 1996
National Endowment for Democracy funded and helped form the opposition National Democratic Union, and drafted its platform, a Contract with the Mongolian Voter, based Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. The goal here was to accelerate the regime’s privatisation programme and create government favourable to the establishment of American corporations and intelligence agencies in the country.
Bosnia 1998
US turns country into ‘American protectorate’ by appointing Carlos Westendorp as high representative in 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Before 1998 elections Westendorp removed 14 Bosnian Croatian candidates, claiming reporting by Croatian television biased. After election removes president of Bosnia Serb republic on grounds that he was causing instability.
In 2001 and 2005 high representative also removed one of the three joint presidents of the country. In 2005 high representative Paddy Ashdown, who sacked Dragan Covic.
Nicaragua 2001
US smears against Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, accused of human rights violations and terrorism. US ambassador openly campaigned for Ortega’s opponent, Enrique Bolanos. US also pressurised Conservative party to withdraw from the elections so as not to split right-wing vote. There were also adds in the papers signed by Jeb Bush, claiming that Dubya supported Bolanos. Bolanos himself also stated that the Americans had told him that if Ortega won, they would cease all aid to the country.
Bolivia 2002
Extensive campaign against socialist candidate Evo Morales because he was against neoliberalism and big business, as well as the attempts to eradicate the coca plant, the source of cocaine.
US ambassador smeared him with accusations of connections to drug cartels and terrorism. US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere also said America could cut off aid if Morales elected. Meetings between US ambassador and officials and leading figures in rival parties to support Morales’ rival, Sanchez de Lozada.
Slovakia 2002
Warnings by US ambassador to the country and the US ambassador to NATO that if they elected Vladimir Meciar, former president running on anti-globalisation campaign, this would damage chances of their country entering EU and NATO. Also interference by National Endowment for Democracy against Meciar.
El Salvador 2004
Campaigning by US ambassador and three US Republican members of congress, including Thomas Tancredo of California, threatening cessations of aid and work permits for the countries’ people to work in America, in order to prevent election of FMLN candidate Schafik Handal and win victory of Tony Saca of the Arena party. FMLN former guerilla group. Handal stated he would withdraw Salvadorean troops from Iraq, re-examination privatisations and renew diplomatic contacts with Cuba. Arena extreme rightwing party, pro-US, free market, responsible for death squads and the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Afghanistan 2004
Pressure placed by US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, on political candidates to withdraw in favour of Washington’s preferred candidate, Hamid Karzai.
Palestine 2005-6
Massive pressure by the Americans to prevent the election of Hamas, including funding of the Palestinian Authority by the National Endowment for Democracy.
This last country is my own suggestion, not Blum’s.
Great Britain?
Go and read various articles in Lobster, which describe the way the US and its various front organisations collaborated with the right-wing of the Labour party to stop possible Communist influence. In the 1980s Reagan also created the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, alias BAP, to cultivate rising politicians of both the left and the right, and make them more favourable towards America and the Atlantic alliance. These included Tony Blair and Ed Balls, but you won’t read about it in the Times, because it’s editor was also a BAP alumnus.
This week it was reported that British Gas were considering raising their prices by 9 per cent. This is frightening, as it means that the other companies may also raise their prices as well. Many people are increasingly finding themselves faced with a choice due to austerity, benefit cuts and stagnating wages. They can eat, and freeze, or stay warm and starve.
I don’t know what the reason given for raising the price of gas is. I suspect, however, from the behaviour of the oil industry, that any justification presented is spurious. William Blum in the chapter on capitalism in his book America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy, shows that the rise in oil prices aren’t due to rising costs. The cost of getting the stuff out of the ground has remained the same, despite all the guff about having reached peak oil. The real cause of the rise in fuel prices, including gas, is financial speculation, and quotes a US Senate report, The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices. This states
The traditional forces of supply and demand cannot fully account for these increases [in crude oil, gasoline, etc.]. While global demand for oil has been increasing… global oil supplies have increased by an even greater amount. As a result, global inventories have increased as well. Today, US oil inventories are at an 8-year high, and OECD [mainly European] oil inventories are at a 20 year high. Accordingly, factors other than basic supply and demand must be examined…
Over the past few years, large financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds, and other investment funds have been pouring billions of dollars into the energy commodities markets … to try to take advantage of price changes or to hedge against them. Because much of this additional investment has come from financial institutions and investment funds that do not use the commodity as part of their business, it is defined as ‘speculation’ by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). According to the CTFC, a speculator ‘does not produce or use the commodity, but risks his or her own capital trading futures in that commodity in hopes of making a profit on price changes.’ The large purchases of crude oil futures contracts by speculators have, in effect, created an additional demand for oil to be delivered in the future in the same manner that additional demand for the immediate delivery of a physical barrel of oil drives up the price on the spot market… Although it is difficult to quantify the effect of speculation on prices, there is substantial evidence that the large amount of speculation in the current market has significantly increased prices. (p. 248).
Blum goes on to make the point that the American financial regulators have been unable to combat these rises, because their ability to do so has been taken away from them by Congress. (pp. 249-50). As a result, although it still costs ExxonMobil $20 to get a barrel of oil out of the ground, the oil itself can trade at $40, $80 or $130 a barrel. (p. 251).
So if you’re worried about paying the gas or heating oil bill, the reason it’s gone up is due the financial sector. The very people that donate to political parties, especially the Tories and employ MPs when they leave.
Boris Johnson is a grotesque clown, intensely ambitious, untrustworthy, and mendacious. His buffoonish behaviour a clever performance to conceal a very cunning intelligence. But in this case, he’s telling the truth. To the acute of embarrassment of his political mistress, Theresa May.
The I also carried a report by Nigel Morris, Boris to apologise to Saudis for criticism yesterday (9 December 2016) that he had been ordered to apologise to the Saudis by May after he accused them of sponsoring wars for their own benefit in the Middle East. The report ran
Boris Johnson suffered a humiliating slap-down from Theresa May after accusing Saudi Arabia, a key British ally, of “playing proxy wars” in the Middle East.
Downing Street said the Foreign Secretary was expressing personal views. Mrs May’s spokeswoman said: “They are not the Government’s position on Saudi Arabia and its role in the region.”
She signalled that Mr Johnson would apologise in person to the desert kingdom’s rulers.
“He will be in Saudi Arabia on Sunday and will have the opportunity to set out the way the UK sees its relationship with Saudi.”
Mr Johnson found himself in hot water after comments emerged in which he charged Saudi Arabia and Iran with abusing Islam and acting as puppeteers in proxy wars in the region.
He said the two nations were unable to build bridges, across the Sunni-Shi’a divide in the Muslim world.
His comments, at a conference last week in Rome, flouted the Foreign Office’s practice of not publicly criticising the UK’s allies. Mr Johnson said: “There are politicians who are twisting and abusing religion and different strains of the same religion in order to further their own political objectives.
“That’s one of the biggest political problems in the whole region.
“And the tragedy for me – and that’s why you have these proxy wars being fought the whole time in that area – is that there is not strong enough leadership in the countries themselves.”
Mr Johnson’s comments emerged hours after Mrs May returned from a two-day visit tot he gulf where she praised the Saudi royal family. (p.4).
BoJo here is right. The Saudis are fighting proxy wars in the Middle East. They were responsible for 9/11, and solidly behind the Iraq invasion, because they too wanted to get their mitts on the Iraqi oil industry and its reserves, the largest in the region after their own country. A week or so ago the I also carried a report that an Islamist terrorist had told the Americans that a centre in Saudi Arabia, that had supposedly been set up deradicalise Islamist terrorists through a 12 step programme, was doing precisely the opposite. It was aiding and training them. The Saudis support Sunni terrorists in Iraq, who are brutalising and massacring the non-Sunni population – Shi’as, Yezidis and Christians, and Syria. Iran is also doing the same, sending its troops into Iraq to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS as they massacre the Shi’a. They’re also staunch supporters of Assad’s regime, whose core is the Alawi Shi’a sect.
But this is precisely what the western authorities really don’t want us to know. The official report on 9/11 was censored so that Congress and the American – and wider public – would not know about the Saudis’ role in 9/11. Just as they don’t want the western public realising that the Iraq invasion wasn’t about combatting Islamist terrorism – how could it, when Osama bin Laden also hated Saddam’s secular Ba’athist regime? – but was all about seizing Iraqi oil. And spreading Wahhabi Islam throughout the region through military violence.
Saudi Arabia, unfortunately, is the world’s biggest oil exporter, and their control over the oil supply has the power to destabilise and overthrow whole regimes. No one wants another energy crisis like the one in the 1970s. And that helped to advance Saudi militant Islamism, by showing them that they had the power to dominate world affairs through their control of the oil supply.
Frankly, the sooner the world moves away from oil and into renewables – solar power, tidal power, even Zero point energy, assuming that isn’t total pseudoscience, and the power of big oil is broken, the better.
This is another piece of American news, which unfortunately has very ominously, and potentially deadly, implications for all of us. In this piece from Secular Talk, the host Kyle Kulinski discusses how the US Congress has managed to upset the deal Barack Obama negotiated with the Iranians over their nuclear programme. The Iranians promised to stop their nuclear programme in return for the Americans lifting the sanctions they had imposed on the country. The international nuclear regulatory body also confirmed that the Iranians were complying with the treaty. The treaty was opposed both by Israel, which wanted a bombing campaign, and the Iranian hardliners, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini. Nevertheless, the peaceful settlement to this issue was a major achievement for Barack Obama and the reformist Iranian president, Rouhani.
Now Congress has undermined all this, and re-imposed sanctions. For no reason whatsoever. Obama has yet to sign the legislation, and Congress has claimed that they’re just symbolic. Nevertheless, it has caused the Iranians to decide that if the Americans can’t be trusted to fulfill their side of the deal, they don’t have to honour theirs. So they’ve restarted their nuclear programme. Kulinski makes the point how stupid Congress has been in both undermining the treaty, and the Iranian reformists, like Rouhani, who negotiated it. And it seems just about all of Congress, with few exceptions, is responsible for this mess.
My guess here is that the Neocons in both the Republican and Democrat parties are desperate to start a war with Iran, and this is the means of providing a pretext for it. Israel wanted military actions against Iran, and a few years ago unleashed a stuxnet virus attack on the Iranians’ computers. From what I’ve read, this led to a major incident at one of their labs and the deaths of several of the scientists and engineers involved. The Republicans in America have also bitterly hated and opposed Obama’s and Rouhani’s treaty. It’s been revealed that the Republicans had plans even before 9/11 for the invasion of seven countries and the overthrow of their leaders. These included not only Iraq and Syria, but also Libya, Somalia, Lebanon and Iran. 9/11 provided them with a pretext to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, although in the case of the last it was justified, as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had committed on act of war.
And Hillary Clinton has been no better than the Republicans. She has also pressed for further military action, including against Russia for supposedly leaking the incriminating emails about her corrupt business dealings.
My fear is that the hawks in Congress are hoping to provoke the Iranians into resuming their nuclear programme, so they have an excuse to launch another invasion. I’ve also written extensively elsewhere on how this would be disastrous. Like Iraq, Iran is a mosaic of different ethnic groups. The majority religion is Twelver Shi’ism, but three per cent of the population are Armenian Christians. The country is also the birthplace of the Baha’is, a religion which grew out of Islam in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Baha’is are not recognised as a distinct religion, and have suffered terrible persecution as heretics and suspected agents of Israel. There is also a growing movement of underground Christianity, which is also severely persecuted. If America invades, you can expect the same process of balkanisation, tribal bloodshed and persecution, as has occurred in Iraq.
And this will not be done to protect America or Israel from any nuclear threat from the Islamic Republic. Shirin Ebadi in her book on the current social unrest in Iran makes the point that when the Iranians say they are developing nuclear power as a source of domestic electricity, they’re speaking the truth. The Iranian regime is supported internationally by its oil exports. In order to maximise these, the regime is determined to cut down on domestic oil consumption. Other sites I’ve seen on the web have also suggested that if the Iranians were to develop nuclear weapons, it would be as a deterrent against the other, neighbouring regimes which pose a possible threat, such as Saudi Arabia and possibly Pakistan, both Sunni regimes.
Any war which America and its allies fights with the Islamic Republic will be done for the very same reasons America invaded Iraq: to safeguard Israel, seize the country’s oil and other industries, and comply with the Saudis’ campaign to destroy Shi’ism, moderate Islam, and non-Muslim religions in the Middle East.
This deliberate attempt to increase tensions with Iran should be stopped right now, before any more of our brave servicemen and women are killed, and more millions are massacred or made homeless, just for the profit of big oil and Wahhabi intolerance.
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