Get some new lawyers.

— Then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on his assertion that the bombing of Balkan States was illegal under international law. (1999) ¹

In this sixteenth anniversary year of Madeleine Albright stating her endorsement of half a million child sacrifices at the alter of the UN Embargo on Iraq as a “price worth it”, this silent holocaust is to be commemorated annually.

In New Haven, CT., on 12th May, marking the day of Albright’s infamous broadcast  a banner was unfurled and a minute’s silence held as the Middle East Crisis Committee, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CT), the Tree of Life Education Fund and We Refuse to be Enemies, inaugurated the first Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.

Stanley Heller, Chair of the Middle East Crisis Committee, commented:

This horrific loss of life was ignored for six years until the US Ambassador to the UN appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and admitted the deaths of half a million children … We in the Middle East Crisis Committee call for May 12^th to be marked as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.

Iraq’s children, of course, continued to die at an average of six thousand a month until the illegal 2003 invasion wrought further apocalyptic disaster.  Currently many hospitals are assessed as even more woeful than under the embargo, thus they continue to die in a near forgotten tragedy of UN-US-UK making. Soaring cancers and birth deformities linked to weapons used in the 1991 bombings, twelve years of subsequent bombings, 2003 and the following years have exacerbated and compounded a tragedy of enormity.²

As others accused of crimes against humanity and the peace end up at the International Criminal Court (but so far, only if black or Eastern European, it seems) Albright gathers a bizarre collection of “humanitarian” awards.

One of the strangest is surely the Freedom Award from the International Rescue Committee, initiated by Albert Einstein which, “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive and rebuild their lives (offering) life saving care and life-changing assistance …” Endorsing infanticide hardly falls within the IRC’s lofty stated aspirations.

Two years after her statement on disposable children, Albright, now having abandoned further tarnishing the United Nations fine founding aspirations, to become US Secretary of State, declared in February 1998:

Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

A year later, the 1999 razing of much of the Balkans became known as “Madeleine’s war.” The largely unrecognized nation of Kosova, carved from that decimation, is now rated one of the most corrupt and lawless countries in the region and high in world ranking, according to December 2011 findings by Transparency International.

Talking after the virtual destruction of Iraq as a nation state, its records, government institutions bombed, looted, stolen, Albright told Jim Lehrer in September 2003:

… I think we actually … kept him (Saddam Hussein) in a strategic box. We bombed very much if you remember all the maps, always in terms of North and South — covers a great portion of Iraq. I think we had him in the box.

No mention that both the bombing and the “box” were comprehensively illegal.

As ever, the  majority of “bombed” victims were Iraq’s children for whom her contempt was seemingly boundless — small rural shepherds and goat herders tending the family flocks on the vast flat tundra with no place to hide.

One politician with whom she had sparred did take a stand in vast contrast. Robin Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, resigned in protest two days before the invasion. His resignation speech in Parliament on March 18, 2003 was a searing indictment of stark double standards on dealing with Iraq. Deliberate selective perception which could now equally apply to threats to Iran.

He began by saying:

I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but twelve years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted

Yet it is more than thirty years since (UN) Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.

He talked of  “ … the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest”, noting that Britain’s credibility was not “helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.  That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.”

And as Iran now, he pleaded that “Inspections be given a chance (that the UK was) “being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.“

He asked for the halt of “commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support” and ended with, “I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action. It is for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.”

On the first anniversary of the invasion he stated in Parliament:

It seems only too likely that the judgement of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy in the half century since Suez. In truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq.

Robin Cook died of a heart complication whilst hill walking on remote Ben Stack in Scotland, coincidentally within a swathe of land owned by the Duke of Westminster, a Major General, and at the time Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, who visited British-held Basra a number of times after the invasion.

His death was on the 6th of August, 2005, Hiroshima Day, and the 15th anniversary of the imposition of the all denying embargo on Iraq. A price Robin Cook had clearly not thought “worth it.”

It has to be hoped that Iraq Genocide Memorial Day spreads worldwide both in memory of those abandoned by the inspiring words committed to in the UN Charter, the numerous hidden casualties, dead and alive – and as a reminder that for a great swathe of the world,  mortifyingly, it is the West which appears to be increasingly despotic.

1. William Blum,  “Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.”  January 3, 2012
2. Bie Kentane,  “The Children of Iraq: “Was the Price Worth it?”, Global Research,  May 9, 2012

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that India has a stockpile of 80-100 nuclear weapons while North Korea has less than ten. North Korea originally signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons (NPT) but withdrew in 2003.

Like Israel and Pakistan, also nuclear powers, India has never signed the NPT. Despite this, the US has supported the development of nuclear weapons in all three countries – India receiving particular support from George W. Bush and Obama. The 2008 India Civilian Nuclear Agreement — an agreement of cooperation between India, the US, and other providers of nuclear technology — is linked with plans to build dozens of nuclear plants in India, a country that exploded five nuclear devices at its Pokhran test site in 1998. Environmental journalist Gar Smith writes:

While this scheme will generate a lot of global cash-flow for the nuclear marketers and their government boosters, it could deal a death blow to nonproliferation hopes by allowing India to become the first country to buy nuclear materials without being a party to the NPT. In April 2010, Washington signed off on a deal that permits India to reprocess its own nuclear fuel. The arrangement, however, has raised fears in neighboring Pakistan, which is now expected to embark on a ‘significant nuclear military buildup’.

Meanwhile, the US government regularly lambasts North Korea for its nuclear weapons programme and, of course, Iran for an alleged nuclear weapons programme that, according to the 16 US intelligence agencies, does not exist.

As Noam Chomsky comments:

Small wonder that outside the West few can take the US charges against Iran very seriously…¹

The headline for the BBC article on India was neutral enough:

India test launches Agni-V long-range missile.

The headline for the article on North Korea struck a different tone:

UN “deplores” North Korea botched rocket launch.

The introduction to the Korean piece continued with the same emphasis:

The UN Security Council has deplored the launch by North Korea of a rocket which broke up shortly after take-off.

A statement issued after closed-door talks said the launch was in breach of two Security Council resolutions…’

The introduction to the India piece was positive, even celebratory:

India has successfully launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile able to carry a nuclear warhead, officials say…

India said the launch was “flawless” and the missile had reached its target…

With this, India joins an elite nuclear club of China, Russia, France, the US and UK which already have long-range missiles, although with a much greater range. Israel is also thought to possess them.

‘It was a perfect launch. It met all the test parameters and hit its pre-determined target’, SP Das, director of the test range, told the BBC. He confirmed the missile had flown more than 5,000km before reaching the target.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated the scientists for the “successful launch” of the missile.

If anyone on Planet Earth had anything negative to say about the launch, the BBC was unable to find them.

The primary source for views on the Indian launch were Indian. By contrast, North Korean opinion was buried in the last of five sections in the article. Perhaps no humanising comments from named North Korean officials or experts were available – the BBC provided only two bland, anonymous sentences from ‘North Korea’s state news agency KCN.’

Ask A World Policeman

The article on North Korea presented the missile launch as a threat eliciting punishment:

Earlier, Washington accused the communist state of threatening regional security. It said North Korea had isolated itself still further from the outside world.

The US has also cancelled a proposed food aid deal with Pyongyang.

A US National Security Council spokesman said they would look at additional sanctions if Pyongyang continued its ‘provocations’.

As for the Indian launch:

The BBC’s Andrew North in Delhi says Indian officials deny it, but everyone believes the missile is mainly aimed at deterring China…

The North Korean missile, then, was portrayed as a threat; the Indian missile as a deterrent. Additionally, the BBC commented: “Many outside the country saw the launch as an illegal test of long-range missile technology.” The sentence could apply to either launch – we will leave readers to guess in which article it appeared.

The article on North Korea repeatedly referenced US sources: “US ambassador Susan Rice”, “Washington”, “A US National Security Council spokesman”, “Washington” (again), and finally “White House spokesman Jay Carney”. When media discussion centres on global “Bad Guys” it is   US opinion that matters. This not so subtly portrays the US as the actual and rightful World Policeman. One might reasonably wonder what on earth events on the Korean peninsula ever had to do with the United States.

The North Korea piece lined up the denunciations, here White House spokesman Jay Carney:

North Korea is only further isolating itself by engaging in provocative acts, and is wasting its money on weapons and propaganda displays while the North Korean people go hungry.

Nothing along these lines appeared in the article on India, a country with 57 billionaires and one-third of the world’s poor. In January, India’s Premier Manmohan Singh called malnutrition in the country “a national shame” as he released a major survey that found 42 per cent of children under five were underweight. One of the NGOs that produced the report commented that, measured by the prevalence of malnutrition, India is “doing worse than sub-Saharan Africa”.

To round off the criticism, the BBC article on North Korea cited South Korea, the North’s main enemy:

South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-Hwan accused the North of a ‘clear breach of the UN resolution that prohibits any launch using ballistic missile technology’.

No mention was made of the Pakistani view of India’s launch. There was also no word at all on the view from “Washington” or the US more generally.

The silence is understandable. As discussed, while preaching against nuclear proliferation to countries like North Korea and Iran, the US and Britain have been working hard to arm both India and Pakistan.

In September 2003, Britain’s BAE Systems announced the sale of 66 Hawk jets to India in a £1 billion package. This constituted 10 times the value of annual UK development aid to India. In July 2010, a further 57 aircraft were sold in a deal worth £700,000,000 described by The Times of India as ‘a quantum jump for Indo-British military ties’.

The Hawks, which can also be used as ground-attack aircraft, are used to train Indian pilots to fly more powerful jets, including 139 BAE Systems Jaguar bombers built under licence. The Ministry of Defence accepts that Jaguars could deliver India’s nuclear weapons. The Indian government receiving these jets has fought three wars with Pakistan in the last 70 years.

In 2003, the Guardian provided the sensible emphasis in a piece entitled:  “5,000 jobs safe as India buys Hawks”.

Similarly, in March 2005, the press reported that the United States had agreed to sell two dozen F-16 nuclear-capable jet fighters to Pakistan. US Senator Larry Pressler commented in The New York Times:

Pakistan… is a corrupt, absolute dictatorship. It has a horrendous record on human rights and religious tolerance.²

It could be coincidence that, with important arms contracts and strategic alliances at stake, the BBC should fail to muster a single criticism of Indian nuclear missile technology. It could also be coincidence that the BBC demonises and lambasts an enemy of the same state-corporate interests. But, in truth, the pattern is so obvious, so consistent, over years and decades. We can debate the precise mechanisms corrupting BBC performance – the fact that senior managers and trustees are Establishment grandees selected by the government of the day. Or we can focus on the role of the entire corporate media system in furthering state-corporate power – system-wide corruption that generates industrial strength pressure to conform on the less overtly corporate BBC. Whatever the reasons, there is no question that the BBC heavily promotes the interests of power at the expense of honesty, critical thought and compassion.

1. Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, Hamish Hamilton, 2010, p.220
2. Pressler, “Dissing Democracy in Asia”, The New York Times, March 21, 2005

The term comes from a tactic that was commonly employed many centuries ago by all the navies of fledgling empires. Although these navies very occasionally engaged in heroic battles with each other in order to protect the citizens of their countries from invading hoards, as our history books suggest, the far more common use of mighty battleships was for theft. Sinking an enemy ship was never the intention of these engagements, and would have been seen as something of a failure. The purpose was to capture the ship, preferably undamaged, and steal anything and everything from the personal possessions of the crew to the very ship itself, which would then be recycled by the victors. After all, what could possibly be the point of sinking an expensive ship, laden to the gunnels with the riches of plundered foreign colonies, when its capture would serve exactly the same political purpose, as well as providing vast wealth?

The Royal Navy, for example, routinely operated a “prize” system right up until quite recent times; and although acts of piracy don’t form quite the same staple diet in the senior service as they used to do, prize legislation remains on British statute books to this day. Right up until the nineteenth century “prize courts” would routinely assess and divvy-up the wealth of ships that had been attacked and seized by the jolly Jack Tars. Some of the plunder was apportioned to the ship’s crew. Of course, it wasn’t an equal distribution of wealth, where the loblolly boy, say, received as much of a cut as the captain; nor was the cut in any way equal to the share gifted to the high and mighty Lords of the Admiralty, who weren’t required to do anything more dangerous for their cut than over-indulge themselves in London society. However, some small portion of the “prize” would find its way to even the lowliest cabin boy – the original “trickle-down” effect perhaps. In short, the routine day-job of the glorious Royal Navy was plunder. In fact, the only way the great sailors of Nelson’s day differed from common pirates was that the piracy of Nelson’s navy was simply deemed to be legal. It’s a similar principle to the one that’s alive and well to this day, and helping to keep investment bankers out of jail.

But even hardened cynics such as myself find it difficult not to admire the considerable skill that was often required for some of the encounters that took place between the mighty warships of Nelson’s day. In the days before modern communications these great behemoths, seventy metres long with a thousand souls on board, could only use the power of the wind to move around, so finding and engaging and defeating an enemy in thousands of square miles of empty ocean was no easy matter, and the seamanship required for these encounters was often truly amazing. Apart from some acts of genuine courage, with perhaps just a hint of insanity, these sailors also relied on a host of devious tricks and raw cunning to capture a “prize”. Apart from plenty of luck, you also needed a good brain to be an effective captain in Nelson’s day; and it’s hardly surprising, given hundreds of years of regular practice in the dark arts of subterfuge and deceit, that the roots of the British intelligence service were established in the Royal Navy.

One of the many tricks used in the days of sail was to make your ship appear friendly to the watchful telescopes of the prospective prize; and the easiest way to do this was to ensure the flags your ship were flying were not those of your own country but were either exactly the same as those of the prize, or the same as those of whichever country was friendly to the prize. This simple ruse would, of course, eventually be discovered as a trick; and, of course, every ship’s crew knew about the trick. However, it would invariably buy some invaluable time, making all the difference between success and failure, enabling the hunter to get close enough to his prey to capture him before the darkness of night might come to the hapless victim’s rescue.

This tactic is still very much alive and well, and survives in modern language usage as the “false flag” attack, to mean an attack by someone who isn’t quite who they seem to be. Variations of it include attacks perpetrated by people pretending to be enemies of the state. These attacks may be carried out by the state’s own armed forces, or by paid mercenaries, or by allies of the state. History is rich with evidence.

Take, for example, the infamous sinking of the Maine. In 1898, when the US was beginning to flex its expansionist muscles abroad, the battleship USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbour. Although there was no evidence to support it, the incident was blamed on Spain, who controlled Cuba at the time; and it had the desired effect of triggering the Spanish American war which eventually led to Spain’s eviction from the island and the installation of a US puppet regime – a model that would be successfully repeated time and again for many decades to come. Fifty-five years later something very similar happened again – this time without going to the extra expense of actually sinking any ships.

On August 4, 1964 the world was informed that another US warship, the USS Maddox, had come under sustained attack by North Vietnam. It was the event which directly led to ten years of total hell for tens of millions of people in South East Asia, and whose effects are still being felt to this day. Fifty years after the false flag event of the Maddox, declassified documents revealed that the US government was fully aware at the time that no such attack had taken place. But by then, of course, the false flag had long served its purpose.

Although the term “false flag” originated from these naval deceptions, false flag incidents have never been solely confined to the high seas. Armies have always used any number of devices to deceive their victims, and anyone who’s ever watched a Hollywood war movie is probably aware of it; for how many of these movies have included a scene where either the good guys or the bad guys dress up in the uniforms of their enemy in order to carry out some raid or another? Is that not a completely routine story-line? Although many of these movies are obviously fictitious, these deceptions, which might also be called “false flag” adventures, are based on normal military tactics which have been used by almost every army, probably since the beginning of civilisation.

However, Hollywood movies seldom reveal the true evil and cynicism of war. Therefore not many of the 99%, who obtain much of their understanding of the world in general and history in particular from the silver screen, know anything at all about the truly dark side of all armies in general, and their leaders in particular. For how many Hollywood movies tell the stories of how armies routinely slaughter defenceless people? Although they will sometimes depict the enemy of the day carrying out these atrocities, they never show the so-called “good guys” doing it – which creates in the mind of the viewer the impression that our armies never behave in such a beastly fashion. But they most certainly do.

Consider the vast number of movies that came out of Hollywood telling how the west was won – how handfuls of brave adventurers defeated marauding hoards of screaming bloodthirsty savages, which was, in fact, a complete inversion of the truth. And how many war movies told the truth about the bombing of Dresden, or of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These completely needless events took place in the closing days of World War Two, when Germany and Japan were already crushed nations. They were events which deliberately targeted hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians, and served absolutely no military purpose whatsoever. They were war crimes, already outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Not many Hollywood movies tell us that.

It’s important to grasp this principle of war that not even Hollywood can glamorise: that our trusted leaders can and do routinely issue orders to slaughter innocent defenceless civilians, and that brainwashed young people then carry out those orders, and that society is then brainwashed into considering these young people to be heroes. Not even Hollywood can glamorise the deep cynicism of that fact.

Although the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians is a different aspect of the cynicism of war, and cannot be considered a false flag adventure, it’s important to cite it as evidence of the psychotic ruthlessness of our own trusted leaders and the brainwashed youngsters who are routinely conditioned to obey an order, any order.

My own personal first-hand experience of false flag adventures was obtained in the late seventies, in Rhodesia, where I was batting out my national service as an intelligence officer. Our army had a small unit of people called the Selous Scouts. They were considered the elite of the elite, and were supposedly originally created by a couple of junior officers serving in the Rhodesian SAS who thought the SAS wasn’t quite hard enough. I did some of my training with the Scouts. They were definitely different.

Later on, when I was operational, I was based in a small rural outpost called Rusape. For me it was a very comfortable posting and, I’m very glad to say, I managed to see out my time there without being injured and, I’m even more glad to say, without causing injury to anyone else.

Each morning, after a leisurely breakfast, I would saunter over to the operations room to see what was going on. Like almost every military operations room in the world, one wall of it was given over to a huge map of our area of responsibility. Most of the time it was just a map of rural Rhodesia, with little coloured stickers on it depicting some sort of recent “terrorist” incident – such as a landmine going off, or an attack on some isolated school or clinic. My job would be to go out to investigate these incidents and report on them. Sometimes it was very harrowing, but mostly it was a fairly pleasant way to sit out the war.

But every now and then I would turn up to the ops room in the morning and would be met with the sight of a sizeable chunk of the map covered over in hatched lines. Everyone understood that that area had been “frozen”. This meant that no army personnel or police were to go into that area. The Scouts had moved into it. For a few weeks after that life went on pretty much as normal everywhere else on the patch; but no information at all emerged from the area with the mysterious hatching; and then one morning I’d turn up for work and the hatching would have been removed from the map as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

Within a day or two of that happening the reports would start rolling in from where the Scouts had been, about “terrorist” murders at some isolated village or another, of a “terrorist” rocket attack on a small business centre perhaps, or a “terrorist” landmine blowing up a rural bus. These would all have been carried out by the Scouts, dressed up as “terrorists” and using “terrorist” weaponry.

The purpose of these attacks was a variation of that old favourite: the hard cop/soft cop routine. The Scouts’ role was to try to out-terrorise the forces working for the likes of Robert Mugabe, to try to alienate the local population from Mugabe’s men by pretending to be Mugabe’s men and committing such atrocities that the locals would be repulsed by them. Then when the soft cops turned up in the shape of government forces, the locals would feel like offering their help and support. It’s called winning hearts and minds, and was a tactic that had already been used by US special forces in Vietnam before that, and by British special forces all over the place before that: Malaya, Congo, Kenya, Aden…

Some would dismiss false flag adventures as conspiracy theory, which is, of course, a very convenient way to persuade the 99% that our trusted leaders couldn’t possibly stoop so low. But history is rich with proof that they most certainly do stoop so low, with amazing frequency. So the really important lesson to learn in all of this is that whenever a so-called “terrorist” outrage occurs, especially those outrages where the perpetrators haven’t been caught in action (and rounding up “suspects” after the event cannot be trusted either – as the “Guildford Four” and “Birmingham Six”, for example, could confirm)… always, always recall the very real world of false flag adventures.

Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in Washington by the Barack Obama administration.

Prince Salman – who Bahraini propaganda sells as a “moderate” – showed up at the US State Department side-by-side with Secretary of State Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton. Those who “die” are evil dictators of the Muammar Gaddafi variety; “our” bastards get to party in DC after being extended a red carpet welcome.

Is there any Arab Spring-related repression and killing going in Bahrain? According to Clinton, of course not; these are only “internal issues” – in her own words.

What this means in practice is that Clinton subscribes to the official narrative that the sectarianization of everything happening in Bahrain is to be blamed on the protesters – and not the al-Khalifas, who for a year now have been destroying Shi’ite mosques and investing on all-out demonization of all things Shi’ite (blame it on “evil” Iran).

The al-Khalifas have been way wilier than President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; they have killed only an acceptable number of people. But why is Bahrain substantially “different” from Syria? Because “it hosts the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, helping the US military project its might in the Gulf and contain Iran”; and that’s not a neo-conservative talking, but Washington director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski.

A Bunch of Cowards

Here is Libya conqueror Clinton:

Bahrain is a valued ally of the United States. We partner on many important issues of mutual concern to each of our nations and to the regional and global concerns as well. I’m looking forward to a chance to talk over with His Royal Highness a number of the issues both internally and externally that Bahrain is dealing with and have some better understanding of the ongoing efforts that the government of Bahrain is undertaking. So again, His Royal Highness, welcome to the United States.

Here’s a Bahraini government spokesman telling it like it is to Reuters only one day before the Clinton-Crown Prince schmooze:

We are looking into the perpetrators and people who use print, broadcast and social media to encourage illegal protest and violence around the country. If applying the law means tougher action, then so be it.

Translation: we will keep going on a rampage because the masters in Washington have our backs covered.

Not a word from the Obama administration on the arrest of top Bahraini human-rights activist Nabeel Rajab, who Amnesty International declared a “prisoner of conscience”, as well as calling for his immediate release. Activist Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, for his part, has been on a hunger strike for three months, protesting his life imprisonment by the al-Khalifa regime.

R2P, “responsibility to protect”, that oh so lovely doctrine espoused by the Three Graces – Clinton, US ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and Special Assistant to Obama Samantha Power – does not apply to civilian protesters, the majority of them Shi’ites, in Bahrain. They have been yelling for their basic human rights – of which they don’t have much – to be protected for over a year now.

Bahrain’s Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa – whose Medieval methods would lead Egyptian Omar “Sheikh al-Torture” Suleiman to blush with envy, not to mention Prince Nayef from the House of Saud – has been in power for 40 years.

And Bahrain’s King Hamad has been oh so generous; after all he commissioned a report on the repression. Needless to say, the report, even highly sanitized, hasn’t been implemented.

What makes it even more tragic is that these people are cowards. It would take just a single word from Clinton or Obama for the al-Khalifas to immediately stop their concerted repression, using their hardcore Sunni police force recruited from Pakistan, Syria and Yemen; release the thousands of prisoners; and rehire the thousands of workers who were laid off because they are “subversive”. Here’s why.

There has been a rumor in Britain that Nasser Bin Hamad, the son of Bahrain’s King, might be banned from attending the London Summer Olympic Games this summer. There are graphic reasons for it; he personally threatened many athletes, on top of being accused of torture. So what did he do? In haste, he deleted all his threatening tweets. Expect Nasser to be partying in Mayfair in July.

•  This article first appeared in Asia Times.

You fasten the triggers for others to fire,
Then you sit back and watch,
When the death count gets higher.
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in mud.

— “Masters of War”, Bob Dylan, 1941- present

Humanitarian Awards are surely taking on a whole new meaning. The end of April brought the obscenity of the announcement that Madeleine Albright, a woman prepared to sacrifice children by proxy was to be awarded America’s highest honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her role as a long time champion of democracy and human rights all over the world.

In the same 24 hours, an announcement was made that Britain’s Prince Harry is to receive a special award for his “humanitarian work”.

The ”Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership” award “recognizes outstanding achievement” and is presented annually by the Atlantic Council. Prince Harry and his brother, Prince William, have been jointly nominated, with Prince Harry traveling to Washington to accept on behalf of both, on May 7.

Madeleine Albright’s latest honour for her services to humanity has been awarded to others who compete admirably with her dedication. They include such peerless warmongers as Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, General Colin Powell, whose pack of lies to the United Nations (February 2003) initiated Iraq’s destruction – and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair whose offices and officers provided those lies.

That human dove of peace, Dick Cheney, has been a recipient, as has his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, and General Norman “No one left to kill” Schartzkopf, to name a few.

Fellow recipient of the Award with Albright is Bob Dylan. Funny world.

Prince William and Harry are both in the armed forces (between social engagements). In a career move that has been dubbed by many “a cynical PR stunt”, William flies Naval Rescue helicopters. Seemingly it no longer looks good for a future king to kill people. Harry clearly faces no such trying constraints.

Deployed to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2007, he reportedly lurked safely, deep in a bunker, out of harm’s way, surrounded by a phalanx of armed Royal Protection Officers whilst playing at being a Forward Air Controller, who remotely (in all senses of the word) guide in aircraft to attack the locals.

There is not alone an irony, but a terrible deviance, about a supremely privileged young man, whose entire upbringing has been in palaces, castles and most elite of schools, calling in aircraft to destroy peasant farmers in remote, poverty stricken villages – along with their subsistence livelihood and simple adobe homes.

There is a further irony in that his “child within” knows loss. At thirteen he walked behind his mother, Princess Diana’s, coffin, as it was transported for her funeral, after her death in Paris in an appalling car crash, with her Muslim lover – some say fiancée – Dodi al Fayad.

Freud might have had something to say of his display of crusading  contempt for the people of Afghanistan – 99% Muslim population – just before he was hurriedly whisked out of the country for his safety in January 2008, once the media had exposed that he was there. His attitude, “day job”, and his fleeing, beneath contempt. If Albright sacrificed children by proxy, the Prince, arguably, killed them by proxy.

Back home he and his brother have their own households, with flunkies to provide, and an aristocratic titled adviser to oversee, the all and their lives.

Now his delayed return to Afghanistan to hone his killing skills is seeming more imminent. He will be more hands on, having been awarded his Apache Flying Badge, so he can return and dissect living beings from an air borne, mass human shredder of obscene and terrifying destructive power.

That the two Princes have established a charity to aid needy children in Africa, whilst Prince Harry has been involved in orphaning, maiming and ending fledgling lives in Afghanistan, and now returning, is surely a near schitzophrenic perversity.

The Atlantic Council presentation for the pair’s humanitarian endeavors, however, is “for efforts in championing” other soldiers involved in invading and killing in two decimated lands which posed no threat to anyone, yet alone far away Britain and America.

Prince Harry “is being recognized (with The Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership trinket) for support to Forces’ charities like Walking With The Wounded, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity, and Help For Heroes.” All of which are funded with the sort of monies which would help the maimed, destitute and traumatized in the countries the Charity’s beneficiaries have helped destroy back to normality for many years.

A St James’s Palace spokesperson commented:

Prince Harry will use the award to pay tribute to British and American veterans’ charities for their achievements in helping to rehabilitate wounded servicemen and women, and to reintegrate those who have served in the armed forces into civilian life.

No such helping and rehabilitation for their Afghan or Iraqi victims.

The Prince, however, is in good company. Previous presentations of the Awards have included Madeleine Albright’s philandering, Iraq strangulating boss, William Jefferson Clinton; President George W. “Crusader” Bush, wanted by many for Crimes Against the Peace; Tony Blair; Henry Kissinger, of course – and General Colin Powell (2005, just two years after his serial misleading of the UN.)

Blair’s acceptance speech air-brushed out “Shock and Awed”, destitute Iraqis and Afghans and blathered on about “commitment to freedom … economically, politically, culturally …”

Brent Scowcroft, Former National Security Advisor and Atlantic Council Director, lauded Colin Powell’s “wisdom, sagacity, integrity …” Powell, of course, responded by talking of “Peace and freedom … respect for human rights …”

Sponsors of this peaceful and freedom loving establishment run into several pages but include the US Departments of the Air Force, Navy, Defence and Energy, and Los Alamos National Laboratory which brought the world the atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In October of that year the Laboratory received the “Army-Navy ‘E” Award” for “excellence in production.”

Another sponsor is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory whose development aimed originally to “spur innovation and provide competition to nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos.” It also brought the world the Polaris nuclear armed submarine.

NATO and Lockheed Martin are on the roll of honour, as Raytheon and SAIC ($2.6 Billion in trade with the Department of Defence in 2003, year of the invasion of Iraq.) SAIC’s Management team includes Bill Clinton, a clutch of former US Defence Secretaries, and former UN Iraq Weapons Inspector David Kay, who continued his fruitless hunt for Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction after the Iraq invasion, when the US-UK coalition was using them.

General Dynamics is at the table, so to speak, as is Boeing and Dow Chemical, which swallowed up Union Carbide, which brought the world the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Exact casualty numbers have never been established relating to Bhopal, but upper figures are fifteen thousand dead and over half a million medically affected, still ongoing.

The Atlantic Council lists its “important contributions” as including:  “The process of NATO transformation and enlargement” and “drafting roadmaps for U.S. policy towards the Balkans, Africa, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and Libya.”

No “E” for Excellence Award for the Balkans and Iraq — watch out Africa and Cuba. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, under whose watch and UNSCR 1973  Libya was largely destroyed by NATO’s “Humanitarian Intervention”, is a fellow recipient of this year’s  Distinguished  Humanitarian Leadership Awards.

It can only be hoped that this joyous occasion is not sullied by the Prince’s lack of respect for cultural diversities and that he is sparing with the liquid refreshment. Hopefully he will also dress suitably .

One episode, when he dressed in a Nazi uniform complete with Swastika arm band, caused Royal Photographer, Arthur Edwards to write:

Where were his father and the highly-paid courtiers who advise this young man? Who let him drive out of (Highgrove House, his father, Prince Charles’ residence) dressed this way? Smoking cannabis, late-night drinking and brawling with paparazzi could be explained away as the errors of youth. But Harry, what must you have been thinking when you put on that armband?

This was shortly before his Uncle, Prince Edward, was to attend the commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, representing the Queen.

Incidentally, Prince Harry’s Award is to be presented by Colin Powell and Ban Ki-Moon’s by Henry Kissinger.

In all, mind stretching stuff. Oh, to be a fly on the wall!

Barrister Robert Jay, QC, the pondering lead counsel for the inquiry into press ethics has been praised for his diverging questioning into the machinations of the Murdoch clan.  One of his bright moments against the mogul was to have happened when Jay probed the decision of The Sun in 1997 to back Tony Blair in the elections.  Suddenly, it seemed, the shock jock rag had turned its hand away from the Tories and placed it firmly on the shoulders of New Labour.  The spin doctor love affair thereby became a marriage.

Jay had his impressive moments but to what end?  Martin Kettle strikes an optimistic note, claiming that the appearance of the Murdochs before the Levenson inquiry and the Commons media select committee in 2011 ‘mark the first time that the Murdoch dynasty has ever been compelled to account for itself to the system of democratic government that it does so much to influence’ (Guardian, Apr 25).  Kettle ignores the ingratiating political forces that allow such a lack of accountability to thrive in the first place.

Murdoch remains a grand vizier, pulling the strings and being the ventriloquist of political puppets, a figure who exerts a control over public opinion that is always hard, if not impossible, to gauge yet all too apparent.  Media analysts claim otherwise, seeing the Murdoch dynasts as dinosaurs awaiting their gradual extinction.  In the fractious, nebulous world of online media, such paper gods are not so much going to be shredded as bypassed, becoming museum pieces in high-tech environs.

Murdoch, quite rightly, disagrees.  As he made it clear in the third Boyer lecture delivered in 2008, newspapers will continue to exist.  Obsolescence will only come to ‘the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper’s most precious asset: the bond with its readers’.

That bond has been a fetid one.  Press ethics, at least through the eyes of such media moguls, tends to be viewed through a municipal sewerage system, and Murdoch hardly let on that there was any ‘influence’ to speak of.  “I want to say, Mr Jay, that I, in 10 years of his power, never asked Mr. Blair for anything.  Nor indeed did I receive any favours.  If you want to check that, I think you should call him.”  Let us ignore, of course, Blair’s incorporation into the Murdoch family by becoming godfather to Rupert’s daughter Grace, or the more recent courtship of the current British Prime Minister, who visited Murdoch on his daughter Elizabeth’s yacht in 2008.

When Jay began pressing Murdoch on the ‘subtlety’ inherent in the alleged Blair-Murdoch interactions, the reply was blunt. “I’m afraid I don’t have much subtlety about me.”  That should have been evident in the Cameron government’s dealings with News Corp over its efforts to increase its stake in British pay operator BSkyB.  Culture minister Jeremy Hunt is the latest victim of the dynastic family’s influence, given allegations that he allowed the family a back channel to ‘influence’ the bid.  “This”, he fumed, “is categorically not the case”. (First Post, April 25). Such is the nature of rage born of impotence.

Son James, ever in the shadow of his father, has adopted the same line.  The Sun was not in the business of backing different horses based on quid pro quos.  What Jay did do was to simply allow the Murdochs to reveal and expand upon their influence over their paper empire and the political forces they chose to influence.  News Corporation, at the end of the day, had only one person to answer to, and one family to pay homage to.

As Martin Dunn in The Guardian (April 25) noted, Murdoch has over the years managed to make the manipulation of power “seem as dull as chartered accountancy.”  The pregnant pause is his metier, and this was used against his inquisitors with effect.  Amidst the struggles before the committee, the patriarch remains in command, slightly blunted by the phone hacking scandal, but still uncompromising.  He has bonds to maintain, and levers to pull.

Jenny Tonge, then a member of the UK’s Liberal Democrat party, was a dangerous British politician as far as Israel was concerned. She not only dared to use strong language while referencing Israeli actions in the occupied territories, she also demanded action from her government

For this she was subjected to the same, predictable verbal abuse by Israeli officials and media, by the pro-Israeli British lobby, and even by some of her peers. However, calling Tonge ‘anti-Semitic’ was never going to be convincing. The formidable woman has spent years of her life serving her community – as a doctor, MP and spokesperson for Health for Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords – and has amassed far too much credibility to be shaken by defamatory accusations.

Moreover, very few will agree that calling for “the immediate—and I mean immediate—establishment by the United Nations Security Council of an independent fact-finding commission to Palestine to investigate all breaches of international law” constitutes anti-Semitism in any way.

But for those who insist that Israel is above any criticism, the mere suggestion that Israel should be investigated for alleged war crimes is an unforgivable act. Any hint of criticism can easily be misrepresented to equal the questioning of the very existence of the state, and casually labeled as racism.

The Baroness is not easily intimidated, however. Speaking at Middlesex University on February 23, she stated that, “Israel is not going to be there forever in its present form,” a reference to the country’s current racially-based political identity as a ‘Jewish State,’ which leaves native Muslim and Christian Arabs vulnerable to institutional racism and discriminatory laws.

Many others have already warned from the increasingly anti-democratic nature of Israel, especially with the rise of religious and ultra-nationalist parties. Leading scholars, Noble Laureates, acclaimed anti-Apartheid figures and former US presidents have all made similar calls, targeting the skewed nature of the Israeli political establishment, which grants rights to people of Jewish lineage while denying basic civil rights to all others.

Tonge was not targeting any race, but rather the small, yet powerful cliques that have long infested both British and US politics in areas concerning Israeli and the Middle East. “One day, the American people are going to say to the Israel lobby in the USA: enough is enough,” she said. “Israel will lose support and then they will reap what they have sown” (The Guardian, Feb 9).

In stating the obvious, Tonge irked British politicians, including members of her own party, who speak of ‘peace in the Middle East’ while actively undermining any real efforts to achieve such peace. Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, said there was “no place in politics for those who question the existence of Israel.” Tonge, in fact, had done no such thing. Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, stated, “I asked Baroness Tonge to withdraw her remarks and apologize for the offense she has caused. She has refused to do so and will now be leaving the party.”

Since his sudden rise to close to the top of British political hierarchy, Clegg has moved substantially from his original stance regarding Palestine and Israel. In his article in the Guardian on December 21, 2009, he had articulated a strong position against the Israeli blockade on Gaza, and asked: “And what has the British government and the international community done to lift the blockade? Next to nothing. Tough-sounding declarations are issued at regular intervals but little real pressure is applied. It is a scandal that the international community has sat on its hands in the face of this unfolding crisis.”

Once in the government, Clegg changed his position. Tonge, on the other hand, remained consistently audacious, regardless of position or perks. Her stance in 2012 mirrored other stances she has taken in the past. In 2006, she uttered what few before dared to even speak in private: “The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they’ve probably got a grip on our party,” she said (BBC, Sep 21, 2006.) Then, as in now, her comments were manipulated by the media to imply something entirely different from what she had clearly intended. Her exit from the party was a testament to the will of this strong British woman, but also to the power of the very Israeli lobby she often criticized.

It is important to remember that Tonge’s battle is not a skirmish within the ranks of the political elites. Rather, it’s a war of narratives, where Israel and its ‘friends’ insist on silencing any meaningful debate on Palestine-Israel. The other side, encompassing Tonge and numerous others, is slowly encroaching on Israel’s well-guarded discourse, and making serious inroads.

A recent episode in the war of narratives involved Gunther Grass, German author of the widely acclaimed anti-Nazi novel, The Tin Drum. Grass has now done what many others, especially in Germany, never dared to do. He criticized Israel for its aggressive posturing towards Iran. Israeli officials responded by calling the man every bad word in the book of defamation.

The typical ‘storm’ created by Israeli responses has, however, not managed to enact a typical response this time. Nicholas Kulish wrote in the New York Times that judging by the ‘outpouring’ of comments by German politicians and media, “it would appear that the public had resoundingly rejected (Gunter’s) work… But even a quick dip into the comments left by readers on various Web sites reveals quite another reality” (April 13). According to Kulish, “Mr. Grass has struck a nerve with the broader public, articulating frustrations with Israel here in Germany that are frequently expressed in private but rarely in public.” He adds that “charge of anti-Semitism aimed at Israel’s critics is widely viewed as a blunt instrument that silences debate, and in the process prevents Mr. Grass from making a point…”

While Israel does occasionally succeed in silencing critics, the tried and true tactic of the past is becoming less effective. In the final analysis, neither Tonge nor Gunter have actually lost to the lobby. In the world of ideas, only the credibility of one’s views actually makes a difference. The rest is hasbara.

The excellent News Sniffer website exposed how the Guardian hurriedly fixed political editor Patrick Wintour’s ugly analysis of Galloway’s 10,140 majority win, with a staggering swing of 36 per cent from Labour to the Respect party. Wintour’s shoddy journalism had initially focused on how the constituency’s ‘Muslim immigrant community’ had largely abandoned Labour. The offensive trope of ‘immigrant’ Muslims appeared three times in his piece. And Galloway’s popular call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, and ‘a fightback against the job crisis’, was disparagingly cast as ‘fundamentalist’.

It was shocking to see such elitist disdain for majority British views and for ‘immigrant’ communities expressed by a senior Guardian journalist. Someone on the newspaper, perhaps spotting the danger of the nation’s flagship ‘liberal’ newspaper appearing so illiberal, acted swiftly to hide the evidence. Too late, News Sniffer was on the trail. This is what Wintour wrote:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim immigrant community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s fundamentalist call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

This was amended to:

‘It appeared that the seat’s Muslim community had decamped from Labour en masse to Galloway’s call for an immediate British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fightback against the job crisis.’

Further key changes are easily visible here.

‘The Muslim Vote’

It is customary for the media to cast an honest, uncompromising political voice as ‘controversial’ and ‘maverick’ (or worse). And journalists did not disappoint. On the News at Ten, celebrity presenter Fiona Bruce, reportedly on a BBC salary of half a million pounds per year, referred blithely to ‘controversial ex-Labour MP George Galloway’. (March 30, 2012). The British public will wait in vain for her to refer to the ‘controversial’ Prime Minister David Cameron or the ‘controversial’ President Barack Obama.

In a News at Ten ‘analysis’, the BBC’s Iain Watson reported, with the broadcaster’s version of impartiality, that Galloway had compared his victory to the Arab Spring and ‘cheekily suggested he was challenging the entire British establishment’. (March 30, 2012)

But perhaps Galloway’s suggestion was accurate, ‘cheeky’ or no. Galloway was, in fact, pretty devastating in challenging the British media establishment in interview after interview. On Channel 4 News, Midlands correspondent Darshni Soni asserted that Galloway’s ‘fiery rhetoric on Iraq and Afghanistan specifically targeted young Muslims’; as though only ‘young Muslims’ should be concerned about Iraq and Afghanistan. (‘“Young Muslims defied elders to vote for Galloway”’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Soni tried to trip up Galloway:

Soni: ‘But what do you say to people who say you played that race card – you specifically targeted young Muslim men?’

George Galloway: ‘Well, I think it was Labour that put up the Pakistani Muslim candidate, not us. So that’s a ludicrous charge, to be honest.’

Soni: ‘But you talked a lot about Iraq, Afghanistan.’

Galloway: ‘Well, Iraq and Afghanistan are not issues only for Muslims.’

Also on Channel 4 News, Cathy Newman sought, like so many before her, to outwit Galloway — only to come out of the encounter with egg on her face. (‘Cathy Newman interviews George Galloway’, C4 News, March 30, 2012)

Newman: ‘George Galloway, you’ve described this as the most sensational upset in history. I think you got a little carried away – there were two previous results with bigger swings. But it is pretty sensational nevertheless. What do you put it down to?’

Galloway: ‘No I don’t think I was exaggerating, if you’ll forgive me, I’m a bit of a student of these matters. No party to the left of Labour has ever taken a Labour seat in a period when Labour has been in opposition.’

Newman pressed on: ‘You’re defining your terms very clearly and quite narrowly, but within those terms a sensational victory – what do you put it down to?’

Galloway responded amicably: ‘I don’t know why you’re being so churlish about this. I know more about left-wing history than you do, I assure you. But anyway, I put it down to a tidal wave of alienation in the country, and not just in Bradford, against the Tweedledee-Tweedledum politics of the major parties.’

This is surely right. When much that matters is so clearly going wrong in this country and the world at large, no wonder the public is thoroughly sick of the fodder that is dished out as ‘responsible’ policies, debate and reporting.

Galloway continued: ‘I think we saw what I described last night as “a Bradford Spring” moment – a kind of uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising of especially young people.’

Newman responded with barely disguised disdain: ‘Isn’t it slightly presumptuous or even arrogant though to describe a … to compare a by-election victory with a revolution that has claimed tens of thousands of lives across the Arab world?’

Galloway exposed the biased stance of C4 News: ‘Well I can see you and I are not getting on very well and probably that’s a sign that I should go and do one of the many other interviews that are waiting for me. You obviously weren’t listening or you’re not hearing me …’

Newman: ‘I’m hearing you perfectly well…’

Galloway: ‘…I said a peaceful democratic uprising, a peaceful democratic uprising – that’s what I think it was. You evidently don’t. We’ll see if it comes to anything. Thanks very much – because I really do have a lot of very important interviews to do.’

As one of our regular readers later reminded us on the Media Lens message board, the encounter was reminiscent of Jeremy Paxman’s remarkable May 2005 interview with Galloway after he had won the Bethnal Green and Bow seat from the war-supporting, Blairite MP, Oona King. In a dismal lowlight of a long BBC career, Paxman repeatedly asked Galloway:

‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?’

Galloway rightly disparaged Paxman’s question as ‘preposterous’ saying that: ‘I don’t believe that people get elected because of the colour of their skin. I believe people get elected because of their record and their policies.’

There was more to come from the BBC. In an extraordinary segment on BBC Radio Five Live, reporter Anna Foster fired a series of hostile and loaded questions at Galloway. Just hours after his electoral victory, Foster kept asking why he had come to Bradford – an issue that he rightly said he had dealt with on numerous occasions before the election. Galloway took her to task for focusing on ‘the’ Muslim vote, as though Muslim voters were a homogeneous mass:

‘This is very incendiary and inflammatory language which the BBC keep using.’

After giving Foster several more minutes of his time, Galloway rightly described the interview as ‘a hatchet job’ and left the studio, leaving the BBC reporter flabbergasted.

Later that day on BBC2’s Newsnight, reporter Peter Marshall recycled the same discredited language: ‘It’s said you’ve relied very heavily on the Muslim vote. I mean, you yourself have said in the past that you used (sic)… you have the Muslim vote…’

Galloway responded: ‘I really reject this concept of “the” Muslim vote. Muslims are individuals just like everyone else. You wouldn’t say that there’s a “Christian vote” because Christians vote in all sorts of ways. And the Labour candidate, I remind you, was a Pakistani Muslim. So I really don’t think that’s a valid question. Every voter is an individual and every voter has to be appealed to.’

Marshall managed to include the standard description of Galloway as ‘a singular figure, a political maverick’ who ‘in triumph’ is ‘unrepentant’. What he was supposed to be ‘unrepentant’ about wasn’t made clear. Perhaps for appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, pretending to be a cat licking milk from Rula Lenska’s cupped hands: stock footage that news broadcasters are seemingly obliged to repeat whenever Galloway is mentioned.

The Wolf Man

The Observer played its part as well, publishing not just one but two anti-Galloway comment pieces. The first, by Andrew Rawnsley, set the tone, referring acerbically to Galloway’s ‘blushing modesty which makes him such an appealing character’. This was a dig at the Respect politician supposedly acclaiming Bradford West ‘the most sensational victory in British political history’. But, shooting himself in the foot, Rawnsley had got the quote wrong. Galloway had called it ‘the most sensational result in British by-election history’, not ‘political history’ – a crucial distinction. As we have seen, Galloway had clearly explained the basis for his claim.

For Galloway to draw any kind of comparison with the Arab Spring was, said Rawnsley, ‘a very advanced form of narcissism’. The Observer columnist then added the sly comment that Galloway had ‘declined to offer his fusion of Marxism and Islamism to voters at the five previous byelections of this parliament’. Whatever counts as a ‘fusion of Marxism and Islamism’ was not spelled out. It was instead left hanging in the air as something to be regarded by right-minded people as dangerously anti-capitalist and un-Christian; perhaps even unpatriotic and anti-British. But arguably the most blatant propaganda element of the Observer piece was the accompanying sinister-looking photograph of Galloway, reminiscent of Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolf Man.

By an amazing coincidence – or not – a second Observer hit piece by Nick Cohen deployed a similarly sinister photograph of Galloway. The Observer’s picture editor had obviously been busy scouring the pictorial archives and struck gold not once, but twice. The comment piece also had a cartoon-like flavour. For example, Galloway’s ‘claim’ that his by-election victory was the ‘Bradford spring’ exhibited, Cohen said, ‘contemptible willingness to exploit the suffering of others for the purposes of self-aggrandisement’ which ‘no politician can beat’. No politician? Not even Cohen’s hero Tony Blair, who exploited the deaths of millions in the Middle East for his own self-aggrandisement as a ‘peace maker’?

Almost in a parody of himself, Cohen wrote that: ‘Galloway and others on the far left believe that Muslims can replace the white working class that let them down so badly by refusing to follow their orders to seize power.’

One had to check the date of publication. Yes, it was published on April 1. But, nonetheless, Observer readers were forced to accept that this was indeed not a spoof piece by a spoof Cohen.

The attitude was summed up by the title of a Liberal Conspiracy blog, run by Sunny Hundal: ‘When populism is dangerous for democracy.’ Hundal, the Guardian‘s ‘blogger of the year’ in 2006, was himself busy on Twitter. He referred to Galloway in responding to a questioner: ‘I don’t want any part of a left that supports dictators thanks. Maybe you do.’

We were intrigued by this and responded: ‘Yet you write that Obama’s re-election “is worth fighting for.” Does Obama not support, indeed arm, dictators?’

The following day, Hundal replied. Here are some highlights from the subsequent exchange:

Sunny Hundal (SH): ‘answer to that question is simple: as Us Prez Obama can’t easily call for dictators to go. But Galloway isn’t leader: he can.’

Media Lens (ML): ‘You can’t reject George Galloway for dictator “support” and then back Obama who arms them, actually helps them kill.’

SH: ‘can you name me one dictator that one Obama has cheerleaded for?’

Writer and activist Ian Sinclair replied:

‘Mubarak “is a stalwart ally… a force for stability and good” – Obama to BBC, 2009 http://bit.ly/H2ZeLg’

We responded to Hundal:

ML: ‘Simple questions 1) Has Obama armed dictators? 2) Is that more or less important than what he/Galloway says about dictators?’

SH: 1) ‘Has he personally sanctioned arming of dictators? No. They can buy weapons from China/Russia too, as Libya did.’

SH: ‘he [Obama] didn’t support Mubarak.’

We replied with a quote from 2011 in The Times on US aid to Egypt: ML: ‘”the Mubarak regime is still receiving $1.3 billion of military aid each year from America.” (The Times, January 31, 2011)’

SH: ‘Just for your info, since you guys set yourself up as a major source of info and critique: “military aid” is not guns/ammo.’

ML: ‘True. Do F-16 jets, M-1A1 tanks, Harpoon, TOW, Hellfire, and Stinger missiles count? http://tinyurl.com/5rwx7zf’

SH: ‘might help if you recognised that most of it referred to stuff over a decade, not during Obama. Now, answer my question?’

ML: ‘Details here: http://tinyurl.com/2ekorm9 May 2009 Apache attack helicopter sale here: http://tinyurl.com/7djfdzl‘

And indeed Hundal’s position was completely untenable. To sample at random, the Washington Post reported last December:

‘The Obama administration on Thursday announced an arms deal with Saudi Arabia valued at nearly $30 billion, an agreement that will send 84 F-15 fighter jets and assorted weaponry to the kingdom.’

And so on. Hundal wriggled and dug himself ever deeper. For us, it was another encounter with the curious capacity for ‘selective inattention’ found at the intellectual fringe otherwise known as ‘the mainstream media’. For Hundal, Galloway’s words really are far worse crimes than Obama’s active participation in the arming and diplomatic protection of murderous dictators who use his support to kill large numbers of people.

Closing Remarks

In our 2005 media alert, Ambushing Dissent, also analysing media treatment of Galloway, we noted how ‘across the spectrum, “rogue” thinkers, politicians and parties are relentlessly smeared and mocked by the elite media. The effect is as inevitable as it is intended – to persuade the public to revile and turn away from radical voices threatening established privilege and power.’

The response to Galloway’s latest electoral victory from the Guardian, the Observer, Channel 4 News and the BBC piles on the evidence. It shows – once again – that the supposedly liberal media, purveyors of ‘open journalism,’ will fight tooth and nail to neutralise anyone who challenges the establishment status quo.

And yet it could hardly be more obvious that the British political system has degenerated into a grotesque, neo-feudalist fraud representing the same elite interests under different brand names. Our politics is structurally addicted to greed-based ‘humanitarian’ militarism, to exacerbating the catastrophic threat of climate change, and to denying the public any serious choice on the major policy issues of the day. An honest media would welcome any small sign of hope that the iron grip of this corrupt and oppressive system might be subject to serious challenge.

The secret Interior Ministry Koenig Memorandum, written shortly after the 1976 Land Day rallies, called for “diluting existing Arab population concentrations” to “ensure the long-term Jewish national interests”. This officially marked the implementation of Ben Gurion’s plans of ethnic cleansing to make Israel a de facto Jewish state. Treatment of native Arab Muslims and Christians ever since merely confirms this policy, with forced Jewish loyalty oaths and second class services and laws for non-Jews.

This year’s 36th annual Land Day rallies saw Israeli security forces shooting dead a 20-year-old man, and wounding 37 stone-throwers in the Gaza Strip and around Jerusalem, using live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades. Israeli forces were put on high alert on the frontiers with Lebanon and Syria, but there were no reports of anyone nearing the frontier fences. In fact, the Israeli Defence Forces were relieved at the relatively small numbers of protesters.

But there is little for them to cheer about. Israeli Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai said, “The Nakba and Naksa days are ahead of us, and that is where the challenge will be.” Nakba (disaster) Day, the day after Israeli independence day, is 15 May, and Naksa (retreat) Day, when Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, previously controlled by Jordan and Egypt, is 5 June.

During Nakba Day commemorations last year, thousands of Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syria marched towards the ceasefire borders with Israel. Fifteen Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded, and more than a hundred protestors from Syria managed to breach the fence and enter the Golan Heights. One even made it all the way to Tel Aviv.

Land Day is now formally commemorated in a Global March to Jerusalem, protesting the Judaisation of East Jerusalem as Israel prepares to make Jerusalem its Jews-only capital. According to organisers, more than 600 institutions from 64 states were involved in planning the march. Protests also took place outside Israeli embassies in European and Arab countries. Backers of the march include former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohammed and former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu. Organisers planned to send convoys of vehicles to Israel’s borders simultaneously from Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

Jordan’s demonstration attracted 15,000, and included four rabbis from Neturei Karta. “We want the world to know that the Jewish religion does not accept the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people. It is against the views of Jews around the world who are true to the Torah,” said Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss. “We are here to mark Land Day, and tell the world not to blame Jewish people for the crimes of Zionism,” Rabbi Ahron Cohen said. “Judaism and Zionism are two different concepts.”

Numbers were smaller in Lebanon, as Lebanese security forces attempted to prevent a repeat of last year’s fatal border protests. About 200 foreign activists, including two more rabbis, arrived at Beaufort Castle to join the southern Lebanon rally. In Syria, despite the civil war, protesters rallied in Damascus in solidarity with both the Palestinians and Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Egypt had planned demonstrations, but they were called off due to heightened security and the tense political situation there.

To mark Land Day, Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role during the Second Intifada, called on Palestinians to launch a popular resistance campaign against Israel and for the Palestinian Authority to stop peace negotiations and all coordination with Israel in the economic and security realms.

Land Day, of course, is all about land. Appropriately, 30 March 2012 is the first anniversary of the Stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF) campaign aimed at ending the role of the JNF in expanding illegal settlements by displacing Palestinians, stealing their property, and then covering this up with tax-exempt donations from diaspora Jews. The JNF uses greenwash to advertise itself as an environmental movement, planting fast-growing non-native firs on razed Palestinian villages to hide Israeli crimes. Israeli parks include a Leisure corner at Nesher Park, Canada Park, American Independence Park, JF Kennedy Memorial, and Coretta Scott King Forest.

The Stop the JNF campaign fights this, even doing “flash” actions in the Israeli parks, nailing notices to trees to identify the destroyed Palestinian villages, as well as lobbying foreign governments to end the JNF’s tax-exempt status. British Prime Minister David Cameron was successfully pressured to end his status as “Honorary Patron” of the JNF last year. Stop the JNF also has a “Plant a Tree” programme in Palestine to replant indigenous trees.

In the build-up to Land Day, throughout February and early March, student solidarity groups marked the 8th Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) at 120 universities in 40 cities around the world, from Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Albuquerque to Yaffa and Zurich. At Boston-area universities Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak screened his 2006 documentary “Bilin Habibti” about Israel Defense Forces violence. Members of Brandeis University SJP marked their first annual Israeli Apartheid Week with a hunger strike to draw attention to Palestinian Khader Adnan’s 66-day hunger strike in protest of his detainment without charge. Good news: the international media spotlight on the case pushed Israeli officials to agree to free Adnan in April.

At the University of Amsterdam, Shir Hever, an Israeli economist at Jerusalem’s Alternative Information Centre, gave a series of lectures “Could the economic policies of Israel be considered a form of Apartheid?” At Glasgow University, Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper, co-founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, spoke on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS”. At the University of Liverpool, the Corporate Watch research group unveiled a new source book Targeting Israeli Apartheid. In London, a Beats Against Apartheid event included performances from hip-hop artists Lowkey, Mic Righteous and Awate.

British and Canadian politicians were furious. In Canada, the Ontario legislature unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week. “If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life. “The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line.”

In the UK, thought police were called on to investigate comments made at Middlesex University’s Free Palestine Society IAW forum by Liberal Democrat Peer Jenny Tonge and former US marine Ken O’Keefe. O’Keefe is alleged to have incited racial hatred by comparing Jewish supporters of Israeli crimes to Nazis in their treatment of Jews. “The decent Germans of World War Two, what did they do when the Nazis came to power and instituted their policies? Did they do enough to stop the Nazis? No, they didn’t. What are the Jewish people doing right now? Are you doing enough to stop your racist, apartheid, genocidal state?” Baroness Tonge agreed with O’Keefe telling the audience that Israel would “not last forever” and would “lose support, and then they will reap what they have sown”.

A poll by the Independent on Sunday shows that 72% of people believe the Government is “out of touch with ordinary voters” and 60% do not trust the Prime Minister and the Chancellor on the economy. Yet the Labour Party lost this safe seat in a landslide to George Galloway.

People do not trust this government but they are not willing to put their trust in Labour either. And who could blame them for that? George Galloway put the reasons for the lack of trust in the main parties colourfully and succinctly:

If a backside could have three cheeks then they [the main parties] are the three cheeks of the same backside. They support the same things, the same wars, the same neoliberal policies to make the poor poorer for the crimes of the rich people. And they are not believable. Nobody believes what they say.

The report “Reading The Riots” commissioned by the Guardian and the London School of Economics quotes a 23 year old man from Liverpool who took part in the UK (August 2011) riots saying: “It doesn’t really matter if it’s Labour or Conservative because the people behind the scenes are always the same…”

George Galloway articulated the frustration of ordinary voters, regardless of ethnicity or faith, with the politics of the main parties in a way that resonated with their daily struggles and experiences. So please let us not insult their intelligence by suggesting that faith and ethnicity has something to do with his victory. Lest we forget he was standing against a local Muslim ethnic minority Labour candidate.

It is not only politicians that are out of touch. The BBC, funded by us, the taxpayers, is meant to reflect the opinions of people across Britain. Alas, it is no longer doing that. When, if ever, do we hear political opinions that challenge the economic orthodoxy of austerity and wars?

Discussions are restricted to establishment figures and the main political parties arguing within the parameters of the middle ground, tweaking this policy or that but no major rethink of an economic policy that is manifestly unfair and unjust. Moreover, it does not even work within the narrow objectives it has set for itself.

In any case, this narrow band of the middle ground is where the main parties perceive it to be. They are wrong. The BBC has a duty to air other opinions, Caroline Lucas leader of the Green Party for example, and yes, George Galloway and others to puncture the straight jacket in which discussions are conducted. It is a must for true democracy, so that an informed decision can be made by us, the electorate. Additionally, I have no doubt that it will lift the quality of the debate.

The Bradford West by-election has demonstrated the pent up distrust of all major parties and their policies of wars and cuts. People are yearning for leaders who can sincerely articulate their worries and their struggles; George Galloway did that and the electorate rewarded him with an emphatic win.

 … she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news,
which was no longer breaking news, when
the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

— The Girl/The Scream, Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008

March was another month of tragic, needless lives lost, the searing grief of mothers and fathers for lost sons and daughters.

Shockingly stark, however, has been the impression that for the powers-that-be, for a swathe of public in the West, some deaths are indisputedly regarded as more tragic, more noteworthy than others.

On March 6th, six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Corporal Jake Hartley (20) and Privates Anthony Frampton (20) Christopher Kershaw (19) Daniel Wade (20) and Daniel Wilford (20), and Sergeant Nigel Coupe (33) died when their armored vehicle was blown up. The resulting fire reportedly burned all night.

More youthful annihilations in an invasion and occupation, illegal, ill-conceived and long lost. Human sacrifices at the altar of political ego, dying because the powerful would rather throw away the lives of others than “lose face” one hundred and twenty-five  months since the “war” started.

In the US, five of the six would have been too young to even legally order a drink in a bar, but are old enough to die for monumental imperial folly, regional foothold –  and a pipeline.

Before the month ended two more British servicemen were shot, and yet another blown to eternity.

In Parliament Prime Minister Cameron paid vacuous tribute. They died, he said, “keeping our country safe.” What nonsense! There are no Afghan hordes massing across the English Channel, planning invasion with near antique rifles – some so ancient they have Queen Victoria’s insignia on them, relics from another historic British folly.

Prince Harry, cavorting round the Caribbean, filling in time before returning to Afghanistan in an Apache Attack Helicopter – with fire power of 632 rounds a minute, plus up to sixteen Hellfire missiles – to wipe out more villagers, and their homes, hung his head and declared himself  “devastated.” Flags in their home and base towns in the UK flew at half mast.

Five days later, on March 11th, there was a massacre of seventeen Afghan villagers by an American soldier, or, say numerous eye witnesses, soldiers. Nine of the victims were children, the youngest two years old.

The names have been gathered, but to date, their ages not matched with them. Mohamed Wazir lost five daughters: Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, and Estmatullah, and his son, Faizullah.

The other known names are: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Nazar Mohamed, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Zahra, Nazia, Essa Mohamed and Akhtar Mohammed. The name of the seventeenth victim is, so far, unknown.

The wounded have names too: Haji Mohamed Naim, Mohamed Sediq, Parween, Rafiulla, Zardana, Zulheja. Since they were taken to a US military medical facility, little is known of their condition.

John Henry Browne is attorney for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the only person, so far, accused of the atrocities – which, allegedly, involved attempting to set fire to the bodies, having covered them with materials and doused them with gasoline. Browne claims that US forces have obstructed him and colleagues from reaching and questioning the survivors.

Ironically, the killings and attempted body burnings were a near carbon copy of the US murders in Mahmudiya, Iraq, six years before, almost to the day. (March 12th, 2006.)

President Obama called Aghanistan’s Hamid Karzai to express his condolences and to assure him that the “tragic incident does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Coming a month after “respectful” representatives of the US military had chucked over a hundred Holy Qurans into a burn pit, a large group of Marine snipers had been photographed posing with a flamboyant Nazi flag, and less than two months after they had been filmed urinating on dead Afghans, the Nobel President’s assurances surely sounded somewhat wanting on the sincerity front.

That impression may have been confirmed when just two days after the killings and pictures of the little broken bodies and their relatives, laid in battered pick-up trucks for their last journey, to their burial – the haunted faces of the male relatives saying more than any words – Obama and David Cameron were pictured, carefree, smirking, sharing jokes and munching hotdogs in Ohio.

Cameron, who had arrived in Washington that day, was whisked off in Air Force One to the annual US college basketball tournament, “March Madness” in Dayton to watch Kentucky’s Hilltoppers challenge Mississippi’s Delta Devils. Ohio is a swing state that is a vital plank of his strategy to win a second term in November, observe commentators.

User-friendly front page pictures of jollying at a game surely beat those of small US victims, over which Obama had declared himself “heartbroken”, in an increasingly unpopular quagmire, which a March CNN/ORC poll showed just 25% of Americans supporting.

David Cameron flew back to the UK just in time to temporarily attempt diversion from an avalanche of self-inflicted domestic problems by leaping to support fellow Libya destroyer, France’s Nicholas Sarkozy. (Even by the woeful record of British Prime Ministers, Cameron and his Croesus-rich Cabinet cronies are so out of touch with the real world, they would make Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette look like a representative of the far left.)

On March 19th, another tragedy struck more children, a father, and their   families.

At a Jewish school, the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France, a gunman, Mohammed Merah, shot dead Jonathan Sandler, a Rabbi and teacher at the school, his two sons, Gabriel and Arieh, aged three and six, and Miriam Monsonego, the seven year-old daughter of the school Principal, Yaacov Monsenego. An un-named seventeen year-old boy was wounded.

President Sarkozy said: “Barbarity, savagery and cruelty cannot win, hate cannot win …One can imagine that the bloodthirsty madness was linked to racism.”

Ironically, the gunman, of Algerian origin, with a Muslim background, three days earlier, had, it seems, killed three soldiers, in nearby Montaubon. Two were Muslim. He has been repeatedly quoted as saying he was driven by the plight of the Palestinian people and of what he perceived as the West’s war against Islam. George W. Bush’s declared: “Crusade” returns to haunt.

David Cameron told Sarkozy: “People across Britain share the shock and grief that is being felt in France, and my thoughts are with the victims, their friends and their families….†You can count on my every support in confronting these senseless acts of brutality and cowardice.”

A minute’s silence was held across France for the victims. A book of condolence was opened at the French Embassy in Washington, and when those who had dual French-Israeli nationality were flown back to Israel for burial, accompanied by their relatives, they were joined by French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe.

Mohammed Merah’s story is becoming as hard to unravel of that of Staff Sergeant Bales in the Afghanistan carnage. However, Merah is predictably being labeled an Islamic terrorist, whilst Bales has been whisked out of Afghanistan. His lawyer cites memory loss and post traumatic stress disorder.

Meanwhile, Sarkozy faces his electorate in April and May, and with France’s finances and Libya threatening to take their toll, no sympathy stone is, seemingly, left unturned.

“What must be understood”, he said: “is that the trauma of Montaubon and Toulouse is profound for our country, a little …  a little, like the trauma that followed in the United States and in New York after the September 11, 2001 attacks”, he told “Europe 1” radio. Loss and grief as chutzpah which out-does chutzpah.

It is surely coincidence that nineteen people have been arrested in France, in connection with the murders. Exactly the same number as the 9/11 hijackers.

When London’s underground system and a bus was struck by explosives on July 7th, 2005, former New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, happened to be in town and did the rounds of media outlets, telling listeners that this was “London’s 9/11.” These shameful political non-senses trivialize losses of enormity, and all who are left to pick up the pieces of, and struggle with, the fractured, often broken, emotional aftermath.

Willfully ignored is cause and effect. Soldiers are dispatched to countries of which they know nothing, for oil and other interests, having been trained to see those in lands they occupy, uninvited, as lesser beings. Always thus, they attach derogatory names to other nationalities, sneer at lives, culture, beliefs and dress. Above all they are trained to kill.

Those who react to this injustice are simply “terrorists”, “a tragic incident”, or “collateral damage.”

Three tragedies, leaving holes in many hearts, but two, clearly, so much greater.

When will Western politicians and their allies address their own: “barbarity, savagery and cruelty … the bloodthirsty madness” their: “senseless acts of brutality and cowardice”, their murderous meddling. Their crimes against humanity?

And far away, in those little villages in Afghanistan, traumatized surviving children are repeatedly asking their parents: “Are the Americans coming back?” (And, yes, they do say “Americans.”)

State repression is used most clearly against the peaceful Arab Spring protestors; the use of police force in US cities where Occupy Wall Street has taken root; against the workers resistance and the “indignados” in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, France…; against students struggling for democracy and against gays in Chile.

In Denmark, some unionists, traditional left organizations, and young anti-racists remind us how German Nazis and Italian Fascists used the race card against Jews to divide and conquer the world. These groups and individuals see history repeating itself in much of Europe with anti-Islamism and are determined to check its growth.

On March 31, some 5000 Danes and a couple hundred like-minded anti-racists from other Scandinavian countries and England marched in Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city) to stop the spread of racist/fascist groupings popping up around Europe. Some have ties in the United States.

Their march was a counter-demonstration to the first all-Europe rally against Muslims. The English Defence League (EDL) succeeded, however, in holding a rally of between 100 and 150 members from ten countries (15 members from England; one or two from Italy, France, Bulgaria, Poland; one or two handfuls from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Germany; most from Denmark).

Counter-demonstrators marched under the banner of multi-cultural societies. They moved spiritedly through many of the cities wide and narrow streets. Hip hop and reggae music accompanied anti-racist chants. About one thousand marchers had traveled from many Danish cities, including 11 buses from Copenhagen, a four-hour drive.

Police had marked a route far enough away from the racist rally so that we could not see or hear one another. Police called out more forces than in decades to prevent clashes. Local city council members, and municipal institutional leaders accompanied by the mass media sought to downplay the multi-cultural vision by characterizing the demonstrations as two “extremist groups”. City council members even called upon people to stay home and light candles. And some Imans encouraged their congregations to stay clear.

While most of the activists were students and other youths, there were some families with children and a good number of elder people with backgrounds in struggles against racism, fascism, war. Some hold pro-socialist or pro-communist visions. Union banners were most prominent as the major unions, including the national coalition of unions represented in Aarhus, endorsed the anti-racist action.

Signs read: “Crush the system that creates fascism”; “Black and White, Unite and Fight”; “United Against Racism”; “Make Love not War”.

Few apparent Muslims were present throughout most of the march. I asked three elder men separately why this was so. One replied that he had been to a mosque where the Iman had warned members not to participate, because police were saying that if Muslims marched they would see to it that their associations were closed down. Two others said only that their Iman told them to stay away to avoid being caught up in violence, which would mostly go against them.

At the end of the march from city hall to a large square, scores of young Muslims joined in. They walked in strong strides and sent anger glances at police who pulled their paddy wagons closer.

During the two-hour rally, there was lively music and a few speeches. The most well received speech was by Englishman Martin Smith representing “Unite against Fascism”.

He caused sustained cheering when he said:

I am proud to be here with you but am sorry that this scum from England has come to your land. These racists are fascists, make no mistake about it. And they won’t go away by ignoring them or by lighting candles.

At their first demonstration in England, this passive attitude prevailed. As their rally met no opposition, they beat up people whose skin color they didn’t like, and declared that when they demonstrated again no opposition would be allowed. Then many of us woke up.

European politicians are playing the race card once again. Every time fascists meet publicly we must be there. No racism in our countries!

Fascistic Rally

At the park designated for the racists, police outnumbered demonstrators as did curious bystanders. There were 12 paddy wagons blocking the possibility of anti-racists entering the area. A few, however, did manage to break through. In all, 89 people (mostly anti-racists) were arrested. Most were soon released. Five were brought to court the next day on charges of assaulting police with rocks and bottles.

Many arrested were ethnic Danes, Swedes and Norwegians. Others have backgrounds from Arabic lands. They were appalled to hear from the platform that the racists spoke of themselves as “patriots” and “freedom fighters”, and used the slogans: “Stop Islamizing Europe”, “No Muslims in our country”.

The Guardian wrote “EDL summit in Denmark humiliated by low attendance” (March 31). It quoted one Norwegian racist as saying that the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has “some good points. There are some people who share his thinking if not his methods.”

(Breivik murdered 77 people, most all young Social Democrats. Yet the Social Democratic party here did not endorse the march. Young Social Democrats came, however.)

The EDL was started in London in 2009. The BBC reported that Breivik participated in some demonstrations. The Danish Defence League (DDL) was started in the summer of 2010 by Gary Hoope, a member of the EDL. The DDL has posted graffiti and anti-Muhammad cartoons on Muslim mosques. Its leader, Philip Traulsen, had been charged with possession of an illegal weapon, in 2007, when he and other Nazis beat up anti-racist youths.

Although the racist gathering was a “humiliation”, there were many counter-demonstrators who wished that they had not been able to meet at all. They recalled what happened the first time that EDL attempted to form an all-Europe organization in Amsterdam, in 2010. Dutch anti-racists, including AJAX soccer fans, prevented the 60 racists who came to their city from meeting. They were forcefully beaten back out of town.

The medics were already sentenced by a military tribunal (a military tribunal!) to up to 15 years in prison after months of being held in illegal detention, denied legal counsel and subjected to torture.

Moving their case to a civilian court is presumably meant to signal a concession by the regime. But what it illustrates is that the Al Khalifa royal rulers of Bahrain are unreconstructed despots who are implacably set against accepting any kind of democratic reform.

The persecution of the majority Shia population – 70 per cent of the island – by an unelected Sunni elite is business as usual as epitomized by the vindictive targeting of medics whose only “crime” was that they treated hundreds of people injured in the state’s brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement.

Recently, Washington has been doing its PR best to present the monarchy in the Persian Gulf kingdom as being belatedly open to reform – this after a year of unrelenting repression against a largely peaceful pro-democracy uprising.

Bahraini grassroots activists are concerned that sections of the official opposition belonging to the Shia Al Wefaq political society are being groomed by the US State Department to accept a “compromise deal” with the royal rulers that would effectively see the monarchy remaining in power and the status quo merely being given a facelift.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has been praised in the US corporate media for overseeing “brave” moves towards political power-sharing and dialogue with the mainly Shia-led opposition.

Washington’s envoy on human rights Michael Posner and former national security advisor Elliott Abrams have talked up “important steps” by the Bahraini regime towards reform.

However, no amount of Washington spinning can conceal the facts of life: that the US-backed Bahraini regime will continue violating human rights and international law in order to maintain its stranglehold hold on political and economic power at the expense of the Shia majority.

For 280 years, the Sunni rulers, who invaded the country from neighbouring Qatar, have sat on the chests of the indigenous Shia, and they are not going to give up their privileged seats of comfort. The Al Khalifa dynasty has enriched itself through graft and corruption while the majority of Bahrainis struggle with unemployment and poverty.

The oil wealth of the tiny island has lined the pockets of the Al Khalifas, but for the ordinary Shia it has brought poverty, pollution and sickness. To add insult to injury, when the mainly Shia-led uprising last February peacefully demanded elected government to replace the unelected venal family dynasty, it was met with batons, bullets and brutality, with thousands incarcerated or fired from their jobs, several tortured to death while in prison.

Historically, to maintain this excruciating state of inequality, the Bahraini rulers developed a system of governance and state security apparatus that is “bullet-proof to reform”. Under American and British tutelage, the Bahraini rulers became adept at presenting the kingdom as a relatively benign monarchy. They may have acquired the modern semantics and appearance of political progressivism, such as referring to the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy with a (rigged) parliament instead of an absolute monarchy as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms. But not far below the surface, Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism was always the dominant reality.

For example, the kingdom’s prime minister is 78-year-old Prince Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the incumbent king. He is the world’s longest sitting prime minister, having first occupied the post in 1971 when Bahrain gained nominal independence from Britain. Prime Minister Khalifa – also known locally as Mr Fifty-Fifty – has never faced an electorate and is notorious for siphoning off Bahrain’s oil wealth to become one of the richest men in the world.

For decades, despite glamorous images of mirrored skyscrapers and Formula One Grand Prix, Bahrain has been run with an ironclad National Security Agency. The agency was, and is, a veritable “torture apparatus” headed up by members of the royal family and assisted in its nefarious conduct by ex-colonial power Britain.

Between 1968-98, the main architect of the NSA and its sectarian methods of repression against the Shia population was British colonel Sir Ian Henderson. Henderson, who had previously gained British government commendation for his role in efficiently, that is brutally, suppressing the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya during the 1950s-60s, oversaw the detention and torture of thousands of Bahrainis held for years without trial in the dungeons of Bahrain.

Former detainees told Global Research that one of Henderson’s sadistic methods of interrogation was to force them to sit naked on upright glass bottles, the necks of which had been roughly broken off to leave protruding jagged points. The detainees told how Henderson personally oversaw the torture of inmates.

Today, the British influence on Bahrain’s NSA continues. One of Bahrain’s senior police chiefs is Briton John Yates, formerly of Scotland Yard; another senior police chief is American John Timoney, who formerly ran the force in Miami, Florida. Both men have reputations of corruption and brutality from their previous commands.

Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism under a family dynasty is backed up with a military and police force whose ranks are filled by foreign expatriate Sunnis recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Jordan. The regime forces serve their Sunni masters with a vicious hatred towards the Shia population.

This fact is attested by the daily and nightly attacks on Shia villages by Saudi-backed regime forces, with massive amounts of tear gas fired into streets and homes. At least 25 people have died from suffocation with tear gas over the past year since Saudi-led forces invaded Bahrain to crush the uprising. The victims range from a five-day-old baby girl to elderly men and women who are too weak or infirmed to escape from their smoke-filled homes.

In the past week, mourners attending the funerals for two men who died from tear gas exposure were themselves attacked by riot police who proceeded to fire more tear gas.

So, on the one hand, we see the Bahraini rulers wearing a velvet glove offering “dialogue” and “reforms”, with Washington and London providing the positive-sounding script; while on the other hand, what is felt is an iron-fist smashing down the doors of homes, firing tear gas into houses, dragging suspects away in the middle of the night, detaining them without trial and torturing to death.

And this is all happening in a supposed new era of reformism and dialogue in Bahrain that Washington assures is underway.

The continued persecution of the Bahraini medics is another fact on the ground to demonstrate the despotic nature of Washington and London’s “important ally” in the Persian Gulf.

The medics were sentenced for up to 15 years by a military court last September on a range of outlandish charges, including “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading defamatory information” about the royal rulers.

That verdict caused international protests from human rights groups, who denounced it as a travesty of legal procedure, not least because the sole basis for the prosecution were the confessions of the defendants – confessions that were obtained under torture.

Then, as now, the response from Washington and other Western governments and media was muted.

The medics include world-renowned surgeons Ali Al Ekri and Ghassan Dhaif and his wife, Zahra, and brother and sister, Bassim and Nada. Also sentenced was Rula Al Suffar, the former head of Bahrain’s Nursing Society. These are individuals of impeccable medical professionalism and ethics, who refused to close the doors of Bahrain’s main public hospital, Al Salmaniya, when the regime began butchering protesters last February-March. Global Research can bear witness to the dedication of these medics and countless others who struggled in the wards and corridors of the hospital to patch people up with the most horrendous wounds as wave after wave of injured were ferried in.

Dr Al Ekri was assaulted while performing surgery and hauled into detention by Saudi-backed forces who had smashed their way into Salmaniya Hospital – a crime against humanity, just one of many following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain that was given the green light by Washington and London.

There was a faint sign that Washington’s recent talk of progress and reform in Bahrain may have somehow sent the hint to its favoured despots to quietly drop the embarrassing show trial against the medics. But with the continuance of the prosecution – albeit in a civilian court instead of a military tribunal – it seems that institutionalized barbarism cannot overcome its tyrannical instincts for power, even at the behest of its more PR-savvy patron in Washington.

One can only imagine the sanctimonious mouth-foaming reaction by Washington, London and the corporate media if such a travesty was perpetrated against medics in Syria.

But Bahrain is not Syria; it is an ally, therefore Western governments and media suddenly develop blindness and speech impediment in the face of blatant crimes against humanity.

The annual farce of the chancellor’s budget has little of the pageantry of the yearly visit by the monarch, but given the fact that the nation’s media seem unable to find anything else to talk about when it happens, it is of course always useful as a distraction from the many other events the people should be hearing about. We should be hearing more about what our country’s intentions are in the impending war with Iran, for example; or finding out why exactly our government is sabre rattling around the Falkland/Malvinas islands – again; or what exactly is behind the government initiative to export teaching jobs to Indian call-centres. But no; our trusted media spend hours and hours distracting our attention with their supposed analyses of the chancellor’s budget. Well we all know what the implications of the chancellor’s budget will be. We don’t need the media to waste our time telling us. They’re exactly the same implications as they’ve been for at least the last thirty years:

The rich are going to get richer, and the poor are going to get poorer. And until we have significant political reform that will be exactly the same budget story, year after year, until there’s absolutely nothing left to plunder – by which time the plunderers will have packed up and left to enjoy their ill-gotten gains in their various treasure islands and other off-shore tax-havens, exactly as has happened to every other dying empire since the dawn of “civilisation.”

I think parliament should start a new annual custom to precede the chancellor’s budget. Rather than the present naff pantomime where the world’s press collect outside the door of 11 Downing Street to film a dull-looking little businessman leaving home with a tatty red box, we should instead see a masked highwayman striding arrogantly out his door, mount a shining black steed and gallop off towards parliament, black cape billowing behind him, pistol waving in the air as he cries out through the streets of London, “Your money or your life.”

Following the news of the student’s punishment, Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) organised a protest in support of the student. At a general meeting held after the protest, a statement of “no confidence in the university Vice Chancellor, management and Court of Discipline” was endorsed after a vote by the hundreds of students and staff present. A petition against the judgement has already garnered over 6000 signatures, with over 2000 of them coming from students and academics at the university. The university also continues to receive hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls from its alumni who are pledging not to donate any further until the university repeals the decision.

Before the hearing, sixty students and twenty dons signed a ‘Spartacus’ letter, which insisted that the protest against Willetts was a collective act and that singling out one student for punishment was “arbitrary and wrong”. In the letter the signatories asked to receive the same charge for the action. The letter has so far been ignored by the university Court of Discipline.

Gerard Tully, president of CUSU said: “The student body is demonstrating unprecedented anger over the disproportionate sentence handed down. The University has been caught out acting with no thought to precedent or to fairness, and ought to be ashamed of the message it sends. Two and a half years suspension for one person for one action is madness.”

Rachel Bower, a PhD student in English said: “Like the suspended student, I am also studying for a PhD in English. The punishment undermines the foundations of critical thought and debate that underpin our discipline, and supposedly the University as a whole. It endangers academic freedom, and makes me ashamed to be a member of the University today. I am glad so many of my fellow students have come out in support of our right to protest today.”

China’s re-emergence as a world economic power raises important questions about what we can learn from its previous rise and fall and about the external and internal threats confronting this emerging economic superpower for the immediate future.

First we will outline the main contours of historical China’s rise to global economic superiority over West before the 19th century, following closely John Hobson’s account in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Since the majority of western economic historians (liberal, conservative, and Marxist) have presented historical China as a stagnant, backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”, some detailed correctives will be necessary. It is especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.

In part two we will analyze and discuss the factors and circumstances which led to China’s decline in the 19th century and its subsequent domination, exploitation and pillage by Western imperial countries, first England and then the rest of Europe, Japan and the United States.

In part three, we will briefly outline the factors leading to China’s emancipation from colonial and neo-colonial rule and analyze its recent rise to becoming the second largest global economic power.

Finally we will look at the past and present threats to China’s rise to global economic power, highlighting the similarities between British colonialism of the 18 and 19th centuries and the current US imperial strategies and focusing on the weaknesses and strengths of past and present Chinese responses.

China: The Rise and Consolidation of Global Power 1100-1800

In a systematic comparative format, John Hobson provides a wealth of empirical indicators demonstrating China’s global economic superiority over the West and in particular England. These are some striking facts:

As early as 1078, China was the world’s major producer of steel (125,000 tons); whereas Britain in 1788 produced 76,000 tons.

China was the world’s leader in technical innovations in textile manufacturing, seven centuries before Britain’s 18th century “textile revolution”.

China was the leading trading nation, with long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

China’s “agricultural revolution” and productivity surpassed the West to the 18th century.

Its innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms, and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system.

China possessed the world’s largest commercial ships. In 1588 the largest English ships displaced 400 tons, China’s displaced 3,000 tons. Even as late as the end of the 18th century China’s merchants employed 130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain. China retained this pre-eminent position in the world economy up until the early 19th century.

British and Europeans manufacturers followed China’s lead, assimilating and borrowing its more advanced technology and were eager to penetrate China’s advanced and lucrative market.

Banking, a stable paper money economy, manufacturing, and high yields in agriculture resulted in China’s per capita income matching that of Great Britain as late as 1750.

China’s dominant global position was challenged by the rise of British imperialism, which had adopted the advanced technological, navigational, and market innovations of China and other Asian countries in order to bypass earlier stages in becoming a world power.²

Western Imperialism and the Decline of China

The British and Western imperial conquest of the East, was based on the militaristic nature of the imperial state, its non-reciprocal economic relations with overseas trading countries and the Western imperial ideology which motivated and justified overseas conquest.

Unlike China, Britain’s industrial revolution and overseas expansion was driven by a military policy. According to Hobson, during the period from 1688-1815 Great Britain was engaged in wars 52% of the time.³ Whereas the Chinese relied on their open markets, their superior production, and sophisticated commercial and banking skills, the British relied on tariff protection, military conquest, the systematic destruction of competitive overseas enterprises as well as the appropriation and plunder of local resources. China’s global predominance was based on “reciprocal benefits” with its trading partners, while Britain relied on mercenary armies of occupation, savage repression and a “divide and conquer” policy to foment local rivalries. In the face of native resistance, the British (as well as other Western imperial powers) did not hesitate to exterminate entire communities.⁴

Unable to take over the Chinese market through greater economic competitiveness, Britain relied on brute military power. It mobilized, armed and led mercenaries, drawn from its colonies in India and elsewhere to force its exports on China and impose unequal treaties to lower tariffs. As a result China was flooded with British opium produced on its plantations in India — despite Chinese laws forbidding or regulating the importation and sale of the narcotic. China’s rulers, long accustomed to its trade and manufacturing superiority, were unprepared for the “new imperial rules” for global power. The West’s willingness to use military power to win colonies, pillage resources and recruit huge mercenary armies commanded by European officers spelt the end for China as a world power.

China had based its economic predominance on “non-interference in the internal affairs of its trading partners”. In contrast, British imperialists intervened violently in Asia, reorganizing local economies to suit the needs of the empire (eliminating economic competitors including more efficient Indian cotton manufacturers), and seized control of local political, economic, and administrative apparatus to establish the colonial state.

Britain’s empire was built with resources seized from the colonies and through the massive militarization of its economy.⁵ It was thus able to secure military supremacy over China. China’s foreign policy was hampered by its ruling elite’s excessive reliance on trade relations. Chinese officials and merchant elites sought to appease the British and convinced the emperor to grant devastating extra-territorial concessions opening markets to the detriment of Chinese manufacturers while surrendering local sovereignty. As always, the British precipitated internal rivalries and revolts further destabilizing the country.

Western and British penetration and colonization of China’s market created an entire new class: The wealthy Chinese “compradores” imported British goods and facilitated the takeover of local markets and resources. Imperialist pillage forced greater exploitation and taxation of the great mass of Chinese peasants and workers. China’s rulers were obliged to pay the war debts and finance trade deficits imposed by the Western imperial powers by squeezing its peasantry. This drove the peasants to starvation and revolt.

By the early 20th century (less than a century after the Opium Wars), China had descended from world economic power to a broken semi-colonial country with a huge destitute population. The principle ports were controlled by Western imperial officials and the countryside was subject to the rule by corrupt and brutal warlords. British opium enslaved millions.

British Academics: Eloquent Apologists for Imperial Conquest

The entire Western academic profession – first and foremost British imperialist historians – attributed British imperial dominance of Asia to English “technological superiority” and China’s misery and colonial status to “oriental backwardness”, omitting any mention of the millennium of Chinese commercial and technical progress and superiority up to the dawn of the 19th century. By the end of the 1920s, with the Japanese imperial invasion, China ceased to exist as a unified country. Under the aegis of imperialist rule, hundreds of millions of Chinese had starved or were dispossessed or slaughtered, as the Western powers and Japan plundered its economy. The entire Chinese “collaborator” comprador elitists were discredited before the Chinese people.

What did remain in the collective memory of the great mass of the Chinese people – and what was totally absent in the accounts of prestigious US and British academics – was the sense of China once having been a prosperous, dynamic and leading world power. Western commentators dismissed this collective memory of China’s ascendancy as the foolish pretensions of nostalgic lords and royalty – empty Han arrogance.

China Rises from the Ashes of Imperial Plunder and Humiliation: The Chinese Communist Revolution

The rise of modern China to become the second largest economy in the world was made possible only through the success of the Chinese communist revolution in the mid-20th century. The People’s Liberation “Red” Army defeated first the invading Japanese imperial army and later the US imperialist-backed comprador-led Kuomintang “Nationalist” army. This allowed the reunification of China as an independent sovereign state. The Communist government abolished the extra-territorial privileges of the Western imperialists, ended the territorial fiefdoms of the regional warlords and gangsters, and drove out the millionaire owners of brothels, the traffickers of women and drugs as well as the other “service providers” to the Euro-American Empire.

In every sense of the word, the Communist revolution forged the modern Chinese state. The new leaders then proceeded to reconstruct an economy ravaged by imperial wars and pillaged by Western and Japanese capitalists. After over 150 years of infamy and humiliation the Chinese people recovered their pride and national dignity. These socio-psychological elements were essential in motivating the Chinese to defend their country from the US attacks, sabotage, boycotts, and blockades mounted immediately after liberation.

Contrary to Western and neoliberal Chinese economists, China’s dynamic growth did not start in 1980. It began in 1950, when the agrarian reform provided land, infrastructure, credits and technical assistance to hundreds of millions of landless and destitute peasants and landless rural workers. Through what is now called “human capital” and gigantic social mobilization, the Communists built roads, airfields, bridges, canals and railroads as well as the basic industries, like coal, iron and steel, to form the backbone of the modern Chinese economy. Communist China’s vast free educational and health systems created a healthy, literate, and motivated work force. Its highly professional military prevented the US from extending its military empire throughout the Korean peninsula up to China’s territorial frontiers. Just as past Western scholars and propagandists fabricated a history of a “stagnant and decadent” empire to justify their destructive conquest, so too their modern counterparts have rewritten the first thirty years of Chinese Communist history, denying the role of the revolution in developing all the essential elements for a modern economy, state, and society. It is clear that China’s rapid economic growth was based on the development of its internal market, its rapidly growing cadre of scientists, skilled technicians, and workers and the social safety net which protected and promoted working class and peasant mobility were products of Communist planning and investments.

China’s rise to global power began in 1949 with the removal of the entire parasitic financial, comprador and speculative classes who had served as the intermediaries for European, Japanese and US imperialists draining China of its great wealth.

China’s Transition to Capitalism

Beginning in 1980 the Chinese government initiated a dramatic shift in its economic strategy: Over the next three decades, it opened the country to large-scale foreign investment; it privatized thousands of industries and it set in motion a process of income concentration based on a deliberate strategy of re-creating a dominant economic class of billionaires linked to overseas capitalists. China’s ruling political class embraced the idea of “borrowing” technical know-how and accessing overseas markets from foreign firms in exchange for providing cheap, plentiful labor at the lowest cost. The Chinese state re-directed massive public subsidies to promote high capitalist growth by dismantling its national system of free public education and health care. They ended subsidized public housing for hundreds of millions of peasants and urban factory workers and provided funds to real estate speculators for the construction of private luxury apartments and office skyscrapers. China’s new capitalist strategy as well as its double digit growth was based on the profound structural changes and massive public investments made possible by the previous communist government. China’s private sector “take off” was based on the huge public outlays made since 1949.

The triumphant new capitalist class and its Western collaborators claimed all the credit for this “economic miracle” as China rose to become the world’s second largest economy. This new Chinese elite have been less eager to announce China’s world-class status in terms of brutal class inequalities, rivaling only the US.

China: From Imperial Dependency to World Class Competitor

China’s sustained growth in its manufacturing sector was a result of highly concentrated public investments, high profits, technological innovations and a protected domestic market. While foreign capital profited, it was always within the framework of the Chinese state’s priorities and regulations. The regime’s dynamic “export strategy” led to huge trade surpluses, which eventually made China one of the world’s largest creditors especially for US debt. In order to maintain its dynamic industries, China has required huge influxes of raw materials, resulting in large-scale overseas investments and trade agreements with agro-mineral export countries in Africa and Latin America. By 2010 China displaced the US and Europe as the main trading partner in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Modern China’s rise to world economic power, like its predecessor between 1100-1800, is based on its gigantic productive capacity. Trade and investment was governed by a policy of strict non-interference in the internal relations of its trading partners. Unlike the US, China did not initiate brutal wars for oil; instead it signed lucrative contracts. And China does not fight wars in the interest of overseas Chinese, as the US has done in the Middle East for Israel.

The seeming imbalance between Chinese economic and military power is in stark contrast to the US where a bloated, parasitic military empire continues to erode its own global economic presence.

US military spending is twelve times that of China. Increasingly the US military plays the key role shaping policy in Washington as it seeks to undercut China’s rise to global power.

China’s Rise to World Power: Will History Repeat Itself?

China has been growing at about 9% per annum and its goods and services are rapidly rising in quality and value. In contrast, the US and Europe have wallowed around 0% growth from 2007-2012. China’s innovative techno-scientific establishment routinely assimilates the latest inventions from the West (and Japan) and improves them, thereby decreasing the cost of production. China has replaced the US and European controlled “international financial institutions” (the IMF, World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank) as the principle lender in Latin America. China continues to lead as the prime investor in African energy and mineral resources. China has replaced the US as the principle market for Saudi Arabian, Sudanese, and Iranian petroleum and it will soon replace the US as the principle market for Venezuela petroleum products. Today China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter, dominating even the US market, while playing the role of financial life line as it holds over $1.3 trillion in US Treasury notes.

Under growing pressure from its workers, farmers and peasants, China’s rulers have been developing the domestic market by increasing wages and social spending to rebalance the economy and avoid the specter of social instability. In contrast, US wages, salaries and vital public services have sharply declined in absolute and relative terms.

Given the current historical trends it is clear that China will replace the US as the leading world economic power, over the next decade, if the US empire does not strike back and if China’s profound class inequalities do not lead to a major social upheaval.

Modern China’s rise to global power faces serious challenges. In contrast to China’s historical ascent on the world stage, modern Chinese global economic power is not accompanied by any imperialist undertakings. China has seriously lagged behind the US and Europe in aggressive war-making capacity. This may have allowed China to direct public resources to maximize economic growth, but it has left China vulnerable to US military superiority in terms of its massive arsenal, its string of forward bases, and strategic geo-military positions right off the Chinese coast and in adjoining territories.

In the nineteenth century British imperialism demolished China’s global position with its military superiority, seizing China’s ports – because of China’s reliance on “mercantile superiority”.

The conquest of India, Burma and most of Asia allowed Britain to establish colonial bases and recruit local mercenary armies. The British and its mercenary allies encircled and isolated China, setting the stage for the disruption of China’s markets and the imposition of the brutal terms of trade. The British Empire’s armed presence dictated what China imported (with opium accounting for over 50% of British exports in the 1850s) while undermining China’s competitive advantages via tariff policies.

Today the US is pursuing similar policies: US naval fleet patrols and controls China’s commercial shipping lanes and off-shore oil resources via its overseas bases. The Obama-Clinton White House is in the process of developing a rapid military response involving bases in Australia, Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia. The US is intensifying its efforts to undermine Chinese overseas access to strategic resources while backing “grass roots” separatists and “insurgents” in West China, Tibet, Sudan, Burma, Iran, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. The US military agreements with India and the installation of a pliable puppet regime in Pakistan have advanced its strategy of isolating China. While China upholds its policy of “harmonious development” and “non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries”, it has stepped aside as US and European military imperialism have attacked a host of China’s trading partners to essentially reverse China’s peaceful commercial expansion.

China’s lack of a political and ideological strategy capable of protecting its overseas economic interests has been an invitation for the US and NATO to set-up regimes hostile to China. The most striking example is Libya where US and NATO intervened to overthrow an independent government led by President Gaddafi, with whom China had signed multi-billion dollar trade and investments agreements. The NATO bombardment of Libyan cities, ports and oil installation forced the Chinese to withdraw 35,000 Chinese oil engineers and construction workers in a matter of days. The same thing happened in Sudan where China had invested billions to develop its oil industry. The US, Israel, and Europe armed the South Sudanese rebels to disrupt the flow of oil and attack Chinese oil workers⁶ In both cases China passively allowed the US and European military imperialists to attack its trade partners and undermine its investments.

Under Mao Zedong, China had an active policy countering imperial aggression. It supported revolutionary movements and independent Third World governments. Today’s capitalist China does not have an active policy of supporting governments or movements capable of protecting China’s bilateral trade and investment agreements. China’s inability to confront the rising tide of US military aggression against its economic interests is due to deep structural problems. China’s foreign policy is shaped by big commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests who rely on their “economic competitive edge” to gain market shares and have no understanding of the military and security underpinnings of global economic power. China’s political class is deeply influenced by a new class of billionaires with strong ties to Western equity funds and who have uncritically absorbed Western cultural values. This is illustrated by their preference for sending their own children to elite universities in the US and Europe. They seek “accommodation with the West” at any price. This lack of any strategic understanding of military empire-building has led them to respond ineffectively and ad hoc to each imperialist action undermining their access to resources and markets. While China’s “business first” outlook may have worked when it was a minor player in the world economy and US empire builders saw the “capitalist opening” as a chance to easily takeover China’s public enterprises and pillage the economy. However, when China (in contrast to the former USSR) decided to retain capital controls and develop a carefully calibrated, state-directed “industrial policy” directing western capital and the transfer of technology to state enterprises, which effectively penetrated the US domestic and overseas markets, Washington began to complain and talked of retaliation. China’s huge trade surpluses with the US provoked a dual response in Washington. It sold massive quantities of US Treasury bonds to the Chinese and began to develop a global strategy to block China’s advance. Since the US lacked economic leverage to reverse its decline, it relied on its only “comparative advantage” – its military superiority based on a world wide system of attack bases, a network of overseas client regimes, military proxies, NGOers, intellectuals and armed mercenaries. Washington turned to its vast overt and clandestine security apparatus to undermine China’s trading partners. Washington depends on its long-standing ties with corrupt rulers, dissidents, journalists and media moguls to provide the powerful propaganda cover while advancing its military offensive against China’s overseas interests.

China has nothing to compare with the US overseas security apparatus because it practices a policy of non-interference. Given the advanced state of the Western imperial offensive, China has taken only a few diplomatic initiatives, such as financing English language media outlets to present its perspective, using its veto power on the UN Security Council to oppose US efforts to overthrow the independent Assad regime in Syria, and opposing the imposition of drastic sanctions against Iran. It sternly repudiated US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s vitriolic questioning of the “legitimacy” of the Chinese state when it voted against the US-UN resolution preparing an attack on Syria.⁷

Chinese military strategists are more aware and alarmed at the growing military threat to China. They have successfully demanded a 19% annual increase in military spending over the next five years (2011-2015).⁸ Even with this increase, China’s military expenditures will still be less than one-fifth of the US military budget and China has not one overseas military base in stark contrast to the over 750 US installations abroad. Overseas Chinese intelligence operations are minimal and ineffective. Its embassies are run by and for narrow commercial interests who utterly failed to understand NATO’s brutal policy of regime change in Libya and inform Beijing of its significance to the Chinese state.

There are two other structural weaknesses undermining China’s rise as a world power. This includes the highly ‘Westernized’ intelligentsia which has uncritically swallowed US economic doctrine about free markets while ignoring its militarized economy. These Chinese intellectuals parrot the US propaganda about the “democratic virtues” of billion-dollar Presidential campaigns, while supporting financial deregulation which would have led to a Wall Street takeover of Chinese banks and savings. Many Chinese business consultants and academics have been educated in the US and influenced by their ties to US academics and international financial institutions directly linked to Wall Street and the City of London. They have prospered as highly-paid consultants receiving prestigious positions in Chinese institutions. They identify the “liberalization of financial markets” with “advanced economies” capable of deepening ties to global markets instead of as a major source of the current global financial crisis. These “Westernized intellectuals” are like their 19th century comprador counterparts who underestimated and dismissed the long-term consequences of Western imperial penetration. They fail to understand how financial deregulation in the US precipitated the current crisis and how deregulation would lead to a Western takeover of China’s financial system – the consequences of which would reallocate China’s domestic savings to non-productive activities (real estate speculation), precipitate financial crisis and ultimately undermine China’s leading global position.

These Chinese yuppies imitate the worst of Western consumerist life styles and their political outlooks are driven by these life styles and Westernized identities which preclude any sense of solidarity with their own working class.

There is an economic basis for the pro-Western sentiments of China’s neo-compradors. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign bank accounts, purchased luxury homes and apartments in London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They have one foot in China (the source of their wealth) and the other in the West (where they consume and hide their wealth).

Westernized compradors are deeply embedded in China’s economic system having family ties with the political leadership in the party apparatus and the state. Their connections are weakest in the military and in the growing social movements, although some “dissident” students and academic activists in the “democracy movements” are backed by Western imperial NGO’s. To the extent that the compradors gain influence, they weaken the strong economic state institutions which have directed China’s ascent to global power, just as they did in the 19th century by acting as intermediaries for the British Empire. Proclaiming 19th Century “liberalism”, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade. Proclaiming “democracy and human rights”, US gunboats now patrol off China’s coast. China’s elite-directed rise to global economic power has spawned monumental inequalities between the thousands of new billionaires and multi-millionaires at the top and hundreds of millions of impoverished workers, peasants and migrant workers at the bottom.

China’s rapid accumulation of wealth and capital was made possible through the intense exploitation of its workers who were stripped of their previous social safety net and regulated work conditions guaranteed under Communism. Millions of Chinese households are being dispossessed in order to promote real estate developer/speculators who then build high rise offices and the luxury apartments for the domestic and foreign elite. These brutal features of ascendant Chinese capitalism have created a fusion of workplace and living space mass struggle which is growing every year. The developer/speculators’ slogan “to get rich is wonderful” has lost its power to deceive the people. In 2011 there were over 200,000 popular encompassing urban coastal factories and rural villages. The next step, which is sure to come, will be the unification of these struggles into new national social movements with a class-based agenda demanding the restoration of health and educational services enjoyed under the Communists as well as a greater share of China’s wealth. Current demands for greater wages can turn to demands for greater work place democracy. To answer these popular demands China’s new comprador-Westernized liberals cannot point to their “model” in the US empire where American workers are in the process of being stripped of the very benefits Chinese workers are struggling to regain.

China, torn by deepening class and political conflict, cannot sustain its drive toward global economic leadership. China’s elite cannot confront the rising global imperial military threat from the US with its comprador allies among the internal liberal elite while the country is a deeply divided society with an increasingly hostile working class. The time of unbridled exploitation of China’s labor has to end in order to face the US military encirclement of China and economic disruption of its overseas markets. China possesses enormous resources. With over $1.5 trillion dollars in reserves China can finance a comprehensive national health and educational program throughout the country.

China can afford to pursue an intensive “public housing program” for the 250 million migrant workers currently living in urban squalor. China can impose a system of progressive income taxes on its new billionaires and millionaires and finance small family farmer co-operatives and rural industries to rebalance the economy. Their program of developing alternative energy sources, such as solar panels and wind farms – are a promising start to addressing their serious environmental pollution. Degradation of the environment and related health issues already engage the concern of tens of millions. Ultimately China’s best defense against imperial encroachments is a stable regime based on social justice for the hundreds of millions and a foreign policy of supporting overseas anti-imperialist movements and regimes – whose independence are in China’s vital interest. What is needed is a pro-active policy based on mutually beneficial joint ventures including military and diplomatic solidarity. Already a small, but influential, group of Chinese intellectuals have raised the issue of the growing US military threat and are “saying no to gunboat diplomacy”.⁹

Modern China has plenty of resources and opportunities, unavailable to China in the 19th century when it was subjugated by the British Empire. If the US continues to escalate its aggressive militaristic policy against China, Beijing can set off a serious fiscal crisis by dumping a few of its hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury notes. China, a nuclear power should reach out to its similarly armed and threatened neighbor, Russia, to confront and confound the bellicose rantings of US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. Russian President-to-be Putin vows to increase military spending from 3% to 6% of the GDP over the next decade to counter Washington’s offensive missile bases on Russia’s borders and thwart Obama’s regime change programs against its allies, like Syria.¹⁰

China has powerful trading, financial and investment networks covering the globe as well as powerful economic partners. These links have become essential for the continued growth of many of countries throughout the developing world. In taking on China, the US will have to face the opposition of many powerful market-based elites throughout the world. Few countries or elites see any future in tying their fortunes to an economically unstable empire-based on militarism and destructive colonial occupations.

In other words, modern China, as a world power, is incomparably stronger than it was in early 18th century. The US does not have the colonial leverage that the ascendant British Empire possessed in the run-up to the Opium Wars. Moreover, many Chinese intellectuals and the vast majority of its citizens have no intention of letting its current “Westernized compradors” sell out the country. Nothing would accelerate political polarization in Chinese society and hasten the coming of a second Chinese social revolution more than a timid leadership submitting to a new era of Western imperial pillage.

1. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press 2004).
2. Ibid, Ch. 9: 190-218.
3. Ibid, Ch. 11: 244-248.
4. Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso 2011) for a detailed historical chronicle of the savagery accompanying Britain’s colonial empire.
5. Hobson: 253-256.
6. Katrina Manson, “South Sudan puts Beijing’s policies to the test”, Financial Times, 2/21/12, p. 5.
7. Interview of Clinton NPR, 2/26/12.
8. La Jornada, 2/15/12 (Mexico City).
9. China Daily, 2/20/2012.
10. Charles Clover, ‘Putin vows huge boost in defense spending’, Financial Times, 2/12/2012.

The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.

—  J.Edgar Hoover, 1895-1972

Smelled any proverbial rats lately? If not, you have not been paying attention. There are plenty about.

Consider, for instance, this:

“Assad must halt his campaign of killing and crimes against his own people now” and “must step aside …” Hilary Clinton (Asia Times,  February 9, 2012)

“I strongly condemn the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault  … and I offer my deepest sympathy to those who have lost loved ones.  Assad must halt his campaign of killing and crimes against his own people now.  He must step aside …” said President Barack Hussein Obama.

Yet responsibility for US victims, in their hundreds of thousands, spanning Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, are wholly unaccountable — and uncounted.

Responsibility for tyrannicide (including the horrific, state sponsored assassinations of Osama bin Laden and others, including Libya’s Head of State, Colonel Gaddafi) have seemingly entered a Presidential memory hole.

“This (Syria’s) is a doomed regime as well as a murdering regime. There is no way it can get its credibility back either internationally or with its own people”, Britain’s little Foreign Secretary, William Hague, chimed in obediently from the Washington script on Sky News.

“Because the regime is so intransigent, because it is conducting ten months unmitigated violence and repression – more than 6,000 killed, with 12,000 or 14,000 in detention and subject to every kind of torture and abuse – it is driving some opponents to violent action themselves”, concluded Hague.

Hypocrisy reigns supreme. Walking distance from Hague’s office, “living in style and protection”, is Bashar Al Assad’s Uncle Rifaat, under whose Defence Brigades onslaught killed up to perhaps 30,000 people in the city of Hama, which was also partially destroyed Falluja style. The thirtieth anniversary of  a truly terrible event is commemorated today, February 25. (See Robert Fisk, Independent, February 25, 2012.)

Of Libya, in March 2011, Obama stated:

Going forward, we will continue to send a clear message: The violence must stop. Muammar Gaddafi has lost legitimacy to lead, and he must leave. Those who perpetrate violence against the Libyan people will be held accountable. And the aspirations of the Libyan people for freedom, democracy and dignity must be met.

An anomaly (apart from the script similarity): In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,  deaths resultant from US-UK and “allied” actions are “impossible to verify” by Washington and Whitehall.

Indeed, this month the (UK) Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence issued a Report, after an Inquiry into operations in Libya, stating that:

Britain has no way of knowing how many civilians died in the Libyan conflict as a result of Nato bombing.

Back in March 2011, however, the exact figure of Gaddafi’s victims was “known.” Coincidentally, it was also exactly 6,000, stated a “political analyst” — using remarkably similar State Department  phraseology.

As under Saddam Hussein in Iraq (with no diplomatic presence), in Libya, and now little in Syria, with no point of contact bar, seemingly a satellite dish fitter in Coventry, England, alleged to be the “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights”, exact death and casualty figures are always miraculously available.

A new nemesis appears on the horizon — or “Arab street” — and precise numbers are trumpeted. Yet when Western forces, “Viceroys”, “Intelligence” services, “mentors” and myriad general meddlers, mercenaries and marauders pitch up, murder and occupy, none are available.

Of course, no proposed invasion (sorry, “humanitarian intervention”) regime change and accompanying mass slayings would be complete without forces of a wicked tyrant switching off electricity to babies’ incubators.

For anyone who has forgotten the details, the (1990-1991) Iraq model went like this: vast US government employed PR agency, Hill and Knowlton (“we create value by shaping conversations: we start them, we amplify them, we change them. We can connect seamlessly with all of your audiences…”) produced a fifteen year old girl called “Nayirah”, a “Kuwaiti with first hand knowledge of … her tortured land.”

I volunteered (tears) at the Al Addan Hospital .. I saw the Iraqi soldiers ..with guns, they took fifteen babies out of incubators, left them on the cold floor and took the incubators.

Strangely, no one asked why she didn’t pick them up and wrap and tend to them, or checked who she really was.

She was the daughter of Saud al Sabar, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to US. The incubators’ story, of course, was a complete fabrication.

October 10th 1990, Amnesty presented evidence against Iraq with Hill and Knowlton at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Capitol Hill. Amnesty International trustingly endorsed the incubator story, apparently never investigating who “Nayirah” was, and in a charged situation, whether propaganda might not be rampant.

Amnesty US Executive Director, John Healey, compounded the incubator baby story in testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on 8th January 1991. The carpet-bombing of Iraq began nine days later.¹

Amnesty, enjoined by Human Rights Watch, are amongst the most enthusiastic champions of Syrian intervention and onward to Armageddon. Glen Ford writes all you ever need to know.

The first Syria incubator baby story surfaced last August. “Syrian government troops”, had cut the electricity. It was quickly exposed as beyond questionable.

A similar story came up on February 8  with numbers varying from eighteen poor mites to a subsequent eighty. With both tales, as the Iraq version, no distraught parents, extended family were found, no funeral gatherings. Then the stories, too, quietly vanished.

Coincidentally, the current Speaker of the eighty eight Member Arab Inter-Parliamentary union, which backs intervention in Syria, is Kuwaiti, Ali Al-Salem Al-Dekbas, calling for all Syria’s Ambassadors to be expelled, confrontation with Russia over its stance — and in remarkable US-speak, for swift intervention to stop the Syrian government “killing (their own) people.” (Reuters, February 4, 2012.)

The new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, is Suzanne Nossel, formerly Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Assistant for International Organization Affairs at the State Department. She has also previously worked for Human Rights Watch.

She “… has launched several campaigns against Iran, Libya and Syria.”

The allegation that Kuwait gave Amnesty $500,000 for backing the Iraq incubator baby story has never gone away, but the little island, once famously called ”an oil company posing as a state”, with population just  2,595,628 (July 2011) which  includes 1,291,354 non-nationals, also has powerful American-proxy clout.

In 1999, an agreement was signed between the USA and Kuwait for a permanent US force to be stationed there, in twelve facilities (there are a further eight “spares”, seemingly not currently in use.)

The agreement for the bases, incidentally, was named “Operation Desert Spring.”

Here is a further coincidence. In March 2010, Libya was voted, near unanimously, on to the UN Human Rights Committee, after a glowing Report on human rights progress. After a ferocious campaign by Geneva-based UN Watch not only were they expelled from it, but nineteen months later, their country lay in ruins, their leader lynched and most of his family dead.

Last November, Syria was elected to the Committee and the fifty eight Member Arab board added their votes to the country’s place on UNESCO panels.

UN Watch railed that:

Western democracies, unanimously elected Syria to a pair of Committees – one dealing directly with human rights issues – even as the Bashar al-Assad regime maintains its campaign of violence against its own citizens.

Syria’s Committee places, as Libya before it, died a quick unnoticed death.

Amnesty’s Ms Nossel, unsurprisingly, has spoken at a number of events with UN Watch Director, Hillel Neuer, a Montreal born attorney, whose career has included serving as a judicial law clerk for Justice Itzhak Zamir at the Supreme Court of Israel.

In March last year, there seemed a glimmer of hope that the US and “allies”, would back away from repeating the tragic disaster that was unfolding in Libya – and had already struck Afghanistan and Iraq.

Secretary of State Clinton committed on CBS  (March 27, 2011) that the US would not intervene in the way it had in Libya.

Now, it seems, a miracle is needed, as it emerges Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among those subsidizing insurgents with vast sums – as French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe announced that the EU is about to further tie the government’s hands by freezing the assets of the Syrian Central Bank from February 27. Syria is already under a crippling raft of sanctions.  France was, of course, one of the leading and most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the destruction of Libya.

At the same “Friends of Syria” Conference in Tunis (February 24, 2012) UK Foreign Minister William Hague declared that the UK recognized the insurgents and Hilary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton called Russia and China ”despicable” for their veto at the UN, which may well have blocked further “intervention.”

The US said it will consider military assistance to the insurgents – a representative of the insurgents said they were already receiving “western aid.”

With “friends” like these, Syria certainly needs no enemies.

The US has, of course, “despicably”, vetoed thirty five UN peace Resolutions relating to the Middle East including  on “Operation Cast Lead”, the 2008-2009 Israeli Christmas-New Year onslaught on Gaza, and Israel’s 2006 blitzkrieg of Lebanon.

A “new world map”

Chillingly, no outrage, or cries of “despicable” has been given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement in Switzerland the day before the Tunisia conference that there: “would be no Lebanon in the new world map. ”

He stated, further, that an Israeli strike against Lebanon would be supported by the United States and Gulf States countries.

There surely is a wildlife park of elephants in the room. Given George W. Bush’s “Crusade”, the belief by extreme right Israeli circles in their control of the Middle East “from the Nile to the Euphrates” and General Wesley Clark’s revelations of 2007 that the Pentagon planned “(taking) out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”, there is an obvious question, sparked by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s confidence over a Lebanon attack:

Are these AIPAC and Israel’s wars?

1. John R. Macarthur,  Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War , 17 December 1993, Chapter 2, pp. 54-59

In the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967, an upsurge of Jewish consciousness hit the campuses, and a new voice—what we call the ‘Jewish Left’—appeared. Young Jews began to make demands for ‘Jewish studies’ programs, to publish Jewish underground newspapers, to criticize Israeli policies while defending Zionism against Arab and pro-Arab attacks, and to confront the Jewish Establishment for ‘selling out’ to the ‘American dream’ while ignoring the needs of the Jewish community.¹

Thirty years later, journalist Esther Kaplan described “the old school of Jewish activism on Palestine…organizations from Breira in the 1970s to New Jewish Agenda, International Jewish Peace Union, the Road to Peace and Women in Black in the 1980s and early ’90s.”²

These activists followed “the star of identity politics”; they felt personally implicated by Israel’s deeds, saw a strategic role for themselves, and felt that changing the views of the US Jewish community was possible and necessary.³ After the second Intifada (Palestinian uprising) began in 2000, Kaplan found all this “anachronistic.”⁴ She described new organizations such as the International Solidarity Movement, and the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement (BDS), and concluded: “We Jews can join in—many of us will—but we don’t own this movement any more.”⁵

Yet the Jewish Left has thrived. It is not uniform, and exists in more and less sophisticated forms, but it is noticeable. It is the subject of a new book by David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel.⁶ Landy is the former head of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and earned his PhD at Trinity College, Dublin. Landy’s main focus is the British “Israel-critical diaspora Jewish movement,” in his careful phrase.⁷ He notes that the UK movement became important only after the second Intifada, while elsewhere in Europe and Australia, movements arose only after Israel’s assaults on Lebanon in 2006, and especially on Gaza in 2008-9. Obviously that is not true in the US, whose movements’ “size and dynamism” make them the most important case.⁸

In his introduction, Landy states that this movement seeks “to challenge Zionist hegemony among fellow Jews and to challenge Israel, speaking as Jews…who oppose Israel” so that we “do not conflate the two.”⁹ This formulation at once raises questions, beginning with the meaning of “Jew.” A religious definition is clear, as one who practices Judaism, but a secular definition is not; in fact, secular Jewish nationality is precisely what Zionism claims, and what many in Landy’s movement claim.

Landy’s background is Jewish, but he states that being a “movement activist is more important than shared Jewishness.”¹⁰ He also notes that many people of Jewish background are “active in society-wide groups…rather than specifically Jewish ones,” so that his study understates diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel. More important, the choice to work in “society-wide groups” sets a universalist benchmark to judge the choice to work in Jewish groups. The book is a sustained critique of identity politics, yet Landy does not fully comprehend his subject, in part because the UK movement, his main focus, is not the most illustrative example, which is in the US. Still, Landy’s rigor and honesty inevitably raise wider questions, and his book is a welcome contribution.

In his first chapter, “Understanding and researching the social movement,” Landy argues that the movement “seeks to re-cognize what it means to be a disapora Jew,” and also notes “the constraints and traps, as well as the opportunities that identity contestation offers.”¹¹ Landy defines the movement theoretically using Pierre Bourdieu’s formula of “[(Habitus)(capital)] + field = practice”. “Habitus” is “‘a system of durable, transposable dispositions’” acquired in upbringing from which an individual “generates schemata” in different spheres of life.¹² “Capital” is “‘good, services, knowledge, or status.’¹³ “‘Fields denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation’” of capital.¹⁴ Social life is a struggle over “field-dependent capital.”  Participating in a field means accepting its “doxaor realm of undiscussed and undisputed paradigms.”¹⁵ Thus while “the unnameability of Palestinians has been successfully challenged” within the Jewish field, “other silences, such as on the Palestinian right of return, have to an extent been reproduced.”

Landy’s second chapter discusses “The conflict over diaspora Jewish identity.” He notes that “identity has replaced ideology as the idiom of modern politics,” and that “diaspora identity is commonly deployed to create some sense of bounded racialized identity.”¹⁶ Diaspora identity is thus “a concession” to the “hegemonic language” and “illusio of the field.”  Diaspora is viewed “perhaps as thecondition of authentic Jewish existence and imbued with qualities of alterity, heterogeneity, hybridity and (usually) universalism.”¹⁷ This outlook, “while often critical of Israel, effaces Palestinian subjectivity,” and “creates a false symmetry with Palestinian refugees” by confusing “symbolic chosen exile and actual forced exile.”¹⁸

A claim that “Jews are uniquely univeralistic subjects” arises from concepts like Marxist Isaac Deutscher’s “non-Jewish Jew.”¹⁹ Landy “wonders what the term ‘non-Jewish Jew’ means absent these specific social connotations,” i.e., the traditional Polish Jewish upbringing that Deutscher rejected. Landy forgets today’s activists who choose to work in “society-wide groups” rather than Jewish ones, even as he finds them often as stifling as Deutscher’s traditional background. Landy notes the “link between Jews and justice,” citing the rabbinical injunction tikkun olam, conventionally interpreted as “heal the world.”²⁰ This leads to claims of pre-Zionist Jewish innocence, and that Zionism is actually assimilation to Christian values. He finds the term “Jewish prophetic” much over-used, a “flag of convenience” which becomes an “ideological and even racial construct.”²¹ Despite all this “diasporist ideas with all their problems are a motivating force for Jewish Israel-critical groups.”

Landy’s third chapter, “The Jewish field and its dissidents,” discusses “community” in the traditional “sense of community as a small-scale, organic, bounded arena.”²² Landy accepts today’s Jewish self-definition as “ethnic” even as he finds “ethnicity” a problematic concept, and finds Jews among the least “ethnic” in their societies. He refers to a “religiously linked ethnicity,” a “religio-cultural concept called Jewishness.”²³ He seeks to account for the power and patronage in organized Jewish life, and recalls Bourdieu’s notion of “field” in order to avoid making “assumptions about its authenticity or normativity.”

From this ambiguous foundation, Landy surveys the Jewish field, or fields. With national variations, he finds the inexorable forces of liberal society at work, and enduring Zionist allegiance, despite criticism. Jewish populations are declining more or less from assimilation and exogamy, with secular disaffiliation from religion, from communal organizations, and from other Jews. In religion, the center is outflanked by traditional Orthodoxy, syncretism of liberal Reform and Christianity, and non-denominational spirituality. A diasporist culture of “‘new forms of synagogue…festivals, books and films’” accompanies alienation from, and criticism of, Israel most strongly among the young. Yet “disillusion and disidentification” can lead “to withdrawal,” not change.²⁴ In Britain, it “is not true that most Jews aren’t ‘really’ Zionist.”²⁵ In the US, an “ageing Zionist leadership” still controls a “robust institutional framework.²⁶ However, former points of unity, Israel and Holocaust, are now points of dissension, allowing “Israel-critical movements” to arise in the “Jewish field.”

Landy surveys these movements, since the second (al-Aqsa) intifada began in September, 2000. In Britain, the conventional Jewish Israel-critical strategy of “reach[ing] out to the community” failed, being depicted as “one-sided,” which confirms “the success of Jewish communal controls at repressing dissent.”²⁷  Overall, the events of the past decade have radicalized the Israel-critical groups within the Jewish field, and institutionalized them in the general movement, following en bloc the Jewish individuals omitted from his study. Landy finds in the US “the most dynamic national Israel-critical Jewish movement.²⁸ Landy notes the limitations of J Street’s “community-based criticism,” and the past “pusillanimous position” on BDS of Jewish Voice for Peace.²⁹

Landy’s fourth chapter, “Activists between the universal and the community,” discusses the emergence of Israel-critical Jewish activists. “In the USA, this process of coming out against the Occupation or against Israel has been compared to, and sometimes experienced as more difficult than, coming out gay or lesbian.”³⁰ Human rights discourse is useful against Zionists, but also has “decontextualizing qualities” which undercut “the political aims of oppressed peoples and their struggles.³¹ Activists often adopt a position of “strategic Jewishness” and may even experience a “return to Judaism. ³² Most agree that “community is the locus of Jewishness” and it thus follows that interventions “should be done with respect.³³ Ultimately, “engagement with the community constrains as well as enables Israel-critical activism.”³⁴ Landy’s last two chapters seek to reconcile this tension.

In “The terrain of activism,” Landy acknowledges charges that Jewish Israel-critical groups want mainly to “feel good about themselves…or ‘heal the Jews’…rather than affect the outside world,” are perhaps “backdoor Zionists” or otherwise act in “bad faith.”³⁵ Landy argues that their concern is to be effective, and offers the debate over BDS (boycott/divestment/sanctions) as an example. Groups that feel that a reformed “community” can help Palestinians find boycott ineffective, for the opposition it arouses, while those who view the community as less important than the larger world find it successful and useful. Landy does not dispel suspicion of the opponents, who apparently oppose a broader, non-Jewish movement like that against apartheid South Africa.

A common view is that Jewish criticism of Israel discourages anti-semitism, but one activist questioned its importance in the Palestine solidarity movement. In support of one who did not, Landy could only cite Israeli ex-patriate jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, for comparing US organized Jewry to the Elders of Zion.³⁶ Atzmon was in good company, with comedian Jon Stewart, the late Israeli academic and activist Tanya Reinhart, and veteran Israeli politico Uri Avnery.³⁷ A related view is that speaking “as a Jew” breaks the link between Jews and Zionism. Landy notes that this can also “strengthen the idea of a primordial link” and make Jews “gatekeepers” of criticism, but in the end accepts such ploys. The view of one interviewee that “solidarity with Palestinians has to be taken out of that [Jewish] ghetto” is an outlier.³⁸

Landy’s final chapter is “Rooted cosmopolitans: participants and Palestinians.” His activists have adopted this position “to counter the characterization of an actor as being a rootless cosmopolitan,” with no “real stake in the local [Jewish] field and therefore…of no relevance.”³⁹ Landy’s concern is that this self-conception “leads to a lack of contact and denial of political subjectivity of Palestinians” which “hampers movement effectiveness in achieving change.⁴⁰ Landy argues that relating to Palestinians is a general problem for the Palestine solidarity movement; his chief example is western feminist criticism of Palestinian men and women.

Jewish activists have special difficulties. Some are jolted by political trips. “‘I felt bad for being so concerned with my own Jewishness…Here that concern feels selfishly stupid. The people of Gaza are persecuted. Full stop.’⁴¹ Jewish groups, however, are limited by heavy reliance on Israeli interlocutors, and their desire to appeal to Jewish diaspora public. They tend to cast Palestinians as victims without agency and in need of charity, even as they deprecate solidarity groups as uncritical.

Landy errs in chapter two when he labels Deutscher a “Eurocentric” who replayed “the Zionist-Bundist debates of his youth.”⁴² Deutscher was a Communist, never a Bundist, and implicitly shared the Palestine Communist Party’s struggle against Zionism and British imperialism in the 1930s. The international PCP was torn apart in 1943 by the rising Arab-Jewish struggle over Palestine; after the war Deutscher accepted Israel, but did not consider himself a Zionist, and was acutely critical until his death shortly after the June 1967 war. Landy also overlooks classical Reform Judaism’s strictly religious version of the “Jewish prophetic,” and Marc Ellis’s religious notion of exile, though he is surely correct about their secular misappropriation. While tikkun olam is now interpreted as a call for social justice, it began as a prescription for social order.⁴³

Landy is correct to qualify today’s Jewish “ethnic” self-description. A century ago, many cities in western Europe and North America had districts where life was scarcely distinguishable from cities in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. No amount of academic theorizing about ethnicity can equate Yiddish immigrant society and contemporary “Jewish identity.” A more fruitful branch of social theory is race theory, in the modern sense of race; e.g., “whiteness,” as a social construction.⁴⁴  Few social artifacts today are more wilfully and assiduously constructed than “Jewish identity,” beginning with Zionism.

Zionism is not “Jewish nationalism.” That term is reserved for political movements which arose in Jewish quasi-national conditions in the Pale of Settlement, where Jews spoke Yiddish, and were a high plurality, especially in the cities. Such movements included the socialist Bund, and the bourgeois Autonomist movement. Zionism, which proclaimed a “people” speaking a vernacular language that did not exist, in a land they did not inhabit, a people descended from biblical “history,” a people alien to their societies, no matter how acculturated or assimilated, is not nationalism, but race doctrine. “Because it defines Jew not by religious observance, language, place of birth, or culture, but by descent, Zionism is an ideology of race.”⁴⁵ Unsurprisingly, the biblical studies, archaeology and historiography that purport to show a “Jewish people” have been totally demolished.⁴⁶  In modern terms, the “Jewish” national group in Palestine can only be Israeli Hebrew, potentially a secular nationality open to all, as Boas Evron argued in Jewish State or Israeli Nation in 1986.⁴⁷

Diaspora Zionism, the “Zionism of Jewish peoplehood,” is also race doctrine, ipso facto, no less wilfully and assiduously constructed.

We Jews form a unique entity, neither wholly a nation, nor wholly a religion, though part of us share a common faith, and all of us derive from that faith. We are a group without a common language, and with little that binds us as a common culture. What makes us a group today? It is our international character and concern; we are men and women who care deeply about what happens to Jews throughout the world. It is our historical heritage; we are men and women who together come from somewhere. It is our destiny; we are men and women who share a common fate…We are made a group…by our fathers and mothers and theirs, who constituted a people on earth, and who brought us into the world to carry on the existence of that people.⁴⁸

Obviously, the racial construction of “Jewishness” excludes personal and family history. In principle it also excludes Judaism, the academic study of Jewish and Judaic subjects, and cultural and philanthropic activity. Racism begins when such activities are undertaken in the name of the Jewish people, in support of its social and political claims, or when such claims are opposed in the privileged terms of Jewish identity politics. This critique is immanent in Landy’s strained attribution of Jewish “ethnicity” to contemporary diaspora Jews, and in his critique of Jewish identity politics as, essentially, a regime of privilege. He cites one description of “ethnic community” as “an ideological claim: ‘a categorical identity that is premised on various forms of exclusion and construction of otherness.’”⁴⁹

The left Jewish field in the US maintains its own doxa and illusio, some that Landy criticizes and some he misses, as shown by the views of Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest US group. JVP’s web site states that “Jewish ethics guide us to a belief that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs are of equal importance and deserve equal rights; members are inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice.”⁵⁰ The group has a new rabbinical council, but does not identify itself as religious. Landy criticizes this self-attribution of the universal on several grounds. One must add that in modern terms there is only Judaic religion, or secular citizenship; accepting secular “Jewish ethics” and “progressive Jewish tradition” as more than personal allusion and illusion, as collective social traits, lets identity politicians turn Jewish identity into a universal category, and claim identity prejudices as civil rights.

JVP claims that “[b]ecause we are Jews, we have a particular legitimacy in voicing an alternative view.” Moreover, “Israel claims to be acting in the name of the Jewish people, and it is up to us to make sure the world knows that many of us are opposed to their actions.”⁵¹ In Landy’s terms this “‘queers’ Jewish identity” from the Zionist norm, “enabling others to speak [critically] about Israel/Palestine.”⁵² He acknowledges that “such practices can strengthen the idea of a primordial link between Jews and the Jewish state…whether…through criticism or through support.” ⁵³ For JVP it makes “the community” the normative locus.

While Landy testifies to the Zionist obduracy of the Jewish field in Britain, and Esther Kaplan states that “no effort tough enough to overpower that [Israeli] government’s belligerence will ever emerge from the American Jewish community,” JVP national director Rebecca Vilkomerson states: “We are trying to create a space in the Jewish world where we can express our criticism as Jews without needing to apologize for ourselves.”⁵⁴ Deputy director Cecilie Surasky seems anguished most of all by the hostility of official Jewry. “‘It’s very painful to do this work and it’s very hard…I do not use the word McCarthyite lightly.’” “Jewish organizations in San Francisco have ‘banned us [JVP] from the Jewish public square.’”⁵⁵

JVP pursues a Potemkin politics of “Jewish debate,” notably by organizing debates on BDS, with interlocutors who advocate arming and funding and supporting Israel politically to the hilt. J Street, the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobby, advocates “maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge” as “an important anchor for a peace process” along with “robust US foreign aid to Israel”.⁵⁶ JVP debated BDS with J Street at Princeton University, in defense of a campus BDS measure.⁵⁷ A second debate was organized at J Street’s annual meeting in 2010, for the express purpose of discrediting JVP.⁵⁸ A debate in Boston pitted Vilkomerson against a liberal hypocrite and a neoconservative, the range of Jewish communal opinion.⁵⁹ JVP’s first attempt was to invite the Jewish Federation of San Francisco to debate; naturally the Federation didn’t show.⁶⁰ This activity is like asking Murder, Inc. to plead guilty to manslaughter, when it commits first degree homicide with impunity. Posing the real question—should Israel be coerced by withholding US support—would reveal communal obduracy and dispel the illusion that it can be reformed.

Another disadvantage of Jewish sanction of criticism of Israel, according to Landy, is that it can lead to Jews determining what is and is not acceptable. Landy claims that activists “are alive to the problem of becoming ‘certifying authorities.’⁶¹ Again, JVP seems to regard this not as a problem, but an opportunity. On the origins of US policy, JVP states:

“Interest groups within the United States, such as the Christian Zionist lobby, the arms and aerospace industry lobbies, and right-leaning Jewish organizations, have a vested interest in maintaining the Occupation.”⁶²

This is narrowly true, but very misleading. Israel exists today because the nascent Zionist lobby captured US policy 1944-48 and secured official patronage for a Jewish state, over the opposition of the military and diplomatic establishments, and amidst elite concern that national security was being affected by partisan politics.⁶³ Today’s fundamentalist Christian supporters of Israel were far over the horizon, and US arms sales to Israel were proscribed.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, call Christian Zionists a “an important ‘junior partner’” for whom Israel is not the sole or most important issue, and who do not have the lobbying ability, policy analysis and financial resources of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.⁶⁴ Nor are Christian evangelicals united behind Israel. A film for this audience, With God on Our Side, looks “at the consequences Christian Zionism has on the local people in the Middle East, especially the Palestinians,” and leads thoughtful Christians “to question some of the things they had always just taken for granted.”⁶⁵ Mearsheimer and Walt also show that US military aid is designed to benefit Israel, often to the detriment of US arms manufacturers.⁶⁶ They further note that “American Jews are the lobby’s predominant constituency.”⁶⁷ All organizations represented in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations strongly support the present US-Israel relationship, including arms sales, making all of them “right-wing.”

JVP’s constrained view of history is abetted by its “core principles,” including “human rights, and respect for international law.” Landy emphasizes the inadequacy of the rights and law discourse. “Palestinians need the right to seek redress within the framework of their loss, not futile demands by outsiders that their occupier acts illegally…‘a rights discourse entails the renunciation of the frame, the historical context.’”⁶⁸ That context is the conquest of Arab Palestine by Zionist Israel, now a century old. International law and human rights are important, but omitting Zionism is like describing the Nazi conquest of Poland and the Judeocide as violations of League of Nations collective security, and the minority rights clauses of the Versailles Treaty, without mentioning Nazism.

JVP’s liberalism does not include opposing Zionism. On Zionism, JVP only states that its “members hold a wide variety of views on many issues involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This diversity has been a great source of strength for JVP.”⁶⁹ It is also a source of confusion and ignorance. JVP’s “Israel-Palestine 101” material leads the reader carefully away from, not toward, insights like Boas Evron’s noted above, away from any fundamental critique of Zionism. One “primer” states: “Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, is a modern political movement. Its core beliefs are that all Jews constitute one nation (not simply a religious or ethnic community) and that the only solution to anti-Semitism is the concentration of as many Jews as possible in Palestine/Israel and the establishment of a Jewish state there.⁷⁰ The innocuous claim of “modernity” contradicts the common view of Zionism as reactionary and pre-modern because it opposes assimilation and integration of Jews. JVP accepts secular Jewish identity, and accepts Zionism as a “solution to anti-Semitism.” Yet that secular identity was also upheld by racialist anti-semitism, of which Zionism was a fraternal twin, a role which included major cooperation with Nazism.

Zionism’s antithesis, liberal society, has proven the overwhelmingly successful “solution to anti-Semitism,” but that doesn’t interest the authors, Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, American academics in Middle East Studies. They present Zionist and Arab claims to Palestine as if they cannot be adjudicated. Zionist claims are based “on the biblical promise to Abraham and his descendants” and “on the fact that this was the historical site of the Jewish kingdom of Israel.” Arab claims are based on “continuous residence in the country for hundreds of years, and the fact that they represented the demographic majority.” They note that Arabs “reject the notion that a biblical-era kingdom constitutes the basis for a valid modern claim,” as if this were a partisan view, not international law and common sense.

Beinin and Hajjar argue that Jews needed “a haven from European anti-Semitism,” as if a Jewish state in Palestine would obviously and necessarily have prevented the Judeocide. The great majority of Jews in Germany and Austria managed to emigrate before war began.⁷¹ Most European Jews were not in Germany, but in Poland. One historian has estimated that “had the gates of Palestine been open in the 1930s…[i]nstead of 140,000 Polish olim during the entire [interwar] period, there would perhaps have been half a million who went to Palestine. (To be sure, even that figure would not have solved the Jewish question in Poland.)”⁷² Had the Nazis conquered Palestine, it would have been a death trap, not a refuge. The Judeocide happened because Hitler and Nazi Germany committed it, not because there was no Jewish state; the Zionist movement in any case always subordinated rescue of Jews to its political aims in Palestine.

Beinin and Hajjar acknowledge Orthodox religious anti-Zionism, but cannot name liberal, secular anti-Zionism. “Some Jews…opposed Zionism out of concern that their own position and rights as citizens in their countries would be at risk if Jews were recognized as a distinct national (as opposed to religious) group.” For Beinin and Hajjar liberalism was apparently only an obstacle to Jewish collective destiny, not a positive program. Overall, their “primer” concedes most of the critical history of Zionism in Palestine, while defending Zionism in subtle and unsubtle ways.

Even as Israel commits genocide and foments wars, it demands recognition as the state of the Jewish people. Rejecting Zionism, not merely “the occupation,” as bellicose racialism, is a moral imperative, not a debating point. A sovereign Jewish state in Arab Palestine is inherently violent and unnatural, as the record amply shows. Full peace will arrive only when the Israeli Hebrews become another minority in the Arab and Muslim world. The historic Jewish communities would naturally revive, and Hebrew Palestine would become a source of Jewish tradition, and of cosmopolitan detachment, for the Islamic world. That is the only moral future for Zionism, whatever the path.

The “strategic asset” view of the US-Israel relationship is a staple in left Jewish thought, as developed by Beinin and others.⁷³ The “asset” view, which denies or deprecates the relationship between US policy and organized US Jewry, is the most important example of the gatekeeper effect noted by Landy, the most important question of all, and must be considered at length. Mearsheimer and Walt deprecate Israel’s “asset value” even during the Cold War; Walt states that Israel has been a strategic nemesis, an instrument of imperial decline, from the 1990-1 Gulf War to today.⁷⁴ Israel’s US supporters were a decisive factor in the 1991 Gulf War. Israel had traditionally cultivated Iran against the Arab states, in its “periphery” doctrine, which did not change after the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979. During the Iran-Iraq war, Israel’s US supporters tried assiduously to orient US policy against Iraq, most conspicuously in the Iran-contra affair. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the congressional war vote—52 to 47 in the Senate, 250 to 183 in the House—was the closest since the War of 1812, amidst dire predictions of casualties, and deprecation of war aims.⁷⁵ “Some of the ten Democrats in the Senate and eight-six in the House who supported the use-of-force resolution did so because of their overriding concern for the fate of Israel.”⁷⁶ The ultras, chiefly Jewish neoconservatives, argued for attacking Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but were frustrated when Bush limited the campaign to expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was elaborated in a 1996 study, “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” published by an Israeli think-tank, but written by US neoconservatives for the new Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.⁷⁷ The replacement of Saddam Hussein’s regime by a Hashemite monarchy was proposed, as part of a broad assault on Israel’s “enemies,” including Hizbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

When Clean Break was written, Iran had surpassed Iraq in Israel’s demonology. The US policy of “dual containment” of Iran and Iraq was an incentive for Israel to participate in the Oslo “peace process.”⁷⁸  Crippling sanctions were imposed on Iraq, over the opposition of the US oil companies.⁷⁹  US-Iran trade of $5 billion was first banned by executive order, then prohibited outright by legislation. Business interests protested vehemently and later organized unsuccessfully against the legislation.⁸⁰ Several Clean Break authors became part of the George W. Bush administration, making it then “a policy manifesto for the Israeli government penned by members of the current U.S. government.⁸¹ Afghanistan was targeted immediately after 9/11, but the invasion of Iraq followed in March, 2003, accompanied by fabrications about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and a connection with al-Qaeda.

The 9/11 attacks themselves were directed above all against US patronage of Israel. The “notion of payback for injustices suffered by Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden’s speeches.”⁸² Bin Laden’s concern for Palestine is attested by statements from his mother about his teenage years; by accounts after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization, and intimidate Palestinians in the occupied territories; and from his first public political statement in 1994. “Speaking just before the 2004 presidential elections, bin Laden himself voiced amazement that Americans, deceived, he supposed, by their government, had yet to understand that he had struck America because ‘things just went too far with the American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our people.’”⁸³ The perpetrators of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center garage, which killed 6, shared that view.⁸⁴

Israel’s long march to war on Iran is the ultimate strategic nemesis, a nightmare from which we cannot seem to awaken. AIPAC forced renewal of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act in March 2001, over strenuous objection by business interests. Iran provided vital cooperation during the US attack on Afghanistan in late 2001, but the ultras spurned further contacts. After the US crushed Iraq in the spring of 2003, Iran proposed, through Swiss auspices, an extraordinary “grand bargain” of critical concessions, in return for improved relations, which the ultras also spurned. The ultras have also thwarted US “realist” initiatives, such as a 2004 study by the Council on Foreign Relations urging dialogue with Iran; the 2006 Iraq Study Group proposal of a gradual US withdrawal from Iraq, in consultation with Syria and Iran; and the December, 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus of the 16 US intelligence agencies, which deprecated Iran’s nuclear potential.

The ultras’ relentless campaign against Iran informs US policy in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. The “major domestic supporters of an accelerated war in Afghanistan are the neoconservatives,” wrote Stephen Sniegoski in 2009. Stabilizing Afghanistan “would involve broadening Iran’s role in Afghanistan” making it “virtually impossible for the US to treat it as an enemy.⁸⁵ The ultras “will be advocating a hard-line interventionist position towards Libya, in large part, because they see that such an endeavor can facilitate U.S. military intervention in Iran.”⁸⁶  The US is presently attempting to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, ally of Iran and patron of Hizbollah in Lebanon, by exploiting popular protest. Manifestos such as “Which Path to Persia?” and “Toward a Post-Assad Syria,” from many of the Clean Break authors, prepare the way.⁸⁷ Recent history is following 1982 proposals by Israeli strategist Oden Yinon to balkanize the entire Arab world into ethnic and religious statelets which Israel could easily dominate. Such ideas long predate Yinon’s article in Zionist thought.⁸⁸

The Iran campaign has entered a more ominous phase. AIPAC legislated sanctions on foreign firms dealing with Iran’s central bank, a requirement in oil sales.⁸⁹  Iran threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, and held naval exercises.⁹⁰ Trita Parsi warns that the “temperature between the West and Iran has increased dramatically…military confrontation is a rising probability.”⁹¹ Iran has become an issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, while Netanyahu, US neoconservatives and GOP elements are plotting to prevent Obama’s re-election.⁹² Roger Cohen in the New York Timeswarned Netanyahu against attacking Iran to influence the election.⁹³  The US has cancelled military exercises with Israel and has warned Netanyahu against an attack.⁹⁴  Israel insists that any attack is “far off,” and things are hanging fire more precariously.⁹⁵

In the vulgar Marxism favored by the Jewish left, this is all a capitalist master plan to seize “oil” and “resources.” Yet the capitalists, including the oil industry, opposed sanctions; indeed the ultras vilify business for selling out Israel. Capitalism requires access, not sanctions, and enough peace for trade and investment. Politics and ideology are separate domains from economics, and capitalism is a protean system that can exist under different regimes. Capitalist Germany had interests in eastern Europe under the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic during the Cold War, and in the unified Federal Republic of today. The Nazi period, and the invasion of the USSR, resulted not from a sudden interest in Russian oil and wheat, but because German elites embraced a dictatorship and its fanatical ideology, which led them to total war and genocide.

Zionism is playing that role for the US today; it is turning western Asia into the “eastern front” of the US empire, comparable to the eastern front of the Third Reich. Like the Nazi crusade against “Judeobolshevism” and the Judeocide, the US eastern front is the site of our most depraved ideologies and deeds—Islamophobia, the “war on terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” crushing attacks on Arab societies, beginning with Palestine, with more horrors threatening daily. As the 1930s wore on, Hitler consolidated his rule, outflanking elite conservatives. The struggle between the ultras and the realists over US foreign policy is like the struggle between Nazis and non-Nazi conservatives in the 1930s; it cannot be said that today’s realists are winning. The Zionist agenda of total war, which includes 9/11 and its disastrous blow to civil liberties, is the essential axis of the emerging US dictatorship.

Obviously, Israel did not invent the US empire and its military Moloch, which gave Osama bin Laden his start against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The empire also overthrew the elected government of Iran and installed the Shah in 1953, which led to the Islamic revolution 26 years later. Nor has Israel invented the rivalry of Iran and the Arab Gulf states, or the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, or Arab monarchies, or other features of regional politics. However, Israel’s anti-gentile racialism, its boundless irredentism, and its overwhelming influence on the US government, have turned normal politics into an existential crisis, and national interest into an endless war for existence, with pyrrhic victories for winners and total destruction for losers.

Against this world-historical catastrophe, JVP offers ahistorical legalism and anti-occupation; strategic asset; and—the last refuge of the scoundrel on this topic—anti-anti-Semitism. “As Jews, we can make the distinction between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue to shield Israel from legitimate criticism. [A]s long as even legitimate criticism of Israel is blocked by accusations of anti-Semitism, it is the responsibility of Jews to stand up for universal justice. [W]e also believe that actual anti-Semitism is alive and well and is mostly misunderstood both on the left and in the mainstream.”

JVP publishes an anti-anti-Semitism manifesto, its contribution to a literary genre on the Jewish left.⁹⁶

Reframing Anti-Semitism begins by discussing “the Holocaust” as the cardinal event in Jewish history and Jewish consciousness. “Holocaust” means “burnt offering,” as in a religious sacrifice; historians prefer non-emotional, descriptive terms such as “Judeocide.”⁹⁷ JVP has no interest in criticism like that of Marc Ellis, who discusses the “Holocaust and redemption” syndrome long used to defend Zionism, or of Norman Finkelstein, who describes how a rich “Holocaust industry” shakes down governments and financial institutions. JVP has its own use, to define “illegitimate” and “legitimate criticism of Israel,” and to trivialize and caricature claims of Zionist influence as “Jewish conspiracy theories,” and thus prima facie evidence of “anti-semitism on the left.” For US policy, JVP adduces the usual alternate suspects, Christian Zionism and the arms industry, and tragicomically compares the Jewish role to that of medieval Jews who were channeled into exploiting the peasantry while serving landowners and nobility.

One article charges the Allies with responsibility for the Final Solution for focusing on defeating the Nazis instead of saving Jews, as if there were a choice. “Arguably, the decision to do nothing else to save the victims’ lives can be seen as culpability akin to violence.”⁹⁸ Historian William Rubinstein, in The Myth of Rescue, doubts that more Jews could have been saved “by any action which the Allies could have taken at the time, given what was actually known about the Holocaust, what was actually proposed at the time, and what was realistically possible.”⁹⁹ He implies that the “failure to rescue” critique mainly expresses Jewish chauvinism after the June, 1967 war. “This great and profound change in the perception of the Allies and their leaders arose fairly abruptly between the late 1960s and mid-1980s.”¹⁰⁰ Rubinstein also reviews immigration policy and anti-Semitism in the democracies in the 1930s.

The JVP writers in Reframing Anti-Semitism generally concede that Jews live freely today, but still find pervasive anti-semitism in subtle and unique forms, and find it perpetually immanent in gentile attitudes. JVP holds an essentialist view of gentiles as inalienable anti-Semites, actual or potential, which is the inverse of anti-Semitic essentialism about Jews. Two thoughtful articles attempt to deal with Jewish chauvinism, in limited ways.

Rightward of JVP, the liberal temper is shown by the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” J Street, fulsome funders and armourers of Israel. Another example is Peter Beinart, whose widely cited 2010 article denounced “the failure of the Jewish establishment” to preserve “humane universalistic Zionism.”¹⁰¹  Beinart warned of the disaffection of young, liberal American Jews, and of the future domination of communal life by the blindly pro-Israel Orthodox. The “humane univeralist Zionism” has never existed, and pro-Israel fanaticism arrived long ago, seen today in the Iran war drive and the plotting of Obama’s defeat. Beinart is a step back from the late Tony Judt, who called for a unitary democratic state nearly a decade ago.¹⁰²  The danger is not anti-Semitism but the opposite, overweening Jewish power and confidence, which make the US-Israel relationship immutable.

JVP’s outlook expresses maximum Jewish advantage and minimum Jewish obligation, a lawyerly plea bargain on behalf of Jewish identity. This is due to an exaggerated sense of Jewish entitlements, and to anti-gentilism. Philip Weiss, co-editor of the influential web site Mondoweiss, has written candidly about the Jewishness of today’s establishment, about the anti-gentilism of his upbringing, and about anti-gentilism in the left. The “bastards, the goyim in power, they always received the full measure of our scorn…the bastards had unbroken pedigree in my family’s cultural/political memory from Coolidge to Hoover to Dulles to Eisenhower to Nixon to Reagan, right on up to the Bushes and the Koch brothers. These were the real powers in political life; and I think there is some bastard-ism in Chomsky’s analysis and in the New Yorker magazine’s.” Yet: “We are wealthy and privileged in America…we are not excluded from the real sources of power. To believe otherwise is a piece of nostalgic self-service.”¹⁰³

Anti-gentilism encourages the idea that gentile criticism is, or must inevitably be, about more than Israel. Endless repetition of the truism that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israelmakes anti-Semitism the overriding concern, and conceals the mortal dangers of Zionism, come what may in Palestine, in the Gulf, in Washington, or on 9/11. JVP’s “Muzzlewatch” web site seeks to expose “pressure, intimidation, and outright censorship of critics of US-Israeli policy,” anodyne terms for fanatical attacks like those on 11th-grader Jesse Lieberfeld for his prize-winning essay criticizing Israel.¹⁰⁴  Perhaps the fact that they are Jewish, and are also directed at gentiles, prevents JVP from calling such attacks Jewish racism. Racism is instead reserved for gentile attacks on Jews.

Landy speaks of his UK subjects “‘queering’ Jewish identity.” JVP claims that “[b]ecause we are Jews, we have a particular legitimacy in voicing an alternative view,” and affirms the “responsibility of Jews to stand up for universal justice.” This accepts Zionist essentialism about “Jews.” Secular “Jewish identity” cannot be “queered” from the outside, nor can it be the basis for “universal justice,” because it is a Zionist invention, based on anti-gentilism. For Ahad Ha’am, one of its chief inventors a century ago, “assimilation, not antisemitism…threatened the Jewish people most compellingly.”¹⁰⁵ Thus Ahad Ha’am disowned one of his daughters when she married a gentile, despite the husband’s conversion, since “for nonreligious Jews like himself…‘a goy remains a goy’” who could not “‘change [by his conversion] his soul from within.’”¹⁰⁶ “The State has no daughters,’” Ahad Ha’am said sternly, and saw his daughter once in the remaining 15 years of his life.¹⁰⁷

Freedom is absolute and normative, not Jewish identity. The possible disappearance of the group through assimilation is a trifling price to pay for freedom and its benefits. While “Jewish Israel-critical activity” may have a role in assisting people of Jewish background to understand Israel and Zionism, mature awareness, and general public awareness, cannot be so limited. “Universal justice” cannot be achieved on Jewish terms, but only with the rest of humanity. JVP members should declare that Zionism has no claim on Jewish identity or gentile conscience, proclaim themselves liberal citizens, and join their fellow citizens in opposing Zionism, in the US and Palestine. Any Jewish Israel-critical activity must be subordinated to that. Any hypothetical anti-Semitism can be opposed only in concert with others, not by Jewish separatism. Precedents are the people in Landy’s study who work in “society-wide groups” and “the New York activist group JATO [Jews Against the Occupation]” which “now exists more or less as a paper organization, since many members have joined Adalah-NY, the wider boycott organization in New York.¹⁰⁸

The chief concern of US citizens must be the US-Israel relationship and its arming, funding and political support of Israel. BDS is adopted because the formal political process is owned by the “Israel lobby,” which precludes coercing Israel by reducing US support. A narrow legal focus on particular actions and companies may sometimes be useful in pressing BDS, but asking “who profits from the occupation” implies that profits of Motorola and the like are driving US policy. This is naive if not deliberate obfuscation. Broader BDS campaigns like cultural and academic boycott can stigmatize Israel, and US support for it, like apartheid South Africa. Whatever the approach, reliance on BDS cannot obscure the fact of US support for Israel and its sources.

The Washington-based US Campaign to End the Occupation says nothing about Zionism. It has never organized a demonstration against the annual AIPAC meeting, which the president and most of Congress attend, though it did showcase a small Jewish demonstration. This is due to the “strategic asset” and anti-anti-Semitism dogmas of JVP, which has shared personnel with the Campaign. It was up to scrappy Code Pink to organize Move Over AIPAC in 2011, which the Campaign, and JVP and others “endorsed” but did little about, except to oppose Helen Thomas’s presence.¹⁰⁹  Code Pink is organizing Occupy AIPAC in early March.¹¹⁰. Every year energetic and courageous campus activists organize “Israeli Apartheid Week,” which dramatizes the facts on the ground. Showing their origins requires Anti-Zionism Week.

Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, insist that the “Israel lobby” is just another interest group doing its job, when Grant Smith has shown that it has always operated on the margins of legality.¹¹¹ Mearsheimer and Walt accept Israel as a Jewish state, rather than discussing it as racist.¹¹² These emphases reflect in part their total lack of support from elsewhere in the culture, notably the left.

The tentativeness and limitations of criticism of Israel in the US show that a general movement against Zionism is the only way of even addressing the issues and marshaling such resources as we have.

Today, Jewish identity is made to seem as timeless and monumental as the Grand Canyon, but it is really a big sand dune blown up by chauvinist winds since 1967. In the 1940s, American Jews rallied to the Zionist call, established the state of Israel—and that was that. Ant-Semitism declined rapidly, and Jews began to enjoy their just desserts in liberal society. Holocaust and Israel were not the complexes they later became. Three historians of US Jewry have called the two postwar decades a “golden age.”¹¹³

The New Left, which began in the late 1950s, had many Jewish members, though not a majority. Nonetheless, “Jewish issues in these years…were publicly invisible.”¹¹⁴ Anti-Semitism was not a concern, Jews were prosperous, and Israel was neither threatened nor threatening. “The New Left was the most ‘American’ movement since the early Socialist party at around the turn of the century…made up almost entirely of native-born Americans,” and “also more American than its predecessors in terms of its ideology and dominant themes.”  This broad appeal was important to Jewish and non-Jewish members alike. Thus, like “their cosmopolitan Jewish predecessors in the pre-World War I Socialist party and in the student movement of the 1930s, the Jewish New Leftists did not desire to be tied to particularistic primordial groups and identities. They wanted instead to be part of a universalistic movement.”¹¹⁵ The contrast with today’s Jewish left could not be sharper, and compares unfavorably to the Jewish religious debate over the Judeocide in the 1960s and later.

One school in the debate held that the “‘Voice of Auschwitz… commands the survival of Jews and Judaism. Because Hitler was bent on the destruction of both, it is the duty of the Jews who survived Hitler to make sure that they do not do his work, that they do not, by assimilation, bring about the disappearance of what Hitler attempted, but ultimately failed to destroy.’”¹¹⁶ Another school ridiculed the substitution of “‘the commanding Voice of Auschwitz’ for the revelation of Sinai, and Hitler for Moses.”¹¹⁷ For this view, “‘the voices of the Prophets speak more loudly than Hitler,’” and “‘the divine promise sweeps over the crematoria and silences the voice of Auschwitz.’”¹¹⁸ “Jews find in the Holocaust no new definition of Jewish identity because we need none. Nothing has changed. The tradition endures.”¹¹⁹  The secular Jewish left in the US had no such debate and affirmation. The universalism of the New Left was swept away in a tsunami of identity politics, largely, if not entirely, due to the June, 1967 war.

At the same time, for older/non-American universalists, “the tradition endured.” Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Marxist, accepted Israel after World War II, but did not consider himself a Zionist. He died on August 19, 1967, a sharp critic of Israel and its role in the origins of the June war. Rabbi Elmer Berger, who co-led the American Council for Judaism in the 1940s, at age 60 in 1968, founded Jewish Alternatives to Zionism to continue the fight, and was resolute until his death in 1996. Maxime Rodinson, the French Marxist scholar of Near Eastern languages and sociologist of Islam, remained an acute critic of Zionism and Israel to his death in 2004.

Israel Shahak survived the Warsaw Ghetto, the Judeocide, Zionism and Israel, to discover what he called “the modern, secular Jewish tradition,” which he dated from Spinoza, the most rigorous of the 17th c. rationalist philosophers. He was a chemist at the Hebrew University and a leading human rights activist and critic of Zionism and Orthodox Judaism. The Israeli Socialist Organization, founded in 1962, attempted to rebuild internationalism from the wreckage of the 1940s. The ISO, known as Matzpen (compass) for its publication, included Arab members, and Matzpen had an Arabic edition which was, however, censored. Shahak and Matzpen came of age after the 1967 war, and put Israel’s occupation on the map from the Israeli side. Shahak died in 2001; senior Matzpen alumni are still active.

All these veteran universalists knew radical evil first hand, except for Berger, who was fortified by liberal upbringing and religious conviction. It never occurred to them that, once Nazism had been totally destroyed, they were threatened by gentiles. They expressly rejected Zionism, in terms of their respective outlooks; their criticism was generally more substantive and acute than the work of the American Jewish left, and richly repays study today.

In diametric contrast, the JVP school fails to confront Zionism, in Palestine or in the US. It invokes a chimerical, liberal Palestine Zionism, or buries the subject in ahistorical legalism and anti-occupation rhetoric. It conceals Jewish power in the US with the “strategic asset” dogma, or deprecates and dismisses it. This failure to oppose Zionism with its universalist antipodes is stupendous and unbelievable, comparable to the “treason of the intellectuals” described by Julien Benda in his 1927 book about the climate that preceded World War I.¹²⁰

Landy is well aware of the many problems of identity politics, but his UK focus makes him like a promising minor league pitcher, who must still face the major league sluggers. In the words of a pitcher who had all the moves:

What do you want with this particular suffering of the Jews? The poor victims on the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the Negroes in Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play a game of catch, are just as dear to me. Do you remember the words written on the work of the Great General Staff about Trotha’s campaign in the Kalahari desert? “And the death-rattles, the cries of those dying of thirst, faded away into the sublime silence of eternity.”

Oh, this “sublime silence of eternity” in which so many screams have faded away unheard. It rings within me so strongly that I have no special corner of my heart for the ghetto; I am at home wherever in the world there are clouds, bird and human tears.

— Rosa Luxemburg, writing to Mathilde Wurm, from jail in 1917.¹²¹

1. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier, eds., Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. xv-xvi.
2. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with Zion. Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 81.
3. ibid.
4. ibid., p. 82
5. ibid., p. 88
6. David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel, London: Zed Books, 2011
7. ibid., p. 6
8. ibid., p. 211
9. ibid., p. 5
10. ibid., p. 12
11. ibid., p. 21
12. ibid., p. 28, quoting Bourdieu
13. ibid, quoting Bourdieu
14. ibid., p. 29
15. ibid., pp. 31-2
16. ibid., pp. 44
17. ibid., p. 47
18. ibid., pp. 42, 47
19. ibid., p. 52
20. ibid., p. 53
21. ibid., p. 64
22. ibid., p. 66
23. ibid., p. 70
24. ibid., p. 85
25. ibid., p. 78, 80
26. ibid., p. 84, 85
27. ibid., p. 89
28. ibid., p. 103
29. ibid., p. 107, 110
30. ibid., p. 125
31. ibid., p. 138
32. ibid., pp. 140-1
33. ibid., pp. 144, 148
34. ibid., p. 148
35. ibid., p. 153-4
36. ibid., p. 167
37. Philip Weiss, “Jon Stewart Calls AIPAC ‘Elders of Zion’”,  June 6, 2008; Philip Weiss, “Late Tanya Reinhart Reportedly Likened Lobby to ‘Protocols of Elders of Zion’”, September 15, 2008; Uri Avnery, “The Charge of the New York Times”,  CounterPunch, July 22, 2011
38. Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 169
39. ibid., p. 198
40. ibid., p. 182
41. ibid., p. 191
42. ibid., p. 59
43. Jill Jacobs, “The History of ‘Tikkun Olam’”, Zeek. A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. June 2007.  Jacobs points out that the term also has antecedents in an intolerant passage about the true god in a common Jewish prayer.
44. See David W. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. Race and the Making of the American Working Class, New York: Verso, 1991
45. Noel Ignatiev, “Zionism,” Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (New York: Macmillan Press, 2007), pp. 240-44. See also EAFORD and AJAZ (International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism), Judaism or Zionism: What Difference for the Middle East?(London: Zed Books, 1986
46. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (New York: Verso, 2009); Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism. Myth, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (New York: Verso, 2008); Israel Finkelstein and Neil Ascherman, The Bible Unearthed. Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts,  New York: Free Press, 2001
47. Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). The Hebrew edition appeared in 1984.
48. Jacob Neusner, Stranger at Home. “The Holocaust,” Zionism and American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 135-6, Neusner, a distinguished Judaic scholar, is a loyal critic of the “people,” who considers himself “on the margins of the group.” His “Zionism of Jewish peoplehood” is descriptive, not prescriptive.
49. ibid., p. 67
50. JVP Mission Statement,”;   “Frequently Asked Questions,”
51. Jewish Voice for Peace, “Frequently Asked Questions,”
52. Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, pp. 17, 168.
53. ibid., p.167
54. Kaplan, “‘Globalize the Intifada’”, Wrestling with Zion, p. 88; Gal Beckerman, “JVP, Harsh Critic Of Israel, Seeks a Seat at the Communal Table But Its Refusal To Support ‘Two States’ Prevents Acceptance,” Jewish Daily Forward, April 13, 2011; see http://forward.com/articles/137016/#ixzz1evMmyIIu
55. Philip Weiss, “‘JVP’ takes on the ‘epic battle’ inside the Jewish community,” Mondoweiss, March 5, 2010;
56. “The U.S.-Israel relationship and foreign aid,”
57. Max Blumenthal, “A BDS Debate at Princeton, with J Street, JVP, and me (this Wednesday)”;
58. Max Blumenthal, “JVP’s Rebecca Vilkomerson debates for BDS at J Street’s annual convention,” March 1, 2011; Philip Weiss, “J Street says it invited boycott advocate to its conference so as to pillory her,” Mondoweiss, February 10, 2011; Phil tries to say that Ben-Ami was covering his right flank, but any organization that advocates “maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge” is the right flank.
59. Leah Burrows, “BDS backer in hot seat at shul forum,” Jewish Advocate (Boston), October 28, 2011 -  subscription only; Leonard Fein, who co-founded Moment magazine with Elie Wiesel, and Larry Lowenthal of the American Jewish Committee were the featured speakers. The AJC is a bastion of neo-conservatism, and Moment of liberal hypocrisy; also Fein’s columns
60. Cecile Surasky, “Omar Barghouti asks Jewish Federation to a debate on BDS,” March 4, 2010
61. ibid., p.166
62. ibid., Jewish Voice for Peace, ?
63. See Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On elite concern, see Walter Millis, with the collaboration of E. S. Duffield, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951), pp. 322, 344-46, 356-65
64. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 132-39
65. See the film’s web site;  Professor Stephen Walt introduced a showing of the film at Harvard and moderated a discussion afterward
66. ibid., pp. 31-4
67. ibid., p. 115
68. Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 138, quoting Raef Zureik
69. “Frequently Asked Questions,”
70. Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar, “Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. A Primer,” The authors are academics, Beinin a historian at Stanford and past president of the Middle East Studies Association, Hajjar a sociologist at UC Santa Barbara.
71. William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue. Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997); see Chapter 2, “The Myth of Closed Doors”
72. Ezra Mendelssohn, “Zionist Success and Zionist Failure,” in Ruth Kozodoy, David Sidorksy and Kalman Sultanik, eds., Vision Confronts Reality. Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Jewish Agenda (New York: Herzl Press, 1989), p. 205
73. Joel Beinin, “The United States-Israeli Alliance,” in Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with Zion. Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
74. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Chapter 2, “Israel: Strategic Asset or Liability?”; Stephen Walt, “When did the American empire start to decline?”
75. Geoffrey Wawro, Quicksand. America’s Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), pp. 405, 418-21; Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal. The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk, VA: Enigma Editions, 2008), pp. 62-3
76. Elizabeth Drew, “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, February 4, 1991
77. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies;
78. Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle. The Conflict Between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 261
79. Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal. The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (Norfolk, VA: Enigma Editions, 2008), pp. 335-6, part of Chapter 18, “Oil and Other Motives.”
80. Sasan Fayezmanesh, “The Politics of the U.S. Economic Sanctions against Iran”, Review of Radical Political Economics 35:3, Summer 2003, pp. 221-240
81. Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal, p. 90.
82. Max Rodenbeck, “Their Master’s Voice,” New York Review of Books, March 9, 2006.
83. Rodenbeck, “Their Master’s Voice”
84. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 65-5.
85. Stephen Sniegoski, “Afghanistan: Back Door to War on Iran,” September 7, 2009;   See also Stephen Sniegoski, “President Petraeus: The Neocons’ Choice,” July 14, 2010;  and  Stephen Sniegoski, “The Duel of the Machiavellians: Obama vs. Petraeus,” July 6, 2010
86. Stephen Sniegoski, “Neocons’ Goal: Iran by Way of Libya,” March 19, 2011
87. See “Which Path to Persia?” from the Haim Saban Center at the Brookings Institution; and and “Toward a Post-Assad Syria,” from the Foreign Policy Initiative
88. Oden Yinon, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” from Directions, a Journal for Judaism and Zionism, Issue 14, Winter 5742, February, 1982, translated by Israel Shahak;
89. See Philip Weiss, “AIPAC posterizes Obama in Senate, 100-0,”
90. David E. Sanger and Annie Lowrey, “Iran Threatens to Block Oil Shipments, as U.S. Prepares Sanctions,” New York Times, December 28, 2011
91. Trita Parsi, “Reckless talk of war with Iran makes confrontation a probability,” The Independent, January 7, 2012;
92. Max Blumenthal, “The Bibi Connection,” January 12, 2012
93. Roger Cohen, “Don’t Do It, Bibi,” January 16, 2012
94. Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe, “Obama Delays U.S.-Israeli War Exercise,” January 17, 2012
95. Isabel Kershner and Rick Gladstone, “Decision to Attack Iran Is ‘Far Off,’ Israel Says” New York Times, January 18, 2012
96. Henri Piccioto and Mitchell Plitnick, eds., Reframing Anti-Semitism. Alternative Jewish Perspectives,  San Francisco: Jewish Voice for Peace, 2004
97. Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, New York: Harper and Row, 1988
98. ibid., p. 75
99. William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue. Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997), p. x.
100. ibid., p. 2. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s demotion from Jewish hero to anti-semite was unjust, according to Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006
101. Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010; see also “‘The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment’: An Exchange,” June 24, 2010, Abraham H. Foxman, reply by Peter Beinart
102. Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003.  See also “An Alternative Future: An Exchange,” December 4, 2003, Amos Elon, Abraham H. Foxman, Michael Walzer, and Omer Bartov, reply by Tony Judt
103. Philip Weiss, “The Bastards,” April 27, 2011
104. Philip Weiss, “Jesse Lieberfeld is a, a fake, b, about to be swallowed by a whale, c, the Jewish future,” January 17, 2012
105. Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet. Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 80
106. ibid., p. 289
107. ibid., p. x
108. Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, p. 105
109. Harry Clark, “Move Over AIPAC”
110. See Occupy AIPAC
111. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 11-12. See the web site of the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy for Grant Smith’s writing, including articles and books based on documents unearthed with FOIA
112. ibid., p. 11
113. Arthur Goren, “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews, 1945-1955” in Peter Y. Medding, ed., A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. An Annual. VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), for the Institute for Contemporary Jewry, the Hebrew University; Goren cites on p. 3 a chapter in a work by Lucy Dawidowicz entitled, “The Golden Age in America,” referring to 1945-67. See also Chapter XVIII, “From Cold War to Belle Epoque,” in Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America, New York: Knopf, 1992.
114. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), p. 560. See the section “The New Left and Jewish Concerns,” in Chapter 9, “The New Left and the Jewish New Left in the 1960s and 1970s”
115. ibid., p. 561
116. Neusner, Stranger at Home, p. 73, citing a review of Emil Fackenheim by Michael Wyschogrod
117. ibid., p. 86
118. ibid., p. 77, quoting Wyschogrod.
119. ibid., p. 81
120. Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007). This book has been tendentiously misinterpreted by neoconservatives, and a recent reprint has an introduction by Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, but the book transcends such misuse.
121. Paul Le Blanc, ed., Rosa Luxemburg (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 19

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the double veto a “travesty”. Then Clinton duly incited “friends of democratic Syria” to keep working for regime change, which was the object of the resolution. The copyright for this idea is held by the liberator of Libya, neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said Paris was already working to create a NATOGCC “Friends of the Syrian People Group” in charge of implementing the Arab League’s regime change plan.

Right on cue, Paris puppet Burhan Ghalyun, the head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) – the opposition umbrella group – also summoned these countries “friendly to the Syrian people”. Everybody knows who they are; the US, Britain, France, Israel and GCC members Qatar and Saudi Arabia. With “friends” like these, the “Syrian people” certainly don’t need enemies.

Those ‘disgusting’ BRICS

United States ambassador to the UN Susan Rice – a top cheerleader of R2P, also known as humanitarian bombing – called the double veto “disgusting”.

Even the venerable stones of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus know that only Washington has the right to wield veto power at the UN – overwhelmingly to protect the state of Israel’s right to kill Palestinian men, women and children with tanks and shelling without bothering about pesky UN resolutions.¹

Russia, vocally – and China, silently – had been adamant for weeks; forget about a UN resolution for regime change in Syria, or worse yet, opening the doors for a Libya-style NATO humanitarian bombing.

Russia has its own geopolitical reasons to consider Syria a red line; Syria hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean, in the port of Tartus; and Syria buys Russian weapons. But, in fact, all the five BRICS – plus the overwhelmingly majority of the developing world – are in synch; forget about regime change-enabling UN resolutions, promoted by the usual suspect Western trio US-Britain-France and – the summit of hypocrisy – devised by the “democratic” House of Saud and Qatar.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be in Damascus this Tuesday to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and discuss a serious plan to try to end the bloodshed. Lavrov has calmly explained the reasons for the Russian veto.

He had sent Russian amendments to the draft resolution directly to Clinton; “The rationality and objectivity of these amendments should not cause anyone’s doubt.” But to no avail; the resolution remained “unilateral” – demanding nothing from Syrian anti-government armed groups. Lavrov stressed, “No president with self-respect, no matter how treated, will agree to surrender inhabited localities to armed extremists without resistance.” Imagine if Homs was in Texas.

Still, the SNC now holds Moscow and Beijing “responsible for the escalating acts of killing and genocide”, and facilitators of a “license to kill”. Lavrov is imperturbable; “We have repeatedly said that we are not protecting Assad but international law. The prerogative of the UN Security Council does not envision interference in internal processes.”

Homs: Who’s killing whom?

Syria’s UN ambassador Bashar Ja’afari strongly denied the opposition’s accusation of regime forces bombing the Khadiliya neighborhood in Homs with tanks and artillery and killing over 200 people – arguing that “no sensible person” would launch such an attack the night before the UN Security Council was discussing a resolution. Without any preliminary investigation, France called it a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity”. Like France’s performance during the Algerian war?

To understand what’s at stake, it’s crucial to keep in mind who’s defecting from the Syrian army. Syria’s top military – also members of the Ba’ath Party – are almost all Alawis, the folk Shi’ite sect (10% of the overall population). They are not defecting.

The defectors are overwhelmingly Sunni troops (70% of the overall population); they are forming militias, Libya-style, heavily infiltrated by mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, and fighting government troops. The government’s response has been to target the neighborhoods where the families of these defectors live. The center of Homs nowadays is controlled by the rebels.

So what’s really happening on the ground in Homs? Here are sections from a crucial e-mail sent by a trusted Syrian Christian source:

Many Syrians are ecstatic about the double veto but Homs is very worrying. The opposition spread news about a massacre just before the vote and they quoted numbers in the hundreds … unbelievably quoted by all news channels (all based on “activists”) without any verification, only to bring the number down to something like 33 later. They never showed any bombing or taking people under rubble or any injured people … just clean-bodied men with their hands and feet tied up and shot mostly once and only in their underwear. Whatever the Syrian government has in its arsenal it seems there are very intelligent bombs that can strip and tie up people then shoot them in the head!!

The thing that we know fully well is that there are no army presence in Homs. My parents left the city then came back Saturday morning on the day of the alleged massacre and there was nothing. They usually call a hotline (115) and ask if the roads are safe and security operator will tell you to come to Homs or not. This time they told them to come and indeed there was nothing to be seen or heard. This of course doesn’t mean that most of the city and particularly the old city is under the control of the gunmen. Our old neighborhood where I grew up (the Christian Bustan al-Diwan) was completely taken over by the gunmen. YouTube videos show how the FSA cleared the army roadblock in the previous neighborhood (Bab al-Dreib) and then proceeded to destroy the one guarding our neighborhood.

People in my neighborhood did not complain of any major harassment or problem, however the “revolutionaries” did indeed break into a couple of homes that their people left either days earlier or at the time, also into a school, Homs Newspaper (operated by the Orthodox church for more than 100 years) and a few other restaurants but no other complaints. I mean, considering what these FSA do to Alawites, then the Christians are really getting very fair treatment so far.

What many believe now is that the bodies shown tied up and shot in Khalidiya and which are alleged to be “men, women and children” killed by a bombardment of the Syrian army were nothing but kidnapped Syrian soldiers. Add to them kidnapped Alawites who were not liberated (or actually exchanged). When the FSA kidnap some people, Alawites started to kidnap in return to exchange the prisoners. This doesn’t always work and some people who weren’t “exchanged for” turned up dead in Khalidiya.

All in all up to this point there really isn’t any offensive by the Syrian army on the city. The rebels continue to attack other checkpoints. People are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs. It’s devastating for me to see my neighborhood become another battleground and many of my friends leaving.

All this dovetails with an explanation by fine journalist Nir Rosen, author of the indispensable Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World; Homs is essentially a question of rebels seizing government checkpoints – and government forces shelling a few neighborhoods with mortars. According to Rosen:

There was no fighting in Homs, just shelling from these safe locations (from the point of view of the regime), suggesting they are unable to actually attack Khalidiya with regime fighters … No opposition fighters were killed in the attack. And up to 130 people in Khaldiyeh were killed and 800 wounded (like I said not fighters). Now that’s a lot of people but if you were watching the news … you would think that Homs was destroyed while in fact this attack can also be seen as a sign of the regime’s weakness in the city.

Compare this with my Syrian source worried that “people are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs”.

Imagine an armed insurrection in a mid-sized city in the US; the whole world saw how peaceful Occupy Wall Street was dealt with by billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. The “disgusting” BRICS have made it clear; there will be no NATOGCC humanitarian bombing of Syria. But NATOGCC may be succeeding in its plan B: to plunge Syria into civil war.

• First published at Asia Times.

1. Here’s a partial summary of US vetoes at the UN

One of the aspects of journalism that we find particularly fascinating is the extent to which even the best, most honest, or most radical journalists can push back the mainstream walls enclosing media debate. How dissenting are they really permitted to be? And how might their presence in the media underpin the public’s perception of a “free press”?

As we noted in Newspeak in the 21st Century, the journalist Jonathan Cook addressed these points in an eye-opening reply to one of our media alerts. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer, agreed with us that the most consistently challenging voices are systematically filtered out of the mainstream. He asked:

How is it then, if this thesis is right, that there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?

But as Cook himself observed, this tiny group almost entirely exhausts the list of writers who can be said to confront the established consensus from a progressive perspective.

Cook continued:

That means that in Britain’s supposedly leftwing media we can find one writer working for the Independent (Fisk), one for the New Statesman (Pilger) and two for the Guardian (Milne and Monbiot). Only Fisk, we should further note, writes regular news reports. The rest are given at best weekly columns in which to express their opinions.

With the exception of Pilger, none of these journalists “choose, or are allowed, to write seriously about the dire state of the mainstream media they serve”. It is important, Cook added, that we recognise both the positive and negative roles these individuals play:

However grateful we should be to these dissident writers, their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s “leftwing” media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the “character” of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that a professional media is a diverse media.

Consider Seumas Milne, for example. Since September 2011, we have been trying to engage with him to debate these vital issues. Milne is a regular high-profile Guardian columnist and an associate editor of the paper. Indeed, he was the paper’s Comment editor at the time of the September 11 attacks, motivating his Guardian retrospective as the 10-year anniversary approached last year. (“9/11: A “babble of idiots”? History has been the judge of that”.)

The thrust of Milne’s proud boast was that the Guardian had bravely hosted a ‘‘full range of views” that had been “blanked” by most other media, attracting hostility and even vitriol from right-wing quarters. But this was a selective and conveniently self-serving assessment, closer to corporate marketing than honest accounting, as we put to him in an email two days later:

Hello Seumas,

Hope things are good with you. I thought your article on Monday was well-written and made good points. But it was also highly contentious in places and it can’t go unchallenged. I hope you’ll be willing to respond openly to this email, please.

You wrote that, following 9/11, the Guardian ‘comment pages hosted the full range of views the bulk of the media blanked; in other words, the paper gave rein to the pluralism that most media gatekeepers claim to favour in principle, but struggle to put into practice. And you said that you published “articles joining the dots to US imperial policy or opposing the US-British onslaught on Afghanistan”.

It may well be that you were able to do a better job of including voices of dissent than any other trusted pair of hands at the Guardian would have managed. But how many of these dissenting voices really ‘joined the dots’ in the way that Noam Chomsky does so well and so consistently? How many critical pieces in the Guardian portrayed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq accurately as wars of aggression, as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials? How many pointed out that Bush, Blair, senior government politicians and military commanders should, by those agreed standards, be tried for ‘the supreme international crime’? How many analysed the invasions and wars as an integral part of the West’s longstanding attempts at global control and subjugation of peoples and natural resources, consistent with the demands of corporate-led capitalism? How many joined the dots by examining the role of the corporate news media, including the BBC and the Guardian, in enabling these wars of aggression? How many questioned the core assumption promoted by Western states that ‘we’ are the ‘good guys’?

Perhaps you’d be able to point to a handful of such comment pieces. But sadly they were swamped by a deluge of news propaganda, complacent ‘journalism’ and supine commentary elsewhere in the Guardian.

As I said at the start, your article was not totally wide of the mark. But it also fits with the relentless marketing of the Guardian as a supposedly open and power-scrutinising flagship newspaper of fearless journalism. The evidence that we’ve presented in two books (Guardians of Power and Newspeak) and hundreds of media alerts in the past ten years clearly shows otherwise.

Best wishes
David (Cromwell)
(Email, September 7, 2011)

The issue of marketing is highly relevant here. As Milne himself noted, “the most heartening response to the breadth of Guardian commentary after 9/11 came from the US itself where there was a dramatic increase in readership of the Guardian’s website. In fact, “traffic on the Guardian’s website doubled in the months after 9/11, driven from the US.” This is highly attractive to advertisers wishing to target relatively affluent and educated consumers. Indeed, ironically, the Guardian appears far more comfortable publishing the views of US dissidents writing on US issues, rather than their UK counterparts writing on UK issues. This makes good business sense, attracting US readers without stepping on too many powerful domestic toes here in the UK.

Almost three weeks later we still hadn’t heard back from Milne, so we nudged him. He apologised and said that he’d been on holiday “and then came straight back into party conferences. Will reply when have a window.” (Email, September 27, 2011)

Almost two months later, during which time he’d continued to publish articles in the Guardian, we asked him when he might reply. He told us that he’d been “operating a bit below capacity” after recovering from an operation, “so everything takes longer than usual, but will try and send something in next week or two”. (Email, November 22, 2011). We replied at once, sincerely wishing him a full recovery.

Just over two weeks later, and not having heard from him, we emailed Milne again following a piece he’d published on the rising threat of war against Iran:

Hi Seumas,

Hope you’re recovering well from your recent op. Good to see your new article on Iran. But a glaring omission is the media’s own role in stoking the flames; not least your own newspaper, the Guardian. Here’s a tiny sample:

• A recent Guardian editorial asserting: ‘It really is time to drop the pretence that Iran can be deflected from its nuclear path.’
• Julian Borger’s blog, with an appalling accompanying photograph helpfully depicting a giant mushroom cloud.
• Julian Borger again, giving prominence to a quote from an unnamed ‘source close to the IAEA’.
• And let’s not forget Simon Tisdall, in a disgraceful Guardian front page story in 2007.

Did you see our recent media alert on Guardian (and other) coverage [on Iran]?

It’s pretty clear why, as a Guardian regular, you’re not at liberty to criticise your own paper’s dismal record. It’s another example of the media silence that you’ve yet to address in my initial challenge [of September 7, 2011].

Why does this abysmal media performance appear to feature so low down in your list of priorities? It brings to mind the four-month wading through treacle, when you were the Guardian’s comment editor, to finally publish our piece that was critical of the Guardian over Iraq.

I hope you’ll be able to engage with this argument soon. (Email, December 8, 2011)

Four days later, with no response from Milne, we emailed him again and asked when he might be able to tackle the points we’d been trying to raise with him over the previous three months.

Still no response.

In the meantime, on December 19, 2011, Milne published a good historical analysis titled, “The “Arab spring” and the west: seven lessons from history”.

Milne’s case studies of British imperialism and media propaganda focused on the 1930s (Libya and Palestine), the 1950s (Iraq, Libya, Iran, Tunisia, Syria and Egypt) and the 1960s (Aden).

Welcome as this article was, we have yet to see an equivalent Guardian piece from Milne, or anyone else on the paper, examining the West’s recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, how they fit into the age-old imperialist framework and, crucially, the role played by corporate news media, including the Guardian, in paving the propaganda path; and then allowing politicians to get off the hook afterwards. Readers may recall, for example, the Guardian’s shameful editorial calling for Tony Blair to be re-elected in 2005.

We recognise that Seumas Milne was no doubt under pressure after a recent operation (although he was continuing to publish articles regularly). But even bearing this in mind, not to respond to the issues in our initial email after four months, despite repeated promises to do so, is disappointing.

George Monbiot As Don Quixote: Tilting At Safe Target

As we saw at the beginning of this alert, the Guardian’s George Monbiot is one of very few mainstream journalists who is regarded as fearlessly honest and progressive. His many supporters would surely expect that he would be willing and able to tell the unadorned truth about the media.

As he launched into a recent article under the stirring title, “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to”, it looked like readers were in for something special:

Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry that should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.

Monbiot continued:

The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press re-frames major issues so effectively, it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.

It’s not just Rupert Murdoch and his crooks, we were told. All the corporate barons who corrupted our political system must be unmasked.

And – alas – there was the fatal flaw in his approach. Perching on a horse and pointing a blunt lance at “corporate barons”, while overlooking the systemic failings of the whole corporate media system, is symptomatic of many a failed quest. The knight-errant Monbiot is no different in this regard from a multitude of other commentators writing for the corporate press.

Thus, Monbiot was happy to make jabs at the Mail, Express and Telegraph newspapers for their puff pieces on celebrities and pathetic attacks on the weak in society. And he was keen to hurl deprecations at the weekly Spectator magazine for its ignorance on climate change. These are all easy right-wing media targets. But with just a passing comment about the BBC, and nothing at all about the supposedly “liberal press” – not least his own paper, the Guardian – the valiant adventurer missed the most important targets.

There was not a single word in Monbiot’s article about the Guardian’s scandalous 2005 support for Blair’s re-election; the paper’s war-mongering over Iran (take a special bow, Simon Tisdall); Monbiot’s thoughts on Western intervention in Libya and Syria (his mutism on these vital issues has been stunning); the Guardian’s crippling dependence on advertising (which he has, to his credit, discussed in the past, albeit in limited fashion: see here and here); and the paper’s corporate and establishment links.

One astute reader, somehow evading the over-zealous censoring Guardian ‘moderators’ on the ‘Comment is Free’ website, noted accurately:

And just like Ed Miliband, the Guardian merely pretends to confront the elite in the silly Kabuki theatre of British politics.

The truth is, at bedrock ,you are all pro capitalist market fundamentalists. Some of you are open about it. Others, like the Guardian and Ed Miliband, fake opposition.

We asked the experienced journalist and film-maker John Pilger for his response to Monbiot’s article. He told us candidly:

Since George Monbiot completed his Damascene conversion and decided the likes of Fukushima were good for the planet, and that smearing those who challenged other orthodoxies might be fun, he has barely drawn breath. His latest crusade is journalism itself — the corruption of “the entire corporate media”. The headline over his Guardian piece on 13 December read: “The corporate press are fighting a class war, defending the elite they belong to.” A given, surely. As the public has become more and more media savvy, many people understand this, just as they understand that articles like Monbiot’s are part of the problem.

He attacks Murdoch, the Mail, the Telegraph, the “sleazy crooks”, but not a splenetic word is directed towards the most influential corporate media in modern Britain: the BBC and the Guardian, the “new establishment”, as Max Hastings wrote.

Not a word reminds us of how the greatest, wanton slaughter of the new century – in Iraq – was so often subtly (and not so subtly) supported and apologised for in the pages of his own newspaper. (“The remarkable extent,” opined a Guardian leader on 25 March 2003, “to which US and British forces are attempting to reduce the risk of civilian casualties in the Iraq campaign is probably unprecedented.”)

Not a word from Monbiot reminds us that two credible studies found that the BBC — despite the Gilligan episode — had been virtually a Blair government mouthpiece in the run up to the bloodbath. In fact, both the BBC and the Guardian used their reputations to maintain Blair at a level of respectability long after his lies and high crimes were evident.

When Monbiot complains that the “corporate press” has “hobbled progressive politics, he is dead right. His omissions serve the same purpose. (Email, December 24, 2011)

Far from being an “unreconstructed idealist, a professional trouble-maker”, as his Twitter bio would have it, Monbiot is a Guardian man, a corporate lightning rod conducting the raw energy of outrage and dissent down to the safe little ‘box’ of the Guardian website. There his readers are regaled with state propaganda, corporate adverts and assailed by the poisonous, system-supportive beliefs of his corporate colleagues. The corporate system got us into this disaster and the corporate media is the last place to encourage people to look for answers.