Sunday 31 August 2014

Army sees 'megacities' as the future battlefield

Wonder why  continued wars in Gaza are so important to the powers that be ??? 
There are lessons being learnt for future wars  in  the worlds third world mega cities. 

WASHINGTON — When the Army looks to the future, it sees cities. Dense, sprawling, congested cities where criminal and extremist groups flourish almost undetected by authorities, but who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state.
And the service is convinced that these “megacities” of 20 million or more people will be the battleground of the future.
The problem from a military strategists’ point of view, however, is that no army has ever fought it out in a city of this size. So in thinking through the issue of what to do about the coming age of the megacity, the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) got together with US Army Special Operations Command, the chief of staff’s Strategic Studies Group and the UK’s Ministry of Defence in February to explore these types of urban operations.
“There is no historical precedent” for these kinds of operations, Brig. Gen. Christopher McPadden, ARCIC’s director of concept development and learning directorate, said on Aug. 28. “We really have to figure out the scope and scale of the kind of operations we’ll have to participate in.”
But “it’s not about pouring brigade after brigade into a megacity; they’ll just get eaten up,” said Col. Kevin Felix, chief of the Future Warfare Division at ARCIC. While there will be many more than the current 24 megacities in the coming years, “there will be some that we care about and some that we don’t” depending on economic impact, distance and a range of local factors.
The United Nations estimates that such massive cities will increasingly become part of the worldwide landscape by 2030, when the current global urban population of 3.6 billion will likely hit about 5 billion — meaning that 60 percent of all humans will live in cities.
Looking at numbers such as those, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno’s Strategic Studies Group delivered a report to the chief in May claiming that “it is inevitable that at some point the United States Army will be asked to operate in a megacity and currently the Army is ill-prepared to do so.”
The team of Army officers and civilian academics continued that “the problems found in megacities (explosive growth rates, vast and growing income disparity and a security environment that is increasingly attractive to the politically dispossessed) are landpower problems. Solutions, therefore, will require boots on the ground.”
So in its annual Unified Quest war game, the Army gamed out a scenario in which it would put boots on the ground.
The Army team fought through what it envisions a battle in a massive city would look like around 2030. The impetus for U.S. action was a humanitarian disaster caused in part by the breaking of a dam, which broke down critical parts of the local state apparatus, while armed groups jumped into the fray to further destabilize the situation.
The Red Team representing these groups did several things to test the players representing the Army, including evading U.S. technological superiority by using anti-access techniques, conducting malware-like and electronic warfare attacks, and “expanding these battlegrounds into other contested spaces like organized crime and politics,” said ARCIC chief Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
McMaster said one of the primary aims of the game was to generate ways to “extend the reach of the [infantry] squad so the squad can see and fight over a wider area” than it can now. That tracks with other Odierno initiatives in recent years to make infantry squads more lethal and more autonomous.
McMaster said that by 2030, the Army wants to provide infantry squads “access to aviation and air support and full-motion video, [along with] the ability to overwhelm the enemy during chance contact.” One of the key things is the firepower of the squad, particularly “shoulder-fired weapons capabilities, counter-defilade capabilities, as well as flying munitions and combined arms … mobile protected platforms capable of precision firepower.”
Army gamers also explored potential directed-energy capabilities that “would allow U.S. to have direct-fire capabilities with significant logistics reduction, and to counter enemy long-range missile capability,” McMaster said.
Recent lessons learned in the Israeli fight against Hamas in Gaza and the sweeping advance of the extremist Islamic State group across eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq have also got the Army thinking, and McMaster said there are lessons for the U.S. there, as well.
According to the general, the two fights show that there is only so much that airpower alone can accomplish, and to truly compel an enemy, it takes humans in contact with other humans.
“There’s a belief that complex problems can be solved from standoff range,” he said. “But what you can do from a standoff distance are mainly punitive things, and positive things that have to be done in this environment have to be done on the ground by human beings, to human beings.”
Strikes from the air or from long distances leave “decision making in the hands of the enemy … only on land can you compel an outcome,” McMaster insisted.
And it’s not only the Army that is convinced these cities represent the battlefields of the future.
In April, the Australian Army released its “Future Land Warfare Report,” which came to many of the same conclusions, and voiced the same concerns, as its American partner.
The Australians wrote that in the future, “the environment in which the land force will operate will most likely be the urban littoral.
“The emergence of unregulated cities, or zones of disadvantage where traditional rule of law models do not apply, within otherwise functional cities, provides a potential haven for organized crime, terrorists and insurgents, from which they can organize and launch operations,” the analysis concluded.

http://www.armytimes.com/article/20140830/NEWS/308300056/Army-sees-megacities-future-battlefield

BLOWBACK - FOREIGN FIGHTERS AND THE THREAT THEY POSE

CAGE releases report on purported threat of British fighters returning from Syria
 
Blowback - foreign fighters and the threat they pose written by CAGE's Research Director Asim Qureshi, (you can see Asim on Newsnight and Channel 4 speaking about British Fighters in Syria), argues that the threat of blowback by fighters returning from Syria is exaggerated and that counter-terrorism measures used to deal with the purported threat are alienating Muslims. The release of the report comes just weeks after Sir Richard Dearlove, former MI6 chief, claimed that the government had exaggerated the threat posed by returnees from the war in Syria in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute. 
 
The main points of the report are:
  • There is no empirical evidence of blowback because not only have the 58 of the 66 men that have been involved in terrorist plots since 9/11 never trained or fought overseas, they have cited foreign and domestic grievances as the main contributing factor.
  • Britons fighting in Syria should be viewed through the prism of international law and not through a counter-terrorism paradigm. 
  • The threat of terrorism has always existed - The UK government's foreign and, more recently, its domestic policy has led to the continued threat of terrorism in the UK.
 
Selected quotes:
 
'In almost every single case of individuals having fought abroad, there is little to suggest that such training or fighting had resulted directly in the decision to carry out an act of political violence in the UK. What, however, is clear, is the correlation between foreign and domestic grievances against the UK government, and the decision by these men to be involved in some form of plot.'
 
'The form of blanket criminalisation that is being witnessed in response to the involvement of British men and women in Syria, is completely disproportional to any threat that has so far manifested. When juxtaposed with other societal issues, such as drugs or other forms of violent crime, no such disproportionate policy or securitisation is seen.'
 
'Current UK government policy in relation to Syria is both confused and dangerous. The government has been inconsistent in the way it has handled the revolutions in Libya and Syria. While in the former they were actively involved in supporting rebels and permitting foreign fighters to become involved, in the latter they have taken the approach that involvement constitutes.'


http://cageuk.org/publication/blowback-foreign-fighters-and-threat-they-pose

A window on the world

A window on the world , in the world.

                                                   The message is  NO WAR 



Not in my name

Suzanne Weiss is a Holocaust survivor based in Toronto, Canada, and a member of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid and Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism. Here, she comments on the stand taken by anti-Zionist Jews against Israel's massacres in Gaza--and on the real history of the Nazi Holocaust and the resistance to it.

I AM proud to join more than 250 Jewish Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors in condemning "the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza" and "the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people."
Our statement of solidarity calls for "an immediate end to the siege against and the blockade of Gaza" and a "full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel."
We believe that "never again," the often-repeated lesson of Hitler's Holocaust, "must mean never again for anyone!"--especially the Palestinians.
We also protest the full-page advertisement published in the New York Times and elsewhere by Zionist Elie Wiesel that holds Palestinians responsible for the deaths of the hundreds of Palestinian children in Gaza killed by Israeli bombs. "Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities," we say.
Wiesel, a Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, accuses the Palestinian resistance group Hamas for having supposedly embraced a "death cult" of "child sacrifice" because Hamas has launched rockets against Israel.
In reality, it is Israel that has deliberately bombarded densely packed civilian residential areas, says Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Among the Israeli targets was a UN school in Rafah being used as a shelter--an attack that even the U.S. State Department termed "appalling" and "disgraceful."
Sourani calls Israel's actions the "Gaza Doctrine"--a "policy of collective punishment" in which "disproportionate force is used to cause terror among the civilian population to exert political pressure" on their government. "To bomb densely packed Gaza homes is a war crime," he says.
Such collective punishment was the Nazis' standard response to acts of resistance to their genocidal rule during the Second World War. When Czech resisters assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the Jewish Holocaust, the Nazis slaughtered more than 1,300 civilians in reprisal.
The Nazis took such actions in France, where I lived then as a child. In June 1944, the village of Oradour, about 100 miles from where I was hidden at the time, was attacked by a German Waffen-SS detachment, based on false reports that a German commander was held prisoner there. In a matter of hours, 600 civilians were killed.
Jewish fighters were a leading force in the armed resistance in France, as they were in other countries across Europe. And even where Jews were isolated in ghettos and concentration camps, they nonetheless found ways to fight back.
In the celebrated 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a mere 750 fighters, armed with primitive weapons smuggled along with food through hand-dug tunnels, held out for a month, before heavily armed Nazis extinguished resistance, bombing and leveling the ghetto to the ground.
There were Nazi reprisals across Europe. They killed 205 children at Oradour--but no one has ever accused the heroic resisters of being a "death cult of child sacrifice."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AT THE time of these events, I was marked for death by the Nazis. My story is an example of building solidarity in the face of overwhelming odds.
In 1942, the French police began rounding up Jewish residents by the tens of thousands--men, women and children--handing them over to the Nazis to be killed at Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland. Among the victims was my mother, who died in Auschwitz in 1943. The Nazis' goal was to round up, deport and kill all the Jews in France--as was being done throughout Europe.
But amid this terrible slaughter, a wave of revulsion grew in France against the attack on the Jews. Through the efforts of both social organizations and individual initiatives, thousands of Jews were hidden. Altogether, three-quarters of the French Jews escaped the Holocaust.
The first big raid of July 1942 caught Jewish organizations in France by surprise. It was only then that the Jewish population realized that their children had to be hidden. They embraced the slogan, "Save the children by dispersing them." Searches were initiated for safe havens, false papers were made, and transport arranged in an atmosphere of urgency and despair.
More than 10,000 Jewish children were taken from their families and hidden. I was among them. In 1943, when I was 2 years old, a resistance organization took charge of my care and placed me with a peasant family in Auvergne, a farming region in south-central France.
Recently, I went back to Auvergne with my partner, John Riddell, to learn how it was that I had been saved. I spoke to people in Auvergne who remembered those years. The Jewish children were placed discreetly, away from the towns and sometimes in remote hamlets. Yet they lived in the open, going to school and to church.
Why were they not betrayed to the police? The villagers protected them, thus putting their own life and that of their families at risk. Despite the dangers, peasants took the children with love into their tightly knit communities.
The children were saved, in most cases, by the actions not of individual heroes but of entire communities, who hid them not in cellars but in plain view. They were saved by a resistance that embraced not only the guerrilla combatants, but those who set up civilian networks to defy anti-Jewish decrees, and, in a different way, by those who looked the other way, who did not ask questions, and who--even if hostile to the presence of Jews--did not betray them.
The resistance embraced French and immigrants; Christians, Jews and Muslims; and refugees from Spain, Italy and German-occupied territories. This was a solidarity born of common social experience of farmers, working people and those that they influenced.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE SITUATION in Gaza is unlike that faced by Europe's Jews under Hitler. The Israeli government has converted the territory into the world's largest concentration camp, sealed off and subjected to periodic and murderous bombardment. For the people of Gaza, there is no place to shelter their children; no friendly countryside that could provide refuge.
No wonder that in Gaza, in the words of Raji Sourani, "a cease-fire is not enough. We demand justice. We demand to be treated like human beings. We demand an end to the closure of the Gaza Strip."
And in the words of London writer and journalist Tariq Ali, our politicians "have to understand that there is no equivalence between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation. When a country is occupied, resistance emerges. If you want no rockets being fired, no tunnels being dug, get out of Gaza."
But the people of Gaza do not stand alone. To quote Barnaby Raine, a student organizer of a Jewish Bloc against Zionism addressing a solidarity rally in London on August 9, "People from all backgrounds, from all walks of life, all over the world, come together and say in our thousands, 'We are all Palestinians.'"
Today, the peoples of the world are unequivocally vocal in their denunciation of Israeli apartheid and Israeli slaughter. They express this in repeated gigantic demonstrations with signs and banners calling out: end to the killing in Gaza, lift the siege of Gaza, freedom for Palestine.
Several governments--Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela – have taken actions against the Israeli assault, including boycott and sanctions.
Today, our human dignity is challenged by Israel's cruelty toward the Palestinians. Palestinians call for a world movement of solidarity. We must speak out for their right to defend their lives and their homelands. We support their call to create economic pressure on Israel with a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).
The demands of this campaign are: For the right of Palestinians to return to their homeland, equal rights for Palestinians in Israel and an end to the Israeli occupation. Today the boycott campaign is winning increasing support on several continents.
Let us redouble our efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid.
Free Gaza! Palestine shall be free!

http://socialistworker.org/2014/08/13/not-in-my-name

Top Middle East scholars call for academic boycott of Israel

 by Sarah Irving


More than one hundred senior scholars of the Middle East have signed an open letter calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The letter’s organizers referred to the list of signatories — which includes many of the world’s best-known scholars of the history, literature, anthropology and politics of the Middle East — as an “unprecedented expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
While directly responding to the most recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, which have left thousands of civilians dead, injured and homeless, the letter also cites as reasons for their boycott call: “the occupation and dispossession in East Jerusalem, the Naqab (Negev), and the West Bank; the construction of walls and fences around the Palestinian population, the curtailment of Palestinian freedom of movement and education, and the house demolitions.”
The announcement adds that these violations have “long histories and no apparent end in sight.”
A press release accompanying the list of signatories emphasizes that those endorsing the call are “senior and tenured scholars and librarians, all of whom have deep knowledge of the Middle East.”
In signing the letter, the press release states, these educators “have pledged not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.”
This action follows a number of other academic boycott resolutions from scholarly associations including the American Studies Association, theCritical Ethnic Studies Association and African Literature Association.
These actions take their lead from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, one of the Palestinian civil society organizations that have called for the comprehensive implementation of boycott, divestment and sanctions measures against Israel.
The list of academic signatories brings together major scholars from occupied Palestine (such as Saleh Abdel Jawad, Fadwa Allabadi, George Giacaman, Islah Jad and Magid Shihade of Birzeit and Al Qudsuniversities) with some of the most eminent names in Middle East studies around the world. These include Roger Owen of Harvard, Talal Asad of CUNY, Rosemary Sayigh of the American University of Beirut,Joel Beinin of Stanford, Karma Nabulsi of Oxford and Lila Abu-Lughod and Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University.
Scholars from the Arab world include those from Cairo (Khaled Fahmy) and Beirut (Mona Fawaz, Mona Harb, Tarif Khalidi and Nisreen Salti). And a number of academics of Jewish background have put their names to the statement, including Haim Bresheeth of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Israeli sociologist and historian Ilan Pappe, now at Exeter, and Richard Falk, former UN rapporteur on Palestine and Princeton emeritus professor of international law.
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/sarah-irving/top-middle-east-scholars-call-academic-boycott-israel

Saturday 30 August 2014

A Free Society Must Give Up Empire

If Americans want a free society at home, then they must convince the U.S. government to give up its global empire. The militarized police recently on display in Ferguson was no freak coincidence: Antiwar activists and other civil libertarians have been warning for decades that an aggressive US foreign policy would eventually destroy domestic liberties. Americans can’t ask their government to subjugate foreigners with bombs but bow to their own wishes at the ballot box.
As obvious as the above statements seem to me, according to a recent article Daniel McCarthy apparently would disagree. This surprised me, because McCarthy is editor of The American Conservative, a magazine that has tirelessly reminded US right-wingers that true conservatives don’t go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, and that nation-building is a progressive hobby. Moreover, McCarthy himself led the prosecution at this year’s FreedomFest "trial" of US foreign policy. Given this context, McCarthy’s recent magazine article both surprised and disturbed me. McCarthy makes the case that empire – first as provided by the British and now by the United States – has been necessary for the flourishing of a liberal (in the classical sense) democracy. As much as I generally respect McCarthy’s views, I find his qualified case for empire to be very weak. In the present piece I’ll outline some of the major problems with his argument.
McCarthy’s Qualified Case for Empire
McCarthy argues that we can draw the following lesson from history: "Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which liberalism could flourish." This belief explains McCarthy’s ultimate thesis, which is that "America will not be anything other than broadly liberal and democratic for a long time to come, and liberal democracy requires a delicately balanced system of international security upheld by an empire or hegemon."
To be sure, McCarthy acknowledges severe limitations on what America the hegemon can hope to accomplish in the world; McCarthy is no starry-eyed neocon. Nonetheless, the purpose of his essay – which is titled "Why Liberalism Means Empire" – is to convince so-called "conservative realists" that America must continue to uphold its global empire since Great Britain obviously can no longer fulfill the role it served historically. If the US government foolishly caters to the anti-imperialists, it will remove the foundation holding up our liberal society.
Did Hitler and Stalin Prove the Need for an American Empire?
McCarthy’s essay is quite long, and I do not pretend to know the historical and military details as well as he does. But I do know enough about World War II and its aftermath to point out the glaring emptiness of his claims.
Specifically, McCarthy argues that US entry into World War II was crucial for maintaining a liberal society back home. He writes at length on the wishful thinking of those who wanted the US to stay out of the second great bloodbath. Yet to reiterate, McCarthy’s actual arguments here make no sense. He writes:
The old myths of natural peace and prosperity, which had taken root in America during a century of pax Britannica, died hard. In the decades between the wars, honorable men…argued that events in Europe posed little danger to America and were frankly none of our business.
Their argument doesn’t hold up. Although the two great anti-liberal powers, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, eventually turned on one another, a scenario in which they completely canceled one another out is implausible, to say the least. More likely one would have overcome the other, and the alacrity with which Soviet power did in fact fill the vacuum left by the defeated Nazis in Eastern Europe after World War II suggests what would have happened to all of Europe had one totalitarian juggernaut triumphed.
Notice what McCarthy has done in the above passage. He is pointing to how much a totalitarian regime managed to devastate Europe after the US helped it enormously, and then asks us to imagine how much more lopsided the domination would have been, had the US not picked a side and helped it.
No, it would actually make more sense to flip the argument the other way: Look at what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe after the Americans provided them with all sorts of aid and attacked Germany from the west. If we dislike that outcome – and McCarthy and I do both dislike it – then to have achieved a more balanced outcome, surely the US should not have jumped in on the side that ended up winning.
Back to McCarthy:
Just as the world order made possible by the British Empire had a liberalizing effect on the United States, a Soviet or Nazi world order would have profoundly influenced American development in the opposite direction. In such a world, the US would have faced both domestic and foreign pressures to assimilate to the Soviet or Nazi model, and resisting such pressure could itself have taken an illiberal turn…
A Cold War between an embattled, increasingly illiberal and security-conscious America and a burgeoning USSR or Nazi Germany is not at all hard to conceive of – because in fact, we got just such a thing even with American involvement in World War II. Had Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought one another to a standstill in the 1940s, the results would have been much the same: a Cold War, only one whose poles were Moscow and Berlin rather than Washington and Moscow.
Had we stayed out of World War II, there is every reason to think that all of the illiberal measures taken by the US in the Cold War that we actually did fight with the Soviets – in which the US held the upper hand from the start – would have been taken in a much worse strategic, economic, and cultural climate. America might still have prevailed against an inhuman and unsustainable Soviet or Nazi system, but the America that emerged would hardly have been likely to be more liberal or democratic than the one we have today.
Here McCarthy is using the same rhetorical trick that Keynesians such as Paul Krugman use when it comes to fiscal stimulus, whom we can paraphrase as arguing:"Sure, the economy tanked after the newly-sworn in President Obama enacted his massive package, but that just shows how urgently the stimulus was needed. The carnage that followed from half-heartedly implementing my policy advice just shows how awful things would have been in an alternate timeline in which policymakers did nothing."
Inasmuch as McCarthy is appealing to self-described conservatives, I’m sure most of his readers – and I imagine McCarthy himself – would chuckle along with me when seeing someone like Krugman deploy such a rhetorical move when it comes to Keynesian economics. Yet it’s the same trick that McCarthy uses in his historical analysis above. He points to all of the grossly illiberal consequences following his own desired intervention – US entry into World War II – and somehow tries to use them as evidence showing us how illiberal things would have been, had the US minded its own business.
In case any reader doesn’t see the big deal, I ask to go read the previous block quotation again: McCarthy is actually arguing that a victorious Soviet Union would have been a stronger opponent in the 1950s, had the US not helped it fight the Nazis in the 1940s.
Conclusion
When it comes to human affairs, there are no controlled experiments. Nobody can really say for sure what would have happened had the British never established their empire, or had the US government stayed out of European wars.
However, what we do know is that the (classical) liberal order that survived briefly under the heyday of the British Empire was snuffed out by World War I; the existence of a British empire did not guarantee the survival of liberalism. Further, we know that US entry into World War II brought the US itself to the brink of outright central planning during the war, and that the emerging Security State in the postwar era was the antithesis of a democratic Republic.
Although I generally respect his writings, I must sadly conclude that McCarthy’s recent article in support of US empire was woefully deficient. Indeed, I would argue the exact opposite of what McCarthy tried to demonstrate. Specifically, if you allow your government to maintain an empire abroad, then you can’t possibly expect a free and open society at home. This fact is staring us in the face as police departments across the country accept the surplus military equipment used in foreign occupations.
We no longer have classical liberalism of the kind that McCarthy and I both cherish. It died in Britain and the United States even though those two governments pursued empire, as McCarthy recommends. Perhaps he’s right that a more prudent administration of those empires would have preserved freedom, but then again that’s part of the danger of empire: It’s hard to get it "just right."
As in so many other areas, when it comes to international intrigue and geopolitical maneuvering, central planning by government officials always seems to go horribly wrong. The wise thing to do is admit we can’t control the world, and at least refrain from killing innocent foreigners.
Robert P. Murphy has a PhD in economics from New York University. He is the author of several books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalismand Lessons for the Young Economist. He blogs at ConsultingByRPM.com.

http://original.antiwar.com/Robert_Murphy/2014/08/29/a-free-society-must-give-up-empire/

Tony Abbott criticised by indigenous leaders over naming First Fleet arrival ‘defining moment’

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has come under fire from indigenous leaders over his comment that the arrival of the First Fleet was “the defining moment” in Australia’s history.
Launching an exhibition at the National Museum on Friday, Abbott’s comments weren’t going to go unnoticed when he repeated the line that has earned swift condemnation.
“The First Fleet was the defining moment in the history of this continent,” he said.
“Let me repeat that, it was the defining moment in the history of this continent. It was the moment this continent became part of the modern world.”
Despite his firm stance on the issue, head of the Stolen Generation Council for New South Wales and the ACT, Matilda House, said the PM couldn’t have been thinking straight when he delivered the one-liner.

“I can’t fathom how a ship or a boat sailed into Sydney Harbour can overtake the 60,000 years before,” she told ABC’s AM.
Chair of Abbott’s own indigenous Advisory Council Warren Mundine also joined the criticism.
Mundine told the program it was inarguable that the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 was a defining moment in Australian history, but added “it was also a disastrous defining moment for indigenous people”.
Abbott’s latest clanger was delivered at the opening of the Defining Moments Project in Canberra on Friday — the project has identified Australia’s 100 defining moments over the past 52,000 years.

http://www.news.com.au/national/tony-abbott-criticised-by-indigenous-leaders-over-naming-first-fleet-arrival-defining-moment/story-fncynjr2-1227042292321

The Israeli ISIS

Opinion: 

After two Americans and a French national were reported killed while fighting alongside the Israeli army in Gaza, the news passed as if this was a normal occurrence. This news did not cause any commotion in political and media circles in the West. Western and international media outlets reported the news without fanfare, and no side expressed its condemnation or called for an investigations into those who left their countries in order to participate in the Israeli army’s operations in Gaza.
The situation in Gaza has been described by human rights activists and UN officials as a “massacre.” with many calling for investigation as to whether the huge civilian death toll constitutes a war crime or not. However we did not see any politicians lining up to demand measures be imposed to stop “foreign” fighters from travelling to Israel.
This leads us to ask: How would the US and Europe react if their citizens of Palestinian origins decided to head to Gaza or the West Bank in order to fight Israel?
Probably, or maybe certainly, this would cause a great commotion and lead to these volunteers being listed as terrorists. There have been many cases of Arabs or Palestinians who were prosecuted or put under surveillance for raising funds for Palestinian organizations, or for their activism protesting against the Israeli occupation. Such activities are far less serious than volunteering to fight, an act which will inevitably lead to stricter procedures.
The picture seems to be completely different when it comes to dealing with the thousands of volunteers who travel annually from Europe, the US and other countries to join the Israeli army as trainees or soldiers. These foreign-born “volunteers” take part in direct military operations, such as the one currently taking place in Gaza. They, of course, are not branded as terrorists or dismissed as mercenaries. They fight alongside the Israeli army and then return to their countries of birth without being interrogated or prosecuted.
If one of them happened to be killed in a military operation, they would be honored in Israel and would find someone to defend them in the Western media, justifying their involvement in the killing of Arabs and Palestinians.
The Israeli propaganda machine, which is active in many Western political and media circles, promotes these volunteers and seeks to convince the world that they are “heroes,” while the volunteers who go to Arab and Muslim countries are, of course, terrorists.
There are thousands of Jewish volunteers from the US, Europe and other countries serving in the Israeli army today. According to official figures, the number of Jewish volunteers reached 5,500 in 2012. Today, there are an estimated four thousand volunteers who are contributing, in one way or another, in the military operations in Gaza, whether by serving on the front lines or operating from behind a desk.
The Israeli army has programs for recruiting Jewish “volunteers” who come to receive military training and serve for up to 18 months. A proportion of these do not return to their countries of birth and remain in Israel. In a bid to shield them from criticism, the Israeli propaganda machine claims that these volunteers are “patriots” committed to defending the “Jewish state.” They are not mercenaries fighting for money, Israel claims. This logic, of course, is not different from the logic of any extremist ideology, whether political or religious, and is similar to the logic being employed by the extremist groups operating in the Arab and Muslim world.
Fighters of an organization, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, promote themselves as not motivated by earthly gains but seeking to promote their religion. They join the ranks of extremist groups because they feel a sense of belonging to its ideology and agenda.
In fact, the atmosphere that feeds the minds of Jewish volunteers is not much different from the one producing extremists anywhere in the world, including the Arab and Muslim world.
However, extremism always breeds counter-extremism. Volunteers who join the Israeli army are the product of extensive recruitment programs pumping racist propaganda against Arabs and Muslims by portraying them as terrorists and extremists who seek to exterminate the Jews and uproot their state. This propaganda is based on stressing “never again” to the injustices suffered by the Jews in Europe; however the Palestinians and Arabs are not the ones responsible for this ugly past. Little wonder that footage has surfaced on social media of recruits boasting about shooting Palestinian civilians and bragging about their desire to kill Arabs and Palestinians.
Double standards have become a familiar approach in international politics. But turning a blind eye to extremists on the Israeli side and Jewish volunteers from the US, Europe and other countries who join the Israeli army will not only exacerbate the situation in the region but also feed into an atmosphere of extremism from which no one will be safe.
Osman Mirghani

Osman Mirghani

Osman Mirghani is Asharq Al-Awsat's former deputy editor and senior editor-at-large.


http://www.aawsat.net/2014/08/article55335242

The Truth About The IS

By Chandra Muzaffar

The Islamic State (IS) has been roundly condemned by everyone. It deserves to be. It deserves to be condemned because of its barbaric brutality and its harsh cruelty. It deserves to be condemned because of its collective massacres and its individual murders. It deserves to be condemned because of its oppression of Shias, of Christians, of Yazidis. It deserves to be condemned because of its degradation of women. It deserves to be condemned because of its distortion and perversion of Islamic law.
Nonetheless, many of those who have condemned IS do not want to know how this terrorist outfit came into being in the first instance. It is a direct consequence of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In order to anchor itself in Iraqi society, the occupier zealously sought to eliminate the power base of deposed President Saddam Hussein by dismantling his security forces and emasculating related Baathist structures. At the same time, the Shias, the majority population, were strengthened in politics and the public services. This heightened resentment among the Sunnis and led to the formation of militias among them.
When democratic elections were held in 2005, Shia parties expectedly swept into power. Shia leaders reinforced their cordial ties with the Iranian Shia elite ---- some of whom had been their mentors long before the 2003 invasion. Seeing the increasingly close bond between the Shias of Iraq and Iran, the US began to feel that its invasion of Iraq had enhanced Iranian influence in that country. Ironically, the US had strengthened the geopolitical hand of its adversary! More than the US, Israel which had also encouraged the invasion of Iraq in order to get rid of a staunch Israeli opponent in Baghdad was appalled that Iran, its other mortal foe, had now expanded its reach in the region. The Saudi elite and elites in a number of other Gulf monarchies and certain other Arab governments also viewed Iraq –Iran ties with much apprehension. To add to their apprehension, the Shia based Hezbollah in Lebanon was also emerging as a major actor in Lebanon following its steadfast defence of the nation against Israeli aggression in 2006. This is why a Sunni Arab leader warned his fellow Sunnis of the rise of a Shia arc in West Asia, centred in Tehran.
These Sunni fears, paralleling US- Israeli concerns about their dominance over West Asia, prompted these parties to try to stem what they perceived as Shia influence in Iraq by supporting Sunni militias with arms, intelligence and money. Sunni insurgencies like Al-Qaeda became stronger and created a lot of havoc in Iraq, directed mainly at the Shias. A more radical breakaway group from Al-Qaeda calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Shams (Syria) (ISIS) established itself as a tough fighting force and moved into Syria with the same aim of ousting a Shia government, namely the government of Bashar Al-Assad.
In Syria, ISIS has outdone other armed rebel groups in its insatiable appetite for violence. ISIS fighters have massacred Christian communities and beheaded scores of Shias. With ruthless efficiency they have captured strategic routes and oil fields. It is alleged that apart from the spoils of war, this terrorist outfit is also financed and armed by some of the same groups that helped the Sunni insurgents in Iraq between 2003 and 2008. It has even been suggested that ISIS has deep links with Mossad. After all, Israel which has conducted at least six military strikes against the Syrian armed forces in the current conflict is determined to oust Assad since he continues to oppose Israeli control over much of the strategic Golan Heights in Syria and insists on protecting his special relationship with Hezbollah and Iran as part of the resistance against US-Israeli hegemony over West Asia.
It is significant that ISIS brutalities in Syria --- like those of the other armed groups --- have only elicited whimpers from the US and the West. The reason is obvious. They support the larger aim of these groups which is the overthrow of Assad. The US and the West are (or were) on the side of ISIS in Syria. And yet in Iraq they are against ISIS which has now renamed itself as IS. What explains this seemingly glaring contradiction?
If the US has decided to fight IS in Iraq, it is because it threatens US and other Western oil companies in the Kurdistan region in the north. All the big Western oil players --- Mobil, Chevron, Exxon and Total --- are in the region. Kurdistan, according to Robert Fisk, “accounts for 43.7 billion barrels of Iraq’s 143 billion barrels of reserves, as well as 25.5 billion barrels of unproven reserves and three to six trillion cubic metres of gas.”
Preserving the West’s oil interests in Kurdistan is intimately connected to yet another factor. The US and Israel have always regarded Iraqi Kurdistan as a special ally. For decades its leadership has helped to further their agenda in West Asia. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq for instance the Kurds rendered much assistance to the US and Britain.
One should not be surprised therefore that the US has chosen to defend the Kurds against the IS menace. It is simply a matter of protecting its geo-economic and geopolitical interests. Similarly, if in Syria the US is against Assad, it is because of the pursuit of its hegemonic design over West Asia. Since the US will not be able to eliminate the IS threat to Kurdistan in Iraq without taking military action against the IS in Syria, it is now considering launching military strikes against the IS in certain parts of that country.
US military action against the IS in Syria should signal the beginning of the end of all direct and indirect assistance to the various armed groups in Syria, all of which have committed acts of terror at some point or other. The US’s European and West Asian allies should also desist from providing any form of military support to these groups. Without such external support it is very likely that the violence and bloodshed in Syria will come to a halt. Syrians would then be in a better position to bring about whatever change they feel is necessary through peaceful means.
What is more important, the end of crass political violence in Syria will undoubtedly help to reduce IS generated terror in Iraq. Terrorism in West Asia as a whole may witness a decline. If one is principled and not opportunistic or hypocritical in the fight against terrorism, it is not just IS in one corner of Iraq that will be one’s target. Terrorism, whether it is perpetrated by friend or foe, will be confronted and defeated with courage and integrity.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Malaysia.

http://www.countercurrents.org/muzaffar290814.htm

Continuing Media Silence On The Fate Of Flight MH17


By Stefan Steinberg

With a handful of exceptions, a shroud of silence has been drawn by the international media regarding the fate of Malaysian Airlines MH17, which crashed over Ukraine nearly six weeks ago.
Immediately after the plane crash on July 17, leading US officials, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the fore along with sections of the US and European media, alleged, without a shred of evidence, that the passenger jet had been shot down by a Russian missile fired by pro-Russian separatists operating in eastern Ukraine. The completely unfounded allegations were then used to create a frenzied political climate to justify the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions by the US and the European Union against Russia.
Since the crash there has been deliberate stalling on the part of Western authorities in releasing relevant information. At the start of this month Dutch investigators leading the inquiries announced they would release a preliminary report “in a few weeks.” Now, with only days before the end of the month, no such report has been issued. This is despite the fact that the Dutch co-ordinator for the struggle against terrorism admitted in parliament that the Dutch authorities already have extensive data from the black boxes and other sources in their possession.
One article which has raised questions regarding the silence surrounding the crash appeared recently in the German magazine Der Spiegel.
The magazine has played a particularly vile role in the US-led propaganda campaign to blame Russia for the crash. On the cover of its July 28 edition Der Spiegel featured photos of MH17 victims with the prominent red lettered text “Stop Putin Now!”. In its latest edition, the magazine again raises the banner of German militarism in a lead article deploring the state of the German army and arguing for a massive increase in military sending.
However, in one article on the crash, headlined “The strange silence of the investigators”, the magazine attempts to backtrack somewhat and at least intimate there are good reasons to doubt the official line put out by Washington and Brussels. The article refers to a letter sent to Barack Obama at the end of July by a group of former US intelligence officers. In their letter the group, known as VIPS, accused Secretary of State Kerry of attempting to use the crash to blacken Russia, recalling other blatant provocations by the Obama administration, such as the claim that Syria was responsible for chemical weapon attacks. The Obama administration has never responded to the allegations made in the VIPS letter.
The Spiegel article then goes on to quote reports in the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times, which charge Ukraine with responsibility for the crash, citing one journalist who writes: “It is farcical that the country known for overseeing the world’s most sophisticated and far-reaching surveillance capabilities has sunk to citing grainy YouTube videos to justify its policy decisions.”
Noting that Dutch authorities already have considerable information about the details of the crash which they have undoubtedly shared with their German counterparts, the Spiegel article warns that it is unlikely that the black box recordings will ever be released in full. The Dutch investigation team recently announced that there were alleged legal grounds for withholding evidence from the boxes.
The failure of the media to raise the issue of the fate of MH17 prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to query on Monday why the plane’s black box recordings had not been released publicly. It appears, Lavrov said, that apart from Russia, “everyone else has lost interest in the investigation.”
Lavrov also asked why Ukraine had not yet provided recordings of conversations between air traffic controllers in the nearby airport of Dnepropetrovsk. Kiev has up until now persistently refused to publish the recordings of the conversations between the MH17 pilot and Ukrainian air traffic controllers.
Lavrov noted that Russia had contacted the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations aviation agency, and offered to provide its own information on the crash, but noted that “so far there is nothing transparent to be seen there either.”
Lavrov concluded: “We must not allow the investigation of the MH17 crash to be manipulated into oblivion as already happened to investigations of many Ukrainian tragedies, including the sniper assault against civilians in Kiev in February, massacres in Odessa and Mariupol in May, and others.”
Bearing in mind the leading role played by the US in utilizing the crash of MH17 to create the conditions for a confrontation with Russia, there can be no doubt that the administration in Washington and US intelligence services are in close contact with the Dutch authorities and are complicit in the efforts to bury the truth about what really took place on July 17.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/08/29/mh17-a29.html