People Before Profit blog

Thousands of Israelis protest Gaza war in Tel-Aviv

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 14:56:00 +0000

TEL AVIV, Israel - Some 7,000 Israelis on Saturday evening protested the war in Gaza under the banner: "No more deaths - Israeli-Palestinian peace, now." According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, it was the largest protest against the Israeli military operation in Gaza thus far. With Israel having a population of about 8 million, it was the equivalent of a rally of about 250,000 in the U.S.

It took place in Rabin Square in central Tel Aviv. The square is named for Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who negotiated the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization and was assassinated by an Israeli right-wing extremist in 1995.

Slogans chanted by the protesters included "Stop the war," "Bring the soldiers back home" and "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies." Participants called for an end to the fighting and a return to negotiations to end the occupation of Palestinian territories. They lit memorial candles among photos of the dead, both Israelis and Palestinians.

The protest was organized by Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), of which the Israeli Communist Party is a leading component; Combatants for Peace, composed of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters; and The Parents' Circle - Families Forum, an organization of bereaved Palestinian and Israeli families.

Speakers included Knesset (Parliament) member Dov Khenin, who is a leader of the Israeli Communist Party; an Israeli captain in the reserves and a Palestinian veteran from Ramallah in the West Bank, both from Combatants for Peace; Ben Kfir of The Parents' Circle - Families Forum; Yifat Solel, head of the left-wing Zionist Meretz party's anti-occupation forum; Professor Eva Illouz, president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Israel's 107-year-old national art school; writer Odeh Basharat, columnist for Haaretz and the Palestinian newspaper al-Ittihad; and Dr. Julia Chaitlin, a lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot and resident of kibbutz Urim in southern Israel near Gaza. The Meretz party and Peace Now organization had opted not to take part in the rally, according to Israel's Channel 2.

"So many heartbreaking moments happened this month," Khenin told the rally, as reported by Haaretz. "A son crying over his father's grave, a mother weeping for her son, and many pictures of the wounded and dead. Behind each picture is a name, a family. We must answer truthfully: Has a drop of all this bloodshed really helped bring us to a better place?"

The Israeli government, he said, should support the recently formed Palestinian unity government headed by Mahmoud Abbas, and negotiate for a peaceful just solution.

Kfir, whose daughter was killed in a Hamas suicide bombing in 2003, also spoke, and challenged the government's claim that there is no partner for peace among the Palestinians. He and other speakers criticized the Israeli government for its negative attitude toward peace negotiations, and for making war its default policy. Kfir noted, ""The infrastructure of terrorism is ignorance, poverty and despair. It is with these we must deal."

Roughly 300 extreme right-wing counter-protesters were on the scene trying to sabotage the main demonstration. According to Haaretz, they "shouted 'Death to the leftists'" and "merrily sang 'Why is there no school in Gaza? Because no more kids are left.'" A large police presence circled the square to keep the sides separate. Several of the rightists were arrested.

The invitation to the peace protest read: "On Saturday, the peace camp takes a stand at Rabin Square. The war is taking a heavy toll in lives and injuries on both sides, in destruction and horror, in bombings and rockets. We answer this by taking a stand and making a demand: end the war now!"

"We must end the war and start talking with the recognized Palestinian leadership of the West Bank and Gaza to end the occupation and the siege and to achieve independence and justice for both peoples - in Israel and Palestine."

"Instead of being drawn, again and again, into more wars and more military actions, it is now time to lead the way to dialogue and a political settlement. There is a political solution. What price must we pay - the people of the South and the other residents of Israel, and the people of Gaza and the West Bank - until we reach that solution? Together, Jews and Arabs, we will overcome occupation and war, hatred, incitement and racism - and offer a path to life and hope."

Photo: A scene at Saturday's peace rally in Tel Aviv, Israel. Combatants for Peace Facebook page

Oil depot ablaze, Libyan government appeals for help

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 12:15:00 +0000

CAIRO (AP) - A fire at the oil depot for the airport in Tripoli, Libya's capital, raged out of control Monday after being struck in the crossfire of warring militias battling for control of the airfield, the latest violence to plague the country as foreigners flee the chaos.

Libya's interim government said in a statement that the fire could trigger a "humanitarian and environmental disaster" in Tripoli, appealing for "international help" to extinguish the inferno. It did not say what it specifically needed.

The blaze had spread to a second depot by Monday afternoon, the government said. It was unclear if there were any injuries from the fire.

"The government appeals to all concerned parties to immediately stop firing as the situation has become very grave," the government said.

Libyan television stations called on residents to evacuate areas within a 5-kilometer (3-mile) radius of the airport. Many Libyan families scrambled to leave. Black smoke billowed over the Tripoli skyline.

Mohammed al-Harari, the spokesman for the Libyan National Oil Company, said the oil depot had a capacity of 6 million liters (1.6 million gallons) and that if the fire was not brought under control, it could ignite liquid gas nearby.

Fire trucks from several nearby cities and towns have been deployed to help extinguish the blaze, said a Libyan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to journalists.

"There is a risk of a massive explosion which could cause damage over three to five kilometres," al-Harari said. "Firefighters have been trying for hours to put out the blaze but to no avail.

"Their water reserves finally ran out and they've had to leave." He said the only option left was "intervention by air."

The battle for control of the airport began two weeks ago when Islamist-led militias - mostly from the western city of Misrata - launched a surprise assault on the airport, which has been under control of a rival militia from the western mountain town of Zintan. It wasn't clear whose fire started the oil depot blaze.

The Health Ministry said Sunday that the fighting has so far killed 79 people and wounded more than 400.

More than three years after Moammar Gadhafi's downfall, Libya is witnessing one of the worst bouts of violence amid growing lawlessness in the country. Libya's interim government, which relies on militias filled with rebels who battled Gadhafi's forces for security, now finds itself unable to rein them in.

The fighting has sparked many to flee the country. On Saturday, the U.S. evacuated its diplomats from Tripoli to neighboring Tunisia and shut its embassy. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya and the International Committee of the Red Cross have already withdrawn their staff as well. European nations are warning their citizens to immediately leave the country.

German embassy staff in Tripoli were evacuated on Monday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Sawsan Chebli said in Berlin. They will be sent back "as soon as the security situation allows," she said.

Austria also removed its diplomatic staff Monday and urged citizens to leave the country as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, Egyptian ambassador to Libya Mohammed Abu Bakr, who runs the embassy's affairs from the Foreign Ministry in Cairo, denied on Monday that there were some Egyptian nationals among the 23 people killed when a rocket slammed into a house in Tripoli on Saturday.

Abu Bakr said he was officially informed about this by the Libyan Interior Ministry and did not elaborate.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that there were some Egyptian nationals among the 23 killed.

Associated Press writer George Jahn in Vienna contributed to this report.

Photo: This July 26 frame grab from video obtained from a freelance journalist shows an airplane on the tarmac of the airport belching black smoke into the air during fighting in Tripoli, Libya. (AP Photo/AP video)

Judicial finding in Chile says U.S. complicit in death of young Americans

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 13:49:00 +0000

A Chilean judge recently issued a ruling that United States officials were complicit in the 1973 murders of two young Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.

Judge Jorge Zepeda's ruling specifically named a U.S. military officer, Naval Captain Ray Davis, for having practically delivered the two young Americans to officials of the military dictatorship of General Agosto Pinochet, who had both of them executed. Judge Zepeda also ruled that court cases against two Chilean officials, Colonel Pedro Espinoza and counterintelligence agent Rafael Gonzalez, can proceed. Davis, Espinoza and Gonzalez were indicted in Chile in 2011 for their role in the repression.

In Judge Zepeda's words "Military intelligence services of the United States played a fundamental role in the murder of two U.S. citizens in 1973, providing Chilean officers with the information that led to their execution".

Horman, a journalist and filmmaker, and Teruggi, a student had gone to Chile to do freelance journalistic work because they were interested in the social experiment being carried out by the left-wing government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The Nixon administration, and specifically Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, had been working hard to undermine Allende by various methods of destabilization and sabotage.

On September 11, 1973, a clique of senior military officers carried out a bloody coup in which Allende died.

General Pinochet and his colleagues, with the full U.S. backing, established a military dictatorship which carried out a campaign of terrorism that reached right into Embassy Row in Washington D.C. where, on September 21, 1976, a car bombing killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

The coup took place while Horman was visiting the coastal city of Viña del Mar. Horman witnessed things which strongly suggested U.S. involvement, such as U.S. warships in the port and U.S. military personnel very evident in the town, being waved through checkpoints by Chilean troops. Horman was offered a ride back to Santiago, Chile's capital, by Captain Davis, who plied him with intrusive questions and then turned over the information to the Chilean military.

Davis was in Chile with a mission to spy on people who expressed "subversive" ideas; Horman and Teruggi fitted the profile because of their friendly attitude toward the Allende government. So Davis fingered the two young Americans as subversives, and the Chilean fascist military rounded them up, briefly detained them in the Santiago stadium where many others, including noted folk singer Victor Jara were murdered, and then executed them.

For a long time U.S. officials in Washington and embassy personnel in Chile stonewalled Harmon's widow, Joyce Harmon, and others who were trying to find out what happened. In 1982, the noted Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras produced "Missing", a historically accurate, Oscar winning film about the incident, starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek, the latter as Joyce Horman.

The U.S. ambassador in Chile at the time of the murders, Nathanial Davis, and two others sued Costa Gavras for defamation of character and demanded $150,000, but lost. The National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington D.C. has doggedly pursued truth and justice for Horman and other victims of the Pinochet coup, and has amassed a treasure trove of incriminating documents.

Horman's widow, Joyce, has been true to her husband's memory by trying year after year to seek justice in American courts (unsuccessfully due to government sandbagging) and now, successfully, in Chilean courts.

General Pinochet left office in 1990 and died while under house arrest in 2006. In 1999, the Clinton administration finally released key classified documents that strongly supported the belief that U.S. officials had played a role in the murders. Mrs. Harmon also started a U.S. court case against a Chilean officer in 2011. Chilean judiciary officials, thinking that Captain Davis was living in the United States, had called for his extradition; ironically, he was living secretly in Chile where he died of natural causes last year.

Henry Kissinger, a key mover in the coup, is still alive at 91 and is treated as a revered elder statesman by both Republican and Democratic politicians. However he dares not travel much overseas, as he is wanted for questioning in several countries, and Uruguay has asked for his extradition for his role in these brutal events.

Photo: Heavily armed military oversee political prisoners at the football stadium of Santiago de Chile, November 14, 1973. Two young Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were executed here. The total number killed is unknown, over-all, the Pinochet regime left over 3,000 dead or missing and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile. (AP-Photo/str/ADN-Zentralbild)

Remembering a tragedy: How Cyprus became a nation divided

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 17:03:00 +0000

For the people of Cyprus, July 20, 1974, is a day that will always live in infamy. This was the day that the Turkish military, using an attempted right-wing coup as a pretext, invaded the island nation. Nobody, including the great imperial powers, the U.S. and Great Britain, tried to stop or hinder them or stand in their way

On July 15 of that year the right-wing Cypriot terrorist organization EOKA-B staged a coup and attempted to murder the elected president, Makarios III. They failed and the coup government collapsed in only eight days, but this pretext along with the fanatical anti-Turkish hate rhetoric of the Cypriot right was all the pretext that the Turkish army needed.

In subsequent weeks, even after the collapse of the coup, the Turkish army expanded and consolidated its aggression, eventually coming to occupy more than one third of Cyprus' territory, even as the great powers stood by. The Turkish army continues to this day to occupy this ill-gotten territory including part of the capital, Nicosia, making it the only divided city in Europe.

During the invasion, over 200,000 people were driven from their homes, becoming refugees in their own land. Thousands more disappeared, their fates unknown even until today. Many Cypriots who did not flee from the Turkish Army remain "enclaved" in the occupied regions, quasi-prisoners in their own country.

While Turkey bears the ultimate and direct responsibility for the present state of affairs, Cyprus was subject to the meddling of the imperial powers for a long time before that.

In 1960, after suffering many years under the British colonial yoke, Cyprus achieved its independence. From the start, however, it was victimized by the great powers. Right out of the box the new nation was saddled with a constitution that was set up by power brokers in Washington DC, London and Athens.

This rotten setup let Turkey in the door by making them party to the agreement although they had renounced all interest in Cyprus following World War I. In the end, the leader of the Cypriot independence movement, Makarios, was forced to sign the ill-fated constitution, pressured mainly by Britain but also by the U.S. and Greece.

In the years preceding the invasion, right-wing nationalist forces in both the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities, wittingly or unwittingly doing the dirty work for imperialism, fought to drive the Cypriot people apart. Indeed the right-wingers, in their campaign against all those who called for unity, ended up murdering more members of their own communities than those of the supposed "enemy" community.

The nationalists should have known whose work they were doing. There is plenty of evidence that imperialism always favored a Cyprus that was partitioned between NATO members Greece and Turkey.

From the time of its founding up until the present, Cyprus was non-aligned, thus was out of the complete dominance of imperialism, out of the grasp of NATO.

Imperialism, for its part, always figured that a divided nation would more easily fall into the clutches of NATO, or, barring that, a NATO member could maintain de-facto control of a part of the island, which, from imperialism's view, was almost as good.

The British for example, had an interest in maintaining the large military bases that the flawed constitution granted them. Thus they had an interest in keeping Cypriots focused on the more pressing question of unifying their nation rather than worrying about the presence of the bases.

In the end, although the right was defeated, Makarios survived and the left on Cyprus emerged stronger than ever, imperialism still got some of what it wanted - de-facto partition, allowing NATO to partially get its claws on Cyprus thanks to the Turkish army.

The pattern for what occurred was set one year earlier with the right-wing coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. We now know that this outrage was the brainchild of Henry Kissinger who likewise is blamed for being the brains behind the similar events on Cyprus. Although the Cypriot and Greek ultra-right and the Turkish militarists were stage front in this tragedy it was Kissinger who was the stage manager.

This story is also detailed in some excellent English language works. First off there is a chapter on Cyprus in C. Hitchens's book, "The Trial of Henry Kissinger." Also, the entire situation is covered in greater detail in "The Cyprus Conspiracy" by Brendan O'Malley and Ian Craig, and in "Cyprus: A Modern History" by William Mallinson.

The illegal Turkish occupation has now gone on for some 40 years, and progressive minded people the world over should take a keen interest. Even now, years later, NATO is still lusting after Cyprus.

Photo: Cypriot refugees Akhna 1974, Public Domain.

Movement that changed the world began in Cuba July 26, 1953

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 15:12:00 +0000

On July 26, 1953, exactly 61 years ago this Saturday, a small band of courageous and principled young Cubans stormed the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago, in Eastern Cuba. Though that uprising failed to dislodge the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, it was the beginning of a movement that has changed the world forever.

Batista had originally taken power in the "Sergeants' Coup" of 1933. He ruled Cuba behind the scenes for a while, but made himself president in 1940. In his first term, Batista carried out relatively progressive pro-worker policies, and thus was supported by the Cuban Communist Party and the labor unions.

After leaving power in 1944 and living in the United States for a while, Batista returned to Cuba and ran for president again in 1952. When he saw he was going to lose, he organized an armed coup d'état. The second time around, Batista ditched his former relatively progressive policies and showed himself as the corrupt and violent instrument of the Cuban and U.S. wealthy classes, and an enthusiastic ally of the Meyer Lansky wing of the Mafia. Thousands of political opponents were murdered and Cuba was left wide open for every kind of exploitation and vice.

Many brave Cubans tried to stand up to this monstrous dictatorship. The bravest of the brave were the group of 135 young Cuban men and women who were recruited by Fidel Castro Ruz to carry out the Moncada Barracks assault. Their plan was to seize the military barracks and the arms it contained, and use this as an organizing center to rouse the entire Cuban population against the Batista regime, which at that point had only been in power for about 16 months. .

But everything imaginable went wrong, and the uprising was defeated. Batista's henchmen murdered about 70 of those they captured at the scene or managed to round up later. Others were put on trial and sentenced to various prison terms (Fidel Castro and his brother Raul to 13 years each). Many were tortured.

At his own trial, Fidel drew upon his vast erudition, his sharp wit and his skills as a practicing lawyer to turn the tables on the regime. In what became known as his "History will Absolve Me" speech, Fidel laid bare the crimes of the Batista dictatorship, the illegitimacy of its legal procedures, and the responsibility of all people of conscience to oppose such a regime in Cuba and, by implication, anywhere.

Fidel closed his speech to the court: "I can not ask freedom for myself while my comrades are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the Isle of Pines. Send me there to join them and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest men should be dead or in prison in a Republic where the President is a criminal and thief.... But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me."

Sixty-one years later, the Isle of Pines is now the Isle of Youth (Isla de la Juventud), a center of high quality education for Cuban and international youth.

A public outcry led to an early release for Fidel and Raul. They went to Mexico and organized a new expedition to invade Cuba on the motor yacht Granma and start another movement to oust Batista. That too went seriously wrong, and only 12 men survived to keep on fighting. Their movement grew and took the name of the 26^th of July Movement to honor the Moncada barracks event.

On New Year's Day 1959, insurgent troops headed by Ernesto "Che" Guevara seized the city of Santa Clara in central Cuba, and Batista, seeing the writing on the wall, decamped with his cronies and loot, to go into exile in Portugal where he died in 1973.

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the United States and some of its allies have done their level best to overturn it and restore the old regime to power. They have not succeeded. Cuba implemented socialist policies of great benefit to its workers and small farmers, and especially to its women and minorities. Beyond that, Cuba has carried out, and continues to carry, international solidarity projects that have improved the lives of millions in the poorest countries in the world

Lest we forget, Cuba played a mighty role in the defeat of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Many of the heroes of July 26 have passed on. Fidel and Raul are still with us, and have not budged a millimeter from the resolve they have always shown.

History has absolved! Now it is up to us to learn from the heroic story of the 26^th of July, and never let it be forgotten by future generations.

Photo: Young students at a celebration to mark the anniversaries of the Organization of Cuban Pioneers at the Angela Landa elementary school in Old Havana, Cuba, April 4. The organization was founded in 1961 to encourage the values of education and social responsibility among Cuban children and adolescents. Franklin Reyes/AP

Ukraine itself burns in wake of airliner shoot-down

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 12:25:00 +0000

According to reports today, two Ukrainian military aircraft have been shot down over the Eastern Ukraine. This latest incident comes only days after the shooting down July 17 of a Malaysian airliner over the area and the resulting deaths of 298 innocent persons. As today's events show, the deaths of the 298 people shot out of the sky last week will be a source of tension for some time. Incidents of this type sometimes require years before the full story comes to light.

Various people with their own agendas continue to push their versions of who is to blame. The United States has now backed away from directly accusing Russia, but points at dissident militias. Russia, for its part, has raised questions about Ukrainian air force jets that it says were in the vicinity of Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 when it was knocked out of the sky.

Meanwhile, there is a shooting war in Eastern Ukraine between military forces under the control of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and local militias who reject the Poroshenko government and respond to the orders of the Donetsk and Luhansk "Peoples Republics."

At first, Ukrainian military forces sent by the Kiev government to crush any resistance to its control in the east suffered from defeats, surrenders and defections. But after Petro Poroshenko was elected president (in a highly questionable election lacking meaningful voter participation in huge swaths of the country) on May 25, the tide began to turn.

Part of the reason the Kiev government was able to reverse defeats on the battlefield was its willingness to rely on the help of extreme right-wing militia groups. One of these groups, the Right Sector, had played a major role in the violence in Kiev itself back in February. Their leader, Dmitryo Yarosh, has been seen on the battlefront in the east with the Azov Battalion. The Azov Battalion fights in cooperation with Ukrainian government forces under the patronage of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, himself an extreme right winger who is a major figure in the drive to ban the Communist Party of Ukraine as well as the Party of the Regions.

In the past, the Communist Party of the Ukraine and the Party of the Regions are the two parties that have had the most electoral support in Eastern Ukraine.

Azov Battalion leaders are known for their racist and extremist rhetoric, and are feared by the majority Russian-speaking population in Eastern Ukraine. They are believed to have played a key role in the violent capture, by the Kiev forces, of the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk over the 4^th of July weekend. There were reports of many civilian casualties.

There are also indications that Right Sector forces were behind the massacre in Odessa on May 2, in which at least 41 opponents of the Kiev government were burned, suffocated and beaten to death after they were trapped in the Trade Union Hall.

Poroshenko and his officials, including Andriy Parubiy, another right wing extremist official who is coordinating the military action in the East, have refused to negotiate with the dissident forces in Luhansk and Donetsk, claiming that they are "terrorists" and "animals" under the control of Russia. They call for "revenge' for the loss of lives of soldiers. There is reported to be a massing of forces for a full attack on Donetsk and Luhansk, cities of 1 million and 425,000 people respectively. Shelling and bombing have already reached Luhansk and the suburbs of Donetsk. Air raids followed by street-by-street fighting could ensue.

A half million refugees, fearing for the safety and lives of their families, have already crossed into Russia. At least five Ukrainian military aircraft have been shot down, with fatalities.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Symonenko, has called for a full and impartial investigation of the shooting down of the airliner, as have Russian President Putin, the United Nations Security Council and many others. The Ukrainian Communists' position has been for a united Ukraine with a federal system to protect the rights of minorities, but Kiev nevertheless accuses it of being pro-Russian and "separatist". On Tuesday, the Kiev Parliament, the Rada, voted to ban the Communist Party faction. (This decision has to be ratified in the courts).

On Tuesday also, a violent brawl broke out on the floor of the Rada, when Poroshenko narrowly won a vote authorizing the calling up military reserves to face a supposed Russian threat. One of the remaining deputies from the Party of the Regions denounced the killing of civilians in Eastern Ukraine, and a fistfight was started by ultra-right deputies, including the well-known Svoboda Party goon Igor Miroshnichenko.

The United States, NATO and the European Union see this struggle as a fight to bring Ukraine under their sway, and out of the orbit of Russia. In play are questions of trade, geopolitics and access to fossil fuels. The Kiev regime, the key ally of these "Western" forces, is, however, playing with fire by allying with neo-Nazis for the purpose of crushing resistance by people in Eastern Ukraine. Top officials such as Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk are opportunists, not ideologues. Eventually they will clash with the neo-fascist forces who are not "pro Europe" and are, many of them, anti-Semites. Remember General von Schleicher? [German Chancellor during the Weimar Republic, he was assassinated in 1934 by order of his successor, Adolf Hitler, in the Night of the Long Knives.^]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been denouncing the way ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians are treated by Kiev, but fails to mention that the government in Kiev will prove no friend of ethnic Ukrainians either, once it pursues its line of integrating this poorest of European countries with the European Union. So he too is playing a "national" card.

We in the U.S. should demand that our government, which has heavily supported the Kiev regime, back away from its hard line position, and call for negotiations, not just between Kiev and Moscow but between Kiev and Donetsk also.

And there should be no truck with neo-Nazis, or support for a government that includes them.

Photo: At a camp for refugees from Ukraine's east, on the border with Ukraine near the Russian town of Donetsk in Rostov-on-Don region, July 13. A half million refugees, fearing for the safety and lives of their families, have already crossed into Russia. Sergei Pivovarov/AP

Cuba's "Operation Miracle" celebrated throughout Latin America

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 17:24:00 +0000

All over Cuba these days there are celebrations of the tenth anniversary of "Operation Miracle." The U.S. public knows almost nothing about this internationalized project involving the restoration of vision for enormous numbers of people.

Set in motion on July 8, 2004, Operation Miracle took shape within the context of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - otherwise known as ALBA - which Cuba and Venezuela established that year also.

Latin American and Caribbean nations joining ALBA engage in mutually beneficial trade-offs, or so-called solidarity exchanges, of educational and medical services, scientific projects, even commodities. ALBA exemplifies the role of Cuba and Venezuela in spearheading regional integration.

Under Operation Miracle, Cubans and Venezuelans alike have benefited from surgical eye care. Tens of thousands of foreign nationals have traveled to Cuba for ophthalmology care. And Cuban ophthalmologists serving in Venezuela took the lead in establishing 26 eye care centers there. Staffed by eye surgeons, nurses, technicians, and other physicians, centers cropped up throughout Venezuela. They serve Venezuelans but also vision-impaired people from 17 Latin American countries plus Italy, Portugal, and Puerto Rico. Then Operation Miracle organizers established centers in 14 Latin American and Caribbean nations. Ten years after its start the program operates in 31 countries, some in Africa and Asia.

The program serves people denied eye care because of poverty and/or geographic inaccessibility. By far the most common cause of reduced vision the teams deal with is cataract. They also provide treatment for glaucoma, strabismus, retina problems, and abnormal growths. Corrective lenses are provided. These far-flung ophthalmology services are available for patients at no personal cost. So too are the transportation and accommodations they utilize.

According to one report, Operation Miracle has improved or restored vision for 3.4 million individuals. That measure of the project's effectiveness takes on additional meaning through World Health Organization data showing that 39 million people in the world are blind. These figures are actually within reach of one another, especially because most visual impairment - 80 percent - is preventable or curable. It seems that two formerly colonized, dependent nations have taken giant steps toward addressing a major cause of human disability.

Yet this story of human betterment plays out well beyond the range of inquiry and understanding of the great majority of U.S. residents. Maybe for minders of official orthodoxy this remarkable saga poses the threat of a good example. Historian Aviva Chomsky suggested that was the case in 2000 in regard to other Cuban health care achievements. Writing recently for Cuba's La Pupila Insomne web site, journalist Jose Manzaneda laments that international media are ignoring this "spectacular news."

Manzaneda focuses particularly on the Spanish El Pais newspaper as a purveyor of anti-Cuban bias. For example, in his recent report on international assistance to Haiti, El Pais writer Mauricio Vicent failed to credit Cuba for trying to fill Haiti's prominent health-care vacuum. Without mentioning Cuba, he contrasts Haiti's low indices of human development unfavorably with those of the Dominican Republic, a country with an infant mortality rate five time higher than Cuba's.

Manzaneda points out that, in fact, 11,000 Cuban health workers, mostly physicians, have served in Haiti for more than 16 years; 700 of them are there now. They have cared for 20 million patients, performed 373,000 surgical operations, and delivered 150,000 babies. Over 1,300 Haitian young people, recipients of Cuban government scholarships, have graduated from Cuban universities Currently 322 Haitians are studying medicine in Cuba. Manzaneda refers to triangular South-South cooperation evident in Brazil's funding of three new medical centers staffed by Cuban doctors, also in Cuban-Venezuelan collaboration in remodeling or building 30 community hospitals.

In a 2008 letter explaining his decision no longer to serve as Cuba's president, Fidel Castro stated that, "My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas." Indeed, medical outreach to Haiti, Operation Miracle, and ALBA itself are ideas Cuba has advanced in its struggle. Additionally, there is the idea attributed to Cuban national hero Jose Marti that "Patria es Humanidad" - in English, homeland is humanity. Surely, as demonstrated by these down -to- earth, people - centered instances of international solidarity, Cuba's revolution remains true to its roots.

Photo: Fundación Misión Milagro

What next for Gaza?

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 16:41:00 +0000

Editor's note: This article was written before the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza.

(UNRWA) -- As I sit here in my office cum bedroom in Gaza City, listening to the airstrikes and rocket fire, there is talk of how to bring the violence to an end. This is to be eminently desired, particularly for the civilian population in Gaza who have suffered the brunt of this escalation. But when I think of the 17,000 displaced people sheltered in our schools, some of whom I spoke with yesterday, I wonder what they would think of this. Because they have seen it all before, for most this was their third displacement since 2009; many having returned to the exact same classroom. If this prospective cease-fire ends the same way as those before it, would they think this is anything other than a brief respite from violence?

For Gaza, a return to 'calm' is a return to the eighth year of blockade. It is a return to over 50 percent of the population either unemployed or unpaid. It is a return to confinement to Gaza and no external access to markets, employment, or education - in short, no access to the outside world.

For example, if one of the grandmothers I spoke to yesterday should wish to go to Birzeit University in the West Bank to study, she cannot. The Israeli government need not demonstrate this grandmother poses any specific threat to security as they have approved a blanket ban on Gazans studying in the West Bank based on an undefined security threat. The vast majority of the population are prevented from leaving this 365 square kilometer sliver of land.

If one of the tomato farmers I met yesterday can find a buyer for his product in Paris, Peoria or Prague under certain conditions he can box up his tomatoes, ship them through the one open commercial crossing and on to Ashdod port or Ben Gurion airport - two of the most sensitive security sites in Israel. Unfortunately there is no market for Gazan tomatoes in Paris, Peoria or Prague. There is a market for Gazan tomatoes in Israel and the West Bank, but this farmer is not allowed to sell his tomatoes there because of that same undefined security threat.

The elderly I met yesterday wonder how they will access health care after this cease-fire. Other than the services provided by us at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and some private and NGO facilities, the government health care system is collapsing. Infrastructure has been damaged and the people wonder who will take responsibility to fix it. If the Palestinian Authority is not permitted or is unable to do that is the international community expected to? Or will Israel, the occupying power, assume that responsibility?

The mothers I met yesterday wonder where their children will go to school in six short weeks if not in one of UNRWA's 245 schools. Who will repair the government schools, deliver the textbooks, pay the teachers? If government schools do not open will UNRWA be expected to fill that void? We lack the physical capacity, human and financial resources to accept tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of additional students in our schools.

UNRWA and the UN family, including WFP, UNICEF, OCHA and UNDP, remain engaged in meeting the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza. Amongst the areas in which UNRWA has scaled up its work in recent years is construction, where we have a very large portfolio. This is predominantly schools for our education program, in which we taught over 230,000 children last year, and houses for those whose homes were destroyed in previous conflicts or demolished by Israel. If we want to build something we have to submit a detailed project proposal to Israel with the design, location and a complete bill of quantities. The Israelis then review the proposal, a process that is supposed to take not more than two months but on average takes nearly 20 months. We received no project approvals between March 2013 and May 2014, during the last 'calm', despite having nearly USD 100 million worth of projects awaiting approval. Will this 'calm' be any better?

More importantly, the people here wonder who will govern Gaza? No one has an answer to that question. I think the people of Gaza would say that if this is the form of 'calm' people have in mind, while preferable to the current violence, it cannot last. It will not last.

Robert Turner is the Gaza Director of Operations for UNRWA

This article and photo are reposted from the UNRWA website.

UNRWA is a United Nations agency established by the General Assembly in 1949 and is mandated to provide assistance and protection to a population of some 5 million registered Palestine refugees. Its mission is to help Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and the Gaza Strip to achieve their full potential in human development, pending a just solution to their plight. UNRWA's services encompass education, health care, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, microfinance and emergency assistance. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions.

World calls for Ukraine cease fire after plane crash

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 15:44:00 +0000

ROZSYPNE, Ukraine (AP) -- World leaders called for an immediate cease-fire in eastern Ukraine on Friday and demanded speedy access for international investigators to the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner shot down over the country's battlefields.

The strong words came amid the contrasting images of emergency workers and off-duty coal miners fanning out across picturesque sunflower fields searching for charred pieces of wreckage from the Boeing 777.

The attack Thursday afternoon killed 298 people from nearly a dozen nations - including vacationers, students and a large contingent of scientists heading to an AIDS conference in Australia.

President Barack Obama called for an immediate cease-fire between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russia separatists. He also called for a credible investigation.

"The eyes of the world are on eastern Ukraine, and we are going to make sure that the truth is out," Obama said at the White House.

U.S. intelligence authorities said a surface-to-air missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it traveled from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told the U.N. Security Council in New York on Friday the missile was likely fired from a rebel-held area near the Russian border.

The Ukrainian government in Kiev, the separatist pro-Russia rebels they are fighting and the Russia government that Ukraine accuses of supporting the rebels all denied shooting the plane down. Moscow also denies backing the rebels.

After holding an emergency session, the U.N. Security Council called for "a full, thorough and independent international investigation" into the downing of the plane.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said both sides in the Ukrainian conflict should put down their weapons and hold peace talks. On Thursday, Putin blamed Ukraine for the crash, saying Kiev was responsible for the unrest in its Russian-speaking eastern regions. But he didn't accuse Ukraine of shooting the plane down and didn't address the key question of whether Russia gave the rebels such a powerful missile.

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry released a video purporting to show a truck carrying the Buk missile launcher it said was used to fire on the plane with one of its four missiles apparently missing. The ministry said the footage was filmed by a police surveillance squad at dawn Friday as the truck was heading to the city of Krasnodon toward the Russian border.

There was no way to independently verify the video.

Ukraine's state aviation service closed the airspace Friday over two border regions gripped by separatist fighting - Donetsk and Luhansk - and Russian airlines suspended all flights over Ukraine.

Access to the sprawling crash site remained difficult and dangerous. The road into it from Donetsk, the largest city in the region, was marked by five rebel checkpoints, with document checks at each.

A commission of around 30 people, mostly officials representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, traveled to the crash site Friday afternoon in the first such visit there by an international delegation.

"No black boxes have been found ... we hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened," Donetsk separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai said.

Yet earlier Friday, an aide to the military leader of Borodai's group said authorities had recovered eight out of 12 recording devices. Since planes usually have two black boxes - one for recording flight data and the other for recording cockpit voices - it was not clear what the aide was referring to. It was possible he was referring to a variety of computer systems.

The crash site was spread out over fields between two villages in eastern Ukraine - Rozsypne and Hrabove. In the distance, the thud of Grad missile launchers being fired could be heard Friday morning.

In the sunflower fields around Rozsypne, 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the Russian border, lines of men disappeared into thick, tall growth that reached over their heads. One fainted after finding a body. Another body was covered in a coat.

About 70 off-duty coal miners joined the search, their faces still sooty from work.

In Hrabove, several miles away, large numbers of sticks, some made from tree branches, were affixed with red or white rags to mark spots where body parts were found.

Andrei Purgin, a leader of the pro-Russian separatists, told The Associated Press that after consultations with international diplomats and a former Ukrainian president, a decision has been reached for bodies to be taken to the government-controlled Black Sea city of Mariupol.

Smashed watches and mobile phones, charred boarding passes and passports were among the debris.

Large chunks of the plane, which bore the airline's red, white and blue markings, lay strewn over one field. The cockpit and one turbine lay a kilometer (a half-mile) apart, and the tail landed 10 kilometers (six miles) away. One rebel militiaman in Rozsypne told the AP the plane's fuselage showed signs of being struck by a projectile.

The area has seen heavy fighting between government troops and pro-Russia separatists, and rebels had bragged about shooting down two Ukrainian military jets Wednesday in the region.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed Kiev's accusations that Moscow could be behind the attack.

"Regarding those claims from Kiev that we allegedly did it ourselves: I have not heard a truthful statement from Kiev for months," he told the Rossiya 24 television channel.

He also said Russia has no intention of getting its hands on the plane's black boxes and added they should be given to international aviation organizations.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk described the attack as an "international crime" whose perpetrators should be punished in an international tribunal.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lay insisted again Friday that the airline's path was an internationally approved route and denied accusations the airline was trying to save fuel and money by taking a more direct flight path across Ukraine.

Aviation authorities in several countries, including the FAA in the United States, had issued previous warnings not to fly over parts of Ukraine after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March. Within hours of the crash Thursday, several airlines announced they were avoiding parts of Ukrainian airspace.

Photo: At the crash site near the village of Hrabove, Ukraine, July 17. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

Future of the BRICS

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:53:00 +0000

One of the lesser-known side effects of the threatened roll back of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve is fear of a credit crisis in emerging economies. Massive asset purchases have helped keep interest rates low for developing countries as well as the major creditor countries of the world.

The creditor countries - U.S., UK, Germany, Japan - also fund and control the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the largest international lending institutions. However, both the IMF and the World Bank engage in highly "conditional" lending-amounting, to many, as significant interference in the internal politics and affairs of the borrowing nations.

That interference has led to coups, civil wars, militarization, widespread repression and social upheaval in the past. The Western dominated banks favor constraints that prohibit governments from enacting or preserving national legislation providing public goods like health care, infrastructure, collective bargaining rights, environmental restrictions, democratic institutions, and schools, without first passing a "means test" - also known as the you-can't-do-anything-until-after-we-get-paid test.

Further, development efforts at the IMF and World Bank have been plagued for years with the "Washington Consensus" theory of international development that was and remains an ideological sewer product of the Reagan-Thatcher, free-market fundamentalism and worship of private property, era. The doctrine has been a miserable failure, by any objective standard. Most credit for alleviating world poverty must go to China, which has had a consistent theory of mixed public and private development aimed at strategic objectives.

Nonetheless, the Washington Consensus worked pretty well in a narrow sense. It owed its fame to the shameless intellectual scaffolding erected over the rape of public assets in the former Soviet Union following its collapse. The theory perfectly suited the Reagan-Thatcher led worldwide assault on socialism, social democracy, and - of course - democracy too. The "consensus" fit perfectly with an Anglo-American imperial model where everyone else must come begging for credit. We also learn from Piketty, that the privatization movement, harmonizes with removing all public interference to a return to levels of returns on capital that the super rich enjoyed on the eve of World War I; before the former plutocrats plunged the world and a hundred million lives into fire for 30 years; before they had to yield some power and wealth to democratic forces.

As emerging economies in Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa - known as the BRICS - have become wealthier there has been growing interest in consolidating a new tier and center of development funding that better reflects the special interests, requirements, opportunities and obstacles that new and recent entrants in Asia, Africa and Latin America must confront in the globalized commercial world.

Barely noticed in the US press, but reported in the Economic Times, leaders of the BRICS group of emerging powers on Tuesday created a Shanghai-based development bank and a reserve fund to finance infrastructure projects and head off future economic crises. The funds are seen as counterweights to Western-led financial institutions.

"These initiatives show that, despite our diversity, our countries are committed to a solid and productive association," Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said at a summit in the northeastern seaside city of Fortaleza. Russian President Vladimir Putin also hailed the agreements as "a very powerful way to prevent new economic difficulties." The New Development Bank aims to rival the Washington-based World Bank while the reserve is seen as a "mini-IMF."

It is too early to tell for sure if this effort is sustainable given the very diverse political economies and histories of the emerging nations. For example, President Rousseff is quoted saying: "The IMF urgently needs to review its distribution of voting power in order to reflect the unquestionable weight of emerging countries," This echoes calls by BRICS leaders who have long pressed for reform of the International Monetary Fund to give developing countries more voting rights. Is the new bank a real move toward a new development center, or simply a bid for the IMF and World Bank to liberalize their governance?

However the more formal stature of the new bank and reserve funds gives the multi-tier, multi-center thesis more credibility than at anytime since the end of the cold war. The development bank will have initial capital of $50 billion that could rise to $100 billion, funded equally by each nation. To ease worries of any nation getting more power than the other, BRICS leaders agreed to put the bank's headquarters in Shanghai. The first president will be Indian while the first board chair will hail from Brazil.

Further, according to the summit declaration, an Africa Regional Center will be based in South Africa and will help emerging and developing nations mobilize resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects.

The Contingent Reserve Arrangement will have $100 billion at its disposal to immediately head off potential economic volatility linked to the United States exiting its stimulus policy. China is expected to make the biggest contribution, $41 billion, followed by $18 billion each from Brazil, India and Russia and $5 billion from South Africa.

Assessing the BRICS summit depends in part on one's fundamental sense of world economic development trends. There is certainly much evidence to support a changing distribution of world wealth, economic productive power, and resources. And the balance of evidence in this writers view points strongly away from the older imperial, or bipolar, world towards a multi-centered, multi-tendency international environment. Recognizing multi-tendency means recognizing more diplomacy and more democracy and more cooperation as a more sustainable framework, than an imperial one relying on a superpower and the superpower's ability to impose alliances. The former seems both suitable and necessary for more democratic and inclusive evolution of a global governance network. As economies-including both capital and human resources-become both richer, and more intertwined, it is difficult to see greater international peace and stability without abandoning an imperial approach, and viewing emerging nations' struggle for seats at the global table as a positive force.

Here is to BRIC success in promoting emerging nations development and becoming more responsive to crisis impact and remediation!

Photo: BRICS leaders in Brazil CC BY 3.0. Presidential Press and Information Office.

Maduro: Brics summit will change the world order

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:12:00 +0000

Decisions taken at the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (Brics) summit will change the course of the 21st century, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said July 16.

"Brics have made very important decisions to change the political and economic world order," he told his weekly TV programme.

The bloc has "decided to create a development bank with $100 billion (£58bn) as starting capital and a commercial and financial system among its members to use local currencies instead of U.S. dollars."

It would have a reserve currency pool worth over another $100 billion.

Both initiatives will counter the influence of imperialist lending institutions and the dollar.

The Brics leaders ended their two-day summit in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza with the announcement that the planned bank would be headquartered in the Chinese financial hub of Shanghai.

The New Development Bank will have an African regional branch in South Africa and other nations will be able to participate eventually.

President Maduro is among regional presidents from the Union of South American Nations and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States taking part in talks with Brics leaders to deepen co-operation between these blocs.

"Our foreign policy is well advanced," said Mr. Maduro.

"It's at the centre of all world events to continue deepening our alliance with Brics."

The Venezuelan president will host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Caracas later this week, before Mr. Xi leaves for Cuba and Argentina.

Mr. Xi supports a China-Latin America forum to further expand bilateral trade that has already reached $262bn (£153bn) in the past year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who began his Latin American tour with a visit to Cuba at the weekend, will be pleased to have shown that his country's recent exclusion from the G8 group of industrialised nations does not signify international isolation.

The new Brics financial mechanisms could benefit Argentina, which is at risk of defaulting on $1.3bn (£759 million) in debts after losing a U.S. Supreme Court battle with "vulture" hedge funds.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said that nothing was certain "because we just formed this institution," but she was sure that the group would "examine" any request from Argentina.

This article is reposted from Morning Star.

Photo: UNASUR

Israeli government lied, manipulated teens’ deaths, to wreck Palestinian unity

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:29:00 +0000

It turns out the the Israeli government knew almost immediately that the three teenagers kidnapped June 12 in the West Bank had most likely been killed. Officials also quickly identified the likely kidnappers/killers. These individuals were known to be operating independently of the Palestinian Hamas organization. But instead of acknowledging these things publicly, the right-wing government issued a gag order barring reporting of any details about the investigation. Then it lied to the public. A nationwide emotion-laden "Bring Back Our Boys" campaign was launched, with a massive military search-and-destroy operation in the West Bank, titled "Brother's Keeper." From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, Hamas was linked to "Satan" and targeted for attack. The aim? To use the opportunity to wreck the recently formed Palestinian unity government and thereby divert any pressure for an Israeli peace pact with the Palestinians.

Israelli journalist Noam Sheizaf said in a June 19 Facebook posting (in translation) that the gag order was being maintained in order to "preserve the local and international legitimacy for the policy objective in the areas (breaking down the unity government)" aimed at Hamas - it was "manipulation" of the media, and the media accepted it. In a later article, Sheizaf called it "large-scale public manipulation," saying, "The government-led campaign calling for [the youths'] release helped the legitimacy of Israel's military operation in the West Bank. Local and even international media played along."

On the night of the kidnapping one of the teenagers, Gilad Shaer, 16, managed to place a 2-minute call to Israel's emergency phone number. After hours of delay that are now the subject of hot dispute, the recorded message got to Israeli security services the next morning. On the tape, writes J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward, Shaer "was heard whispering 'They've kidnapped me' ('hatfu oti') followed by shouts of 'Heads down,' then gunfire, two groans, more shots, then singing in Arabic. That evening searchers found the kidnappers' abandoned, torched Hyundai, with eight bullet holes and the boys' DNA. There was no doubt."

But officials lied even to the victims' families, telling them that the shots heard on the tape were blanks, and that no DNA was found on the burnt car.

The government "maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas' West Bank operations," Goldberg writes.

Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel, writing on June 20 and pushing the boundaries of the gag order, hinted that the military believed the youths were dead because its operation in the West Bank days after the apparent abduction had nothing to do with the missing teens. In fact, according to the article, even Israeli military personnel felt the operation was targeting Hamas rather than really helping find the kidnapped teens.

Daniella Peled, an editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and a regular contributor to Haaretz, wrote, "As well as taking advantage of the horrific murder of three Israeli teenagers to torpedo the Palestinian unity government and cut a swathe through Hamas, Israel's government also used them as a particularly shoddy way of shoring up the bond between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora."

Beyond this, says Goldberg, Netanyahu's inflammatory rhetoric "raised expectations that after demolishing Hamas in the West Bank he would proceed to Gaza. Hamas in Gaza began preparing for it. The Israeli right - settler leaders, hardliners in his own party - began demanding it." Israeli media reported that the government was readying plans to call up reservists for a possible ground re-invasion of Gaza.

Thus began the cycle of rocket firings from Gaza into Israel and massive Israeli aerial attacks on Gaza, leading to wide condemnation of Israel for its disproportionate use of force and mounting destruction of civilian lives, homes and infrastructure in the densely populated Gaza Strip. While no deaths have been reported in Israel as a result of the rockets from Gaza, some 200 deaths have been reported in Gaza, including families, old people and children.

In a July 11 statement, the Communist Party of Israel said, "[T]he real motivation of Netanyahu's administration was never to achieve security for the people of Israel but solely to obstruct the Palestinian unity government and absolve itself from responsibility for the failure of the peace negotiations.

"The present assault on Gaza also serves the Israeli government in yet another two ways: (1) it reconsolidates Netanyahu's coalition in times of domestic unrest ... and (2) it puts all questions of poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, and discrimination off the table, and marginalizes all struggles for social justice and democracy

"Everybody knows now that Netanyahu and his co-bullies in the government and the military were aware that the three young settlers were murdered on the very first day they were kidnapped. What was the cause of Israeli invasion and mass arrests in the West Bank if not to set the whole region on fire and promote the said goals?"

Photo: Israel soldiers conduct the so-called "Brother's Keeper" operation in the West Bank, June 17, days after government officials knew the teenagers were dead. Israeli Defense Forces/Wikipedia

Palestinians and Israelis mourn together but crisis deepens

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 15:58:00 +0000

Hundreds of Israeli Jews visited the mourning family of Muhammad Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem on Tuesday to express condolences over the vicious killing of the Palestinian teenager last week. Muhammad, age 16, was burned to death in reprisal for the June killings of three Israeli youths hitchhiking in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. Six Jewish teenagers have been arrested for Muhammad's murder and some have reportedly confessed.

A rabbi from northern Israel who was among the group paying condolences called Muhammad's murder "the desecration of God's name."

"I came to protest and declare that this is not the way my religion goes," the rabbi told the Times of Israel. "I think we should say it out loud: This isn't what we expect and what we want to happen. We're looking for a different type of coexistence."

The Abu Khdeir family thanked the visitors, noting that the family had not allowed Israeli government representatives to visit "because we felt their condolences were insincere."

The visit was organized by Tag Meir, an Israeli interfaith coalition opposing Jewish anti-Arab racism and hate crimes.

Earlier, Muhammad's father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, talked by telephone with Yishal Fraenkel, uncle of one of the three murdered Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel. The uncle told reporters that "the life of an Arab is equally precious to that of a Jew. Blood is blood, and murder is murder, whether that murder is Jewish or Arab."

Several Palestinians from the Hebron area in the West Bank visited the Fraenkel family. One of the Palestinians said, "Things will only get better when we learn to cope with each other's pain and stop getting angry at each other. Our task is to give strength to the family and also to take a step toward my nation's liberation. We believe that the way to our liberation is through the hearts of Jews."

On Saturday, some 300 Israelis demonstrated in Haifa, in northern Israel, under the theme "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies." They included members of left Meretz party and the Israeli Communist Party - among them Knesset (Parliament) member Dov Khenin.

But right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent out a Twitter message calling for "vengeance" for the murders of the three Israeli youths.

And as a number of news media report, thousands of Israelis, including both soldiers and civilians, have joined rallies and social media campaigns calling for killing Palestinians in retaliation for the murders.

A Facebook page entitled "The People of Israel Demand Vengeance!" got more than 36,000 "likes" in just under two days before it was removed. Over 10,000 people joined an online campaign to kill a Palestinian "terrorist" every hour until the teens were returned to their families.

In April, the Palestinian news agency Ma'an notes, a Facebook page created to support an Israeli soldier who cocked his gun and aimed at Palestinian teenagers in Hebron received over 60,000 likes.

A scandal has erupted over charges, supported by video footage, that Palestinian American 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, a cousin of Muhammad Abu Khdeir who was visiting the family in Jerusalem, was savagely kicked and beaten by Israeli border police last week. Tariq lives in Tampa, Fla. The police claim he had been involved in anti-Israel actions. He and the family deny this. He has been released from jail and put under house arrest in Israel. His family is trying to get him released and returned home.

Meanwhile a confrontation between Israel and the Hamas leadership in Gaza has escalated sharply.

Israeli military officials said the Israeli air force carried out strikes on some 160 targets in the Gaza Strip over Tuesday night. Ma'an reported Wednesday that the Palestinian death toll from Israeli strikes on Gaza had reached 39. Among the latest victims Wednesday were a mother and two small children in the al-Maghazi refugee camp, with another two children reported missing.

Israel says its airstrikes were launched in retaliation for rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Palestinians in Gaza fired more than 85 rockets at Israel on Monday, "with Hamas openly claiming responsibility for some of the launches for the first time since the current escalation began." The rockets hit several major cities in Israel's south and, for the first time in the current fighting, caused alarms to go off in central Israel and Jerusalem. (The Jerusalem alerts were later reported to be false alarms.) The rockets lightly wounded two Israelis and caused property damage.

In turn, those rocket firings from Gaza followed a wave of Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip over Sunday night, causing Palestinian fatalities for the first time since the current fighting began. Hamas' armed wing said six of its members were killed in the strikes. Israeli armed forces denied this, claiming the six were killed in the collapse of a tunnel under the Gaza-Egypt border.

Inside and outside Israel, critics of Israel's air campaign say military escalation will not solve the problem of rocket attacks from Gaza and will further inflame the situation. In addition, it puts Israel in the position of inflicting collective punishment on civilians, a violation of international law.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition appear to be using the murders of the three Israeli teenagers to try to destroy the recently formed Palestinian unity government which includes Hamas. Formation of the unity government is widely seen as having the potential to help achieve a Palestinian-Israeli agreement. But that is something fiercely opposed by the Israeli far-right.

Photo: Knesset (Parliament) member Dov Khenin (second from left), a leader of the Israeli Communist Party, with other participants in a joint Jewish-Arab demonstration June 7 in Haifa, Israel, holds a sign reading "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies." Communist Party of Israel/Al Ittihad

Conservatives pass new election law designed to suppress vote

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:05:00 +0000

VANCOUVER, Canada - The right-wing Conservative Party government of Stephen Harper has finally succeeded in imposing U.S. Republican Party style voter suppression legislation in Canada. The Conservative dominated Senate approved bill C-23 June 27.

While the Conservatives claim that the law, which they have dubbed The Fair Elections Act, is necessary to fight electoral fraud and ensure the integrity of the Canadian electoral system, critics charge that the bill is designed to discourage voter participation and tilt the political playing field in favor of the Conservatives during the 2015 elections.

Among other things, the bill will scrap vouching, which allows one voter to vouch for another voter who has a government issued voting card but lacks ID proving name and residence. The most controversial of the proposed changes, critics charge that it will disenfranchise tens of thousands of non-conservative voters. A voter whose ID doesn't list an address can sign a written oath of residency. Another voter, with full ID, would have to co-sign the oath.

Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand, who heads Elections Canada, (the electoral agency in charge of running elections) has denounced the bill as anti-democratic and said the end of allowing voters to vouch for others and the enactment of mandatory ID requirements will adversely affect more than 100,000 voters.

"Many electors still have a challenge producing proper identification documents at the polls - especially certain groups that come to mind are aboriginals, young people, even seniors that are increasing in terms of population and have increasing difficulty producing proper identification documents," Mayrand said.

In 2011, 120,000 people voted through vouching. Elections Canada has found no evidence of widespread voter fraud through vouching.

Elections Canada also will no longer be permitted to monitor and investigate election fraud. Instead, a new commissioner of Elections, placed under the authority of the director of Public Prosecutions, a Cabinet appointee who is in turn answerable to Cabinet and the prime minister, not Parliament, will be created for this task. But the new commissioner - unlike Elections Canada before the changes - will have no power to investigate fraud, such as compelling witness testimony.

Bill C-23 will expand the role money plays in influencing election results. Under campaign finance rules, corporations and unions cannot donate money to parties and individual donations are capped. Under the new bill, allowable donations will increase from $1,200 to $1,500 and $1,200 to $5,000 for candidates to their own campaigns. Critics charge that this will benefit large parties with big donor lists. The Conservatives, of all parties, have the largest number of donors.

While Elections Canada will be able to offer programs explaining voting to elementary and secondary students, it will not be allowed to run larger campaigns to encourage voter turnout as it previously did. Instead political parties will have the responsibility to mobilize people to vote.

A long list of experts and organizations have spoken out against Bill C-23, among them: the opposition New Democratic Party, Greens, Liberals, Communists, Canadian Federation of Students, Leadnow, Council of Canadians, the Chief Electoral Officer of Ontario Greg Essensa, former rightwing Reform Party leader Preston Manning, 150 political scientists who signed an open letter, former Auditor General Sheila Fraser and Commissioner of Canadian Elections Yves Cote; an open letter signed by 19 international scholars. Tens of thousands of people across the country signed petitions against Bill C-23.

The Conservatives first introduced Bill C-23 in January, saying it was necessary to fight voter fraud and ensure clean elections. Critics were alarmed with the haste in which the Harper Conservatives pushed through the 242-page bill. After introducing it to Parliament, the Conservatives - who control 54 percent of seats - moved a motion to limit debate. The Conservatives then refused opposition requests to hold public hearings on the bill, saying it would create a circus like atmosphere.

Public opposition and outrage forced the Conservatives to finally modify the bill in April, at the urging of Canadian Senators, to calm public anger and ensure that its own members of Parliament would vote for it. Among other things, the sections permitting the winning party to appoint supervisors to run voting stations during elections, and allowing parties to claim fundraising expenses were withdrawn.

Most parties across the political spectrum, from the Liberals and the Libertarians on the right, to the New Democrats, Greens and Communists on the left, have vowed to continue their fight against Bill C-23. The Liberal Party, which is running neck and neck with the Conservatives in the polls, has promised to do away with the legislation if elected government in the 2015 elections.

The Council of Canadians and the Canadian Federation of Students is taking the Fair Elections Act to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the two groups charge that the law's ban on Elections Canada running campaigns to encourage voter participation will reduce voter turnout among young voters who tend to vote for parties other than the Conservatives.

In 2012, evidence emerged suggesting that the Conservatives committed widespread election fraud to win the 2011 elections by sending tens of thousands automated phone calls to non-conservative voters directing them to non-existent polling stations and altering voting results in favor of Conservative candidates. As a result, opposition parties and many Canadians are deeply distrustful of the Harper Conservatives who they fear will take advantage of the new changes to commit more dirty tricks to win the 2015 elections.

Photo: Protest sign against election fraud hangs on Parliament fence in Ottawa, Canada in 2012 (Peter Blanchard/CC/Flickr)

Left, right, and even satirical parties get votes in Germany

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 14:22:00 +0000

BERLIN - In early June, Europe had to digest the results of the European Parliament elections - and choke down some pretty nasty clumps. Far-right groups took alarming leads in France and Britain, came in stronger than ever in Austria, Denmark, Belgium, always building on hatred against immigrants, mostly Muslim immigrants. In Greece and Hungary outright pro-Nazi parties shot upward in votes and influence.

Left-wing parties also registered big gains in Portugal, Spain and Greece but on the whole the balance was very negative. Dissatisfaction, distrust, also real distress commonly resulted in abstention from voting or supporting parties opposed to the European Union. Such reactions by German voters to nasty policies were all too understandable, but were very often misdirected against refugees from wars, political or economic repression in Africa or the Mideast who were worse off than themselves.

How did the vote go in Germany, the strongest of the European Union's 28-member countries? The two parties forming the government coalition, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), more or less kept their positions, with small gains for the latter.

But since the usual five percent hurdle did not apply this time, even small parties could win a seat with only 0.6 percent of the vote. So the big German delegation with 96 Mandates (out of 751) will now include one delegate each from the Pirate Party, the Animal Protection Party, the Family Party, the right-wing Ecological Democratic Party - and one called simply "The Party," a purely satirical group which, aside from other total nonsense, calls for "more old age pensioners in Berlin; they improve the social atmosphere" - "Police water cannon to be filled in future only with beer or, for visiting car drivers, with lemonade.

"In general, crime will be forbidden... As for ourselves we totally reject juvenile delinquency.

"There must be round-the-clock free day care for all children and youth up to the age of 18.

"When we win we will make sure that managers' salaries are limited to 25,000 times that of a worker's wages." And so on!

Yes, even this nutty party with its crazy but sometimes pointed demands won a seat in the European Parliament. But so did the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) with exactly one percent.

More significant was a new star on the German political horizon - not of high magnitude (as yet) but worrisome enough with a seven percent result and seven seats. Although this Alternative for Germany (AfD) has not positioned itself clearly on many issues and has a variety of "wings," it won votes because it is sharply critical of the European Union - generally unpopular even here - and loudly "pro-Germany" and anti-immigrant.

While Merkel officially shuns this evidently evil star, some of her party leaders are whispering about dropping their uncomfortable ties with the SPD and joining this new spark on the firmament, which has stolen votes from all the others, especially from the Free Democrats, now largely vanished from the scene, but even from the LINKE, or Left Party. The AfD hopes to play a key role in three states in eastern Germany which hold elections in August and September.

What about the Left Party? It did not do as well as hoped, getting 7.6 percent of the German vote, which, like the AfD, meant seven seats in the Parliament, one less than before. It was no catastrophe, even showed a small gain in absolute numbers from the last such election, and was not unexpected, but certainly reflected the failure of the party to win a much broader audience over and above its fairly stable base of 18 to 28 percent in the eastern states, seven to 13 in a few smaller western states and two to five percent in the others.

There were two constant problems: on-going differences within the party and unrelenting attacks by the media, which magnified and gloated over any and all inner-party disagreements - although they are a common feature in all parties.

Tussle becomes public

On June 4th one such tussle became public. The on-going, bitter, increasingly bloody events in the Ukraine are a central issue for Germany's government; on the one hand its whole history since 1945 (and actually well before that) commits it to join the U.S. in extending "western" influence and NATO military presence ever further eastward, very obviously encircling Russia in the process. But on the other hand Merkel & Co. are under pressure from major German corporations to maintain profitable economic ties with Russia, especially in respect to very important gas and oil imports.

In this dilemma it has been the Green party, not in the government coalition and thus lacking any such responsibilities or pressures, which outdoes all the others in demanding ever tougher sanctions or other measures against Russia. The Greens in Germany are not like those in the U.S., their once rebellious roots have largely withered; with some exceptions they have become a quite conservative party, worst of all in foreign policy. In the Yugoslav wars and the attacks on Libya they were the most belligerent of all and in the current bloody Ukraine crisis they were louder than any other party in their support of the new government in Kiev. And, like all except the LEFT, they were undisturbed by the presence of vicious chauvinists and anti-Semites in the group which seized power in Kiev.

Stephen F. Cohen wrote in The Nation: "Independent Western scholars have documented the fascist origins, contemporary ideology and declarative symbols of Svoboda and its fellow-traveling Right Sector. Both movements glorify Ukraine's murderous Nazi collaborators in World War II as inspirational ancestors. Both, to quote Svoboda's leader Oleh Tyahnybok, call for an ethnically pure nation purged of the "Moscow-Jewish mafia" and "other scum," including homosexuals, feminists, and political leftists. Both hailed the fiery massacre in Odessa as "another bright day in our national history." And both were part of the new Kiev government.

Katrin Göring-Eckardt, co-leader of the Greens' caucus in the Bundestag, disregarded such reports. She made statements like: "Many of us Greens have long been connected with the reform movement in the Ukraine ... motivated by the defense of European values and the protection of human rights." When she stuck by this stand, criticizing Left opposition even after events like the brutal killings in Odessa on May 2, she was attacked by the fiery Sevim Dagdelen of Bochum, one of two Left women delegates with Turkish background and a party spokesperson on foreign policy issues.

"It makes me angry, I am really shocked at your claim that because candidates of the Svoboda party and the Right Sector got few votes in the elections the problem of neo-fascism, the problem of anti-Semitism in the Ukraine is eradicated." Dagdelen then quoted the German author Bertolt Brecht: "Whoever does not know the truth is simply a fool. But whoever knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal."

This was tough talk, and three top leaders of the Left Party, co-chairs Riexinger and Kipping and Gregor Gysi, its leader in the Bundestag, distanced themselves from it. "Such criticism by no means justifies calling delegate Göring-Eckardt a criminal."

Dagdelen quickly responded, regretting that the three had not first spoken with her. They might have learned that in 1983 the Secretary General of the Christian Democrats had used the very same quotation in criticizing leaders of the SPD - and his party leaders had found no reason to distance themselves from him. "I wonder why the three leaders of my party feel they must distance themselves from me."

Indeed, some Greens, including Göring-Eckardt, have on occasion been far nastier, like when they published a cruel photomontage depicting Left-leader Sahra Wagenknecht at the head of a menacing group of Russian soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs.

But the disagreement within the Left Party also reflected the on-going debate as to whether the party should aspire to a joint SPD-Green-Left coalition after the elections in 2017, which would require toning down some of its key positions and certainly avoiding such tough comments.

Abstains on minimum wage vote

On another question the Left stuck together, abstaining - almost alone - on a vote for a minimum wage in Germany. It had been the first to call for the measure, thus far lacking in Germany, but after first rejecting its demand the SPD and, more grudgingly, the CDU, then swiped it, re-wrote it and made it into law. The Left abstained because it finds 8.50 euro too low and because some groups will be left out, including the long-time jobless, who can be hired at lower wages for six months, and those under 18. (And, at least temporarily, newspaper deliverers. The press lobby proved too strong.)

Other items deserving of mention

Three other items deserve mention. Asylum-seekers from conflict zones in Africa and the Near East have occupied a square and then a school in Berlin for well over a year, demanding that their residence applications be dealt with at more than a terrible snail's pace - while they are restricted to mostly miserable barracks in only one county and barred from any jobs and most education. After a sharp conflict between the arch-conservative head of the city Interior Department and the somewhat left-leaning Green woman borough mayor, a shaky solution may finally be in sight, this time with a minimum of violence.

For several months there have been big Monday peace demonstrations in over 40 German cities, reflecting popular rejection of any German military action. This sounds good, and could be very good - except for attempts by very dubious groups to mix anti-American words with barely disguised anti-Semitic slogans (often attacking the Federal Reserve Board, claiming it has been to blame for all past wars and hinting that it is Jewish-dominated). Now there is news that the traditional peace movement has decided, not quite unanimously, to join the fray and take part on Mondays - but with a clear rejection of anti-Semitism or any other fascist ideas.

Finally, on an almost humorous note (for a change), the special Bundestag committee to investigate NSA snooping - not only of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell-phone but of just about everybody else's - suddenly discovered a snooper in its own midst. In line with a recent swift increase in anti-Russian propaganda, Putin was immediately suspected. But alas, the 31-year-old official has allegedly been selling secret committee documents to - you guessed it - the NSA (or an equivalent). Poor Merkel must still walk a tightrope; loud indignation towards Washington while keeping it as its main ally. No easy balancing job!

Photo: Martin Sonnebom, shown in 2008 in Berlin, chair of the Partyt, founded by editors of the satirical magazine Titanic. The Party got 0.6 percent of the vote in Germany and a seat in the European Parliament. Franka Bruns/AP

Stuttgart and Sarajevo: lessons from the “Great War”

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 12:32:00 +0000

On June 28, 1914, exactly a century ago, a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarejevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. It triggered the outbreak of World War I - one of the deadliest conflicts in history - just one month later.

Franz Ferdinand was a disagreeable man, abusive to the peasants on his estate in Bohemia. He had a chip on his shoulder because the emperor's court snubbed his wife for not being of royal birth. Ironically, Franz Ferdinand was one of the few people in the Austro-Hungarian ruling class who did not want war and was working to prevent it. This made him enemies in the ruling class and the army, who were spoiling for a fight with neighboring Serbia. But it did not make him any friends in Serbia. Serbia's leaders were afraid that Franz Ferdinand's idea of conciliating the Slavs in the empire by giving them a federated state (alongside Austria and Hungary) would ruin the plan to break off south-Slavic areas and create a united kingdom of southern Slavs.

So when Austrian security in Sarajevo, where the archduke had gone to inspect troops, practically delivered him to the waiting assassins, there were few tears, and the Austro-Hungarian leadership eagerly jumped at the opportunity to crush the Serbs forever. After making sure that Germany would back them, they presented the Serbian government with an ultimatum deliberately designed to be rejected. The rest is history.

The killing of the archduke and his wife, however, was not the "cause" of the First World War. In the years leading up to Sarajevo, tensions were building to such a degree that everybody could see that some small incident could set off a huge conflagration. To imperialist rivalries over colonies, trade and markets were added ideological factors including extreme nationalism and militarism. Furthermore, not only the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also the Russian and Ottoman ones were suffering such extreme stresses that their demise was regularly predicted, and their leaders were capable of doing anything to save their thrones.

This is why the socialist parties of Europe and beyond put the issue of preventing war as one of the major points on the agenda of the 7th Congress of the Second International, which took place in Stuttgart, Germany, in August 1907. This event, attended by 886 delegates from almost all major countries of Europe plus the United States and India, brought together the most outstanding leaders of the socialist movement at that time, including V. I. Lenin, Max Litvinov and Anatoly Lunacharsky from Russia, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin from Germany, Jules Guesde, Jean Jaures, and Eduard Hervé from France, and Daniel DeLeon and Morris Hillquit from the United States. Both sides of the growing left-right split in world socialism were amply represented.

In his brief report on the conference, Lenin's sketches on matters of women's suffrage, colonialism, immigration and the relationship between political work and labor unions show clearly how much progressive humanity and the working class today owes to the left-wing socialists, and not to the so-called moderates. Lenin, Luxemburg, Zetkin and other "lefts" took clear stands against colonialism, for complete voting rights for all women, and for rights of all immigrant workers.

The leftist delegates prevailed in passing a resolution that denounced militarism as "the chief weapon of class oppression," called for anti-militarist campaigns among the youth, and insisted that socialists unite not only to oppose war, but also to use a war crisis to advance socialist revolution.

However, when war actually broke out in August 1914, the apparent anti-war stance of the socialist movement fell to pieces. Major sectors of the socialist movement forgot the Stuttgart resolution and lined up behind the war aims of their ruling classes and governments. Several very prominent socialist leaders stayed firm, including Debs in the United States (who later did hard jail time for speaking out against U.S. involvement in the war), Jaures in France (who was assassinated by a right-wing nationalist for opposing the war) and James Keir Hardie in Britain (whose death was supposedly hastened because he could not stop the war). Only Debs was able to carry his party with him. Yet this did not stop the U.S. from plunging into the war in 1917.

Irredeemably split on the war issue, the leadership of the Second International ceased to function. A year into the war, the left wing of the socialist movement organized another conference, in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, but by that time it was evident that the left-right breach in the socialist movement could not be healed. In Stuttgart, the socialists tried to unify to put an end to war, but the war put an end to socialist unity instead. The "Zimmerwald left" became the nucleus of the future world communist movement.

Why did Sarajevo negate the high hopes of Stuttgart? First of all, because the commitment to working class unity was not strong enough to override national prejudices. Once the war started, in most countries those who spoke out against it faced prison, and the opposition was weakened by enhanced repression.

The lesson for us today is that we must spare no effort to build international working class unity against war, militarism and imperialism, starting with a firm opposition to war plans of our own ruling class.

Photo: Austro-Hungarian troops killing Serbian civilians in Herzegovina in the aftermath of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 1914. Wikimedia (CC)

How imperial "Great Loot" shaped Middle East tragedies

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 11:29:00 +0000

"So far as Syria is concerned, it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy" - T. E. Lawrence, February 1915

It was a curious comment by the oddball, but unarguably brilliant, British agent and scholar, Thomas Edward Lawrence. The time was World War I, and England and France were locked in a death match with the Triple Alliance, of which Turkey was a prominent member. But it was none-the-less true, and no less now than then. In the Middle East, to paraphrase William Faulkner, history is not the past, it's the present.

In his 1915 letter, Lawrence was describing French machinations over Syria, but he could just as well have been commenting on England's designs in the region, what allied leaders in World War I came to call "The Great Loot" - the imperial vivisection of the Middle East.

As Iraq tumbles into yet another civil war, it is important to remember how all this came about, and why adding yet more warfare to the current crisis will perpetuate exactly what the "Great Loot" set out to do: divide and conquer an entire region of the world.

There is a scorecard here, filled with names, but they are not just George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice - though the latter helped mightily to fuel the latest explosion - but names most people have never heard of, like Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6^th Baronet of Sledmere, and Francois Georges-Picot. In 1915, these two mid-level diplomats created a secret plan to divvy up the Middle East. Almost a century later that imperial map not only defines the region and most of the players, but continues to spin out tragedy after tragedy, like some grotesque, historical Groundhog Day.

In 1915, the imperial powers' major goal in the Middle East was to smother any expression of Arab nationalism and prevent any unified resistance to the designs of Paris and London. France wanted Greater Syria, Britain control of the land bridges to India. The competition was so intense that, while hundreds of thousands of French and British troops were dying on the Western Front, both countries secret services were blackguarding one another from Samara to Medina, maneuvering for position for when the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement was the compromise aimed at ending the internecine warfare. France would get Greater Syria (which it would divide to create Lebanon), plus zones of influence in northern Iraq. Britain would get the rest of Iraq, and Jordan, and establish the Palestine Mandate. All of this, however, had to be kept secret from the locals lest they find out that they were replacing Turkish overlords with French and British colonialism.

The Arabs thought they were fighting for independence, but London and Paris had other designs. Instead of the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and access to the Mediterranean the Arabs had been promised, they would get the sun-blasted deserts of Arabia, and the rule of monarchs, who were easy to buy or bully.

However, to run such a vast enterprise through the use of direct force was beyond the power of even London and Paris. So both empires transplanted their strategies of using religion, sect, tribe and ethnicity, which had worked so well in Indochina, India, Ireland and Africa, to divide and conquer, adding to it a dash of chaos.

There are new players in the Middle East since Sykes and Picot drew up their agreement. Washington and Israel were latecomers, but eventually replaced both imperial powers as the major military forces in the region.

The enemy of the "Great Loot" was secular nationalism, and the U.S., France, and Britain have been trying to overthrow or isolate secular regimes in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya since they first appeared. The rationale for the hostility is that secular regimes were run by dictators - many were - but questionably no worse than the Wahabi fanatics in Saudi Arabia, or the monsters the Gulf monarchies have nurtured in Syria and northern Iraq.

Why is Syria a dictatorship and Saudi Arabia is not? This past February, the Kingdom passed a law equating dissent, the exposure of corruption, or demands for reform with "terrorism" including "offending the nation's reputation or its position."

The list of names on the ledger of those who nurture terrorism in the Middle East is long. Yes, it certainly includes the Bush administration, which smashed up one of the most developed countries in the region, dismantled the Iraqi state, and stoked the division between Sunni and Shiites. But also the Clinton administration, whose brutal sanctions impoverished Iraq. And further back, during the first Gulf war, George H. Bush pounded southern Iraq with toxic depleted uranium, inflicting a massive cancer epidemic on places like Basra. It was Jimmy Carter and the CIA who backed Saddam Hussein's rise to power, because the Ba'athist dictator was particularly efficient at torturing and killing trade unionists and members of the Iraqi left.

Not to mention members of the Gulf Cooperation Council - Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Morocco and Jordan - who fund the Islamic insurgency in Syria. Some of those countries may decry the excesses of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant (ISIL), but it was they who nursed the pinion that impelled the steel.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also on that list. It is through Turkey's borders that most fighters and supplies pass into Syria. So is the Obama administration, which farmed the insurgency out to Qatar and Saudi Arabia and is now horrified by the creatures that Wahabist feudal monarchies produced.

And don't forget T.E. Lawrence's French.

Paris has never forgiven the Syrians for tossing them out in 1961, nor for Damascus's role in the 1975-91 Lebanese civil war that dethroned the French-favored Christian minority who had dominated the country since its formation in 1941.

The French have been enthusiastic supporters of the insurgency in the Syrian civil war and, along with the British, successfully lobbied the European Union to drop its ban on supplying the rebels with military hardware. Paris has also earned favor from Saudi Arabia by trying to derail efforts to find a solution to the conflict over Iran's nuclear program. France is a member of the P5+1-France, the U.S., Russia, Britain, China and Germany - involved in talks with Teheran.

The Gulf Council praised France's attempted sabotage, and Paris promptly landed a $6 billion contract to upgrade Saudi Arabia's air defense system. It is negotiating to sell $8 billion in fighter-bombers to the Emirates and almost $10 billion worth to Qatar.

Saudi Arabia recently donated $3 billion in aid to the Lebanese Army on the condition that it is used to buy French weapons and ammunition. It is a somewhat ironic gift, since the major foe of the Lebanese Army has been Saudi-supported Wahabists in the country's northern city of Tripoli.

Apparently French President Francois Hollande met with the foreign ministers of Jordan and Emirates last September to discuss a plan for Pakistan to train a 50,000-man Sunni army to overthrow the Syrian government and defeat al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups.

Members of that army may already be on their way to Europe, much as the mujahedeen from Afghanistan did a generation ago. According to western intelligence services, more than 3,000 European Union citizens have gone to fight in Syria, ten times the number who went to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The gunman who killed four people May 24 at the Jewish Museum in Brussels was a veteran jihadist from the Syrian civil war.

For now, the Gulf monarchies see themselves as pulling the strings, but they have virtually no control over what they have wrought. Those Wahabi fanatics in Syria and northern Iraq may do what Osama bin-Laden did and target the corruption of the monarchies next.

The Gulf countries are rich but fragile. Youth unemployment in Saudi Arabia is between 30 and 40 percent, and half the country's 28 million are under 25 years of age. In other Gulf nations a tiny strata of superrich rule over a huge and exploited foreign work force. When the monarchies begin to unravel, the current chaos will look like the Pax Romana.

But chaos has always been an ally of imperialism. If things fall apart and mayhem rules, governments and bankers in Paris, Zurich or New York have not been overly bothered. "The agenda has always been about imposing division and chaos on the Arab world," wrote long-time peace activist Tom Hayden. "In 1992, Bernard Lewis, a major Middle East expert, write that if the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity ... the state then disintegrates into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

Military intervention by the U.S. and its allies will accelerate the divisions in the Middle East. If the White House is serious about stemming the chaos, it should stop fueling the Syrian civil war, lean on the Gulf Monarchies to end their sectarian jihad against Shiites, pressure the Israelis to settle with the Palestinians, and end the campaign to isolate Iran.

And tell the French to butt out.

This article was originally posted at the author's blog, Dispatches From the Edge.

Photo: Sykes-Picot Agreement map carving up the Middle East for Britain and France, May 8, 1916. Wikipedia