“’This is something similar to what occurred in Gaza or worse, because neither observers nor journalists had access to the war zone,’ stated a UN source who asked for anonymity. The army acknowledges that 6,200 soldiers and 22,000 guerrillas died in the last three years of the longest civil war in Asia. The UN affirms that between 80,000 and 100,000 persons died in the conflict,” wrote Elisa Reche of Prensa Marea Socialista.

“During the war,” Reche continued, “the army had 200,000 troops. Now with peace, 100,000 are being incorporated… A strange peace it is that requires more troops than in actual combat.”

More troops are needed because systematic ethnic cleansing is now the order of the day for the Tamil people. Their Homeland will be obliterated by introducing more Sinhalese settlers. The same strategy, as John Pilger pointed out, that Israel uses against Palestinians.

This is what M.K. Bhadrakumar, an ambassador for India who served in Sri Lanka and other countries, wrote about the day after Sri Lanka declared victory.

See, they have already solved the Tamil problem in the eastern provinces… The Tamils are no more the majority community in these provinces. Similarly, from tomorrow, they will commence a concerted, steady colonization program of the Northern provinces where Prabhakaran reigned supreme for two decades. They will ensure incrementally that the northern regions no more remain as Tamil provinces… Give them a decade at the most. The Tamil problem will become a relic of the bloody history of the Indian sub-continent.

Ethnic cleansing goes hand-in-hand with the policy of imprisoning and mistreating hundreds of thousands of Tamils. For more than a year before its military victory, the Sri Lanka government enticed Tamils, wishing to flee the war zone, into so-called “welfare” centers or villages. Tens of thousands became “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP), and are thus subject to United Nations regulations concerning decent living conditions, food and water, freedom of movement and the right to leave and rejoin families. All these rights and necessities have been denied them.

“Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy,” President J.R. told the Daily Telegraph, (UK) on July 11, 1983.

A quarter-century later, the current president is striving to fulfill his predecessor’s genocidal intentions. Mahinda Rajapakse has claimed that no IDP is held against his/her will and all are treated well. However, the few United Nations visitors—there are no official investigators into abuses since the Human Rights Council majority blocked such a possibility—who come to observe have quite another picture.

When UN’s political chief, Lynn Pascoe, visited camps in September he said people were not free or well treated… “this kind of closed regime goes directly against the principles under which we work in assisting IDPs all around the world.”

Rajapakse told Pascoe another tale about “free movement”. He said that detention was necessary because the army was clearing the area for mines, and it was still looking for guerrillas hiding among civilians. However, as the UN resident coordinator reported, and Amnesty Internationalquoted: “Under international humanitarian law, captured combatants…may be held pending the cessation of hostilities. Once active hostilities have ceased, prisoners of war must be released ‘without delay.’”

At of July, there were 9,400 individuals with purported links to the LTTE held separately from the rest of the population. They have not been released nearly half-a-year after internment.

Amnesty International also reported that the camps are clearly militarized. The 19-member Presidential Task Force established in mid-May “to plan and coordinate resettlement, rehabilitation and development of the Northern Province” is headed Major General CA Chandrasiri, who was also appointed governor of the province. All inmates are enclosed by barbed-wire fences, guarded and brutalized by well-armed soldiers.

“Arrests have been reported from the camps and Sri Lankan human rights defenders have alleged that enforced disappearances have also occurred,” wrote Amnesty.

“Sri Lanka’s history of large-scale enforced disappearances dating back to the 1980s, and the lack of independent monitoring… raises grave concerns that enforced disappearances and other violations of human rights may be occurring… Previous research [shows] that [persons] suspected by the government of being members or supporters of LTTE are at grave risk of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, and torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”

“Although the government calls these facilities ‘welfare villages,’ they are effectively detention camps…” Amnesty International also reported that not only are people not free to move as they wish, women and girls are raped by soldiers, and people live in sewage, disease-infested conditions, with little food and water and medical attention. They die in droves because of these imposed conditions.

Women and children are especially mistreated, which was the subject that James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF, complained about to Sri Lankan authorities, who then expelled him from the country. Elder described the “unimaginable suffering” of children caught in the fighting, including babies he had seen with shrapnel wounds.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had refrained from criticizing Sri Lanka’s government, leveling his critique only at LTTE for carrying out atrocities. But when he briefly visited one camp less than a week after the end of the war, he said:

“I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scenes I have seen…I sympathize fully with all of the displaced persons,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told CNN after visiting Manik Farm, the most presentable of Sri Lanka’s squalid and dangerous internment camps for Tamils civilians. The UN Chief has also promised international action regarding the heavy shelling of civilian populations during the recent fighting.

Out of the 280,000 IDPs after the end of the war (there were nearly one-half million over a year’s period), only between 15,000 and 40,000 had been released by November 1. Half of them, perhaps, have been ransomed. The Sunday Times wrote about “human trafficking at the internment camps.” Relatives were made to pay camp authorities in order to secure their release.

Future

A week after the end of the war, the LTTE communicated that several of its leaders were killed, but the organization would continue struggling for an independent Tamil Eelam in peaceful ways. July 22, the LTTE announced that its chief of international relations, Selvarsa Pathmanathan—known as KP—was made the new leader, and that a new strategy for a “free Tamil Eelam” would occur. On August 8, England’s The Independent wrote that Pathmanathan was under arrest by Sri Lanka and held incommunicado.

For us solidarity activists, left-wing organizations, and governments considered to be progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe that our task must be to press for the lives and rights of the Tamil people. Australia’s Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance said it well in its October 2009 international situation report:

Now the Tamil struggle has entered a new phase. The immediate campaign must focus on defence of basic human rights, release and resettlement of the Internally Displaced Persons currently held in SL government concentration camps, an end to murders, torture, rapes, and provision of basic housing, food and drinking water to the Tamil people under brutal occupation.

As a solidarity activist, who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to induce oppressive and terrorist governments to engage in a process aimed at peace with justice, I condemn all perpetrators of terrorism and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology for socialism, for justice with equality.

I find that most, if not all, armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with FARC and PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against, as was the more brutal LTTE, much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. Remember the ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation. They committed much the same.

The main reason why I am on their side, why I have been a leftist solidarity activist and writer for nearly half-a-century is a matter of basic ethics. I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked, invaded, oppressed beyond bare. A moral person, organization, political party, government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality.

1. We act to so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people or class. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making of vital matters, in local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, which fortunately only lasted two years, it acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. The Vietnamese struggle against the invaders of France and the USA was so conducted as well. There are a few other examples: the original Sandinistas is, perhaps, one.

I think that the key reason why so many millions of people the world love and respect Che Guevara is because of his moral stance, of his example as a just revolutionary leader. I conclude this all-too-long essay with these oft-quoted words from Che’s Socialism and Man.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love… Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible… one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow survived the horror against all odds. I even manage to love my neighbour. In spite of all these fearful, traumatic indoctrination I miraculously managed to master my cheering alto saxophone rather than the sobbing violin.

In fact, I have already decided that in case the Queen, or any other member of the Royal Family should ever consider to make me into a ‘Sir’ for my bebop achievements, or even for facing Zionist barbarism with my bare pen, I will immediately change my surname from Atzmon to Vive, just to become the first and only Sir Vive.

I am also totally against Holocaust denial

I clearly resent those who deny the genocides that are taking place in the name of the Holocaust. Palestine is one example, Iraq is another, and the one that is set for Iran, is probably too scary to contemplate.

The Holocaust is a relatively new religion.⁴ It lacks mercy or compassion, instead it promises revenge through retribution. For its followers, it is somehow liberating because it allows them to punish whoever they like as long they gain some pleasure. This may explain why the Israelis ended up punishing the Palestinians for crimes that were committed by Europeans. It is rather clear that the newly emerging religion is not just about ‘eye for an eye’; it is actually an eye for thousands and thousands of eyes.

A month ago, while visiting in Auschwitz, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak left a note in the official visitors book: ‘a strong Israel is both the comfort and the revenge.’ No one could summarise the aspiration of the religion any better. The Holocaust religion doesn’t offer redemption. It is a crude violent manifestation of sheer collective brutality. It cannot resolve anything, for aggression can only lead to more and more aggression. In the Holocaust religion there is neither room for peace or grace. Take it from Barak, revenge is where they find comfort.

To deny the danger posed by the Holocaust religion and its followers is to be complicit in a growing crime against humanity and against every possible human value.

I am also in total support of the Jewish National Project

Some believe that after 2000 years, the ‘phantasmic Diaspora’ Jews are indeed entitled to an imaginary ‘national home land of their own.’ The Zionists apparently meant it sincerely. The Jewish state is now realistic enough to have turned the entire Middle East into a ticking bomb.

Reviewing the Israeli record of crimes against humanity in the last six decades doesn’t leave much room for speculation. We are dealing here with a pathological sinister society. Hence, as much as some of us may agree that Jews should enjoy a hypothetical right for a land of their own, planet Earth is certainly not the ideal location for such an affair.

Hence, I would urge NASA to join in and to make a special effort to find a suitable alternative planet for the Zionist homeland in outer space or even in another galaxy. The Galactic Zionist project would signify the immediate move from ‘promised land’ to ‘promised planet.’ I would enthusiastically stress that rather than searching for ‘a land with no people for a people with no land’, what we really want is a ‘lonely planet.’ It can even be a ‘desert,’ for they claim to know how to make the desert bloom. In a planet of their own, the galactic Zionists wouldn’t need to oppress anyone, they wouldn’t ethnically cleanse either, they wouldn’t have to lock the indigenous people in concentration camps for there won’t be any indigenous people around to abuse, starve, murder, and cleanse. They wouldn’t have to pour white phosphorous over their neighbours for there won’t be any neighbours. I would highly recommend NASA to search for a planet with very low gravity just to make it light for people to wander around. After all, we want the new galactic Zionists to enjoy their futuristic project as much as the Palestinians and many others may enjoy their absence.

So here I am, a proper Jew after all: I am a survivor, I oppose Holocaust denial, I support the Jewish national aspiration. Even the chief Rabbi of Britain cannot ask for more than that.

1. Acknowledged recently to be a ‘myth’ by the Israeli holocaust museum Yad Vashem.
2. A historical fact protected by European Law.
3. A slightly confusing narrative. If the Nazis were interested in annihilating the entire European Jewish population as suggested by the orthodox Zionist holocaust narrative, then it is rather ambiguous as to just what led them to march what was left of European Jewry, into their crumbling Nazi fatherland at a time when it was clear that they were losing the war. The two narratives, i.e., ‘annihilation’ and ‘death march’, seem to oppose each other. The issue deserves further elaboration. I would just suggest that the reasonable answers I have come across may severely damage the Zionist holocaust narrative.
4. The Israeli Philosophy professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was probably the first to define the holocaust as the ‘new Jewish religion.’

Ururú was the oldest member of this close-knit, tiny group and an integral part of it.

Altair Algayer, head of FUNAI’s (Brazilian government Indian affairs department) team which protects the Akuntsu’s land said, ‘She was a fighter, strong, and resisted until the last moment.’ In addition, the oldest-surviving Akuntsu, Ururú’s brother Konibú, is seriously ill.

Ururú witnessed the genocide of her people and the destruction of their rainforest home, as cattle ranchers and their gunmen moved on to indigenous lands in Rondônia state. Rondônia was opened up by government colonisation projects and the infamous BR 364 highway in the 1960s and 70s.

With Ururú dies a large part of the historical memory of this people. While we shall perhaps never know the full horrors inflicted on the Akuntsu in the last half century, today’s survivors say their family members were killed when ranchers bulldozed their houses and opened fire on them. The two surviving men, Konibú and Pupak, have marks on their bodies where bullets entered as they fled.

FUNAI found the remains of houses which had been destroyed by ranchers who were clearing the forest for cattle pasture. The ranchers attempted to hide evidence of the crime, but wooden poles, arrows, axes and broken pottery were discovered.

When the Akuntsu were contacted by FUNAI in 1995 they numbered seven. The youngest, Konibú’s daughter, died in January 2000 when a tree fell on her house.

Today they live in a territory officially recognised by the Brazilian government, where FUNAI protects their land from invasion by surrounding ranchers.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘With Ururú’s death we are seeing the final stages of a 21st century genocide. Unlike mass killings in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, the genocides of indigenous people are played out in hidden corners of the world, and escape public scrutiny and condemnation. Although their numbers are small, the result is just as final. Only when this persecution is seen as akin to slavery or apartheid will tribal peoples begin to be safe.’

The story of the Akuntsu, their neighbours the Kanoê, and the elusive ‘Man of the Hole’ is graphically told in a new film, Corumbiara. The Akuntsu also feature in Survival’s short film, Uncontacted Tribes.

By way of deception thou shalt do war.

– the Mossad motto

Less than a week after Ankara cancelled an air exercise with Israel, Turkey’s state-sponsored channel TRT1 broadcast “Ayrilik” (”Farewell”), a new prime-time TV show that depicts the true image of Israel’s genocidal military operation in Gaza last January.

The Israelis are not happy. “Broadcasting this series is a serious case of state-sponsored incitement. …,” said Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Thursday morning. “Such a series, which doesn’t even have a weak connection to reality presents the IDF’s soldiers as murderers of innocent children….” I wonder whether one should remind hardliner Lieberman, who happens to be an enthusiastic ethnic cleanser and a proud Judeo supremacist racist, that the reality on the ground last January was ‘connected enough’ to establish a genocidal war crime inquiry and a crime against humanity. It left over 1400 fatal casualties. It also left thousands more injured, most of them children, women and elders. However, for once Lieberman happens to read the map. The Turkish TV-show indeed depicts the IDF’s soldiers as murderers of children women and elders for this is what Israeli soldiers are and this is exactly what Israel stands for politically, symbolically, ideologically and practically.

Though Lieberman tries to appease his Israeli crowd and may even be successful in doing so, his chances to mount pressure on Turkish TV and the government are rather limited. By now we all happen to know Israel is all about the establishment of a ‘Jew-only state’ in a stolen land named Palestine.

As it happens we tend to spend a lot of time writing and analysing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the facts on the ground are actually very simple. Zionism is an ideology aspired by the plunder of Palestine. Israel has put the robbery of Palestine and the Palestinians into practice. We are talking here about a national revival project that is taking place at the expense of another people. It is a murderous project inherently inspired by the bible and an unethical plundering project of ‘home coming’. It is a lethal combination of some deadly interpretations of the Old Testament together with a non-ethical present. The only question to be asked is how have they got away with it? How do they continue to get away with plunder, murder, spreading white phosphorus and piling up nuclear weapons?

Spin, Deception, and Lies are the Answer

A few weeks ago, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of the UN waving the Wannsee Conference’s protocols suggesting that he was holding the ‘proof for the Nazi extermination of European Jewry’. With typical histrionics, he pleaded for the nations empathy. “Is this a lie?” he cried out. Embarrassingly enough, though the document he presented to the assembly was genuine, he was actually spinning the usual Zionist lines. The Wannsee Protocol refers in a rather general manner, to the deportation to the East of the entire Jewish population from Germany and German occupied territories. Though the document refers to ‘Final Solution’, the very ‘solution’ it prescribed is rather different from the common interpretation offered by the Zionist Shoa narrative. The Wannsee Protocol refers basically to a sinister plan to exhaust the deported Jews in the hard labour of roadwork.

As much as Wannsee document is devastating, its relevance to the history of the holocaust is rather limited for the ‘Wannsee plan’ has never materialised into an actual operative program. It has actually nothing to do with the historicity of Jewish extermination known as the Shoa. It doesn’t set any plan for death camps or gas chambers whatsoever. As a legal document, it proves nothing but general Nazi inclinations. As a historic document it by no means ‘proves’ the Shoa and the extermination of the Jews, it just affirms that the Nazi regime was committed to the idea of Judenrein (Free of Jews). However, this fact is well established and widely accepted even by most if not all holocaust revisionists. As much as Netanyahu insisted to boost the Holocaust with some fresh credibility, he ended up waving a relatively insignificant paper in front of the nations. Needless to say, he got away with it.

However, far more crucial is the fact that the Wannsee Protocol lines out a program that is not that different from Lieberman’s deadly plan for the Palestinians. In reality it is the Jewish state that murders Palestinians en masse and starves those who survive. Moreover, it is very interesting also to elaborate on the following questions: how is it that the leader of the Jewish state is standing in front of the nation and spins in broad daylight in the name of Israel and the name of the Jewish people? What can we learn from the fact that an Israeli leader tries to fool the entire UN assembly? How is it that as Israeli PM manages to divert the attention so easily from his own crimes against humanity that are taking place in the present into a relatively insignificant historical document? In short, how does he get away with it?

The answer may be pretty trivial. Like in the case of the Mossad motto, they make their wars by deception. The entire Jewish revival project is grounded on sets of lies. The entire tale of Jewish ‘home coming’ is nothing less than a daylight collective crime based on false argument and lies again. Initially Zionists were deceiving their fellow Jews but as time passed by they have been extending their tactics. For more than a while they have been spinning us all. The Israelis and Zionists are born into a lie, they live their life through a lie, they tend to believe that they can get away with lies and deception and the sad truth must be said. As far as world leaders are concerned, they actually do. As we know, not a single world leader challenged Netanyahu’s spin at the UN. More disturbing is the fact that not a single historian or intellectual tried to point out to the Israeli PM that, more than anything else, the Wannsee Protocol actually describes his own policies at home.

Very few World Leaders have the guts to oppose the Zionist spin operation. Recently we have witnessed the courageous Iranian Mahmud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan. This is not a lot considering the level of colossal atrocities committed by the Jewish state. However, it is better than nothing.

The good news is that Humanism and Humanity is not exactly in the possession of politicians or so called ‘world leaders’. It is actually our property, the members of the human race, the people out there who happen to witness the emerging evil. True Humanity and Humanism is delivered by kindness and an aspiration for ethics and truthfulness. In most cases it is actually artists and ordinary people who transform Humanism into a vivid message. Our elected interventionists, for some reason insist on dragging us all into more and more Zionist wars in the name of the holocaust, democracy and liberation’.

Tragically enough, our Western leaders are still silenced or at least ‘captivated’ by Zionist lies. But this shouldn’t be a major concern anymore. The betrayal of Western ideologies (left, right, and centre), politicians and institutions are an established fact. Succumbing to Zionist lies is apparently just one symptom amongst too many. Not only that truth will win, it is actually winning already. The identification of the Zionist spin is becoming common knowledge. As the foggy cloud of the Zionist brutality expands we all develop a growing yearning for some beams of truth and grace. We are beginning to grasp that they make their wars by the means of deception. They may win a few more Pyrrhic battles, but they are losing the war.

Let us remember, here, that the UN has illegally and immorally created and sponsored the terrorist state of Israel in Palestine; the heart of the Arab World. One should understand that the UN, with all its organizations, was established mainly by WWII victorious Western countries as a tool to serve their interests and to expand their authority on the expense of other weaker and poorer countries.

It is so obvious that the UN has no interest in solving the Israeli/Arab conflict in any way. Since its establishment in 1948 Israel has perpetrated a pre-meditated genocide against Palestinians, uprooted the whole population from their country and driven them into refugee camps into the desert, wiped Palestine off the map and is building the rogue terrorist state of Israel in its place. In this process, during the last 61 years, Israel had committed many war crimes, violated all international laws and all humanitarian laws, had broken hundreds of UN resolutions, and even murdered UN personnel and destroyed its facilities. Yet the UN did not lift one finger against Israeli crimes, and did not send its troops to protect Palestinians the way it sent its troops into old Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia), Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan. The UN’s disregard of Palestinian life was reflected in the visit of the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, to Gaza last January to inspect only the damage Israel inflicted on UN buildings, and did not take even one single look at the human sufferings of Palestinians.

In the few incidents the UN was pressured to deal with the Israeli/Arab conflict (Israeli occupation of Palestine) it had sent investigating committees usually led by a pro-Zionist or a Zionist Jewish officials. The latest such officials was the Zionist Jewish Judge Richard Goldstone (Goldstein). His daughter Nicole describes him as a “Zionist who loves Israel.” When the UN Human Rights Council asked Goldstone to chair the mission with the mandate to investigate Israel’s crime during its onslaught on Gaza last December 2008, Goldstone, as a good Zionist, refused the offer unless the mandate is modified to include “crimes on all sides”; a clear pre-biased assumption that Palestinians had also committed war crimes rather than defending themselves.

Goldstone is a well known official with a long international judicial history. He also serves on the Board of Directors of several nonprofit organizations, has affiliations with famous American universities (Harvard, Fordham, and New York University Schools of Law), and he is a trustee in the board of directors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. With the many clear evidences of Israeli war crimes in Gaza broadcast by all televised media (except American media), and with the Israeli objections against such investigation calling it pre-biased, one could not but raise the question why would a well-known Zionist Jewish supporter of Israel accept such a mission knowing very well that his reputation would be attacked and smeared by all Zionists and Jewish organizations the same way they did to Jimmy Carter for just criticizing Israel?

Goldstone, like many other misguided Zionist Jews with blind loyalty to Israel, who sacrificed everything they had, even their own lives, for the sake of Israel (God’s chosen people) might have thought that he could reduce the damage to Israel’s reputation, and use his well-known reputation and judicial expertise to induce, in the report, some legal loopholes to divide the blame, and to give Israel a chance to blame Palestinians, or even some “few rotten apples” in the “most moral” Israeli army, and to justify her massacres in Gaza as some type of self-defense, although disproportionate. And that he did.

Goldstone’s report aimed to annul the many previous investigative reports done by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many other Israeli and international human rights organizations. Such reports incriminated only Israel. Goldstone’s report sought to incriminate both parties.

Goldstone’s investigations were launched with the false perspective that there was a war between Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Authority, and his report was thus restricted in the language of violations of the international laws of war. It equated the poor, bankrupt, besieged, hungry, thirsty, unjustly ignored and persecuted by the international political system, and unarmed Gaza Authority with limited security forces plus the few hundreds lightly armed, barely trained militia cadres of the resistance groups on one side, with the well trained, well armed with the most technologically advanced (American) weapons, well supported, and well financed Israeli army on the other side.

The report states, “The Israeli armed forces are, in technological terms, among the most advanced in the world”, “… have an elaborate legal advice and training system in place … possess very advanced hardware and a market leader in production of the most advanced pieces of military technology available, including UAVs … have a very significant capacity for precision strikes…”

It was not war that happened in Gaza. It was a pre-meditated Israeli onslaught against all kinds of lives in Gaza; humans, animals, and plants. It was genocide; a burning holocaust with nuclear (DU) weapons producing 5,000 degrees of burning heat equals to the heat of the sun according to Dy Williams; the British weapons expert on Al-Jazeera. It was an immediate and long term destruction of life, and contamination and destruction of mother earth. The report stated in this regard:

“Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available [weapons], and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, the Mission finds that the incidents and patterns of events [genocide, holocaust] considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions.”

Although Goldstone’s mission was to investigate Israeli war crimes his mission chose not to investigate the weapons of the crime. His report states: “This chapter does not intend to present a comprehensive analysis of all the aspects raised on the kinds of weaponry used during the military operations. It is rather a summary of the Missions’s views”.

While the Mission did not exclude the use of nuclear DU bombs by Israel “the Mission decided not to investigate the matter further”. The report justified Israel’s use of white phosphorous, flechette missiles, and DIME munitions as “not prohibited under international law”.

While sidelining the holocaustal Israeli weapons Goldstone’s report found the time and the expertise to describe in details and in numbers the types of rudimentary home-made missiles the Palestinians fired at the Israeli colonies.

Although Goldstone’s report accused the Israeli army of bombing civilian infrastructure; homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and UN facilities, it did not “…discount the possibility that Palestinian armed groups were active in the vicinity … launched attacks close to civilian protected buildings, unnecessarily exposed civilian population of Gaza to danger”. The report stated that Israel showed concern about civilian lives by sending warnings before bombing the area; the mission “accepts that Israel dropped leaflets, made phone calls, left recorded messages and dropped smaller explosives on roofs as stated by the Israeli Government.”

Goldstone’s report gave Israelis the best justification of their attack (holocaust) on Gaza when it considered Palestinian launching missiles at Israeli communities as terror attacks. “The Mission finds that there is significant evidence to suggest that one of the primary purposes of the rocket and mortar attacks is to spread terror amongst the Israeli civilian population, a violation of international law”. It explains further the economical and social disruptions and the psychological trauma suffered by populations in the Israeli communities of Sderot, Netivot, Beer Sheba and others by those missiles.

Goldstone here ignores historical events and distorts the facts by switching them to the opposite direction. He ignored the fact that Israel had occupied Palestine since 1948, and that the southern Israeli communities such as Sderot, Netivot, Ashdod, and others are not Israeli towns, rather are Zionist colonies built on stolen Palestinian land. He also ignored the fact that these colonizers in these communities are usually armed and hostile against neighboring Palestinian town, many of them are either on military active duty or on military reserve.

These Zionist occupiers are like an enemy, who occupy your own house, imprison you and your family in one room and deny you all means of existence. Thus it becomes your duty and your human obligation to defend yourself and your family. The mere existence of such Zionist colonies on occupied Palestine is an act or war. The Israeli wall surrounding Gaza Strip and the military siege are acts of genocide that break all humanitarian and all international laws. Genocide is not only the use of weapon to murder people; it is also depriving them from all means of living.

Goldstone faults Palestinians for resisting Israeli aggression from within Palestinian civilian areas, yet he neglects to mention that Israel has a history of attacking civilian areas, and thus would face resistance from within these civilian areas.

In an attempt to portray Palestinians as violent people, even against their own citizens, Goldstone faults the intra-Palestinian conflict between Ramallah’s authority, dominated by rogue small faction of Fatah, and Gaza’s authority, dominated mainly by Hamas faction. What he ignored is the fact that such conflict was planned, orchestrated, and fed by previous American Bush administration, as reported by Vanity Fair, in order to topple down the democratically elected Hamas government.

To maintain credibility Goldstone’s report could not but criticize the obvious blatant Israeli crimes witnessed by the whole world. Yet it did not spare any opportunity to fault Palestinians themselves, deny them the right of self-defense, and even call them violent and terrorists. For defending their lives and the lives of their children the report is accusing the victims (the Palestinians) of the crime inflicted on them by the criminals (occupying Zionist Israelis), who claim to protect the lives of their own children. Israel’s rejection and the pro-Zionists’ harsh criticism of the report meant only to divert the attention away from these facts.

In conclusion, Goldstone’s mission proposes the following major recommendations, among others: that the UNHRC (United Nations Human Rights Council) brings the report to the UN Security Council in order to require both parties to launch appropriate independent investigations, establish an independent committee of experts to monitor such investigation, and refer the situation in Gaza to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

The report also recommends that Israel ceases border closure and blockading access to sea, and pays reparations into a special fund to compensate Palestinians, although the Mission views “the current constitutional structure and legislation in Israel leaves very limited room, if any, for Palestinians to seek compensation.” Therefore the report urges international aid providers to step up financial and technical assistance for organizations providing aid to Palestinian (paying for Israel’s crimes).

The report recommends the Palestinian armed groups renounce attacks on Israeli civilians (indirectly calling their self-defense terror), yet it did not recommend Israel to do the same.

Finally, knowing the UN’s ineffective history in dealing with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, one wonders whether the Security Council would respond seriously, this time, to the report, given the fact that the powerful members of the Council are now busy with what they consider the Iranian nuclear threat.

Thus one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of the terrorists-Palestinians is to ‘push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive” and that their motives are those of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state amid a sea of irrational hatred.

That is the view of the Zionists, and the one they would like for the world to accept.

One also hears that the conflict is a religious one between Jews and Arabs and that it has been continuous for ‘thousands of years’.

Neither is correct.

The first Palestinian suicide bombing occurred in 1994, 40 days after the massacre by the Brooklyn native Baruch Goldstein of 29 praying Muslims at the Al Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron. The ’67 War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip was 25 years old at that time. Thus an entire generation of Palestinians had grown to maturity knowing nothing but occupation before the first suicide bomber struck.

The phrase, ”push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive”, can be traced to a 1961 speech to the Knesset delivered by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. This apparently was the first use of this phrase by a significant political personality, and thus, for all intents and purposes, the phrase has a Jewish and not an Arab origin. The propagation of this emotional phrase throughout the Israeli-Palestinian debate has its source the Israeli Prime Minister himself. (See “Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?“)

The view that the conflict is religious and that it has been ongoing for thousands of years is inaccurate. For approximately 2000 years Jews and Arabs enjoyed a harmonious relation, and for four hundred years up until World War I, as citizens of the Ottoman empire with equal rights. Indeed, Jews enjoyed high government position within the Ottoman Empire.

Change occurred in 1896 with the publication of Theodore Herzl’s book, The Jewish State, in which Herzl propounded the idea of inevitability, immutability, permanence, and omnipresence of anti-Semitism and argued that the only solution was a separate state for Jews.

Herzl’s understanding of the inevitability of anti-Semitism was possibly self fulfilling, for rather that opposing anti-Semitism in the first half of the 20th century, the Zionists found common cause with Hitler, Eichmann and the Nazis and used anti-Semitism and Nazism as a means of achieving their end which was the establishment of a Jewish state. The two reactionary movements shared the view that German Jews were living there as a ‘foreign race’ and that the racial divide was essential to maintain. (Historian Lenny Brenner has written three excellent books on the Zionists-Nazi collaboration.) The Zionist’s use of Nazism involved, among other things, the blocking of avenues of escape to other countries of Europe’s Jews and diverting them to Palestine, even as the death trains began to roll in Europe. The rise of Nazism and Hitler to power was never, or almost never, opposed by the Zionist prior to the establishment of Israel.

History might have been very different had the Zionists component of Jewry opposed Nazism and there might never have been a Holocaust. And there might never have been a state of Israel, as many of the Zionists well understood.

Lenni Brenner puts it:

… of all of the active Jewish opponents of the boycott idea [of Nazi Germany], the most important was the world Zionists Organization (WZO). It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers.

The WZO saw Hitler’s victory in much the same way as its German affiliate, the ZVfD [the German Zionist Organization]: not primarily as a defeat for all Jewry, but as positive proof of the bankruptcy of assimilation and liberalism. (Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators)

Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, as well as with the Fascists and Mussolini is a deep and extensive topic and must be abandoned here.

Though a region of Argentina as well as Ethiopia were considered by Herzl, Palestine was the site for which there was the greatest consensus.

Of the indigenous Palestinians, of which there were about a million at the time living in Palestine, he said: “[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Thus the concept of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionism was introduced.

It is not rocket science. If you want to create a state exclusively of European Jews in the heart of the Middle East, you must first get rid of the Arabs.

Herzl went on the found the World Zionists Organization, whose intent was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and to make itself into proto-government from which the actual state government would seamlessly emerge upon the establishment of the Jewish state.

Though the world seems not to understand the intent of the Zionist program, there was no misunderstanding among the Zionists themselves.

In his 1923 book, The Iron Wall, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder to the “Revisionists” wing of Zionism, wrote

There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority.

Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be the complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.

The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.

It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same conditions exist now.

… a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.

Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for the establishing in the country conditions of rule and defence through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role – with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.

If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for that land,… . Or else? Or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is IMPOSSIBLE! Zionism is a colonization adventure and there fore it stands or it falls by the question of armed force. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization.

To the hackneyed reproach that this point is unethical, I answer – absolutely untrue. This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words not for any tasty morsel. Because this (the Palestinians) is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall.

The ‘Revisionists’ advocated the revision of the British Mandate for Palestine to include the east bank of the Jordan, now the state of Jordan, as well as the west bank, the Jordan River forming the eastern boundary of the mandate at that time. The ‘Revisionist’ transformed over time into the present day Lukud party, the right wing party of Menachem Begin, who regarded Zabotinsky as his model and philosophical father, of Yitzchak Shamir, who became the leader of the Revisionists at the time of Zabotinsky’s death, of Ariel Sharon, and of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Thus in 1937, Ben Gurion stated: “The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.”

And in a letter to his son, also in 1937, he stated: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places then we have force at our disposal.”

And in early 1948 Ben Gurion wrote in his War Diary, “During the assault we must be ready to strike the decisive blow; that is, either to destroy the towns or expel its inhabitants so our people can replace them.”

And in February 1948, Ben Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the settlement of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948: “The war will give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.”

And in 1940, Joseph Weitz, who was head of land purchasing for the World Jewish Organization, and head of one of several ‘transfer committees’ (committees to study ways of transferring the Arabs from Palestine) wrote:

Between ourselves it must be clear that here is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left.

And in 1983, Raphael Eytan, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, said,

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel .… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours…. When we have settled the land, all the Arab will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.

Exactly why the indigenous people of Palestine do not have right to live on the land of their and their ancestors births, or why the colonial European Jews have this right, Mr Eytan is silent.

Between the time that Israel declared itself a state in May of 1948 and the summer of 2005, Israel killed 50,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe. And since October of 2000, Israel has killed 6348 Palestinians, according to the web site, If American Knew. The latter figure averages to about 2 Palestinians killed per day by Israel (1.932, by my calculation.)

One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim, as it is constantly screaming, but the victimizer.

What then is the conflict all about? What is the theme that runs through the entire history of

Zionism?

It is about the ongoing program of Zionism to destroy the Palestinians as a people and to assume possession of their ancestral land.

There are Zionists who would settle for a two state solution and a withdrawal of the Israel presence to the 1967 borders allowing a mini-Palestinian state on the remaining 22% of Palestine. But the reality on the ground is that Israel has expanded beyond the point of retreat with 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, 183,000 in East Jerusalem, as of this writing, with 200 or more settlements in the West Bank some twice the size of Manhattan containing their own, schools, universities, shopping malls and the billions of dollars of invested infrastructure, both private and public, and a segregated, for-Jews-only, highway system, 300 miles long, cutting up the West Bank with Palestinians imprisoned between these disjoint concrete and asphalt barriers.

But whatever the views of these moderate Zionists, who call for contraction to the ’67 borders, the dynamics of Israel is and has always been expansion. The centrifugal forces pushing the expansion are multivaried and complicated. They are religious, they are military, they are for want of security, they are from want of power for its own sake, but they are persistent and they have an entire century of momentum and a century of Zionism on the move.

What the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is all about then is the destruction of the Palestinian people and their evacuation and the complete takeover of Palestine to the Jordan River by the Jewish state. And what hangs win the balance is whether or not the Palestinians will be destroyed and eliminated as a people with a distinct culture and history and with an attachment to the land of their birth and their parent’s and ancestor’s births.

While the Tamils were being butchered by the Sri Lankan State, global Tamils protested peacefully. Despite that, the UN and many other powerful countries failed to support the victims of State terrorism other than issuing statements condemning the Sri Lankan State and the LTTE. And finally, the world demanded the Tamils’ defensive cadres, the LTTE, to silence their guns. But they failed to demand the Sri Lankan armed forces to follow suit. Furthermore, the Sri Lankan State punished civilians by keeping them in the Nazi-style camps tightly guarded by the armed forces in the militarized barbed-wire camps in Vavuniya without providing any basic facilities.

Australia was one of the countries that cried foul when thousands of Tamils were butchered by the Sri Lankan Sate. Despite all the hardships the Tamils endured–poor health, sanitation, lack of food and water, not to mention the further hardship the Tamils will face in the coming monsoon season–Australia extended their warmest greetings to Sri Lanka and consolidated their trade between the two countries. Thanks to Australia and others who continue to extend friendly relations with the terrorist States who have killed tens of thousands with abysmal records of human rights abuses. Sri Lanka’s intention to treat Tamils as human beings has vanished forever and for them, Tamils are history. Sri Lanka still fails to recognise the aspirations of the Tamil people as a nation.

Tamils’ claims validated

Although many countries did not hear the pleas of the global Tamils, the video shown on Channel 4, and thereafter the images circulating on the internet, reveal the mutilated, naked bodies of Tamil captives, both men and women. Many bodies in the pictures lacked torsos, limbs, and hands. While one image showed just the skeletal remains of the upper part of a body, another showed badly eaten away portions of the head of a slain man.

The video is more than written evidence to prove and to bring the Sri Lankan State to justice for unleashing the ethnic cleansing, especially targeted upon the Tamils. The Sinhala soldiers who speak in the Sinhala language did everything possible as vultures in the background of the dead waiting to prey on the dead bodies. These images are nauseating, reflecting the extreme chauvinistic and morbid tendencies of the Sinhala chauvinism perpetuated on the Tamils.

The UN wants the Sri Lankan government to set up an independent probe into the authenticity of a video clip aired on the BBC Channel, allegedly showing Sri Lankan troops executing prisoners. If the Sri Lankan government’s denial is validated as a result of an inquiry, the international community can rest easy and the government will have been vindicated according to them. They will use any excuse to absolve the Sri Lankan government of their crimes against humanity and enhance their impunity. Confident of the Sri Lankan government again cheating on this investigation which he describing the images as “horrendous,” the official said that it indicated a serious violation of international law if found to be authentic. The influence of the triple gem bestowed on Ban ki Moon and other UN officials visiting Sri Lanka prevails. The UN is as corrupt as the Sri Lankan government. They can do business together. It is indeed a disgrace that the UN has descended to this base level.

Now, the UN and the world community who speak of crimes against humanity in the civilized world have the right to speak out and bring the perpetrators of such crimes to book. Although Sri Lanka is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC), ICC can book Sri Lanka as they did to other countries, especially of East European and African countries in the past. There are a few options, such as judges of the court. Also, several member states of the ICC can also formally file the case against Sri Lanka, and many other viable options are available to book Sri Lanka. But, the question is whether the UN and the ICC will do it.

Norway has already sounded out that they will support the move to charge Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka has unleashed violence on Tamils. Based on the video footage by the British broadcasting Channel 4 that depicted the cruel killings of Tamils, international peacemaker and Norwegian External Affairs Minister Erik Solheim has suggested that the global community investigate the war crimes committed by Sri Lanka.

Earlier, Erik Solheim led the peace keeping time on behalf of UN to settle the dispute between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government which resulted in futility. Further, he said he would urge for the UN and the International Community to commence an investigation. He said: “The Channel 4 video is more than solid evidence to accuse the government and those who committed the crime is punishable under law. Thousands of Tamils went missing during the bloody war and no one has questioned the government regarding this violation of Human Rights. The ruling government has wilfully ignored human rights and laid rules of their own. Without evidences, the UN was unable to proceed, but now we have the necessary docs to bring them under custody. Moreover, they have committed the punishable crime of kidnapping international journalists with their white van and I will urge the envoy to put an end to this atrocity.”

Sri Lanka condemns Norway and Britain

Upon bringing to light the video, the Sri Lankan President’s Media Unit released a statement saying the government “will make a strong protest to Channel 4 with regard to the contents of this video and also bring the matter to the notice of the relevant authorities…” It described the footage as “false and doctored.” It promised to “pursue remedies available with regard to the distortion of truth.”

Further, Sri Lankan leaders issued statements condemning Britain for permitting the Channel 4 broadcast without investigations. Little do they realise that in Britain, the mother of Parliamentary democracy, freedom of expression, even by the media, is sacred. Channel 4 representative Mr. Jonathan Miller commented on the Sri Lanka Government denial, saying: “I think Steven Spielberg would have had a hard job staging this grim scene. We were unable to verify the authenticity of the footage, but we did our level best to do so and we would not have broadcast our report had we not been confident with the expert analysis we received. Before we went to air, I watched the video with a leading Sri Lankan human rights investigator – a Sinhalese himself – who provided forensic insights into its authenticity. This investigator has many years of experience looking into abuses and impunity in his homeland, but he’d never seen anything like this.”

A column under the heading ‘Heil Solheim’ written by Gomin Dayasri on August 31 appearing in the Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Defence website, badly condemned the Norwegian Minister, Erik Solheim, and Channel 4. It further says that such periodic releases through friendly media sources are a part of LTTE false propaganda to discredit the Sri Lankan Forces, which have been duly exposed previously. There is not an iota of substance to relate it to Sri Lankan forces except for representations made in the voice cast of the narrator from the studio.

The writer claims, “For the record, previously too, Channel Four journalists were deported from the country for disseminating falsified pictorials, which they did not challenge. Channel Four has a history of desiring to discredit Sri Lanka and has fallen foul of the authorities and harbours a grievance; which does not make it a reliable objective media presenter.”

The statements from Sri Lankan leaders and the articles by well known Sinhala chauvinists appearing in the government websites clearly show that Sri Lanka will not respond cordially with the countries coming against the violations committed by the Sri Lankan State. Even powerful regional associations such as the European Union and NATO have done nothing to disapprove of Sri Lankan atrocities.

It is an irony that the descendant members of one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, such as the Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in Asia, cannot stand up, speak and join with the civilized world in condemning such barbarities. It is also because those who claim to be champions of such a civilization have disgracefully and unashamedly traded and capitulated its reputation for positions, wealth and power. Take the case of Karunanidhi asking the Indian Central government to verify the authenticity of the Channel 4 exposition as if it would ever happen.

And the global community remains a mute spectator; the Tamil people, who make up nearly 80 million world-wide, have not yet lost faith in the global governments completely.

As a civilized nation, Tamils gratefully extend their sincere thanks to BBC Channel 4 and JDSL for having the courage and the unrelenting efforts in revealing the truth which we believe they will continue to do. It is very important that, in the interests of justice against crimes against humanity, the veracity of the tapes in question be independently investigated once again and the world be told of their authenticity.

The Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa, who was to attend the UN sessions in New York with the usual entourage of 150 persons to prop him up, we are informed, has now chosen to attend the 40th anniversary of the founding of an international terrorist State of Libya under Gaddhafi. He will, we are sure, be more at home there, than in the company of some UN representatives. Ban ki Moon will undoubtedly miss him.

What the plaque fails to mention is that the site where Cornwallis directed the colonists/settlers to erect Halifax was on the Mi’kmaq settlement of Jipugtug (anglicized to Chebucto).² The Mi’kmaq, considered themselves the sovereign power in Mi’kma’ki (the present day Maritimes),³ but Cornwallis did not recognize this sovereignty, and he did not consult the Mi’kmaq about his plans.

Halifax historians Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, and David Sutherland wrote of Cornwallis’s attitude toward the Mi’kmaq: “That arrogance set in motion the train of events that led to tragic violence, the memories of which would long complicate race relations in colonial Nova Scotia.”⁴

What it did set in motion was the murder and dispossession of the Original Peoples of Mi’kma’ki, and one outcome was the eponymous honoring of the Cornwallis. Cornwallis has streets, schools, etc. named after him in the province.

Naming places and buildings after a person is common practice, but usually not when that person is an inciter of genocide. Principle 8 of Canadian Permanent Committee of Geographical Names states, “Personal names should not be used unless it is in the public interest to honor a person by applying such a name to the geographical feature. Names should be derived from persons who have significantly contributed to the features selected.”⁵

Author Daniel Paul wrote that Cornwallis and his council raised a “company of Volunteers” by offering a bounty on Mi’kmaq (women, children, infirm; it didn’t matter).⁶

The British had “unwavering resolve to dispossess the Mi’kmaq of everything and to subjugate them absolutely.”⁷ The Mi’kmaq were forced on to reserves too small to provide an adequate means of subsistence. This reduced the Mi’kmaq to a state of dependency, subordination, and internal colonization.⁸

Credentials of a Genocidaire

That Cornwallis is a genocidaire is apparent from the proclamation Cornwallis and his council issued on 1 October 1759. The proclamation set a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq. One can read from the proclamation:

That, in order to secure the Province from further statements of the Indians, some effectual methods should be taken to pursue them to their haunts, and show them because of such actions, they shall not be secure within the Province…

That a reward of ten guineas be granted for every Micmac taken, or killed.⁹

In 1750, the bounty was raised from 10 to 50 guineas. Paul said this bounty is still in effect, having never been repealed by the federal government.

To reclaim this sordid history, the Rename Cornwallis Initiative is underway, drafted by school teacher Cheryl Leblanc-Weldon and Paul, to redesignate these landmarks named after a genocidaire. The petition reads, in part:

To: To the Governments of Canada, Great Britain, the province of Nova Scotia, and all its municipalities and school boards

… Professor Geoffrey Plank of the University of Cincinnati comments about their rational [sic] for approving such a barbarous course of action:

“If the Micmac chose to resist his expropriation of land, the governor intended to conduct a war unlike any that had been fought in Nova Scotia before. He outlined his thinking in an unambiguous letter to the Board of Trade. If there was to be a war, he did not want the war to end with a peace agreement. ‘It would be better to root the Micmac out of the peninsula decisively and forever.’ The war began soon after the governor made this statement.”

Therefore, we the undersigned, because we firmly believe that no person who attempted genocide should, under any circumstances, receive public honors, express support for changing the name of all public entities such as schools, streets, parks, etc. which currently honor the name of Edward Cornwallis, founder of the British colonial city of Halifax which is currently the capital city of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

We ask this be done as a move towards restoring justice to the Mi’kmaq First Nation People of Nova Scotia. Governor Cornwallis, as part of the machinery of colonization, attempting to destroy them completely, oversaw the infliction of terrible suffering and indignities on men, women and children of the Mi’kmaq Nation. Morally, no Nation that self-describes itself as civilized, can justify honoring such a man. His action demands that he be condemned by honorable caring citizens, not honored!

Opposition has arisen to the Rename Cornwallis Initiative. Joseph Bogle calls accusations of genocide against Cornwallis “a blatant lie.” He has started a counter petition to preserve the name of Cornwallis that has garnered 12 signatures (as of 12 August 2009).

LeBlanc-Weldon said, “I am pleased with the progress of our petition as it continues to grow on a daily basis. I think the fact that the counter petition only has 12 signatures pretty much shows that there is not a vocal opposition to our desire for change.”

Bogle’s accusation is counter to the colonial records.¹⁰

Governmental Inaction

The former Nova Scotia heritage minister Bill Dooks argued against the redesignation. Dooks said, “Changing a name does not change what happened. I cannot change the past.” No one asked Dooks to change past events. The designations are current, and that is the change being sought.

The new social democratic government in Nova Scotia also seems uninterested in the redesignation. David Denny, advisor to Heritage Minister Percy Paris, communicated in a statement: “This is not a matter under consideration or review by the new government at this time.”

Changing Names

Redesignation has been the historical practice in Canada; witness the renaming of Mt. Stalin in British Columbia to Mt. Peck and renaming the Ontario town of New Berlin to Kitchener (who is held by many to be a war criminal himself¹¹ ). Furthermore, many place names are reverting to their Indigenous names; for example, the Queen Charlotte Islands are now usually called Haida Gwaii, the Mackenzie River is Deh Cho, etc.

The renaming of landmarks, buildings, and institutions that honor the genocidaire Cornwallis should only be a beginning. The city of Amherst, “Nova Scotia” is named after British army officer Jeffery Amherst notorious for advocating biological warfare against Original Peoples.¹²

In front of the Halifax Public Library is a statue of the bulky mass of Winston Churchill — the man who advocated “spread[ing] a lively terror” with poison gas. His words reveal his racism: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… ”¹³

Racism, and indifference, by Nova Scotians also affect the Rename Cornwallis campaign. “In some cases it’s a racist thing. They say ‘[the Mi’kmaq] lost, too bad’… or ‘lots of people did things wrong, it was war, don’t judge it by today’s standards.’ Others say ‘it doesn’t affect my life,’ but when they find out about it they say ‘yeah, it should change,’” said Leblanc-Weldon.¹⁴

1. Jipugtug is the original designation by the indigenous Mi’kmaq people. Halifax is the colonial designation.
2. Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, & David Sutherland, Halifax: The First 250 Years (Halifax: Formac Publishing, 1999): 8.
3. See map.
4. Fingard et al.: 13.
5. William B. Hamilton, The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place Names (Macmillan, 1978).
6. Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press, 2000): 109-113.
7. Paul: 115.
8. Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Harcourt Brace, 1996): 7.
9. ”A Monstrous crime, a day to remember in Canadian history,” Shunpiking: People of the Dawn (First Nations Supplement), 13 (49), Fall 2007: 14. See also Daniel N. Paul, “British Scalp Proclamations: 1749 and 1750,” www.danielnpaul.com.
10. “It is ironic Europeans who were responsible for diminishing Mi’kmaq life documented much of what they were destroying – in explorer’s logs, trade letters, missionary letters, colonial records, and so forth.” Prins: 4.
11. See “The crimes,” AngloBoer.com.
12. ”Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” Native Web.
13. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Noonday Press, 1992).
14. Ben Sichel, “Renaming Cornwallis,” The Dominion, 17 July 2009.

According to Forbes, Holdren’s environmentalism has been celebrated over the years. He has been the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard’s Research Center and a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Holdren partook as a member of The Limits to Growth club. In his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren writes “it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population.” The science supporting notions of peak oil, regardless of Holdren’s confidence, has been seriously scrutinized, giving credence to Forbes claim that Holdren holds serious dogmas.

From Forbes,

In keeping with his dogmatic (my italicization) limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon.

In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities–chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten–that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.

Holdren also held the view that, by 2040, the US population would reach 270 million, and that that would pose a “severe” problem. Today, in 2009, the population of the U.S. is about 304 million. In a 1975 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, Holdren slightly tinkered with his previous conceptions of limits to energy, writing that “civilization is not running out of energy; but it is running out of cheap energy.”

In his 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdren, Paul Ehrlich (head of science under Bush), and Anne Ehrlich write on page 837 that “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society. Few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion, however.”

Holdren also proposes “a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration and distribution of all natural resources…not only in the atmosphere and the oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes.”

He states further, the “Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits…The Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

Some syndicated columnists argue the claims made by concerned citizens are moot points, for the tome Ecoscience was written more than thirty years ago. Maybe so, until one learns that some of the suggestions are already utilized by the U.S. government, as over 250 different pharmaceutical chemicals have been found in the drinking supply of the unsuspecting U.S. population. Many of these chemicals are attributed to hyper feminization in women and demasculinization in men. In one example, Holdren states his belief that under the current U.S. Constitution, adding sterilants to the nation’s water supply was probably a good thing:

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.

Eugenics, an outcome of the study of human heredity, aims to “improve” the genetic makeup of the human stock. While the idea of eugenics appears in Plato’s Republic, the modern concept became prominent during the second half of the 19th century. Two widespread philosophical beliefs formed the bedrock of eugenics: a belief in the perfectibility of the human species and a spreading faith in science as the most accurate tool of knowledge.

Social Darwinism was one 19th century predecessor to the 20th century eugenics movement. Two predominant themes of social Darwinism—“struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest”—as applied to human sociality, were premised upon the notion that the rich were more biologically fit than were the poor and, for that reason, more successful in life. More nuanced theories of evolution, naturally, render the assumption that competition is the bedrock mechanism of evolution obsolete, thereby making room for the notion that cooperation is in the driver’s seat. Could some form of competitive cooperation oil the gears of evolution? A healthy competition?

By separating the “better” and “worse” elements, according to social Darwinism, the species could continually be improved. Modern eugenics breaks from that pool of thought in noteworthy ways. The latter featured a laissez-faire approach to the philosophy, maintaining that nature would take such a course; that the worst elements of society would over time be eliminated. Such concepts, many argue, form the foundation of the Nazi program.

Modern eugenics, however, has as its basis the notion that careful planning by way of proper breeding is the best means to improving society; this is the ideology adopted by the Nazi Regime.

In the 1930’s in Germany, the rush to sequester and alleviate mental deficiencies was quickly interpreted to encompass malcontents and dissidents opposed to the Nazi regime. This vague theory gave way to the Nazi Sterilization Act, effective July 1933.²

Dr. Ernst Rudin, a leading and articulate authority in favor of the Sterilization Act, traveled in 1930 to Washington D.C. in order to present a paper called, “The Importance of Eugenics and Genetics in Mental Hygiene.” The paper was well-received in the United States, where many—especially among the moneyed elite—were cordial to German pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy.

In late June 1933, German Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick convened a blue-ribbon committee on demographic and racial policy, during which he unraveled an ambitious program to evaluate “our ethnic body politic according to its genetic value.” Frick propagandized that the decay of das Volk was not attributable to an outside enemy, but, rather, to something within the people themselves. The materialism and lamentable moral decline of the Weimar Era had to be eradicated, and Weimar programs stopped. In reality, despite the crushing of the German economy by western business, the Weimar Republic constituted a vibrant culture and enjoyed relatively successful social programs. Among the programs to be stopped were birth control that reduced the Volk by encouraging a “two-child family system,” superfluous social welfare programs that wasted money on “hopeless clients,” and “sexual freedom [that promoted] the ‘mannish woman.’”³

Frick outlined the overbearing program to eradicate the bad and “select” the beneficial. Such issues were referred to scantily in the Nazi Party program but mostly ignored by the party press. During a party rally in 1929, Hitler commented on the topic, commenting that if, of one million newborns 10,000 of the least desirable died, it would result in a net gain for the Volk.

The engineers of the Nazi sterilization program looked to the U.S. as a model. A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, drafted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, justified sterilization: In the wake of world war, when “the best of a generation of young men risked their lives for the nation,” Holmes reasoned, “it would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices…in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The Nazi sterilization program was initiated during a time when 28 American states as well as a number of European nations employed sterilization programs.

The magnitude of, not the ideas behind, the Nazi “ethnic improvement” schemes was what made them stand out. In the United States between 1907 and 1947, about 45, 127 people were sterilized (conservatively). In Germany, internationally respected eugenicist Friedrich Lenz calculated that 1 million feeble-minded Germans (in a population of 65 million) should be sterilized, whilst Agricultural minister Walter Darre called for ten times that many. Frick adapted his radio audience to the concepts by preparing them for a rate of one in five.

Beginning their eugenics programs on children, the Nazis, on July 14, 1933, passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Children. Leaders of the movement to eliminate “mental defectives” from the German Volk were lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, whose phrase “lebensunwertes Leben”—or “life unworthy of life”—became a popular, albeit chilling phrase.²

Sterilization was the preferred means of prevention, and was administered by special “hereditary health courts.” The Nazi euthanasia program was carried out by secret decries, for Hitler refused to seek a legal ruling, well-aware of such a programs illegal nature under the Weimar Constitution.

Between 1934 and 1945, so it is estimated, more than 400,000 people were sterilized as “life unworthy of life.”

The Nazi regime employed these measures in such a convoluted way—what Robert Jay Lifton terms “bureaucratic mystification”—as to make it nearly impossible for victims, their families and even those working within the system to know the vast nature of the euthanasia program.

In the United States, the Rockefellers—who had, among other endeavors, amassed a bustling oil empire—were also interested in the eugenics movement. In 1910, the Eugenics records Office was established, with grants bestowed unto it on behalf of—but certainly not only—John D. Rockefeller.

In 2009, a number of global crises give rise to a social climate in which talks of “global governance” receive little attention or analysis. The war on terror, global warming, swine flu and peak oil—no matter how contrived these phenomenon may be—create an opportunity for the most radical and disreputed of values to appear in the mainstream.

Right Side News points out that, while Holdren can be criticized for publicizing the aforementioned views and other likes it, because he preceded it by evoking other authorities, it cannot be entirely attributed to him. Holdren, according to Right Side News, escapes guilt by stating, “The impact of laws and policies on population size and growth has, until very recently, largely been ignored by the legal profession. The first comprehensive treatment of population law was that of the late Johnson C. Montgomery, an attorney who was president of Zero Population Growth, and whose ideas are the basis of much of the following discussion.”⁴

Right Side News best investigate precedents set in this nation’s legal history. On October 15, 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act) became law. The RICO Act enabled law enforcement to charge persons or a group with racketeering; that is, committing multiple violations of certain varieties within a 10 year period. The purpose of the act was stated to be “the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.” Holdren and his associates, an international ueberclass of about 6,000 individuals, are eligible for such proceedings. Each one of us, naturally, is aware of Nuremburg Trial precedents. The United States government is an organization operating in interstate commerce, as articulated by President Woodrow Wilson in the 1920’s when he said, “the business of America is business.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about past scientific overstatements, and riposted, “The motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time.”

Holdren, by the way, has pontificated that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Also, that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century, far exceeding even the most concerned, who place the level at 13 inches.

While introducing Holdren, Barack Obama promised that his administration was “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”⁵

State directed sterilization breach two deeply rooted principles. One being the secular precept, enshrined in John Locke’s Second Treatise, that “every man has a property in his own person,” and the other the prohibition against any interference in reproduction, which Pope Pius XI forcefully restated in his 1930 Casti Cannubi.³

The Business of Genocide

The H1N1 virus has killed fewer than 500 people. The World Health Organization, nevertheless, declared a global pandemic: “The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” according to Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director.⁶

It has been reported by the Washington Times, “children will be a key target population for a pandemic flu vaccine in the fall.” The students would be vaccinated in a three step program in a mass campaign paralleling that of efforts in the 1950’s against polio. Pregnant women, adults with chronic illnesses and health-workers would join children as the first in line. The federal government expects to receive approximately 100 million doses of vaccine by mid-October, assuming the current production, by only five companies, continues as planned. However vaccine for wide use, by about 120 million “especially vulnerable” people, will not be available until later in the fall.⁷

The Department of Homeland Security, moreover, issued in April a swine flu memo to some health care providers. “The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines,” the memo states. Such authority is limited to diseases listed in presidential executive orders; President Bush, however, added new forms of influenza with the potential to cause pandemics in Executive Order 13375. Anyone violating a quarantine order can be punished by a $250,000 fine and a one-year prison term, according to CBS News.⁸

The Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Plan extinguishes the distinction between a civilian and national security emergency situation, what is effectively the end of Posse Comitatus.

Not only the United States, but rather many other countries have announced mandated vaccination programs. The French government, for example, has purchased 28 million vaccines for the country of 60 million +. The Former chairman of the British Medical Association has, also, called for mandatory vaccinations.

The US Secretary of Health and Human Sercices, Kathleen Sebelius, recently signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from all lawsuits resulting from any new “Swine Flu” vaccine. The $7 billion US Government program to rush vaccines onto the market in time for the Fall flu season is being done devoid of normal safety testing. Swine Flur, H1N1, furthermore, has yet to be rigorously scientifically isolated, characterized and photographed with an electron microscope—the scientifically acknowledged procedure.⁹

Is the United States social climate such, that forced inoculations would not inspire internal dissent?

Created in 2002 by President Bush, NorthCom, the Pentagons Northern Command—with jurisdiction over the United States—has been running preparedness drills in the event of a flu pandemic for at least the past three years. Northcom, furthermore, was recently assigned its own fighting unit six months ago. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Divison 1st Brigade Combat Team spent much of the last five years battling in Iraq.¹⁰

Head of NorthCom General Victor Renuart, testifying in March, claimed the command center would provide “assistance in support of civil authorities” during an epidemic. Adding, “when requested and approved by the Secretary of Defense or directed by the President, federal military forces will contribute federal support.”

According to the General, NorthCom had prepared for a flu outbreak from Mexico. “Because Mexico is our neighbor and disasters do not respect national boundaries, we are focused on developing and improving procedures to respond to potentially catastrophic events such as pandemic influenza outbreak, mass exposure to dangerous chemicals and materials, and natural disasters.”

NorthCom also has a “private sector cell.”

“We have great participation from industry and from other organizations around the country,” the General testified.

One private sector group that has worked with the FBI and Homeland Security on pandemics is InfraGard, a group of more than 30,000 businesspeople who enjoy special access to confidential FBI Information and may be assigned special—even lethal—duties in times of an emergency.”

InfraGard wishes to be a player in pandemic response. “Utilization of their expertise will help local communities prepare for a possible pandemic event to ensure minimal disruption and quick recover,” one InfraGard press release stated.¹¹

1. Bailey, Ronald. John Holdren, Ideological Environmentalist. Forbes Magazine, 2.03.09.
2. Marrs, Jim. The Rise of the Fourth Reich. Harpers.
3. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience.
4. Kincaid, Cliff. Is Obama’s Science Czar a Crackpot? Right Side News, 7.15.09.
5. Harsanyi, David. Science Fiction Czar. Denver Post, 7.15.09
6. WHO declares global swine flu pandemic and says virus is ‘unstoppable.’ Times online UK.
7. Brown, David and Hsu, Spencer. Students first in Line for Flu Vaccine. Washington Post, July 10, 2009.
8. Department of Homeland Security Guidelines For Possible Swine Flu Quarantines. GlobalResearch
9. Eberhart, Dave. Health Bill Would Allow Forced Vaccinations in Private Homes. Newsmax, 7.16.09.
10. Rothschild, Mathew. Will NorthCom Takeover in Swine Flu Outbreak? The Progressive, 4.29.09
11. Engdahl, William F. Now Legal Immunity for Swine Flu Vaccine Makers. Global Research, 7.22.09.

They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it truth.
– Isaiah

The unexamined life is not worth living.
–Socrates

War is always finally about betrayal.
– Chris Hedges

A static universe isn’t physically self-consistent. The sun can’t shine forever.
– James Peebles, Physics Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
– T.S. Eliot

On July 11th, author William Blum e-mailed me a Washington Post article about Ken Meyercord. Fredrick Kunkle, a Post staff writer, described Meyercord as a 65-year old with a “high tech job at Freddie Mac, a local public-access cable television show … and a long history of writing about what he says are ‘myths’ of the Holocaust.” Meyercord, the article continued, hoped to win “an at-large seat on the board of the Reston Citizens Association, a quasi-government body … for the community of 60,000, which is not officially a municipality.” Reston is basically a D.C. suburb in Virginia.

I’d met Meyercord a few months before at a political celebration in downtown D.C. The party’s sponsors were elated over Obama’s inauguration. More cynical than most of those there, I’d latched onto Blum’s coat-tails for the invite—providing chauffeur services in my old van. I met Medea Benjamin, Meyercord and his Palestinian wife, Samira, and a few other interesting people. Nobody I met or overheard struck me as radical or dangerous. Some—not those I’ve mentioned here—struck me as naïve for believing that one election would change the direction of our latter-day Empire.

A few months later, friend Blum and I were at Eduardo Galeano’s reading at Politics and Prose, also in D.C.. We ran into Meyercord there and we decided to get some Chinese food nearby. Meyercord told me about his TV show then, but most of the conversation had more to do with Peking duck than with the sweet and sour business of contemporary, imperial politics.

Meyercord probably mentioned that he was running in the Reston election. A Maryland resident, unable to vote in Virginia, absorbed in my personal problems then, all of that sailed over my head. Conversation was mostly convivial; no one was trying to proselytize; and, in fact, nobody could have. Blum is 75 and he’s seen it all; I’m 63 and I’ve seen enough.

Four days after reading the first article on Meyercord, I was e-mailed another, also by Fredrick Kunkle at the Post. Under the headline, “Write-in Effort Blocks ‘Revisionist,” I learned: “A last-minute campaign to prevent a self-described Holocaust revisionist from serving on a civic body in Reston has succeeded with a landslide. … Ken Meyercord, who had been running unopposed for an at-large seat on the Reston Citizens Association’s 13-member volunteer board, received only 23 votes after his provocative views on Jews created a backlash.” Debra Steppel, who organized the write-in campaign, called it a “fabulous result.”

Mr. Kunkle wrote that Meyercord was “gracious in conceding,” and that he had congratulated Ms. Steppel for her efforts, although he thought her “misinformed.” Further, the article noted that Meyercord and his wife had lived in Reston since 1977, and that, in “writings and interviews,” he had expressed doubt that Nazi Germany had a “mission to annihilate European Jews, a plan known as the Final Solution.” Meyercord had also denied that Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews, and he had “expressed skepticism that the number of Holocaust victims reached 6 million.”

By now, my interest was more than piqued, and I asked Meyercord to send me some of his writing. As a half-Jew with Zionists, anti-Zionists and the indifferent, ignorant and uniformed within my own extended family; as a fan of Paine and Thoreau, Martin Buber, Rilke and Hesse; as a man vitally interested in my world and human psychology, I wanted to know more about this tempest in a teapot in Reston and how it might relate to our confused, violent and pernicious modern macro world.

Perusing Meyercord’s work, I found him to be more apologetic than inflammatory. In “In Search of a Holocaust Denier,” he writes, “What I would like to offer here is a rationale—a plea, really—for investigating all aspects of the holocaust story in an atmosphere free of rancor, intolerance, and intimidation. I believe we can learn from history and that it will be a better world if we do. Of course, to learn from history, we have to have an accurate understanding of what happened. …”

Meyercord describes how the “goose-stepping … siegheiling” Nazis endlessly portrayed by Hollywood and the other media provided little insight into “how a man like Hitler could have risen to power in one of the most sophisticated countries on earth.” He deplores the fact that we have learned so little from the Nazi era, noting that the Foreign Minister of Israel [Avigdor Lieberman] has advocated the deportation of all Palestinians from Eretz [Greater] Israel. Those who have challenged holocaust orthodoxy have found themselves exiled to an academic wilderness—a la Norman Finkelstein in the U.S.—or imprisoned—like David Irving in Austria! And, in that same reasonable, almost apologetic mode, he asks, “Wouldn’t it be better to dispel the myths surrounding the holocaust now, while anti-Semitism is a neglibible factor in American society, than at some future date when hard times lead desperate, angry Americans to look around for a scapegoat?”

So much for the overview of Meyercord’s approach. He’s not some glib-tongued salesman for neo-Nazism. His argumentation is tightly reasoned and far less fiery and provocative than, say, Limbaugh’s, O’Reilly’s, Hannity’s or Coulter’s. He directs his readers (and directed me in a short phone interview of him) to two websites for further exploration of the issues.

Meyercord describes himself as a “revisionist,” not a holocaust denier. He notes: “What causes revisionists to be misrepresented and slandered by the believers is their denial of three constituent parts of the holocaust story:

   1. That there was a plan to exterminate the Jews, aka, “The Final Solution.”
   2. That gas chambers were used in the execution of that plan; and
   3. That no less than six million Jews died as a result.

He offers his own refutations of the predominant “holocaust story” and directs us to others for more detail.

The question I have to ask now is: How is this relevant to our post-9/11 world?

It is relevant because past is prelude, and those who don’t learn the lessons of the past, as Santayana said … well, you know the rest.

It’s relevant because we would rather kill each other to defend the sanctity of our myths—religious, ideological, nationalistic/patriotic—than smash the idols of our perceptions—and misperceptions.

It’s relevant because a thoughtful man’s views of history or religious dogma is irrelevant to the performance of his duties and responsibilities as a citizen in a local civic organization.

It is relevant because every tin-pot dictator who appears on the scene—a Noriega, a Saddam Hussein—who loses the favor of the U.S. imperial regime; and every populist leader—an Ahmadinejead, a Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro—is inevitably compared to Hitler and threatened with regime change, or having his country “wiped off the map,” or has, in fact, been invaded. Hitler has become the gold standard of evil—and that incubus colors every other form of evil. We have personalized and incarnated evil, ignorance and brutality, and exonerated the institutions, the social forms and mechanisms of control, the psychologies and hysterias still very much with us today.

It is relevant because most Americans don’t know squat about Zionism or the role that Jewish nationalism played in the run-up to World War I, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the disastrous Versailles treaty, the Balfour Declaration, etc. (Meyercord, in fact, does not touch on any of this in his writing or in his interviews with me or with Fred Kunkle at the Post.)

It is relevant because whether 6 million Jews died or 1 million died—there still is no justification for the expropriation of another people’s land, resources, country. (My mother taught me as a child, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”)

Meyercord’s little dust-up in a D.C. suburb leaves us with three big ponderables:

   1. A question of censorship
   2. A moral question
   3. The historical record

Ms. Steppel’s write-in campaign, and the voters of Reston, attempted to censor Meyercord’s words and beliefs. They did not vote on the man’s competence, his willingness and ability to serve his local community. They voted against his convictions, at which he had arrived after carefully examining the evidence, his life and the promptings of his conscience. He lived for six months in Beirut, traveled in Israel, has had a long, fulfilling marriage to a Palestinian woman. They raised two children who attended Reston’s public schools. No doubt his unique experiences have enriched his perspective. How does censorship and expurgation serve the public interest? In our intertwined world, are we not all safer reaching out, trying to understand “the other”?

The moral question has too often reduced itself to “my suffering is better than your suffering.” Suffering employed this way has little or nothing to do with morality, much to do with religious dogma. It is suffering as justification—for outrageous reparations (against Germans, for example, no more guilty for World War I than Brits, the French, the Americans, the Russians). It is suffering employed as the ultimate rationale for “man’s inhumanity to man,” “nature red in tooth and claw,” etc. It is suffering memorialized as stasis (James Peebles here: “a static universe isn’t physically self-consistent”). It is suffering as rationalization for continuing the empires of destruction, wreaking havoc and revenge on more innocents, continuing the whole ghastly process (“They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it the truth.”)

As for the historical record, it has always been a rather murky affair. In my entire lifetime, God has never spoken to me once out of the Whirlwind, and I have been waiting for 46 years to find out what really happened on November 22, 1963. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, and Bohr told Einstein to stop telling God what to do! God may not play dice, but He/She/It certainly keeps His/Her/Its cards close to His/Her/Its chest/bosom/ineffable mystery.

Which means I’ve got to keep digging. I have to keep disturbing the universe, checking my notes and revising my memes because in an expanding universe I don’t participate in cosmological events, but I can play my ant-like role in the evolution of awareness and consciousness. “War is finally about betrayal,” as Hedges succinctly and profoundly writes, and I need to know why and how a species that has evolved so magnificently in its technology has, when it comes to interacting with other sentient beings, stymied itself in the Age of Iron and Sky Gods. What gives? What mystery here?

Six million victims or one innocent victim—what compels us to slaughter the innocents under Herod, to crucify Christ for our sins, to burn John Hus for impiety? How shall we employ numbers to justify brutality? Did the death of 20 million Russians in the Great Patriotic War justify the rape of 2 million German women by Russian troops when the Third Reich collapsed? The ghost voices of tens of millions of native peoples of the Americas rise up and cry for justice. What reparations can we pay them? Millions of Africans, lost in the “Middle Passage” of the slave trips, sweated to death among the sugar canes of the Caribbean and the cotton and tobacco plantations of the New (old!) World—what memorials shall we build for them, what is their due?

How do we make equivalences? I suffered, my family suffered, my people suffered … therefore, I have the right to. … What? Wreak vengeance? Upon the innocents?

Probably it is too much to hope for forgiveness—either given or gotten. Humans are not, generally, constituted that way. Except for a few saints we’ve usually managed to crucify upside down, boil in oil, or murder with a thousand cuts.

But we may, possibly, hope for clarity, breaking the cycle of wrong for wrong, by excavating the truths, the hidden causes, penetrating the whirlwind of confusion and setting the record straight–because in this melange of pulsating life called Earth, it’s looking more and more like we’d better all pull on the oars together or we’re all going down together. And it looks more and more like Eugene Debs, who said so much well, said this one perfectly: “While there is one soul in prison, I am not free.”

What else but to know the true history of the human mind and heart—to extricate ourselves, to beam the searchlights in terra incognita, confront our demons, shake our wings loose from the chrysalis of so much ignorance, blood-lust, power-lusting, arrogance, fear, greed and stupidity?

Alan García is no stranger to government-sponsored massacres. In June 1986, he ordered the military to bomb and shell prisons in the capital holding many hundreds of political prisoners protesting prison conditions – resulting in over 400 known victims. Later, obscure mass graves revealed dozens more. This notorious massacre took place while García was hosting a gathering of the so-called ‘Socialist’ International in Lima. His political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) a member of the ‘International’, was embarrassed by the public display of its ‘national-socialist’ proclivities, before hundreds of European Social Democrat functionaries. Charged with misappropriation of government funds and leaving office with an inflation rate of almost 8,000% in 1990, he agreed to support Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori in exchange for amnesty. When Fujimori imposed a dictatorship in 1992, García went into self-imposed exile in Colombia and later, France. He returned in 2001 when the statute of limitations on his corruption charges had expired and Fujimori was forced to resign amidst charges of running death squads and spying on his critics. García won the 2006 Presidential elections in a run-off against the pro-Indian nationalist candidate and former Army officer, Ollanta Humala, thanks to financial and media backing by Lima’s rightwing, ethnic European oligarchs and US overseas ‘AID’ agencies.

Back in power, García left no doubt about his political and economic agenda. In October 2007 he announced his strategy of placing foreign multi-national mining companies at the center of his economic ‘development’ program, while justifying the brutal displacement of small producers from communal lands and indigenous villages in the name of ‘modernization’.

García pushed through congressional legislation in line with the US-promoted ‘Free Trade Agreement of the Americas’ or ALCA. Peru was one of only three Latin American nations to support the US proposal. He opened Peru to the unprecedented plunder of its resources, labor, land and markets by the multinationals. In late 2007, García began to award huge tracts of traditional indigenous lands in the Amazon region for exploitation by foreign mining and energy multinationals. This was in violation of a 1969 International Labor Organization-brokered agreement obligating the Peruvian government to consult and negotiate with the indigenous inhabitants over exploitation of their lands and rivers. Under his ‘open door’ policy, the mining sector of the economy expanded rapidly and made huge profits from the record-high world commodity prices and the growing Asian (Chinese) demand for raw materials. The multinational corporations were attracted by Peru’s low corporate taxes and royalty payments and virtually free access to water and cheap government-subsidized electricity rates. The enforcement of environmental regulations was suspended in these ecologically fragile regions, leading to wide-spread contamination of the rivers, ground water, air and soil in the surrounding indigenous communities. Poisons from mining operations led to massive fish kills and rendered the water unfit for drinking. The operations decimated the tropical forests, undermining the livelihood of tens of thousands of villagers engaged in traditional artisan work and subsistence forest gathering and agricultural activities.

The profits of the mining bonanza go primarily to the overseas companies. The García regime distributes state revenues to his supporters among the financial and real estate speculators, luxury goods importers and political cronies in Lima’s enclosed upscale, heavily guarded neighborhoods and exclusive country-clubs. As the profit margins of the multinationals reached an incredible 50% and government revenues exceeded $1 billion US dollars, the indigenous communities lacked paved roads, safe water, basic health services and schools. Worse still, they experienced a rapid deterioration of their everyday lives as the influx of mining capital led to increased prices for basic food and medicine. Even the World Bank in its Annual Report for 2008 and the editors of the Financial Times of London urged the García regime to address the growing discontent and crisis among the indigenous communities. Delegations from the indigenous communities had traveled to Lima to try to establish a dialogue with the President in order to address the degradation of their lands and communities. The delegates were met with closed doors. García maintained that ‘progress and modernity come from the big investments by the multinationals…, (rather than) the poor peasants who haven’t a centavo to invest.’ He interpreted the appeals for peaceful dialogue as a sign of weakness among the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon and increased his grants of exploitation concessions to foreign MNCs even deeper into the Amazon. He cut off virtually all possibility for dialogue and compromise with the Indian communities.

The Amazonian Indian communities responded by forming the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). They held public protests for over 7 weeks culminating in the blocking of two transnational highways. This enraged García, who referred to the protestors as ‘savages and barbarians‘ and sent police and military units to suppress the mass action. What García failed to consider was the fact that a significant proportion of indigenous men in these villages had served as rmy conscripts, who fought in the 1995 war against Ecuador while others had been trained in local self-defense community organizations. These combat veterans were not intimidated by state terror and their resistance to the initial police attacks resulted in both police and Indian casualties. García then declared ‘war on the savages’ sending a heavy military force with helicopters and armored troops with orders to ‘shoot to kill’. AIDESEP activists report over one hundred deaths among the indigenous protestors and their families: Indians were murdered in the streets, in their homes and workplaces. The remains of many victims are believed to have been dumped in the ravines and rivers.

Conclusion

The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Peruvian civilians in this decade – perpetrated by one of America’s closest remaining allies in Latin America. García, taking his talking points from the US Ambassador, accused Venezuela and Bolivia of having instigated the Indian ‘uprising’, quoting a letter of support from Bolivia’s President Evo Morales sent to an intercontinental conference of Indian communities held in Lima in May as ‘proof’. Martial law was declared and the entire Amazon region of Peru is being militarized. Meetings are banned and family members are forbidden from searching for their missing relatives.

Throughout Latin America, all the major Indian organizations have expressed their solidarity with the Peruvian indigenous movements. Within Peru, mass social movements, trade unions and human rights groups have organized a general strike on June 11. Fearing the spread of mass protests, El Commercio, the conservative Lima daily, cautioned García to adopt some conciliatory measures to avoid a generalized urban uprising. A one-day truce was declared on June 10, but the Indian organizations refused to end their blockade of the highways unless the García Government rescinds its illegal land grant decrees.

In the meantime, a strange silence hangs over the White House. Our usually garrulous President Obama, so adept at reciting platitudes about diversity and tolerance and praising peace and justice, cannot find a single phrase in his prepared script condemning the massacre of scores of indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. When egregious violations of human rights are committed in Latin America by a US backed client-President following Washington’s formula of ‘free trade’, deregulation of environmental protections and hostility toward anti-imperialist countries (Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador), Obama favors complicity over condemnation.

Armenia

Mickey Z: This April, President Barack Obama broke campaign promise #511, namely to explicitly acknowledge the Armenian genocide as U.S. President. What happened on his recent visit to Turkey? What are the ramifications of his breaking this promise?

David Boyajian: President Obama visited Turkey from April 6 to 7, where he did not use the word “genocide” when referring to the 1.5 million murders committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens from 1915-1923. As a candidate, Obama had promised several times to do so. His statement in Turkey that he had “not changed his views”–implying he still believes it was genocide–was still a clear breach of his promise to use the “G word.” It was a case study in verbal gymnastics and political duplicity and should be studied in political science courses. Obama’s broken promise obviously eroded his credibility. The same holds true for Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as senators, supported the Armenian genocide resolution. They’ve since fallen disgracefully silent. Dr. Samantha Power should also be embarrassed. She’s the National Security Council’s genocide expert and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. As a campaign advisor to Obama, she made a video telling Armenian Americans that as president, Obama would definitely acknowledge their genocide. “Take my word for it,” she said.

Appeasement of a genocide-denying country such as Turkey is bad policy because its message is that genocides can be committed without consequence. Appeasement also erodes U.S. credibility on human rights and its stated desire to be a leader in genocide prevention. Unlike what lobbyists for Turkey would have us believe, Armenian genocide affirmation by America would not harm U.S. national interests. Turkey depends on the U.S. for weapons systems, support for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund, security guarantees through NATO, advocacy for Turkish membership in the European Union, and more. Some 20 countries, including Canada, France, and Switzerland, as well as the parliaments of the EU and the Council of Europe, have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. None has ever experienced much more than a Turkish temper tantrum in retaliation.

MZ: Two days prior to Armenian Genocide Remembrance day — which annually falls on April 24 –Turkey and Armenia announced that they had agreed to a “roadmap” to normalize relations. What was the significance of this timing? What does the “roadmap” contain?

DB: Behind the scenes, the U.S. State Department had long been twisting Armenia’s arm to agree to a so-called “roadmap” with Turkey before President Obama issued what has become a customary “April 24 statement” by U.S. presidents marking Armenian genocide memorial day. The “roadmap,” announced on April 22, provided political cover for Obama to not use the “G word” on April 24. That is, since there was now supposedly a roadmap for normalization of relations — no matter how vague and hurriedly slapped together — Obama could say that he did not want to upset Turkey and the touted-as-highly-delicate Turkish-Armenian negotiations by using the “G word.” Notice that Obama did not consult with Armenian-Americans or Armenia about this. So much for promises and moral principles. It’s disgraceful that Obama, simply to help Turkey save face, not only broke his promise, but showed blatant disregard for the activists — not just Armenians — who labored so hard for many years for the cause of recognizing all genocides.

Armenia has always said that it was ready to normalize relations with Turkey — which would include Turkey’s re-opening its border with Armenia-without pre-conditions. Suddenly, however, Armenia has had pre-conditions imposed on it in this “roadmap.” According to the Turkish press, the “roadmap” allegedly contains pre-conditions such as: Armenia’s agreeing to a joint commission to examine the veracity of the Armenian genocide — yes, you heard right, Armenia’s formal recognition of current Turkish boundaries — which contain the Armenian homeland, and, possibly, Armenia’s accepting Turkish mediation in the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed Armenian region of Karabagh — which is absurd since Azerbaijan and Turkey are allies. It appears that Armenia’s president, whose electoral legitimacy is in question, has been worn down in these negotiations by Turkey, the West, and possibly even Russia. And because the Armenian president is grappling with his legitimacy, he is not heeding the cautions being voiced by the people of his own nation about the “roadmap.”

MZ: The U.S. administration and mainstream media would have us believe that Turkey is seeking to “reconcile” with Armenia. Is “reconciliation” really a possibility, or have we misunderstood what’s going on?

DB: The word “reconciliation” in relation to Armenian-Turkish relations is largely an invention of U.S. policymakers, their emissaries, and the mainstream media who take their cues from them. What the U.S. and Europe would like to see is a more stable Caucasus — that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — with open borders. Open borders, you see, would facilitate laying more oil and gas pipelines that would originate in the Caspian Sea region and proceed west to Turkey and then to energy-hungry Europe and Israel. The U.S. and Europe don’t want to put it quite that crudely — no pun intended — so they try to depict Armenia and Turkey as possibly “reconciling” and thus resolving all their differences. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of sympathy with its ally Azerbaijan, which was in a war with the Armenians of Karabagh, a historically Armenian-populated autonomous area within Azerbaijan that Stalin handed to Azerbaijan. Turkey has also been infuriated that Armenia and Armenians worldwide have been demanding that Turkey acknowledge the genocide it committed against Armenians.

Turkey has to acknowledge the genocide or there will never be peace between it and Armenia. And although the Armenian government has not put forth any claims for reparations arising out of the genocide, or for territory, many Armenians do have these goals. They cite the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which provided for Armenian sovereignty over Armenian lands upon which Turkey committed the genocide, and which have since been incorporated into what is now eastern Turkey.

MZ: The countries of the Caucasus are Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Most Americans, including the mainstream media, could not find these small countries on a map. Why are Russia and the U.S. — the latter being thousands of miles from the region — so interested in these three small countries?

DB: The Caucasus is truly Ground Zero in Cold War II, the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. — along with Europe and the NATO military alliance — regard Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan as middlemen between the West and the gas and oil-rich regions around the Caspian Sea. The West has already laid gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia and then on to Turkey and the west. The U.S. wanted those and future pipelines to bypass Russia and Iran because those two countries could shut such pipelines to pressure the U.S. and others. The only possible pipelines routes, therefore, are through Georgia or Armenia. But Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and Azerbaijan closed its border with Armenia even earlier due to the conflict between it and the de-facto Armenian region of Karabagh. That left Georgia as the only place for these Western pipelines. After the Russian-Georgian was last year, however, opening an alternative route has become more urgent. That largely explains the West’s renewed interest in Armenia. Conversely, Russia sees the Caucasus as within its traditional sphere of influence, and regards U.S. and European interest in the region as hostile acts.

Simultaneously, NATO has been pushing into the region. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and to some extent even the ex-Soviet republics on the other side of the Caspian Sea, are on the path to joining NATO. Russia was already upset that, following the Cold War, NATO had absorbed the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. NATO is now attempting, in effect, to do the same thing on Russia’s southern border. Russia fears that it will eventually be virtually surrounded by NATO. As a result, we have Cold War II: The U.S. and NATO are trying to push into the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia is trying to keep them out.

MZ: Why is Israel interested in the Caucasus, and what role is that country playing? Why are Israel and the pro-Israel lobby dead set against recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. Congress?

DB: Israel is interested in getting some of the oil and gas that flow out of the Caspian Sea region. That is, from countries such as Azerbaijan, oil and gas flow west through Georgia, and then on to Turkey and other countries, possibly including Israel. After all, the U.S. and Turkey, which are important players in these pipelines, are obviously also very friendly with Israel. Israel also welcomes all non-Arab supplies of energy since they would make its Western allies less dependent on Arab oil and gas. And Israel has long had what it calls its Periphery Policy. Historically, Israel has not had good relations with its Arab neighbors. Therefore, to serve as counterweights, Israel befriends those countries further away, especially Muslim countries that aren’t necessarily sympathetic to Israel’s Arab neighbors or Palestinians. Azerbaijan, the only Muslim nation in the Caucasus, and some Muslim nations to the east, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, are such countries. Fortuitously for Israel, they also possess significant deposits of gas and oil.

For decades, Israel and Turkey have had very good relations, mainly because they have a common ally, the U.S., and common adversaries, namely Arab nations. In the 1990’s, Israel and Turkey signed a number of military, economic, and political agreements that solidified their relationship. Even before that, but particularly after that, Turkey felt that it did not have sufficient lobbying muscle in Washington. So the Turks asked Israel to convince some of the pro-Israel lobby — the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and others — to serve as advocates for Turkey. The Jewish lobby groups agreed. So these groups, as part of their deal with Turkey, deny or call into question the Armenian genocide and work to prevent U.S. acknowledgement of that genocide. These groups won’t tolerate anyone questioning of the Holocaust, and yet hypocritically work against acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Interestingly, for the last 2 years, Armenian Americans have exposed the ADL’s hypocrisy. In Massachusetts, for example, fourteen cities severed ties with an anti-bias program sponsored by the ADL because of the latter’s hypocritical and anti-Armenian stance (see NoPlaceForDenial.com). Armenians are determined to challenge genocide denial whenever it occurs.

MZ: Is there a problem with the way the mainstream media has been covering Armenian issues?

DB: Yes. The mainstream media have several problems. First, they know very little about the Caucasus or Armenians. Reporters tend, therefore, to copy each other and repeat clichés and falsehoods — such as that Armenia and Turkey are on the verge of a historic “reconciliation.” Media also tend to accept at face value the propaganda issued by Western governments whose interest in the Caucasus is — let’s be frank — not “reconciliation,” democracy, or human rights, but rather self-interested economic, political, and military political penetration of the Caucasus.

Turkey has about 30 times more people and territory, and 50 times more Gross Domestic Product, than Armenia. The power differential is enormous. Turkey has infinitely more allies in Western media, governments, think tanks, and multi-national corporations-and knows how to use them. Commentators who have a vested interest in touting Turkey for their own political and even financial reasons have particularly come out of the woodwork to deride legitimate Armenian demands. But we rarely hear commentators speak of how a small country that has been the victim of genocide, that has had most of its territory stripped from it, and that has been blockaded by the denier of that genocide — Turkey — is being threatened by that very same unrepentant denier. Mainstream media largely fail to appreciate the foregoing facts. Hopefully, Mickey, this interview will help the media and your readers understand the issues and the region a bit better.

Allison Des Forges presents a lecture on ‘genocide in Rwanda’ at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Photo keith harmon snow, 2007.

On 12 February 2009, Alison Des Forges, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for more than 20 years, was killed when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed on route to Buffalo, New York. Des Forges was widely cited as a staunch critic of the Rwandan military government controlled by Paul Kagame and the victors of the war in Rwanda, 1990-1994.

In the ongoing life-and-death struggle to reveal the truth about war crimes and genocide in Central Africa, competing factions on all sides have posthumously embraced Alison Des Forges as an activist challenging power and a purveyor of truth and justice against all odds. Meanwhile, in March, 2009, based on false accusations of genocide issued by the Kagame regime—and given the close relations between Rwanda and the Obama administration’s former Clintonite officials—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began the process of revisiting all immigration cases of Rwandan asylum seekers and criminalizing innocent refugees.

“In May of 1994, a few weeks into the killings of Tutsis in Rwanda, [Alison Des Forges] was among the first voices calling for the killings to be declared a genocide,” reported Amy Goodman, after Des Forges’s passing away, on Democracy Now. “She later became very critical of the Tutsi-led Rwandan government headed by Paul Kagame and its role in the mass killings in both Rwanda and neighboring Congo after 1994. Last year, she was barred from entering Rwanda.”

To say that Des Forges was “amongst the first voices calling for the killings to be declared genocide” in 1994 is an Orwellian ruse. The genocide label applied by Alison Des Forges and certain human rights bodies in May of 1994 was misdirected, used to accuse and criminalize only the majority Hutu people and the remnants of the decapitated Habyarimana government (much as the genocide and war crimes accusations have been selectively applied against President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan).

The Clinton administration refused to apply the genocide label: to do so might have compromised an ongoing U.S.-backed covert operation: the invasion of the Pentagon’s proxy force, the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A).

According to U.S. intelligence insider Wayne Madsen, Des Forges’ criticisms of the U.S.-brokered pact between presidents Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Joseph Kabila (Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC) in December 2008 “earned her some powerful enemies ranging from the murderous Kagame, who will not think twice about sending his agents to silence critics abroad, and international interests who want to nothing to prevent them from looting the DRC’s vast mineral and energy resources.”

“With U.S. military forces of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now backing a joint Ugandan-DRC offensive in the northeastern DRC to wipe out the Lord’s Resistance Army,” wrote Madsen on 16 February 2009, “with hundreds [sic] of civilian casualties in the DRC and Uganda, and a secret pact worked out between Kabila and Kagame to permit Rwandan troops to occupy the eastern DRC, the target of both operations is securing the vast territory that is rich in commodities that the United States, Britain and Israel—all allies of Uganda and Rwanda—want badly. Those commodities are gold, diamonds, columbium-tantalite (coltan), platinum and natural gas.”

Massive oil reserves are also at stake, with major concessions bifurcated by the international border. Ongoing petroleum sector investment (exploration and exploitation) in the region involves numerous western extraction companies—many being so-called petroleum ‘minors’ likely fronting for larger corporations—including Hardman Resources, Heritage Oil and Gas, H Oil & Minerals, PetroSA, Tullow Oil, Vangold Resources, ContourGlobal Group, Tower Resources, Reservoir Capital Group, and Nexant (a Bechtel Corporation subsidiary).

Billed as a “tireless champion” and “leading light in African human rights,” there is much more to this story than the western propaganda system has revealed: Alison Des Forges and HRW provided intelligence to the U.S. government at the time of the 1994 crises, and they have continued in this role to the present. Des Forges also supported the show trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), institutionalizing victor’s justice and shielding the Kagame regime.

Alison Des Forges came across to many people as a wonderful human being with great compassion and impeccable integrity. Indeed, this was my impression upon meeting her as well. She is said to have helped people who were being persecuted—no matter that they were Hutus or Tutsis—by the Rwandan regime that has for more than 19 years operated with impunity behind the misplaced and misappropriated moral currency of victimhood. In the recent past, Alison Des Forges spoke—to some limited degree—against the war crimes of the Kagame regime.

The volcanoes region of the Zaire-Uganda-Rwanda border in 1991, seen in relative peace here, was then just beginning to suffer the destabilizing effects caused by the U.S.-backed invasion of Rwanda by Ugandan troops and the Rwandan Patriotic Army. Photo keith harmon snow, eastern Zaire, 1991.

In life she did not speak about the deeper realities of ‘genocide in Rwanda’, and she had plenty of chances. In fact, she is the primary purveyor of the inversion of truth that covered up the deeper U.S. role in the Rwanda ‘genocide’, and she spent the past 10 years of her life explaining away the inconsistencies, covering up the facts, revising her own story when necessary, and manipulating public opinion about war crimes in the Great Lakes of Africa—in service to the U.S. government and powerful corporations involved in the plunder and depopulation of the region.

THE MYSTERIES OF A PRESIDENT

“Alison des Forges is a liar,” Cameroonian journalist Charles Onana told me, in Paris, France, several years ago. Onana is the author of numerous exposés on war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Central Africa, and he is the author of the book The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, Investigations on the Mysteries of a President, published in French in 2001.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s one-party president ‘elected’ through rigged elections, sued Charles Onana for defamation in a French court in 2002; Kagame lost the original trial and the appeal. Kagame was the commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army (RPF/A) and a leading agent—with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and their U.S., U.K., Belgian and Israeli backers—behind the massive bloodshed and ongoing terrorism in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Congo, Sudan and Somalia.

“Leading light in African Human Rights killed in Buffalo Crash,” reported the Pentagon’s mouthpiece, CNN. “Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, said she was ‘best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, Leave None to Tell the Story.’ She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist—principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.”

Alison Des Forges first worked as a HRW agent in Rwanda in 1992; in 1993 she helped produce a major international document highly biased against the Rwandan Government and protective of the RPF/A invaders: Report of the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990.

In late 1992, the International Federation of Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-African Union for Human Rights and the Rights of Peoples, and the International Center for the Rights of the Individual and the Development of Democracy created the International Commission of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. With ten members from eight countries, the commission reported its findings in March 1993: Des Forges was co-chairperson, one of the three principal writers, and translator of the French to English version.

The report noted that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Rwandans were made homeless and forced to flee, prior to January 1993, but these casualties of the RPF/A invasion were not attributed to international crimes of peace against a sovereign government committed by an invading army—the RPF/A guerrillas covertly backed by the U.S., Britain, Belgium and Israel—but instead merely to ‘war’. In other words, the initial act of aggression, the RPA/F invasion, was institutionally protected and the war crimes that set the stage for the conflagrations in Rwanda and Congo went unpunished.

Later in 1993, Rwandans Ferdinand Nanimana and Joseph Mushyandi, representing four Rwandan organizations under the Rwanda Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, challenged the Des Forges commission in their 26-page document, “A Commentary on the Report of the International Commission’s Inquiry on the Violation of Human Rights in Rwanda since October 1990.”

“How can an international commission be taken seriously when its members spent only two weeks extracting verbal and written evidence on human rights violations for a period of two years?” the authors wrote. They also pointed out that the commission spent less than two hours in areas controlled by the RPF/A rebels and that they could not visit all the 11 prefectures in the country because of demonstrations that blocked the roads. “Can there be any objective and credible conclusions in their report?”

Ferdinand Nanimana was later sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. Many members of the Rwandan human rights organizations he worked with prior to April 1994 were subsequently killed.

The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007. Photo keith harmon snow, Tanzania, 2000.

The rights and due process of Rwandan Hutus are systematically violated due to victor’s justice secured by the U.S., Europe, Israel and the proxy states Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Bernard Ntuyahaga, a Major of the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) accused of killing 10 Belgian soldiers and Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, surrendered to the ICTR to avoid extradition to Rwanda; he was tried in Belgium and sentenced to 20 years in prison on July 4, 2007.

Like other researchers who have endlessly perpetuated the disinformation, Des Forges made no attempts to correct the record. In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, another pivotal ‘human rights’ report that manufactured the ‘genocide’ fabrications, set the stage for victor’s justice at the ICTR, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists. In 1995, Omaar and de Waal recycled the disinformation in the left-leaning Covert Action Quarterly under the title “U.S. Complicity by Silence: Genocide in Rwanda.” Since 2003, Alex de Waal has been one of the primary disinformation conduits on Darfur, Sudan.

“This woman [Omaar] of Somali origin is an RPF agent,” says Jean-Marie Higiro, former director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR). “[Today] she has her office in Kigali. In 1994 she was at Mulindi [Rwanda], the headquarters of the RPF. As the RPF conquered territories from the Rwandan Government Forces [FAR], she collected information fed to her by the RPF.”

“An intensive back and forth activity between this so-called British human rights organization, African Rights, and the intelligence services of the [Kagame] President’s office and the Rwandan military, has been observed,” wrote Hotel Rwanda star Paul Rusesabagina. “Her investigators are very close to the [RPF/A] military intelligence apparatus, and the modus operandi of both appears to be similar.”

Alison Des Forges’ years long ‘investigations’ into the bloodshed of 1994 resulted in the fat treatise on genocide in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, a book co-researched and co-written by Timothy Longman, now Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents—based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008—touted as independent and unbiased human rights documents, all skewed by hidden interests.

According to a recent PBS Frontline eulogy, less than two weeks into the killing in April 1994 Des Forges met with officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council (NSC) and lobbied for their help. “We were not asking for U.S. troops,” Frontline quotes her to say, “it was clear to us that there was no way that the U.S. was going to commit troops to Rwanda.”

But the U.S. military was heavily backing the RPF/A tactically and strategically already. Key to the operation were ‘former’ Special Operations Forces (Ronco Company) providing military equipment and ferrying RPA troops from Uganda to Rwanda; the Pentagon’s logistical and communications support; Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operatives. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), was also collaborating with the RPF/A, serving the Pentagon interest.

Genocide in Rwanda became a massive psychological operation directed against media consumers using ghastly images—produced by RPA-embedded photographers like James Nachtwey and Gilles Peres—to infer that all cadavers were Tutsi victims of an orchestrated Hutu genocide; meanwhile the text was racist disinformation produced by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek, June 20, 1994.

ICTR defense attorney Christopher Black reports that reliable sources confirm that US Special forces were with the RPF all the way through the war. “My client testified in June that U.S. Hercules [C-130 military aircraft] were seen dropping troops in support of the RPF…”

Further, on 9 April 1994, three days after the so-called ‘mysterious plane crash’ where Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira and President Habyarimana were assassinated, some 330 U.S. marines landed at Bujumbura’s airport in Burundi, ostensibly to ‘rescue Americans’ in Rwanda. More centrally however, Uganda—with U.S. trained forces and U.S. supplied weaponry—launched its war against Rwanda as a proxy force for the United States of America. The result was a coup d‘etat: we won. The 2003 Frontline interview with Alison Des Forges exemplifies her continuing role in whitewashing U.S. involvement in war crimes and genocide in Central Africa.

“Kagame received his military education under the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) at the Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, beginning in 1990,” wrote John E. Peck of the Association of African Scholars (2002). “His sidekick, Lt. Col. Frank Rusagara, got his JCET schooling at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey, California. Both were dispatched to Rwanda in time to oversee the RPF’s takeover in 1994. Far from being an innocent bystander, the Washington Post revealed on July 12, 1998 that the United States not only gave Kagame $75 million in military assistance, but also sent Green Berets to train Kagame’s forces (as well as their Ugandan rebel allies) in low intensity conflict (LIC) tactics. Pentagon subcontractor Ronco, masquerading as a de-mining company, also smuggled more weapons to RPF fighters in flagrant violation of UN sanctions. All of this U.S. largesse was put to lethal effect in the ethnic bloodbath that is still going on.”

“This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power,” Des Forges wrote, blaming ‘Hutu Power’. However, her assertions about a ‘planned’ Hutu genocide—“They seized control of the state and used its machinery and its authority to carry out the slaughter”—collapse under scrutiny.

From 1990 to 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), comprised most heavily of Ugandan soldiers led by Ugandan citizens like Paul Kagame, committed atrocity after atrocity as they forced their way to power in Kigali, always falsely accusing their enemies—the power-sharing government of then President Juvenal Habyarimana—of genocide.

“Kagame assigned some people to work with Alison Des Forges,” says Ugandan Human Rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and also to assist her in fabricating and distorting stories to suit Tutsi propaganda plans.”

According to the International Forum for Truth and Justice in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, whose discoveries resulted in the high courts of Spain issuing international indictments against 40 top RPF/A officials: “Between 1990 and 1994, the RPA waged a systematic, pre-planned, secretive but highly organized terrorist war aimed at eliminating the largest number of Rwandan people possible—bodies were hacked to pieces and incinerated en masse. From 1994, once the RPA violently seized power, a terror regime was created, and developed, and a criminal structure parallel to the state was set up to pursue pre-determined kidnappings; torturing and raping of women and young girls; terrorist attacks (both directly and by simulating that the same had been perpetrated by the enemy); illegal detention of thousands of civilians; selective murdering; systematic elimination of corpses either by mass incineration or by throwing them into lakes and rivers; indiscriminate attacks against civilians based on pre-determined ethnic categories for the elimination of the predominant ethnic group; and also to carry out acts of war in Rwanda and Congo.”

Before former President Habyarimana’s assassination on 6 April 1994, Des Forges, and the organizations she worked with, blamed the whole war crimes show on President Habyarimana and his government, they dismissed the illegal invasion and atrocities of the RPF/A, and they began calling it genocide against the Tutsis as early as 1992.

“In the Military II case Alison Des Forges admitted that she was funded by USAID when she was part of that so-called International Commission condemning the Rwandan Government [Habyarimana] for human rights violations,” reports Canadian Chris Black, a defense attorney at the ICTR, “and she admitted that she just took the word of the RPF and pro-RPF groups and that she did not deal with RPF atrocities, as she did not have the time.”

Chris Black notes that Des Forges presented reports to the ICTR in certain legal cases that were decidedly doctored from the original reports presented in previous cases against other accused Hutu genocidaires, and that it was necessary to cross-examine Des Forges ‘very forcefully’ to get her to agree that changes had been made to the reports presented as evidence in the case being tried.

Twelve year-old Hutu child soldiers with the Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in Congo—so-called genocidaires who purportedly fled Rwanda in 1994 and have served as Kagame’s justification for plundering and depopulating Congo since. Photo keith harmon snow, South Kivu, DRC, 2006.

“In her expert report in the 2006 Military II trial against General Ndindiliyimana,” Chris Black adds, “she removed all the positive things she had said about him in her book and in her previous expert report in the [Colonel Théoneste] Bagasora case. When asked by me why she deleted the positive view of him at his own trial, and why she tried to hide the fact that he saved a lot of Tutsis, among other things, she had no explanation. It was a cheap, low thing to do and I can tell you even the judges here at the ICTR were not too happy about it.”

On December 18, 2008, after the protracted ‘Military I’ trial, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda ruled that there was no conspiracy to commit genocide by former Rwandan military leaders affiliated with the former Habyarimana government. It was war, and the actions—far from a calculated genocide—were found by ICTR judges to be ‘war-time conditions’.

“The media reports of the December 18 judgment [Military I] at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda focused primarily on the convictions of three of four former top military leaders, who were the supposed ‘masterminds’ of the Rwandan genocide,” wrote ICTR defense lawyer Peter Erlinder. “But, as those who have followed the ICTR closely know, convictions of members of the former Rwandan government and military are scarcely newsworthy.”

Since the inception of the ICTR its decisions have been decisively biased—victor’s justice—in favor of protecting the Kagame regime and its backers. Thus it is no surprise that the former top military leaders of the Habyarimana government—Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and Major Aloys Ntabakuze—were sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, an act of genocide is not an organized, calculated, systematic genocide.

“The real news was that ALL of the top Rwandan military officers, including the supposedly infamous Colonel Bagosora, were found not guilty of conspiracy or planning to commit genocide,” writes Erlinder. “And General Gratien Kabiligi, a senior member of the general staff, was acquitted of all charges! The others were found guilty of specific acts committed by subordinates, in specific places, at specific times—not an overall conspiracy to kill civilians, much less Tutsi civilians.”

Now, after more than fifteen years of massive western propaganda proclaiming an organized, systematic elimination of the Tutsi people by the Hutu leaders of the former Rwandan government, the official Rwanda genocide story has finally collapsed.

THE GENOCIDE FACTS

In contradistinction to the establishment narrative accusing the ‘Hutu leadership’ of an ‘organized’ and ‘planned’ genocide were the countless acts of genocide committed through a spontaneous uprising of the Hutu masses—people who had been brutalized, disenfranchised, uprooted and forced from homes; people who had witnessed massacres and rapes of family members; people who were themselves the victims of brutal atrocities. These were more than a million internally displaced Rwandan Hutus, people who had been terrorized by the Rwandan Patriotic Army from October 1990 to April 1994, as it butchered its way into Rwanda; and possibly a million Burundian refugees, Hutus who suffered massive reprisals in Burundi after the first civilian President, Melchior Ndadaye, a democratically elected Hutu, was assassinated by the Tutsi military in October 1993. There is evidence that the RPA/F pursued “pseudo-operations”—death squads committing atrocities disguised as government soldiers—and evidence that at least some of the infamous Interahamwe militias pursued their campaigns of terror in the pay of the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Army.

“She [Des Forges] concealed the fact that from 1990 the war caused an unprecedented economic poverty and that the one million internally displaced people tore the social fabric apart!” wrote Dr. Helmut Strizek, a former German official who had called for Des Forges’ resignation from HRW. “And these people knew that Tutsi rebels [RPA] caused their misery. They did not wait for ‘instructions’ in order to revenge, once no one was able to maintain public order after the April 6 [1994] assassination [sic] and resumption of hostilities by the RPF.”

“Alison Des Forges is no longer,” writes Charles Onana. “Peace be with her soul! She nonetheless leaves behind her many victims of injustice, who she painstakingly accused, using false testimony, before the International Criminal Tribunal Court for Rwanda (ICTR).”

Alison Des Forges provided expert testimony in 11 genocide trials before the ICTR, including the ‘Military I’ trials that condemned Col. Theoneste Bagosora and two others on December 18. Des Forges also testified in genocide trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.

Charles Onana continues:

Among her victims there is Jean-Paul Akayesu, the first to be condemned to life imprisonment for genocide. This man, who Alison Des Forges had accused without any proof against him, was even defended by a Tutsi from the Patriotic Rwandan Army [RPA] who had been party to the fabrication of the ‘incriminating’ evidence against him in Rwanda. The Tribunal never listened to this witness, but they did listen to Alison Des Forges.

I have also discovered during the course of my investigations into the ICTR that, at the start of the trial in 1997, she introduced a forged fax that was purported to be written by General Dallaire in 1994. This fax, maintained Des Forges, concerned the ‘planning of genocide’.

New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch spread the mythology of “The Genocide Fax” far and wide. Gourevitch’s first pro-RPF/A disinformation piece appeared in the New Yorker in December 1995; in May 1998 the New Yorker published Gourevitch’s “The Genocide Fax,” a charade fed to him by Madeleine Albright’s undersecretary of state James Rubin. Gourevitch’s fictional book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families was funded by the euphemistically named U.S. Institute for Peace and written in league with the Kagame regime. It is certainly possible that Alison Des Forges was unaware of the original fabrication, but she and Human Rights Watch never changed their tune, and they never denounced the fabrication.

Charles Onana continues:

It was on the basis of this false document that she called for the condemnation of Jean-Paul Akaseyu. To lend credibility to this first trial process, the ICTR, with astonishing lightness and irresponsibility, condemned this man to life. The Tribunal had no proof. The judicial dossier is slapdash and skimpy, but that has no importance. This was Alison Des Forges first great victory.

She then decided to pursue a Rwandan refugee living in Canada: an ideal target. He had the misfortune to be Hutu. For her, this man was a ‘planner of genocide’. But where is the proof? Alison Des Forges has none, but she wants to see this man [Leon Mugesera] in prison. Having deciphered or seen through Alison Des Forge’s arguments, the Judge of the Canadian Federal Tribunal concluded witheringly and without pity: ‘I note above all the relentlessness with which Mme Des Forges launched her diatribe against M. [Leon] Mugesera, and am astonished by the lack of care she has demonstrated in drawing up the report for the International Commission of Enquiry and in her Expert Assessment.’

The Canadian judge did not hesitate to qualify Mme. Des Forges as partisan, demonstrating ‘a prejudice or preconceived position against Léon Mugesera’. He concluded that she could not be considered an objective witness, adding that no correctly informed tribunal could take her allegations seriously. Nevertheless it was on the basis of the same arguments, and of the same fantasy report published in 1999, that she accused numerous Rwandans, all Hutu.

“CONTINENTAL SHIFT,” one of Philip Gourevitch’s pivotal disinformation essays that appeared in the New Yorker, outlined the “new brand of African leader” exemplified by Yoweri Museveni and Paul Kagame: it is a whitewash of U.S.-backed terrorism.

It was thus that she devoted the penultimate day of her examination, during the process against the military, to presenting Colonel Bagosora, Hutu, as the king pin in the genocide. The Tribunal in the long-running ‘Military I’ trial did not accept the ‘planning of genocide’ that Alison Des Forges never ceased to hammer on about by means of her pseudo-fax of 11 January 1994. She lied, lied and lied again. She tried a come-back or to recover her credibility by criticizing her ‘hero’ Paul Kagame, the organizer the 6 April 1994 assassination of two presidents.

Alison Des Forges finally dared to speak of the crimes committed by the Tutsi rebels of the RPF/A: the great taboo. It was a bit late but it assuaged her conscience. For those who were condemned by the ICTR, deliberately and unjustly recorded by her, there will be no justice for them. Can Alison Des Forges still hear their suffering and their pain? She who has done them so much harm—along with their families? She who claimed to defend the Rights of Man has without doubt violated the rights of many Rwandans, who will undoubtedly never forget her. Their homage to Mme. Des Forges would have been different, very different, to what her many friends in the media have to say.

Timothy Longman and Des Forges, the co-authors of the HRW treatise, Leave None To Tell The Story, both worked with USAID, the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Des Forges was a member of the HRW board from 1988 and was “principal researcher” on Rwanda and Burundi, 1991-1994. In this period Des Forges also consulted for USAID, and collaborated with the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council. Simultaneously, Des Forges worked with, informed and influenced U.S. Congress-people, Permanent Representatives at the United Nations, the U.N. Under-Secretary General, and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Rwanda and Special Rapporteur for Summary and Arbitrary Executions. Des Forges also pumped the disinformation into the academic world through her high-level ties to human rights committees, African and Africana Studies departments and the elite African Studies Association.

In the same period, Des Forges constantly influenced the U.S. media through special briefings to the editorial boards and reporters of the New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, and Associated Press, and she was frequently presented as an “expert” on genocide in Rwanda for CNN, 60 Minutes, Nightline, All Things Considered, BBC, Radio France Internationale, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Such relations explain the mass media’s consistency in producing the monolithic disinformation about Rwanda that shielded the illegal U.S.-backed and covert RPF/A (Ugandan) guerrilla insurgency. The blanket media coverage falsely situated the “Rwanda genocide” as it is now widely misunderstood: 100 days of genocide, 800,000 to 1.2 million Tutsis killed with machetes; the ‘highly disciplined’ RPF/A stopping the genocide. Such is the disinformation that indoctrinated the English-speaking media consumers and created a mass psychological hysteria about Rwanda that persists to this day.

Timothy Longman worked with Des Forges in Rwanda in 1994 and has worked regularly with both USAID and HRW on contracts in Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, throughout the late 1990’s and into the present; Longman worked in Rwanda on one USAID contract for Management Systems Incorporated, a firm whose clients include the Pentagon. Longman also worked as a consultant for HRW in the spring of 2000 conducting field research in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and producing “a detailed report on human rights conditions in rebel-controlled areas.”

The Des Forges and Longman position vis-à-vis their whitewashing of the Tutsi-led RPF/A-organized genocide in Rwanda certainly explains the sanitation of HRW reports, and it raises questions, for example, about how Human Rights Watch ‘researchers’ navigate their ‘work’ in rebel (read: Rwandan and Ugandan) controlled areas in DRC. It also raises questions about how, why and when HRW does or doesn’t expose the western operatives, non-government organizations and multinational corporations: a singular example is the Human Rights Watch report that mildly exposes the criminal operations of Anglo-Gold Ashanti—a company partnered with the Bush-connected Barrick Gold Corporation—in eastern DRC. HRW says nothing about Moto Gold, Mwana Africa, Banro Resources, Hardmann Oil, Tullow Oil, De Beers, H Oil & Minerals, OM Group, Metalurg, Kotecha, International Rescue Committee—and the many proxy armies, militias, gun-runners and other organized white collar war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.

The role of HRW as an intelligence conduit to the U.S. Government is incidentally confirmed by Samantha Power in her book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide—a whitewash of U.S. and allied war crimes for which she was rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize. While Power’s “bystanders to genocide” thesis about Rwanda is a total inversion of the facts, she notes in passing that “Human Rights Watch supplied exemplary intelligence to the U.S. Government and lobbied in one-on-one meetings” in April and May 1994, and that Alison Des Forges and other HRW staff visited the White House on April 21, 1994. Samantha Power is currently a member of the National Security Council in the administration of President Barack Obama.

The mass media was flooded with “Rwanda genocide” disinformation between April and July of 1994, and advertising that served up subliminal seduction and white supremacy often surrounded these ‘news’ clips. This adverts’ sexualized message—MODERN MEANS STAYING COOL, CALM AND DIRECTED—is augmented by a sanitized ‘news’ clip that described the double presidential assassination as a “mysterious plane crash.” New York Times, June 12, 1994.

Alison Des Forges continued to remain silent about western corporate and military interests in the Great Lakes region to her death. A perfect example of this silence is the very unrevealing March 2008 interview by the U.S. nationalist and Zionist U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum titled “Alison Des Forges: The Impact of Rwandan Genocide in Congo.”

Timothy Longman also produces significant pro-US propaganda about Sudan. Thus it is important to note that amongst the key USAID conduits for disinformation and covert operations in Sudan today is Roger Winter, one of the primary architects of the RPF/A guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that led to the loss of at least twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since October 1990. Alison Des Forges, of course, never mentioned Roger Winter or his colleague in covert operations, Susan Rice, the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the U.N.

“Roger Winter was with the RPA on the front lines in Rwanda and he regularly briefed the Clinton Administration of the RPA’s military achievements,” says Jean Marie Vianney Higiro, former Rwandan official. “Alison Des Forges contributed to the RPF/A takeover of Rwanda. I have no doubt about that… I met her three times, first in 1995, and in 2004 she encouraged me to testify at the ICTR. I said no way: I will only testify if RPF officials are arrested. She insisted I should testify, she was confident that the RPF were going to be arrested. I think she did not realize that the U.S. government would never accept that. She was something of an opportunist.”

“I don’t know how assassins could control icing on the wings or why it was necessary to bring down 50 other people just to silence her,” says ICTR lawyer Chris Black, commenting on the speculation that Alison Des Forges was assassinated by ‘plane crash’. “It would have been much simpler to kill her in all sorts of other ways. But she was no big critic. She made some noises, but it was just to give Human Rights Watch some credibility.”

“I hold a strong belief in the plane crash being planned,” says Remigius Kintu. “These international cabal members have no mercy to hide their crime in something like this and could care less about the other people on the plane. As for Roger Winter, he was the chief logistics boss for [RPF] Tutsis until their victory in 1994, operating from 1717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington D.C.”

The zeal displayed by Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch in the pursuit of justice and human rights appears in sharp contradistinction to their absence of zeal in pursuing the architects of the criminal invasion of Rwanda on 10 October 1990, the double presidential assassinations of 6 April 1994, and all kinds of other nasty corporate conspiracies in Central Africa.

Thus while the world commemorated the 15th Anniversary of the “Rwanda Genocide” on 6 April 2009, innocent Rwandan asylum seekers and critics of the Kagame terrorist regime, all over the world, live under perpetual fear of being hunted down, branded as genocide perpetrators, ostracized, and persecuted by an illegitimate one-party dictatorship comprised 40 military officials indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by two international courts.

According to insiders from Rwanda, Kagame’s ruthless Directorate of Military Intelligence has dispatched some 300 agents to Europe to kill RPF opponents; some of these agents are operating under cover as bogus asylum seekers in Europe and North America. As of January 20, 2009 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began reopening all cases of Rwandan asylum seekers, and is criminalizing and threatening to deport legitimate refugees to Rwanda, actions that violate the 1951 United Nations High Commission for Refugees Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.

In the weeks that have just passed we had been witness to an Israeli genocidal campaign against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza. We had been witnessing one of the strongest armies in the world squashing women, elderly people and children. We saw blizzards of unconventional weapons bursting over schools, hospitals and refugee camps. We had seen and heard about war crimes committed before, but this time, the Israeli transgression was categorically different. It was supported by the total absolute majority of the Israeli Jewish population. The IDF military campaign in Gaza enjoyed the support of 94% of the Israeli population. 94% of the Israelis apparently approved of the air raids against civilians. The Israeli people saw the carnage on their TV screens, they heard the voices, they saw hospitals and refugee camps in flames and yet, they weren’t really moved by it all. They didn’t do much to stop their “democratically elected” ruthless leaders. Instead, some of them grabbed a seat and settled on the hills overlooking the Gaza Strip to watch their army turning Gaza into modern Hebraic coliseum of blood. Even now when the campaign seems to be over and the scale of the carnage in Gaza has been revealed, the Israelis fail to show any signs of remorse. As if this is not enough, all throughout the war, Jews around the world rallied in support of their “Jews-only state”. Such a popular support of outright war crimes is unheard of. Terrorist states do kill, yet they are slightly shy about it all. Stalin’s USSR did it in some remote Gulags, Nazi Germany executed its victims in deep forests and behind barbed wire. In the Jewish state, the Israelis slaughter defenceless women, children and the old in broad daylight, using unconventional weapons targeting schools, hospitals and refugee camps.

This level of group barbarism cries for an explanation. The task ahead can be easily defined as the quest for a realisation of Israeli collective brutality. How is it that a society has managed to lose its grip of any sense of compassion and mercy?

The Terror Within

More than anything else, the Israelis and their supportive Jewish communities are terrorised by the brutality they find in themselves. The more ruthless the Israelis are, the more frightened they become. The logic is simple. The more suffering one inflicts on the other, the more anxious one becomes of the possible potential deadly capacity around. In broad terms, the Israeli projects on the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Iranian the aggression which he finds in himself. Considering the fact that Israeli brutality is now proved to be with no limit and with no comparison, their anxiety is as at least as great.

Seemingly, the Israelis are fearful of themselves being the henchmen. They are engaged in a deadly battle with the terror within. But the Israeli is not alone. The Diaspora Jew who rallies in support of a state that pours white phosphorous on civilians is caught in the exact same devastating trap. Being an enthusiastic backer of an overwhelming crime, he is horrified by the thought that the cruelty he happens to find in himself may manifest itself in others. The Diaspora Jew who supports Israel is devastated by the imaginary possibility that a brutal intent, similar to his own, may one day turn against him. This very concern is what the fear of anti-Semitism is all about. It is basically the projection of the collective Zio-centric tribal ruthlessness onto others.

There is no Israeli – Palestinian Conflict

What we see here is a clear formation of a vicious cycle in which the Israeli and his supporters are becoming an insular fireball of vengeance that is fuelled by some explosive internal aggression. The meaning of it all is pretty revealing. Since Palestinians cannot militarily confront Israeli aggression and destructive capacity, we are entitled to argue that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All there is, is Israeli psychosis in which the Israeli is being shattered with anxiety by the reflection of his own ruthlessness. Being regarded as the Nazis of our time, the Israeli is thus doomed to seeing a Nazi in everyone. Similarly, there is no rise in anti-Semitism either. The Diaspora Zionist Jew is simply devastated by the possibility that someone out there is as ethically corrupted and merciless as he himself proved to be. In short, Israeli politics and Zionist lobbying should be seen as no less than a lethal Zio-centric collective paranoia on the verge of total psychosis.

Is there a way to redeem the Zionist of his bloody expedition? Is there a way to change the course of history, to save the Israelis and their supporters from total depravity? Probably the best way to pose this question is to ask whether there is a way to save the Israeli and the Zionist from themselves. As one may gather, I am not exactly interested in saving Israelis or Zionists, however, I do grasp that redeeming Zionists of their transgression may bring a prospect of peace to Palestine, Iraq and probably the rest of us. For those who fail to see it, Israel is just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the day, America, Britain and the West are now subject to some similar forms of “politics of fear” that are the direct outcome of Neocon deadly interventionist ideology and practices.

The Shrink from Nazareth

Many years ago, so we are told, there was an Israelite who lived amongst his brethren in the land of Canaan. Like the contemporary Israelis, he was surrounded by hate, vengeance and fear. At a certain stage he had decided to intervene and to bring a change about, he realised that there was no other way to fight ruthlessness than to search for grace. “Turn your other cheek” was his simple suggestion. Identifying the Israelite’s psychosis as “a war against terror within”, Jesus grasped that the only way to counter violence is to look in the mirror while searching for Goodness within.

It is rather apparent that Jesus’ lesson paved the way to the formation of western universal ethics. Modern political ideologies drew their lesson from the Christian prospect. Marx’s normative search for equality can be seen as a secular rewriting of Jesus’ notion of brotherhood. And yet, not a single political ideology has managed to integrate the deepest notion of Jesus’ grace. To seek peace is primarily to search for one within. While Israelis and their Neocon twins would aim at achieving peace by means of deterrence, true peace is achieved by the search for harmony within. As a Lacanian scholar may suggest, to love your neighbour is actually to love yourself loving your neighbour. The case of the Israeli is the complete opposite. As they manage to prove time after time, they are really loving themselves hating their neighbours or in short, they simply love themselves hating in general. They hate almost everything: the neighbour, the Arab, Chavez, the German, Islam, the Goy, Pork, the Pope, the Palestinian, the Church, Jesus, Hamas, calamari and Iran. You name it, they hate it. One may have to admit that hating so much must be a very consuming project unless it gives pleasure. And indeed the Israeli “pleasure principle” could be articulated as follows: it continuously drives the Israeli to seek pleasure in hate while inflicting pain upon others.

It must be mentioned at this point that the “War Against Terror within” is not exactly a Jewish invention. Everyone, whether it is nations, peoples or individuals, are a potential subject to it. The consequences of American nuclear murderous slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the American people into a terrorised collective. This collective anxiety is known as the “cold war”. America is yet to redeem itself of the fear that there maybe someone out there as merciless as America proved to be. To a certain extent, operation Shock and Awe had a very similar effect on Britain and America. It led to the creation of horrified masses easily manipulated by highly motivated elite. This exact type of politics is called “politics of fear”.

And yet, within the western discourse a correction mechanism is in place. Unlike the Jewish state that is getting radicalised by its own self feeding paranoia, in the West, evil is somehow confronted and contained eventually. The murderer is denounced and hope for peace is somehow reinstated till further notice. Not that I hold my breath for President Obama bringing any change, one thing is rather clear, Obama was voted in to bring a change. Obama is a symbol of our genuine attempt to curtail evil. In the Jewish state, not only it doesn’t happen, it can never happen. The difference between Israel and the West is rather obvious. In the West, Christian heritage is providing us with a possibility of a wish grounded on belief in universal goodness. Though, we are under the constant danger of exposure to evil, we tend to believe that goodness will eventually prevail. On the other hand, in Hebraic tribal discourse, Goodness is the property of the chosen. The Israelis do not see goodness or kindness in their neighbors, they see them as savage and as a life-threatening entity. For the Israelis, kindness is their very own property, accidentally they are also innocent and victims. Within the western universal discourse, goodness doesn’t belong to one people or a single nation, it belongs to all and to none at the same time. Within the western universal heritage, Goodness is found in each of us. It doesn’t belong to a political party or an ideology. The elevating notion of grace and a Good God is there in each of us, it is always very close to home.

What Kind Of Father Is That?

“Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you -” a land with large, fine cities you did not build, houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant – and you eat your fill.” (Deuteronomy: 6: 10-11).

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2)

At this point we may try to attempt and to grasp the root cause behind the severe lack of compassion within the Israeli discourse and its supportive lobbies. I believe that an elaboration on the troubled relationships between the Jews and their different Gods may throw some light on the topic. It is rather obvious that the ever growing list of Jewish “Gods”, “Idols” and “Father-figures” is slightly problematic at least as far as ethics and kindness are concerned. The very relationship between “the son” and the “non-ethical father” must be explored. The philosopher Ariella Atzmon (who happens to be my mother) defines the complexity of the false beginning as the “Fagin Syndrome”. Charles Dickens’ Fagin is a “kidsman”, an adult who recruits children and trains them as pickpockets and thieves, exchanging food and shelter for goods the children steal. Though the kids must be grateful towards their master, they must also despise him for turning them into thieves and pickpockets. The kids realise that Fagin’s goods are all stolen and his kindness is far from being genuinely honest or pure. Sooner or later the kids will turn against their master Fagin in an attempt to liberate themselves of the immoral catch.

From a father-son perspective, the Biblical Jewish God Jehovah is no different from what we might see in the Fagin syndrome. The father of Israel leads his chosen people through the desert to the promised land so they can rob and plunder its indigenous habitants. This is not exactly what one may expect of an ethical father or a “kind God”. Consequently, as much as the sons of Israel love Jehovah, they must also be slightly suspicious of him for turning them into robbers and murderers. They might even be apprehensive regarding his kindness. Thus, it shouldn’t take us by a surprise that throughout Jewish history more than just a few Jews had turned against their heavenly father.

However, bearing in mind the common secularist perception that Gods are actually invented by people, one may wonder, what leads to the invention of such an “unethical God”? What makes people follow the rules of such a God? It would be also interesting to find out what kind of alternative Gods Jews happened to pick or invent once Jehovah has been shunned.

Since emancipation, more than just a few Jews had been disassociating themselves from the traditional tribal setting and rabbinical Judaism. Many intermingled with their surrounding realities, dropped their chosen entitlement and turned into ordinary human beings. Many other Jews insisted upon dropping God yet maintaining their racially orientated tribal affiliation. They decided to base their tribal belonging on ethnic, racial, political, cultural and ideological grounds rather than the Judaic precept. Though they noticeably dropped Jehovah they insisted upon adopting a secularist view that was soon shaped into a monolithic religious-like precept. All throughout the 20th century, the two religious-like political ideologies that had been found to be most appealing by the Jewish masses were Marxism and Zionism.

Marxism can be easily portrayed as a secular universal ethical ideology. However, within the process of transformation into a Jewish tribal precept, Marxism has managed to lose any traces of humanism or universalism. As we know, early Zionist ideology and practice was largely dominated by Jewish leftists who regarded themselves as true followers of Marx. They genuinely believed that celebrating their Jewish national revival at the expense of Palestinians was a legitimate socialist endeavour.

Interestingly enough, their opponents, the anti-Zionist Bund of the East European Jewish Labour, didn’t really believe in the institutional robbery of the Palestinians, instead, they believed that taking from rich European is a great universal mitzvah on the path towards social justice.

The following are a few lines from The Bund’s anthem

We swear our stalwart hate persists,
Of those who rob and kill the poor:
The Tsar, the masters, capitalists.
Our vengeance will be swift and sure.
So swear together to live or die!

Without engaging in questions having to do with ethics or political affiliation, it is rather obvious that the Jewish Marxist anthem is overwhelmingly saturated with “hate” and “vengeance”. As much as Jews were enthusiastic about Marx, Marxism, Bolshevism and equality, the end of the story is known. Jews en masse dropped Marx a long time ago. They somehow left the revolution to some enlightened Goyim such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. Leaders who truly internalised in the real meaning of universal equality and ethics.

Though in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, Marxism found many followers amongst European Jews, following the Holocaust, Zionism has gradually become the voice of world Jewry. Like Fagin, the Zionist Gods and Idols: Herzl, Ben Gurion, Nordau, Weizmann, promised their followers a new unethical beginning. Robbing the Palestinians was their path towards a long overdue historical justice. Zionism transformed the Old Testament from a spiritual text into a land registry. But again as in the case of Jehovah, the Zio God transformed the Jew into a thief, it promised him someone else’s property. This in itself may explain the Israeli resentment towards Zionism and Zionist ideology. Israelis prefer to see themselves as the natural dwellers of the land rather than pioneers in a non-ethical Jewish Diaspora colonial project. The Israeli Jew furnishes his political stand by means of severe ethical escapism. This may explain the fact that as much as the Israelis love their wars, they really hate to fight them. They are not willing to die for a big abstract remote ideology such as the “Jewish nation” or “Zionism”. They overwhelmingly prefer to drop white phosphorous and cluster bombs from afar.

However, along the relatively short history of modern Jewish nationalism the Zio God made friends with some other Gods and kosher idols. Back in 1917 Lord Balfour promised the Jews that they would erect their national home in Palestine. Needless to say, as in the case of Jehovah, Lord Balfour made the Jews into plunderers and robbers, he came up with an outright non-ethical promise. He promised the Jews someone else’s land. This was basically a false beginning. Evidently, it didn’t take long before the Jews turned against the British Empire. In 1947 the UN made exactly the same foolish mistake, it gave birth to the “Jews-only State” again at the expense of the Palestinians. It legitimised the robbery of Palestine in the name of the nations. Like in the case of shunned Jehovah, it didn’t take long before the Jews turned against the UN. “It doesn’t matter what the Goyim say, all that matters is what the Jews do”, said Israeli PM David Ben Gurion. Recently Israelis had managed to even shun their best subservient friends in the White House. On the eve of the last American presidential election Israeli Generals had been filmed denouncing President Bush for “damaging Israeli interests for being overwhelmingly supportive” (Ret. Brig General Shlomo Brom). The Israeli Generals basically blamed Bush for not stopping Israel from destroying its neighbours. The moral is rather clear, the Zionists and the Israelis will inevitably turn against their Gods, Idols, fathers and others who try to help them. This is the real meaning of the Fagin syndrome within the Israeli political context. They will always have to turn against their fathers.

I believe that the most interesting Jewish belief system of them all is the Holocaust Religion, which the Israeli Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz rightly defined as the “new Jewish religion”. The most interesting aspect of the Holocaust religion is its God-figure, namely “the Jew”. The Jewish follower of that newly formed dogmatic precept believes in “the Jew”, the one who redeemed oneself. The one who “survived” the “ultimate genocidal” event. The followers believe in “the Jew”, the “innocent” victim sufferer who returned to his “promised land” and now celebrates his successful revival narrative. To a certain extent, within the Holocaust religious discourse, the Jew believes in “the Jew”, expressed as his/her powers and his/her eternal qualities. Within the newly formed religious framework, Mecca is Tel Aviv and the Holy Shrine is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. The newly formed religion has many shrines (Museums) scattered around the world and it has many priests who spread the message around and punish its opposing elements. From a Jewish perspective, the Holocaust religion is a fully transparent expression of self love. It is where past and future merge into a meaningful present, it is when history is translated into praxis. Whether consciously or unconsciously, every person who identifies politically and ideologically (rather than religiously) as a Jew is, practically speaking, succumbing to the Holocaust religion and a follower of its father-figure “the Jew”. And yet, one may wonder, what about Kindness, is there any goodness in this newly formed ‘father-figure’? Is there any grace in this narrative of innocent victimhood that is celebrated daily at the expense of the Palestinian people?

If there is an end to history, the Holocaust religion embodies the very end of Jewish history. In the light of the Holocaust religion the “Father” and the “Son” unite at last. At least in the case of Israel and Zionism they bond into an amalgam of genocidal ideology and reality. In the light of the Holocaust religion and its epic survival ethos the Jewish State considers itself legitimated in dropping white phosphorus on women and children who they have caged in an inescapable open-air prison. Sadly enough, the crimes committed by the Jewish State are done on behalf of the Jewish people and in the name of their troubled history of persecution. The Holocaust religion brings to life what seems to be the ultimate possible form of insular brutal incarnation.

Historically Jews have shunned many Gods, they dropped Jehovah, they dumped Marx, some have never followed Zionism. But in the light of the Holocaust religion, while bearing in mind the scenes from Gaza, Jenin and Lebanon, the Jew may have to continue in the tradition and drop “the Jew”. He will have to accept that his newly formed father-figure was formed in his own shape. More concerning is the devastating fact that the new father is proved to be a call to kill. Seemingly, the new father is the ultimate evil God of them all.

I wonder how many Jews will be courageous enough to shun their esoteric newly formed father-figure. Will they be courageous enough to join the rest of humanity adopting a universal ethical discourse? Whether the Jew drops “The Jew”, only time will tell. Just to remove any doubt, I did drop my “Jew” a long time ago and I am doing fine.

After some weeks of back and forth discussions and me revisiting notes and photos to see what I had, I sent them an e-mail at the definitive moment when they were hoping to receive a brief “dossier” about the specific case — which they said “had generated a lot of interest” at the ICC — and I shared my uncertainty about the ethics of collaborating with an “International Criminal Court” that was only indicting black Africans. I indicated my concern for the witness ‘Sandrine,’ a young girl discussed in my story who named names of commanders, dates of executions, and who herself used a machete in an ethnic massacre and was raped by militiamen. I noted that witnesses identified for the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) had been murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and noted my awareness of the injustice of the Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the disconcerting trajectory of the ICC.

I told them I couldn’t in good conscience help them, it seemed, until the ICC arrested some of the white-collar war criminals running loose around the world. It was the right decision, in light of the recent ICC indictments against another black man, and an Arab at that. It was a very stupid career move, some one else remarked.

On 4 March 2009 the ICC prosecutors announced that they were at last issuing the long-threatened but first ever indictments against a sitting head of state, Omar al-Bashir, the Arab President of Sudan. Meanwhile, Somali ‘pirates’ off East Africa recently freed a Ukrainian ship with a Panamanian registration, a Ukrainian crew and flag of Belize. The freighter carried tanks, rockets and munitions destined for Darfur, and is owned by an Israeli ‘businessman’ and reputed MOSSAD operative named Vadim Alperin.

It is difficult to make sense of the war in Darfur — especially when people see it as a one-sided “genocide” of Arabs against blacks that is being committed by the Bashir ‘regime’ — but such is the establishment propaganda. The real story is much more expansive, more complex, and it revolves around some relatively unknown but shady characters. What follows is a short and imperfect summary of some of the deeper geopolitical realities behind the struggle for Sudan.

THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES

First note that the ICC can now be viewed as a tool of hegemonic U.S. foreign policy, where the weapons deployed by the U.S. and its allies include the accusations of, and indictments for, human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity. To understand this, we can ask why no white man has yet been charged with these or other offenses at the ICC, which now holds five black African “warlords” and seeks to incarcerate and bring to trial another black man, also an Arab, Omar Bashir. Why hasn’t George W. Bush been indicted? Or what about Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? Henry Kissinger? Ehud Olmert? Tony Blair? Vadim Alperin? John Bredenkamp?

Following on the heels of the announcement that the ICC handed down seven war crimes charges against al-Bashir, a story broadcast over all the Western media system and into every American living room by day’s end, President al-Bashir ordered the expulsion of ten international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Darfur under the pretense of being purely ‘humanitarian’ organizations.

What has not been reported anywhere in the English press is that the United States of America has just stepped up its ongoing war for control of Sudan and her resources: petroleum, copper, gold, uranium, fertile plantation lands for sugar and gum Arabic (essential to Coke, Pepsi and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream). This war has been playing out on the ground in Darfur through so-called ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, private military companies, ‘peacekeeping’ operations and covert military operations backed by the U.S. and its closest allies.

However, the U.S. war for Sudan has always revolved around ‘humanitarian’ operations — purportedly neutral and presumably concerned only about protecting innocent human lives — that often provide cover for clandestine destabilizing activities and interventions.

Americans need to recognize that the Administration of President Barack Obama has begun to step up the war for control of Sudan in keeping with the permanent warfare agenda of both Republicans and Democrats. The current destabilization of Sudan mirrors the illegal covert guerrilla war carried out in Rwanda — also launched and supplied from Uganda — from October 1990 to July 1994. The Rwandan Defense Forces (then called the Rwandan Patriotic Army) led by Major General Paul Kagame achieved the U.S. objective of a coup d’etat in Rwanda through that campaign, and President Kagame has been a key interlocutor in the covert warfare underway in Darfur, Sudan.

During the Presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. Government was involved with the intelligence apparatus of the Government of Sudan (GoS). At the same time, other U.S. political and corporate factions were pressing for a declaration of genocide against the GoS. Now, given the shift of power and the appointment of top Clinton officials formerly involved in covert operations in Rwanda, Uganda, Congo and Sudan during the Clinton years, pressure has been applied to heighten the campaign to destabilize the GoS, portrayed as a ‘terrorist’ Arab regime, but an entity operating outside the U.S.-controlled banking system. The former campaign saw overt military action with the U.S. military missile attacks against the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical factory in Sudan (1998); this was an international war crime by the Clinton Administration and it involved officials now in power.

The complex geopolitical struggle to control Sudan manifests through the flashpoint war for Darfur and it involves such diverse factions as the Lord’s Resistance Army, backed by Khartoum, which is also connected to the wars in the Congo and northern Uganda. Chad is involved, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Germany, the Central African Republic, Libya, France, Israel, China, Taiwan, South Africa and Rwanda. There are U.S. special forces on the ground in the frontline states of Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the big questions are: [1] How many of the killings are being committed by U.S. proxy forces and blamed on al-Bashir and the GoS? And [2] who funds, arms and trains the rebel insurgents

UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVASTATION

Rebels? Insurgents? The drumbeat of western propaganda portrays the conflict as a one-sided affair: a “genocidal counter-insurgency by the GoS” — in the words of Eric Reeves — versus the good Samaritans of the ‘humanitarian’ NGO community . . . and throw in a few (non-descript) rebels.

“Sudan ordered at least 10 humanitarian groups expelled from Darfur on Wednesday after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the country’s president,” wrote Associated Press reporter Ellen M. Lederer. “Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the action ‘represents a serious setback to lifesaving operations in Darfur’ and urged Sudan to reverse its decision, U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.”

However, when Ban Ki-moon met with Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame recently, he never called for Kagame’s arrest, no matter the findings of two international courts of law that have issued indictments against top RPA officials. Instead Ban Ki-moon praised Kagame and called for African countries to hunt down and arrest Hutu people purportedly involved in the now specious ‘genocide’ in Rwanda in 1994.

The non-governmental aid groups ordered out of Darfur by President al-Bashir on March 4 were Oxfam, CARE, MSF-Holland, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the International Rescue Committee, Action Contre la Faim, Solidarites and CHF International.

Of course, the western media is all over the expulsion of any big ‘humanitarian’ moneymaker from Darfur — the moral outrage is so thick you can almost wipe it. The NGOs and the press that peddles their images of suffering babes complain that hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees will now be subjected to massive unassisted suffering — as opposed to the assisted suffering they previously faced — but never asks with any serious and honest zeal, why and how the displaced persons and refugees came to be displaced or homeless to begin with. Neither do they ask about all the money, intelligence sharing, deal making, and collaboration with private or governmental military agencies.

Large ‘humanitarian’ NGOs (and ‘conservation’ NGOs) operate as de facto multinational corporations revolving around massive private profits and human suffering. In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Darfur these NGOs also provide infrastructure, logistical and intelligence collaboration that supports U.S. military and government agendas in the region. Most are aligned with big foundations, corporate sponsors and USAID — itself a close and long-time partner for interventions with AFRICOM and the Pentagon.

Refugees and displaced populations are strategic tools of statecraft and foreign policy, just as ‘humanitarian’ NGOs consistently use food as a weapon and populations as human shields. The history of the U.S. covert war in South Sudan is rich with examples of the SPLA and its ‘humanitarian’ partners, especially Christian ‘charities’, committing such war crimes and crimes against humanity.¹

CARE International has received funding from Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s largest and most secretive producer of weapons of mass destruction, and both CARE and Save the Children are tied up with weapons and extractive industries in other ways. A peek at the board of directors of Save the Children makes it clear why the U.S. media is so devoid of truth about Darfur. Similarly, the International Rescue Committee does not work with refugees, per se, but serves as a policy and pressure group involved in funneling private profits from the west back to the west. The IRC has also been cited for involvement in military operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and it has deep ties to people like Henry Kissinger.

The AID (read: misery) industry in Sudan was by the mid-1990s the largest so-called ‘humanitarian’ enterprise on the planet, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) — a form of managed inequality and a temporary and mobile economy of white privilege, adventurism and, of course, good will (sic). The misery industry shifted its focus from South Sudan to Darfur after a pseudo peace ‘treaty’ was organized to end the decades old war between the SPLA and GoS; the U.S. and Israel backed the SPLA from 1990 onward, and continue to do so at present. The result of more than 12 years of illegal U.S. covert low-intensity warfare in Sudan resulted in the creation of the independent and sovereign state of South Sudan in circa 2005 — a state dominated by Jewish and Christian faith-based interests and western multinational corporations.

Much of the AID infrastructure in Sudan has at one time or another been used as a weapon through the use of human shields, food deliveries to refugee populations inseparable from insurgents, and shipments of weapons by ‘humanitarian’ NGOs. This is both incidental and deliberate policy. Christian ‘relief’ NGOs played a huge role in supporting the covert western insurgency in South Sudan. One notable ‘humanitarian’ NGO involved in weapons deliveries was the Norwegian People’s Aid (known affectionately in the field as the Norwegian People’s Army).

In Darfur, Sudan, the U.S. government agenda is to win control of natural resources and leverage the Arab government into a corner and, at last, establish a more ‘friendly’ government that will suit the corporate interests of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Israel.

Several major think tanks — read: propaganda, lobbying and pressure — behind the destabilization of Sudan include the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, Center for American Progress, Center for Security Policy, International Rescue Committee and International Crises Group. Individuals from seemingly diverse positions of the political and ideological spectrum run these organizations, which are ultra-nationalist capitalist organizations bent on global military-economic domination.

The former Clinton officials most heavily focused on the destabilization of Sudan include: Susan Rice, Madeleine Albright, Roger Winter, Prudence Bushnell, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Anthony Lake and John Prendergast. Carr Center for Human Rights co-founder Samantha Power, now on the Obama National Security Council, has helped to whitewash clandestine U.S. involvement in Sudan.

John Prendergast has continued to peddle disinformation disguised as policy and human rights concerns through the International Crisis Group (ICG), and through its many clone organizations like ENOUGH, ONE and RAISE HOPE FOR CONGO. Prendergast has been a pivotal agent behind the hi-jacking of U.S. public concern and action through the disingenuous (and discredited) SAVE DARFUR movement.

Other notable agents of disinformation on Sudan include Alex de Waal and Smith College Professor Eric Reeves. It is through these and other conduits to the corporate U.S. media that the story of ‘genocide’ in Sudan is cast as an Africa-Arab affair devoid of western interests.

In 1992, human rights researchers Rakiya Omaar and Alex de Waal established the London-based NGO African Rights. In August 1995, African Rights published Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, one of many pivotal ‘human rights’ reports that falsely represented events in Rwanda, set the stage for victor’s justice at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, and began the process of dehumanizing millions of Hutu people and protecting the true terrorists: Yoweri Museveni, Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and their western backers.

THE MAN FOR A NEW SUDAN

The pivotal intelligence asset working on the ground in Sudan to destabilize and overthrow the Government of Sudan (GoS) is Roger Winter, profiled very disingenuously in the seven-page New York Times Magazine feature story of 15 June 2008.

Interestingly, “The Man For A New Sudan” story, an establishment whitewash of the involvement of the U.S. military-intelligence establishment in Sudan, was written by Eliza Griswold, a ‘Fellow’ with the New America Foundation, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group with a very confused ideological but nationalist-militaristic position. (The NAF is obviously dependent on U.S. foundation funding, and it reveals no apparent policy formulations of substance on the Great Lakes or Horn of Africa, conflicts for which they remain completely silent).

“When Roger Winter’s single-engine Cessna Caravan touched down near the Sudanese town of Abyei on Easter morning, a crowd of desperate men swamped the plane,” Griswold wrote. “Some came running over the rough red airstrip. Others crammed into a microbus that barreled toward the 65-year-old Winter as he climbed down the plane’s silver ladder. Some Sudanese call Winter ‘uncle’; others call him ‘commander’.”

Winter’s special post at the State Department was created specifically for him and his ‘work’ in Sudan. Why do Sudanese people in South Sudan call Roger Winter ‘commander’?

Roger Winter is the primary conduit for the ongoing covert destabilization of Sudan. His operations are run primarily out of Uganda, with the terrorist government of Yoweri Museveni providing support through the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

The SPLA is the de facto backbone of the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main so-called ‘rebel’ factions involved in Darfur; the SPLA provides military and logistics support to Uganda from the Pentagon through unknown channels, but most likely involving the nearby Pentagon client states of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Chad and Eritrea.

The primary Ugandan agents supporting the U.S. war in Darfur have always been, and remain, Brigadier General James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF); General Salim Saleh, half-brother of Museveni; and President Yoweri Museveni himself.

One of the main protagonists in the Darfur conflict is the current military regime in Rwanda, whose troops have been involved in Darfur under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘peacekeeping’ operation under the African Union ‘peacekeeping’ umbrella — back by NATO and private military companies.

Little known and widely misunderstood is the role of the United States and its proxies, the UPDF and the RPA, in committing massive crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide during the Rwandan conflagration from 1990 to 1994. Prior to the RPA invasion of Rwanda (from Uganda) in October 1990, the RPA and Rwandan Tutsi Diaspora had publications like Impuruza published in the United States between 1984 and 1994 (when the RPA achieved the coup d’etat against Rwandan President Habyarimana). Tutsi refugees joined Roger Winter, who was at the time the Director of the United States Committee for Refugees, to help fund the publication. The editor, Alexander Kimenyi, is a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University. Like most RPA publications Impuruza circulated clandestinely in Rwanda amongst Hutu and Tutsi elite and it peddled a genocidal ideology against Hutu people.

The Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA, assisted by Roger Winter, organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda [Tutsi] Refugees in Washington, DC in 1988, and this is where a military solution to the Tutsi problem was chosen. The U.S. Committee for Refugees reportedly provided accommodation and transportation.

THE DEVIL CAME IN A HELIOCOPTER

Roger Winter was one of the primary architects of the RPA guerrilla war, organized from Washington in 1989, that has led to the loss of more than ten or twelve million lives in the Great Lakes of Africa since 1990. Winter acted as a spokesman for the RPF and their allies, and he appeared as a guest on major U.S. television networks such as PBS and CNN. New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch and Roger Winter made contacts on behalf of the RPA with American media, particularly the Washington Post, New York Times and Time magazine.

Roger Winter moved through Rwanda during the RPA invasion and worked the front lines of the covert war as a key Pentagon and U.S. State Department asset in collaboration with the Kagame-RPA operation of terror. From 1990 to 1994, Winter traveled back and forth from the RPA-controlled zone to Washington D.C., where he briefed and coordinated activities and support with U.S. military, intelligence and government officials.

Roger Winter is intimate with USAID, and is a long-time ally of Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State on African Affairs (1997-2001), Special Assistant to President Clinton (1995-1997), and National Security Council insider (1993-1997). Susan Rice is the Obama Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations and staunch enemy of Omar al-Bashir.

Roger Winter is also a staunch supporter of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, one of the leading U.S. Democrats pressing for action to “stop genocide” in Darfur, Sudan. Payne sponsored the Darfur Genocide Accountability Act and was arrested in June 2001, along with John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, for protesting against the GoS.

Christian Solidarity International has a very subversive relationship to ‘peace’ and ‘religion’ in Sudan, and they have been one of the front-runner organizations peddling the accusations of slavery by the al-Bashir government, in particular, a highly contested and controversial issue generally inflated and manipulated by fundamentalist Jewish and Christian NGOs and missionary organizations, like Christian Solidarity International, Samaritan’s Purse, Servant’s Heart, and Freedom Quest International, that operate in Sudan.

“Roger Winter was the chief logistic boss for [RPA] Tutsis as early as mid-1990,” says Ugandan human rights expert Remigius Kintu, “and until their victory in 1994 they were operating from 1,717 Massachusetts Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Roger Winter told a [name deleted] South Sudanese exile at the time [1994]: ‘I have now stabilized Rwanda and will turn my full attention to Sudan.’ Winter subsequently closed up shop in Rwanda and based himself in Kampala working on Sudan. A few years later, Darfur exploded and with Winter’s manipulations, Rwanda was the first to send troops into that troubled area. From my sources, the Rwanda Defense Forces [working under the African Union umbrella] have killed civilians and brought in their media experts to pile the blame on Sudanese government troops.”

This is exactly what the Kagame and Museveni terror apparatus has done in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the terror operations of the UPDF/RPF in Rwanda in the 1990s were covered up by Human Rights Watch experts Alison Des Forges (d. February 2009) and Timothy Longman, Associate Prof. of Africana Studies and Political Science at Vassar College.

Similarly, throughout the long war in south Sudan, and now in Darfur, the atrocities committed by the U.S.-backed factions were/are downplayed, dismissed or ignored, while those committed by competing factions are amplified and spotlighted. Also, following the pattern of UPDF and RPA criminal activities — such as massacres committed under disguise and/or attributed to the ‘enemy’ — for which there is now a long history of documentation, and given the lack of any true independent evaluation, there is no telling who actually committed the massacres always blamed on the GoS or ‘Janjaweed’ militias.

One Sudanese professional from the south told me recently that it was not the Government of Sudan but rather the UPDF and SPLA who were arming the Janjaweed — the so-called Arab militias accused of wanton killing in an Arab-against-Black genocide. (This Arab-on-black genocide has been widely discredited.

Professor Timothy Longman and Alison Des Forges co-produced the fat treatise on ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, published in 1999. Longman and Des Forges produced numerous documents, based on field investigations in Congo (Zaire), Rwanda and Burundi, from 1995 to 2008, touted as independent and unbiased human rights reports but always skewed by hidden interests. Both Longman and Des Forges had relationships with the U.S. Department of State, National Security Council and Pentagon, both were regular consultants with USAID, and they certainly worked with Roger Winter, the Pentagon’s secret weapon in Sudan.

On 25 September 2008, a Ukrainian freighter was seized by ‘pirates’ off the coast of Somalia and was held until a ransom of $3.2 million was paid on 5 February 2009. (Somali fishermen disenfranchised by international dumping of toxic [and possibly nuclear] wastes off Somalia are labeled ‘pirates’ when they fight for their rights and freedoms.) The MV Faina is registered in Belize, owned by a company registered in Panama and piloted by Ukrainians. The MV Faina carried 33 Soviet T-72 battle tanks, grenade-launchers, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition en route to Mombassa, Kenya, the Pentagon’s primary base on the east coast of Africa.

The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet monitored the Ukrainian ship during the four-month standoff, with the MV Faina pinned down by at least six U.S. and four European warships. The ship’s owner is Israeli national Vadim Alperin (alias Vadim Oltrena Alperin), said to be a MOSSAD agent involved with clandestine activities through offshore front companies and money laundering. The ship was unloaded in Mombassa on February 12, and the weapons are destined for Juba, South Sudan.

There are reports that weaponry also included tank munitions heads sporting deadly depleted uranium and that the final recipients are the Israeli-backed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) ‘rebels’ in Darfur. Sudan has previously accused Israel of supporting ‘rebels’ in the Darfur war. International arms syndicates and dealers routinely transfer ‘Soviet-era’ arms for international organized crime, including covert military operations involving proxy militias and national governments in Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda.

1. See: keith harmon snow, “Oil in Darfur? Special Ops in Somalia?” Global Research, 7 February 2007.

In his Slate column, Rosenbaum attacked the “essential metaphorical thrust” of the film, which he said aimed “to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Rosenbaum decried the notion of honoring “a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that ‘ordinary Germans’ were ignorant of the extermination until after the war…”

Rosenbaum indicted “the Kate Winslet character’s ‘illiteracy’: She’s a stand-in for the German people and their supposed inability to ‘read’ the signs that mass murder was being done in their name, by their fellow citizens. To which one can only say: What a crock!”

In fact it is a crock, a willful misreading of The Reader to lump it in with a genre of films which exploit the Holocaust (e.g., Life is Beautiful, winner of several Academy Awards). Bernard Schlink, author of the novel on which the film The Reader is based, told an interviewer in December: “It’s definitely not a movie about the Holocaust. It’s about a generation trying to come to terms with what they had to learn about their parents’ generation.”

But Rosenbaum’s Shoah sensitivities are Manichean. He concedes nothing to the moral and emotional complexities within or between the characters, especially in the film’s central relationship between Michael and Hanna.

Michael’s passionate affair with the much-older Hanna at first uplifts his adolescence. But when, as a law student, he witnesses her murder trial, along with other former Nazi concentration camp guards, he is devastated. Michael believes that Hanna has admitted to writing a report about the death of 300 Jewish prisoners, trapped in a burning church, in order to avoid revealing her illiteracy.

Michael tells his law professor (Bruno Ganz) that he has knowledge relevant to the trial, perhaps in the defendant’s favor. The older professor urges Michael to speak up: You don’t want to be like us and do nothing do you? Here Ganz is referring to his own silent wartime generation. But Michael cannot bring himself to visit Hanna during her trial, even though he knows her illiteracy has probably condemned her to a far greater penalty than her equally — or perhaps surpassingly — guilty comrades.

The other guards have no moral sense. But they are rewarded for their lies and stonewalling, receiving much lighter sentences than Hanna, who simply blurts out the truth, takes the rap and ends up sentenced to life in prison. She admits to having no moral sense, and therefore must be the more strongly condemned. Does this really create undue sympathy for Hanna, as Rosenbaum suggests? At the end of the film, an escaped victim (Lena Olin) explicitly asks the adult Michael (Ralph Fiennes) if he thinks Hanna’s illiteracy mitigates her guilt. And he says no.

As one of the law students in the film declares, the question is not who knew about the extermination of the Jews. There were hundreds of camps all over Europe. Everybody knew. “My parents, my teachers, everyone.” The question is, what did they do about it? The answer is: Nothing. As the student says to the bemused Ganz: “The only question is why you didn’t all just kill yourselves?”

Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the the Holocaust. The film’s underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge. Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler’s extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.

Power’s book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world — in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere — over the past hundred years. “The key question” writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, “… is: Why does the United States stand so idly by? The most common response is, ‘We didn’t know.’ This is not true.”

“Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it,” Power says. “Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the ‘twilight between knowing and not knowing.’” It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand any action. Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act. U.S. officials “were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.”

Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government. We are, in this moment, as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich. We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation. Starting well before the invasion of Iraq — which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred — we knew the “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam’s connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses. But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren’t sure.

In his Sunday column entitled: “What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us,” Frank Rich remarked upon this “American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago… Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.” Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, “How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead ‘normal’ lives while genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad. If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors.

For Bernard Schlink, this knowledge, that his parents’ generation denied, “makes me aware how thin the ice is on which we live.” Schlink believed that German culture and institutions like courts, universities, churches, unions and political parties “all seemed so solid.” And yet it all broke down, “relatively easily.” In America too. Somehow we allowed our government to invade a country that had committed no aggression toward the United States. We allowed our government to declare an emergency in order to violate human rights of many thousands of individuals, to commit torture, to incarcerate people for years without trial or hearings of any kind. And today we continue the violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. We continue to jail and abuse individuals without charges. And we all know it’s wrong. And it’s time to deal with it before our “land of the free” is irreparably compromised.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy has laid out The Case for a Truth Commission (Time, Feb 20). As Leahy says: “For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans. We need to get to the bottom of what happened — and why — to make sure it never happens again… to find the truth….

“But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America’s reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it…. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.”

It’s not just our right. It’s a fundamental need. German society is still — and may always be — in recovery, not just from the atrocities committed in its name, by its leaders, but from the silent acquiescence of the millions who lacked the will to speak up against what they knew was wrong. To sweep the crimes and excesses of the Bush-Cheney years under the rug would destroy the American soul. The world needs the American sense of justice now more than ever. But we forfeit our moral authority if we do not take responsibility for the crimes of the Bush-Cheney years. Samantha Power is now an adviser to Barack Obama. Nobody knows better than she does the moral imperative for admitting and redressing the moral lapses of government. We must hope that she wields her influence to make the machinery of government responsive to the deepest needs of our culture. Karl Rove continues to flaunt congressional subpoenas to testify. He figures he can stonewall indefinitely, that there will be no day of reckoning for lawless U.S. officials. We must do everything in our power to prove him wrong.

“I’ve been working here four years,” a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS at the largest cemetery in Baghdad, a sprawling expanse in the Abu Ghraib section of the capital city. “In 2006 and some of 2007, we buried 40- 50 people daily. This went on for one-and-a-half years.

“Twenty-five percent of these were from violence, and another 70 percent were killed by the Mehdi Army (the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr).” Only a few appeared to have died from natural causes.

“Most of the dead were never logged by anyone,” Ali said, “because we didn’t check death certificates, we just tried to get the bodies into the ground as quickly as possible.”

An Iraqi Army checkpoint was set up outside the vast cemetery a year ago.

“We opened this checkpoint because people were burying the dead and no information was being given to anyone,” a soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told IPS.

“Most of this (lack of reporting the dead), we found, happened during 2006,” the soldier added. “Anyone could be buried here, and nobody would know about it.”

Not far, in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad, what used to be a park is now a cemetery with more than 5,000 graves. According to the manager, most of the dead are never counted.

“Most of the bodies buried here are never reported in the media,” Abu Ayad Nasir Walid, 45, manager of the cemetery told IPS. He has been the manager here since the park was converted into a cemetery amidst the bloodletting from sectarian violence in early 2006.

“I have the name here of the first martyr buried,” Walid said, pointing to a tombstone. “Gaith Al-Samarai, buried on 21 May 2006, he was the sheikh of the Al-Hurria mosque.”

Latif produced the cemetery logbook. “As of this hour, exactly, there are 5,500 bodies in this place. I log their names in my book, but we’ve never had anyone come from the government to ask how many people are here. Nobody in the media nor the Ministry of Health seems to be interested.”

Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq.

The last serious study, by a group of doctors in the U.S. and Iraq, was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Oct. 11, 2006.

The study said about 655,000 Iraqis (2.5 percent of the population) had been killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation. The research was carried out on the ground by doctors moving from house to house, questioning families, and examining death certificates.

Homes were surveyed in 47 separated clusters across Iraq. The Lancet says the study, carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in the U.S., has been validated by four independent experts.

The worst of the violence followed the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Al- Askari shrine in Samarra. The bombing of one of the most sacred Shia mosques in the world sparked sectarian violence that lasted months, with sometimes more than 300 killed in a day.

“During that time we buried 30-40 bodies daily,” Sehel Abud Al-Latif, a gravedigger at the Al-Adhamiya cemetery told IPS. “Often we had to work through the night, otherwise the bodies would just remain outside.”

Some estimates of the death toll have been considerably lower than that of The Lancet. The group Iraq Body Count (IBC), which describes itself as an “ongoing human security project,” estimates the number to be 98,850 as of the time of this writing.

The group says on the methodology: “Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere.”

IBC adds that figures are included from “incident-based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues and other documentary data-gathering agencies.”

The website adds, however, that “IBC’s main sources are information gathering and publishing agencies, principally the commercial news media who provide web access to their reports.” Also, the IBC only records violent deaths, and only those of civilians.

The unofficial cemeteries around Iraq hold their own additions to the numbers doing the rounds. And no one knows what these add up to.

Americans may decry what we can finally dub as the ‘Bush legacy,’ for it brought economic ruin, but also pushed the country into avoidable, if not completely preventable wars, disgracing the collective history of a nation that for long imposed its sense of moral authority on the world.

But the new president is set to change all of that. True, Barack Obama is duly warning of hyped expectations, but, frankly, he can only blame himself for the eagerness and hope, realistic or otherwise, that has engulfed the nation, even the world over. During his presidential campaign he made many promises, the gist of which is that an Obama administration would be everything that the Bush administration was not. That was enough for ‘Obamaniacs’ to sing and dance the world over.

One cannot expect that Obama has a magic solution for everyone’s problems, everywhere. In fact one must be realistic and simply ask Obama to remedy the problems and conflicts that were introduced or provoked, financed and sustained by his own country.

Regarding the Middle East, Obama seems to have hit the ground running, or so we are told. Shortly after his inauguration, he appointed former Senator George Mitchell as special envoy to the region. Mitchell “will bring a wealth of experience and credibility to the job,” said CNN.

Once again, Obama is clearly attempting to delineate an early policy that differs from Bush’s. The latter was affiliated with the infamous Guantanamo Bay, the ‘gulag of our times’ — according to Amnesty International — thus Obama ordered it closed, a year from now that is. Bush was blamed for his late arrival to the Middle East peace process scene, thus Obama makes it clear that the peace process is a priority for his administration.

But the question is how different will Obama truly be when his administration is done carrying out a few symbolic gestures to appease the ever-eager public?

Naturally a new administration, promising a new era, requires a new language. Although inundated with lofty terminology, the outlines of Obama’s new administration seem, in some instances, a mirror image of Bush.

These are remarks made by Obama (not Bush), on January 22, and seen as the first major statement by his administration regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: “Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel’s security. And we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against legitimate threats. . . . Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements. Going forward, the outline for a durable cease-fire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire; Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza; the United States and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot rearm.”

Funny how Obama started his statement with “let me be clear.” He cannot possibly be any clearer as he spent endless hours for many months assuring Israel and its supporters, while condemning Palestinians without any reservation or remorse.

Those who counted on Obama to bring a just peace to the Middle East must’ve had their hearts broken watching the man charging against Hamas’ terror, as thousands of Gazans were killed and wounded, including 430 children in the matter of three weeks as a result of Israel’s barbarous attacks, using mostly American weapons (and full, unqualified US backing.)

And yet, Obama found it fitting to explain that his administration’s foreign policy is not only “critical in terms of projecting . . . America’s power, but also America’s values and America’s ideals.” Of course, it was Palestinian trust in those ideals that led them in droves to the polls in January 2006, and subsequently to their starvation and carnage in Gaza. It is no wonder that Palestinians are unimpressed.

Aside from Obama’s unparalleled clarity, thus far, on his utter and “unconditional” commitment to Israel, he, along with his officials, continue to borrow similar vague slogans that were used enthusiastically by the Bush administrations: national security, national interests, spreading of American ideals, values, and all the rest.

Commenting on such sloganeering, Howard Zinn, one of America’s most celebrated historians, said, ‘We have to think about these words and phrases that are thrown at us without giving us a time to think. And . . . we have to redefine these words, like “national security.” What is national security? . . . having military bases all over the world (or) . . . having healthcare, having jobs.”

Americans will have four years to determine how Obama and his administration define these tired slogans, ones that also include democracy and “terrorism” (is the latter an exclusively Arab tendency, never an Israeli, no matter how many the latter kills?)

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza hardly have the leverage of time as tens of thousands remain homeless and destitute. More, they have little hope and expectations on Obama or even Mitchell, despite his “wealth of experience and credibility.”

“Obama won’t bring my husband back to life,” Leila Khalil, a Gazan woman, whose husband was killed during Israel’s bloody offensive, told AFP. “He was martyred and left me with six children to feed on my own.”

Obama’s also made himself “clear” regarding the fate of Leila’s husband, and thousands like him: “For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.”

Luckily, Leila no longer has a TV set to listen to Obama’s remarks. It was, along with her home pulverized by Israeli missiles, courtesy of the United States. For Gazans, and most Palestinians, things cannot be any clearer.