Middle East

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The US-led operation that killed 33 civilians and wounded 27 in Boz Village (Northern Afghanistan) last November was an act of self-defense, says a report published by US Forces-Afghanistan on Thursday.

The report describes the events like this: On November 2nd and 3rd, US and Afghan forces were conducting a joint operation in Boz to capture Taliban leaders when they found themselves under fire coming from civilian houses. US Forces came to their assistance with aerial strikes on those Taliban-occupied houses, killing 33 civilians and “approximately 26 Taliban, including three leaders.” Two American soldiers and three Afghan soldiers also died in the operation.

“The investigation concluded that US forces acted in self-defense, in accordance with the Law of Armed Conflict, and in accordance with all applicable regulations and policy,” states the report. “It has been determined that no further action will be taken.”

“Regardless of the circumstances, I deeply regret the loss of innocent lives,” assured the Commander of US Forces-Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, in a press release.

Charles H Cleveland, a spokesman for the US military in Afghanistan, while also deploring civilian casualties, said this to Al-Jazeera: “[Boz] is not a normal village. There are a lot of Taliban fighters there. However, the only real solution to prevent civilian casualties is for the Taliban to not hide behind civilians.”

According to the same Al-Jazeera article, residents of Boz have expressed doubts about the number of Taliban fighters present. “We don’t even know if the Taliban were actually killed in this attack. All we saw were dead bodies of the innocent people,” said one.

The operation in Boz happened a little over a year after American airstrikes destroyed a Doctors Without Borders Hospital in the nearby city of Kunduz, killing 42 patients and staff members. The Kunduz bombing was one of the only instances where US military forces publicly admitted they had made a mistake. President Obama issued a rare formal apology for it on October 7th 2015.

The bombing of a hospital, if established as deliberate, is considered a war crime by international laws. The results of the UN investigation on the matter are awaited in the next month.

* Featured image via Sputnik News

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In this past week Beirut, Bagdad, Paris and most of Syria were the epicentres of yet another gruesome chapter of the war on terror. The images of a blood-stained Paris echoed the images of the Lebanese bloodbath that had followed the day before, but as one served as an echo chamber for the whole struggle against terrorism and radicalism the other was almost practically omitted: “after all,” some said, “it happens over there all the time!”

This gap in solidarity became much more than merely your routine ethnocentricity. Some have put forward the argument that it’s “normal” to feel more proximity to France, and this argument and the debate in general is in many ways the highest manifestation of how the war on terror is fuelled and perpetuated.

One of the best examples of this occurred in the wreckage of the Paris attacks on the On n’est pas couchés (ONPC) set–a renowned French talk-show rebranding itself On est solidaires for the occasion. During the televised debate where several politicians, artists and philosophers were invited, the discourse was the same–except for the notable exception of Jean-Luc Mélanchon (leader of the French left Parti de Gauche) and the philosopher Raphaël Glucksmann.

The drums of war were the same. The actors and the scenery had changed but the script was the same, the same one handed out in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks in the United States.

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The journalists in charge of orchestrating the whole affair reminded the audience time after time that the message the show was promoting was one of solidarity and peace but there was a cognitive dissonance, it seems, between the message of peace they were promoting and the “clash of civilizations” speech that came out of their mouths. The “us” against “them” was reformulated time after time, “they hate us because we love life,” “they hate what we love, music, art, gastronomy”… with every passing sentence the arguments became ever more void.

In the conversation that lasted more than two hours, the fact that the totality of the eight assailants who ravaged Paris last Friday were all Europeans, born and raised, was never brought up. So much for the racists and xenophobes among us for whom the prospect of one of them being a refugee birthed in them a pleasure of orgasmic proportions.

Yet the conclusion François Hollande and the majority of the panelists reached, which now seems a Cannon Law, was that these young men weren’t French, they were Daesh. Once Hollande uttered those words in his speech to the French people, real debate and reflection upon how to put an end to all of this nonsensical bloodshed was silenced.

Once Hollande uttered those words, France’s foreign policy and interventionism, its interior policy with regards to the Muslim minority, and the utter failure of France’s “integration” policies and the state’s relationship with its invisible and silenced minorities were exempt from any criticism.

And thus in the days that followed, just like every time a Western city or capital is the target of a major terrorist attack, the mystification of the terrorist, of terrorism becomes  the phantasmagoric object of all our hidden and deeply buried fears, a sort of blank sheet used as a deflection, to absolve us of all our sins.

This has become a routine affair in the past decade. Regardless of what country the attack might happen in, the drill is the same. It was same here after the attacks in Ottawa last year. Thus the real debate never really surfaces, the real question never really comes up: with all the anti-terrorism measures –le plan vigipirate in France, C-51 in Canada, the Patriot Act in the United States–  do we feel safer?

Today Syria is engulfed in a brutal and gruesome conflict that has millions of refugees fleeing for their lives and, if anything, the attacks in Paris should be the wake-up call for Europeans to understand why. Iraq has been torn apart for the past decade and apart from Kabul in Afghanistan the Taliban pretty much control  the stretches of territory that were in their possession before the invasion of 2001.

So instead of bombing Raaqa and swearing for more retaliation and pinning everything on the cosmic evil that is terrorism, it is our duty, while upholding the memory of the hundreds of thousands that perished in the past fifteen years, in this war on terror, to ask ourselves – hasn’t all of this become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Scores of innocent civilians laid lifeless in back to back attacks in Beirut and Paris and today, as I write this article, scores more will perish in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya because of wars that were not of their doing, caught in the crossfire of a war without end, that strengthens its grip with every attack, with every bombing, with every passing of “anti-terrorist” legislation.

We must ask ourselves the questions: “Who profits from this? What companies gained points on the stock market? Who has an interest in perpetuating the constant state of fear and hate?”

To use the terminology that Podemos has employed in Spain there is a caste, a transnational caste that has every interest not only propagating such terror but also in stabilizing and maintaining perpetual terror. This is the same caste that rails about refugees and yet on the other hand rants and criticizes “Western values.” It’s the same caste that authorizes airstrikes in the guise of retaliation and yet on the other hand guns down innocent civilians in the streets of Beirut and Paris.

On the chess board that is presented to us by the media, all of these different bloodthirsty actors are portrayed as enemies, Islamists versus Western forces, the bad guys versus the good guys, us versus them, when in fact their resolve and objective is the same, when in fact what links them all together is that they are fuelled by grief, destruction and death. From this vantage point, the us and them is a fake dichotomy, a rhetoric that only finds some sort of grounding in the clash of civilizations doctrine that is their lifeline. 

In reality it has never been about us and them, Arabs and Westerns. It’s about a military-financial-complex. The vicious tempo of its ever expansionary cycle has pushed more areas to be colonized by terror and in the wake of its passage deadlier and more gruesome attacks will be symptomatic. For as long as some profit off of war, others will have to die.

In the aftermath of the terrible events of the past week, in the memory of all of the victims of this never-ending war on terror, the victims of Kabul, of Baghdad, of Damascus, of Beirut, of Mosul, of Kenya and Yemen, of Bali, of New York and Washington, of Paris, of London, of Madrid, of all of the victims of this horrible war, it is our duty to honour them, to put an end to the false dichotomy and thus an end to this war!

Vos Guerres, Nos Morts!

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Yesterday, the Conservative government put their ‘money’ where their words were, and officially joined the new coalition of the willing. As I write Canadian fighter jets have joined the mission in Syria and Iraq. The Conservative government is leading Canada into a war that they deem is a moral imperative, a war against the horrific evil of ISIS and their genocidal tendencies, and a war to uphold the values of humanity.

Given the razor thin lines drawn by this Conservative rhetoric, either you are for war, that is, in favor of a military intervention against ISIS, or you’re giving a free pass for human rights to be trampled, or perhaps even worse, you are a de facto ”ally” of the ideology which drives ISIS.

In Bushian terms either you’re part of the ”Free World” or you’re part of the axis of evil.

I couldn’t contain my profound amazement, uncomforting disbelief and utter bewilderment (and yes, I went through all of those states of emotion in merely five minutes; it was one heck of an emotional rollercoaster ride), as I heard our beloved Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird, making the government’s pitch for a military intervention, address the House of Commons the other day.

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The centerpiece of his argument was, believe it or not, women’s rights. Yes; women’s rights. During his fiery intervention, John Baird said that ‘his’ Canada didn’t sit on the sidelines while people were being massacred, blatant disregard for human rights was being done, and innocent women and children were being purposefully targeted.

In his words, it was Canada’s ultimate moral duty to intervene, in order to prevent such things from happening. At the end of the speech, you got this feeling that this was a moment John Baird had long dreamed about. Surely, he had dreamt as a child that one day he would be the champion of the oppressed, of the marginalized, and the champion of those ”lost causes” and that he heartfeltly would rise to the occasion and save Canada’s honour, and in doing so also that of the world.

That would be great story, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately, this is not a dream, this is a nightmare. The Conservative government so far has been a nightmare instilling terror into the hearts of thousands of Canadian citizens. When it comes to upholding human rights, women’s rights, and minority rights, the Conservative government has done Canada, or at least the idea people once had of Canada, a huge dishonor.

No matter how imbued with beautiful lyricism the rhetoric is, mere rhetoric cannot change facts. The Conservative government may paint itself as the Fidei Defensor of women and women’s rights all it wants, but that won’t change the fact that more than 1200 Indigenous women are missing or have been murdered, and that the Conservative government has done nothing to prevent this systemic problem, because, in their words, it isn’t a systemic problem whatsoever. If we were to apply Conservative logic here, than the Conservative government would be siding with criminals, rapists and murderers.

As the Conservative government stood-up, shouted, cheered and celebrated their mission in Iraq by high-fiving each other, what were they really cheering for? Were they cheering for the innocent lives would be saved, or were they applauding this historic decision, and the fact that, now, in some deranged egomaniac way, their names would be forever in books of Canadian history? Maybe they were applauding the idea that, after an awful summer and few months, this war would be their saving grace?

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One thing is certain: this Conservative government will go down in infamy. If any of the joyous Conservatives thought that the vote on the war was ”their historical moment”, don’t fret about it guys, you already have that covered! For hundreds of impoverished and marginalized communities, and the cuts this Conservative government have made to essential social services, will continue to strike terror in the hearts of many, even after this Conservative regime is long gone. For Indigenous communities, the blatant discrimination of this Conservative government has exacted upon them, will be a wound that Canadian society will have much difficulty in healing. For women, the assault Harper’s administration has launched indirectly against their fundamental rights, is a terrorizing reminder that the misogynist ghosts of Canada’s past are still alive and well.

So this is my little advice to this Conservative government. If you’re really hell-bent on stopping ”terror”, in upholding human-rights, then you have two options. Either vote yourselves out of office or declare a war on yourselves. How can a government that has created such an environment of terror, claim to fight terror effectively on the other side of the world? The war on terror starts by looking at the person in the mirror. It starts right here on home soil.

A luta continua.

 

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As I’m writing these words this morning, the situation is becoming direr for the Kurdish resistance in Kobane. So far, the resistance has bravely faced the 22 days long assault lead by ISIS. Meanwhile, here in the West, there are a lot of conflicting views regarding the supposed defeat or victory of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). One thing is for sure, though. The struggle of the PKK and the YPG will go down in history and may have the opportunity to mobilize the whole of Kurdish people in a renewed struggle for “national’’ liberation.

Protests erupted yesterday in the Northern Iraqi Kurdish Autonomous Region, Turkey, in Rojava (the Syrian portion of Kurdistan), and Iran in support of the Kurdish resistance in Kobane, but also in support of what has come to be known as the Rojava Revolution: the struggle to establish a network of autonomous communes, which function within a framework of radical direct democracy.

Unfortunately the spontaneous uprising of thousands, if not tens of thousands of Kurds throughout Kurdistan and beyond was met with tear gas and violence by the Turkish authorities. The clashes between Turkish law enforcers and protesters claimed several lives as of the latest news.

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“ISIS murderer, AKP complicit.” From a protest in Istanbul, Turkey on September 21, 2014.

Meanwhile, the United Nations called for direct action in support of the Kurdish combatants to prevent a massacre. Several Western government officials have also voiced their concerns about what they think will definitely be a major military setback, if ISIS were to overrun the Kurdish forces in Kobane. So what’s preventing the Western powers from attacking ISIS? Wasn’t that exactly the main reason for our intervention?

Many of the proponents of an intervention against ISIS have championed the idea, that without the support of the Turkish government, the long-term defeat of ISIS seems implausible, and that in order to defeat ISIS any international coalition needs Turkish support. This being said, however, think, for instance, of the picturesque moment, when Turkish tanks turned their backs on Kobane. If the non-involvement of the Turkish forces is an indication of anything, it is that the Turkish government has no interest in stopping ISIS’s assault against Kobane.

Little is known of the Turkish “non-involvement” in the past three years during the war in Syria, but one thing is certain. The policy of “non-involvement” was merely a façade. There is strong evidence that the Erdogan administration, in a strategic gamble to topple both the Assad regime and prevent the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous enclave in Syria, allowed the smuggling of weapons and of jihadists through Turkey to ISIS. There are also allegations that Turkey was complicit in helping ISIS find commercial outlets to sell its oil. Isn’t that amazing? Somehow, all major contributors of this so-called coalition of the willing, United States, Britain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have contributed in some shape or form directly in establishing ISIS’s hegemony in the region.

Given that the Turkish government has for decades fought the PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party, the Marxist wing of the Kurdish resistance) and oppressed the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, in Turkey and throughout the region, it’s not surprising that as of today Turkey has no interest in saving Kobane.

It is my firm belief that that not only do global left-wing movements have a lot to learn from the Rojava Revolution, but the fate of these movements is undeniably linked to the struggle of the Kurdish forces in Kobane.

The revolutionary thesis of Rojava is the overcoming the paradigm of the nation-state. The theory of democratic confederalism, which was theorized by the previous and now jailed leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, in the first volume of his prison notebooks entitled the Roots of Civilization. Drawing extensively from the theories of libertarian municipalism, social ecology, and communalism, notably elaborated by Murray Bookchin, the PKK have succeeded in creating a radical new blueprint not only for left-wing movements in the region but also throughout the world.

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The PKK, through the KCK (Group of Communities in Kurdistan), has created a unique synthesis of eco-socialism with an important emphasis on the aspects of the notion of ungrowth; decentralized libertarian socialism, with the setting-up of a unique structure of decentralized and communal direct democracy; and of feminist and alter-globalization theories through the deconstruction of the theory of the nation-state, the participation and citizenship of all of the diverse array of ethnic groups enshrined in their constitution.

It is my heartfelt wish that it won’t, but Kobane may fall, like the workers’ councils of Barcelona fell to the hands of Franco’s fascist thugs during the Spanish Civil War, but its memory and the project will live on. For the sake of humanity, it is our duty to support and to remember the awesome struggle and ideal of the Rojava Revolution. It is my wish, that through the lessons learnt from Kobane and the Rojava Revolution, we will see the dawn of a reinvigorated Kurdish struggle, and also the dawn of a new chapter in left-wing movements.

Amidst the chaos unleashed by the opening of the Pandora’s Box that is neo-liberal capitalism, Kobane is the Thermopylae of the Kurdish people and of everyone who dares to dream a better future for all of humanity.

A luta continua.

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We’re in the thick of it, there’s nothing else to say. All the international credibility gained out of Canada’s decision not to intervene in the Second Gulf War under Jean Chrétien’s leadership was lost in the blink of an eye, when Harper announced Friday that Canada would be sending its troops into combat (airstrikes specifically, no ground troops at this time). The thing is, Canada’s “official” intervention is only two days old, but it is already gearing up to be a disaster of gigantic proportions, and ultimately an utter failure that will only delay, but not prevent, the coming of another ISIS.

Canada might have given its green light for a full scale intervention only two days ago, but the coalition of the willing — which ironically includes Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the patrons of the radical interpretation of Islam promoted by ISIS — has been on the ground for around a month now. What are the conclusions that can be drawn? After one month, what is the future for this war? What new day is dawning on the horizon?

Well, to say the least, it’s a very dark one. The black clouds that arose from the ruins of the Kurdish bastion of resilience, Kobane, gave us, spectators, a little glimpse into the future of this mission.

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The women of Kobane have armed themselves to fight against ISIS.

As thousands of Kurdish fighters held back the reoccurring, never-ending assaults of ISIS against the town, Turkish tanks stood still — not much of a surprise —and Western jets flew on by. The battle of Kobane is a central one for the survival of the Kurdish struggle within northern Syria. Unfortunately the lightly armed Kurds are fighting against the much stronger ISIS forces, ironically, using American artillery and weapons to besiege the town.

The hypocrisy of the Western forces and of their Turkish allies is obvious. They most certainly see this so-called humanitarian intervention, first and foremost, as a means towards an end: the eradication of the PKK and any viable Kurdish autonomous authority in the region.

In one of my articles concerning the conflict I wrote extensively about the “revival” of the Kurdish struggle for self-determination and their project of asymmetric federalism. There, I referred to their struggle and to this project as an alternative form of governance for the peoples of the region and a strong vaccination against the rise of organizations such as ISIS. Three weeks down the path of war, and it seems like Kobane will fall within a matter of days, or even hours, even though this humanitarian intervention was supposed to prevent such a tragedy from happening.

One month into this humanitarian intervention, and the American State Department has already announced that it was anything but humanitarian anymore. The White House announced today that civilian protection policy does not apply to the airstrikes in Syria. Apparently, protecting civilians in areas under rebel control from the wrath and vengeance of Syrian government forces is not part of the plan either. Within the past month much of the ground that was lost during the past three years by Assad has been regained. The bloodthirsty and mad dictator, whom the interventional community vigorously condemned for the usage of chemical weapons against his own people, is on cloud nine.

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Can you believe it? The Americans are actually winning Assad’s war for him. Instead of mobilizing and building strong alliances with the secular and progressive sections of the Free Syrian Army, we actually bombed them last week. So much for wining “hearts and minds!” We’re actually losing them, as the ISIS ranks are filled with thousands, if not tens of thousands of young disenchanted Westerners, who turned to radicalism after years of discrimination and racism, and after years of seeing on the TV their Muslim sisters and brothers suffer excruciating pain in Iraq, Palestine or at the hands of any other Western backed dictatorial regimes.

Radicalism’s fuel is war, and unfortunately, through this war, we have swelled the reserves of hatred, of anger, of despair and of pain, everything ISIS was born out of, to last for a generation or two. If you believed the magical fairytale that whatever is happening was a humanitarian intervention, that we, the West, the ardent defenders of human rights, were on a courageous crusade against evil, that just like communism and fascism, this totalitarian evil of radical Islamism had to be quelled, you were wrong. Don’t be fooled. We are reviving ISIS. We created the conditions for it. We are reenacting them as we speak and what will come out of this third intervention in the Middle East might be more horrendous than anything our imaginations can grasp.

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In my latest article about Stephen Harper’s grand folly of wanting another military intervention in Iraq, I painted a very bleak picture, criticizing the third Western intervention in Iraq from a purely Canadian perspective.

In this article I would like take another approach, through the Orientalist lenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) military and political elite.

One of the biggest fallacies of this whole affair, the need for Western intervention, walks hand in hand with a relatively unnoticed undertone: the concept of Western domination. It appears to be, that, in this day and age, the word “Western” is the exclusive adjective for interventions, which suggests that the notion of a non-Western intervention is just a ludicrous idea. Obviously, international interventions can only be Western.

Libyans Revel In New Freedom As Hunt For Gaddafi Continues

Thus, because the West is only part of the world that apparently has the right to intervene, it considers itself as the center of world, and the rightful guardians of world peace. This is a fundamental factor of the humanitarian arguments calling for intervention, but these humanitarian arguments are merely made up to dissimulate the underlying neo-imperialist ideology. Intervention is not only possible if done by the West, but it is only acceptable if done by the West — the events in Ukraine are a good illustration of this.

The current wave of Western interventionism we have been seeing in Iraq and Syria is rooted in Orientalism. Orientalism is the product of a Eurocentric vision of the world, which dates back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The notion of Orientalism, developed notably in Edward Said’s work by the same name, is that the “West knows best.” All Middle Eastern societies — and all non-Western societies in general for that matter — are undeveloped, static and archaic, and this is why they produce radical groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and terrorists. These societies have to be brought into the light of modernity and globalized capitalism through Western intervention — directly, or indirectly, and whether they like it or not.

As I explained in my previous article, the third “coalition of the willing“ is unprepared and offers only short-term superficial solutions; oxymoronic solutions, such as: dropping bombs to rebuild a strong Iraq. A perpetual déjà vu!

Is it that the veil of Orientalism has blinded the Western elites to such an extent that they’re now incapable of taking any other approach?

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No! To see Orientalism as some sort of a naive, archaic ideology is wrong. It is an idea that has evolved and has been adapted to modern times. It is omnipresent in our language. The “international community,” NATO, and “humanitarian intervention” are just a few examples of its manifestations. Orientalism, which now fuels this third “humanitarian intervention” in Iraq, is an ideology of domination, which is used to justify neo-imperialist attitudes.

Unfortunately this Orientalist approach completely omits the only viable solution, which is self-determination and autonomy for the diverse array of communities that inhabit the region. The Kurds in an initiative spearheaded by the the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) have proven through their military victories against ISIS that self-determination is the best firewall against radicalism.

For instance, ISIS is the direct consequence of Western Orientalism, and the belief that centralized powerful dictatorships are necessary to impose law and order, in a very Hobbesian manner, on the uncultured masses of the Levant. ISIS is the direct consequence of an ideology, which argues that it is possible to “build” a nation from scratch, in the 21st century. This is expected to be done in the same manner as it was done after the First World War, by drawing meaningless borders and hoping to bring about stability. Needless to say, that experiment was a dreadful failure.

In opposition to this foreign belief that the peoples of the Middle East are somehow incapable of sorting out their own affairs, is the idea of Democratic Confederalism: a communal form of self-governance that has been applied by some sections of the Kurdish authorities, notably by the PKK. Throughout the Kurdish Autonomous Region in Northern Iraq, several new forms of participatory and autonomous self-governance have taken root. It is the main explanation for the era of stability and prosperity the Kurdish people have come to know, since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. For the time being, the Kurdish authorities have been able to apply a new radical form of federalism, but unfortunately they’re still prisoners of the oil industry.

And maybe that’s the main problem: the suffocating grip that the oil multinationals and their cronies have throughout the region.

Self-determination will always be a step away from completion until oil is the object and not the subject of control. Democratization of the extraction of natural resources is a necessity for the development of true autonomy. And this is why any movement striving to define new spaces of self-determination in the Middle East is automatically an enemy of the world’s economic elites. The PKK is currently considered a terrorist organization in the same vein as is ISIS by the “international community”.

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The main reason behind this never-ending “War on Terror” is the perpetual destabilization of the Middle East, through a divide and conquer strategy of instilling brutal dictatorships and a reign of terror. This has been ongoing ever since the mid-1920s, when Western powers decided to divide the region into imaginary states and zones of influence. The main weapon of the “War on Terror” is terror, and this is why it is a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle.

The Kurdish model is a glimmer of hope in a windwhirl of chaos. The decentralized model of Kurdish communities is a blueprint for something that has the capacity to shift the balance of power from the hands of an elite, from the hands of a few to the hands of the many. This is the only solution, if put into action, that might end the state of perpetual war, and the era of “Western intervention” in the region. Yet this isn’t in the interest of those, who profit from such chaos.

A luta continua.

NewsPolitics

So, here we go again. Thirteen years after the tragedy at the World Trade Center on September 11, and eleven years after the beginning of the Second Gulf War, a coalition of the ‘’willing’’ is being put together to salvage the what remains of Iraqi democracy.

But let’s be clear here. There is nothing ‘’humanitarian’’ about this third intervention in Iraq, and neither will it resolve anything. Sorry Stevie.

When the lessons of the past aren’t learned properly, or when they’re thrown purposefully into the trash bin, the missteps of the past become the fatal mistakes of the future. As the saying goes: History repeats itself first as tragedy, second as farce. But I don’t know what would it be the third time around. A comical apocalypse? The question that must be asked and yet isn’t being asked by the mainstream media is quite simple: Why? Why again? Why us? Why should we think this will help?

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Soldier looks as Saddam Hussein’s statue is toppled.

Once again, at a frantic pace, the Conservatives and the Liberals are trying to turn the debate regarding the Canadian intervention in Iraq into a Manichean argument, a choice between good and evil: Either you’re for boots on the ground, or you’re with the terrorists! Anything less than military intervention is, apparently, unthinkable. For them, the roots of Islamic terrorism have to be “bombed out,” and obliterated.

But then one must wonder: Isn’t this the same strategy that was also used or attempted in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria? Didn’t the international community, through their sponsorship of radical Islamic organizations, ease the toppling of several governments in the region? Didn’t Western governments, de facto, pave the way for the chaos and massacres that are currently unfolding? Yes, absolutely!

Using the same strategy, with the same problematic actors, yet still expecting a different outcome is insanity.

Blatant, disingenuous hypocrisy fuels the Conservative government’s foreign policy, especially when it comes to the so-called “war on terror.” This is the same hypocrisy employed by the Bush administration, which thought that terror could root out terror, that torture could save the world from cruelty, that bigotry and racism could shun bigotry and racism. Unfortunately, this ideology of fighting fire with fire has left the whole of Middle East in blazes.

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The Guantanamo Bay strategy, using brutal and cruel tactics to fight against brutality and cruelty, has utterly failed in the past and will utterly fail again, but this time around Canada will have indelible blood on its hands.

So, this is the non-strategy that the Conservative government and their Liberal allies are offering us on the silver platter of media: Military intervention with no timeline; no real notion of how many Canadian troops will be sent or what role they might serve; no strong local allies except for the dysfunctional Iraqi government, whose lack of legitimacy is the reason behind the current crisis; and no exit strategy.

As for the rhetorical fallacy of acting as “military advisors,” let’s remember, that back in the 1960s, US president Lyndon B. Johnson promised Americans, that the US’s role in Vietnam would only be an advisory one; we all know how that story turned out.

Maybe, deep down inside, Harper is waiting impatiently for his “Bushian moment.” Maybe he has developed some sort of a Bush complex —something that within the neo-conservative ranks is similar to the Napoleon complex — and this is the moment he has been waiting for all of his life?

How many lives will it take for his folie de grandeur to be exorcised?

News

This past Sunday, with the backdrop of the escalating events in Iraq, Tony Blair, former British prime minister and prominent supporter of the 2003 Iraq invasion, set out on a crusade on his blog to justify a second western intervention in Iraq, just eleven years after the first bullets were fired in March 2003.

In his blog post, faithful to himself and his blatant intellectual dishonesty, Blair made the case that the current situation of Iraq had little, if not nothing at all, to do with the nine year occupation of the country by the “coalition of the willing”. This of course was spearheaded none other than himself and his American partner in crime, former President of the United States of America George W. Bush.

It appeared clearly through Blair’s lyrical rendition, that if fault for the current unrest in Iraq laid with anyone, it was certainly with Iraq’s political elite and the Islamic fundamentalists under the banner of Islamic state in Iraq and the Sham —aka ISIS. Later during the week, this statement was echoed by current American President Barrack Obama, who stated on CNN that the west — read here the United States and the United Kingdom — had given Iraq “the chance to have an inclusive democracy” and that the only form of American intervention on the table was a strategic one to “protect national interests.”

As the events unfold at a velocious pace in the current Middle East geopolitical context, it is very important to pause and replace these statements in a historical perspective that encompasses the dominant foreign policy lines that have guided western intervention in the region since the end of the Second World War.

Eisenhower and Nixon at Dinner with King Saud
(l-r) Dwight D. Eisenhower, King Saud and Richard Nixon

The major historical element that is disregarded too often, and without which an understanding of western invention is always incomplete, is the Eisenhower Doctrine. The special message to the Congress on the situation in the Middle East is – until this day – the backbone of American interventionism in the Middle East and the foundation of American foreign policy with regards to Middle Eastern politics.

In many ways, the Doctrine is more of a strategic alliance with the Saudi strain of Wahhabism, which is an ultra-orthodox reading of the teachings of Islam, against the mounting influence of Nasserite socialism and Ba’athlism, pan-Arab socialism that was a major threat to American domination of the region in the mid twentieth century. In many ways it was the continuation of the divide and conquer  strategy which was espoused by both British and French colonial regimes after the First World War. The objective to split the Arab world into various fractions, and playing these fractions against one another, thus assuring the paramount position of western influence in the region, and the foiling of any pan-Arabist dream.

The reason behind the Eisenhower Doctrine and the emphasis that French and British colonial regimes instigated pseudo ethnic, tribal and religious division was to protect their national interests, the most important being of course the control of the primordial natural resource: petrol.

In the name of natural security and democracy, democratically elected governments were toppled such as the Iranian government of Mossaddegh  in 1953 when his administration made the bold move to nationalize the petroleum industry, or when Islamist extremist militant groups were funded to make the case for right-wing autocratic dictatorships which seated their power on being the final rampart against the Islamists.

But all in all, the gurus of American foreign policy fancied more the chances of advancing their agenda and “protecting their national interests” with the help of Islamist fundamentalists and autocratic regimes than with socialist ones, or left-wing movements be they religious or secular. This is why America has always openly supported the most backwards regime in the region, Saudi Arabia.

waronterror_Frank151It’s a known fact that Saudi Arabia has financed extremist Islamist groups. A current example is their unequivocal support for Islamist forces in the ongoing Syrian conflict. Not only do the Saudis offer financial support to such organizations, but also offer them with logistical support and cover.

The current situation in Iraq and Syria is but another chapter in a covert operation to maintain a managed form of chaos in the region that benefits none other than big western oil companies and corrupt oil drunk dynasties, all which promote extreme Islamist theories outside of their borders and repress them within. The War on Terror of which the Iraq War was a part, a war which was called by its main instigators a war against fear for freedom and democracy (and whatever other amalgamation of buzzwords that fit in sound bites) is anything but a war against terror.

Quite to the contrary, in fact, The War on Terror resulted in utter chaos and the destruction of a strong and viable pan-Arab movement which would have fostered an alternative to the Western colonial and neo-colonial domination of the region and the Saudi reactionary agenda. The War on Terror served an interest: the interest of those that first sowed the seeds of terror within the Middle East and whom without terror would cease to hold such a firm grasp on the petroleum reserves and the cash flow that coincides.

On the 30th of July, 762 (Christian calendar) while all of the “western” world was still engulfed in the dark ages, the city of Baghdad was built, a magnificent place of knowledge and architectural resplendence. Today Baghdad and the magnificent city of Damascus are piles of rubble, ruins, shadows of their former selves. The real terrorists aren’t the ones you might be afraid of.

A luta continua.

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Most people know by now that the US uses drones quite a bit in the Middle East these days. Some are aware that drone killings are frequent and don’t always hit non-civilian targets. But very few get an accurate sense of what’s happening in almost real time.

Now, that may change because of a new iPhone app called Metadata+. Developer Josh Begley, who also runs the Twitter account @dronestream, culls data from news reports of US drone strikes from the New York Times, BBC and other sources and makes that data available in map format on his app which also sends out a push notification each time a strike happens.

metadata drone app

Apple rejected the app, which was originally called Drones+, five times. Now with a name change and a more generalized description (“real time updates on national security issues”) it’s available for free in the app store.

Here’s Begley talking about the app before it was approved on MSNBC. In this interview he asks the question: “Do we want to be as connected to our foreign policy as our iPhones?”

It’s an interesting question. Are people and in particular activists speaking out against the US drone program and targeted killings going to download an app that effectively announces each time one of those killings occurs? Can people stomach having their day interrupted regularly with a buzz from their pockets every time the US military kills someone with a drone?

Will you download this app?

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This post originally appeared on TaylorNoakes.com, republished with permission from the author

Hats off to the Beaverton for nailing it with their headline Israeli Prime Minister Stephen Harper returns after long visit in Canada and to the Gazette’s Terry Mosher (aka Aislin) for this cartoon:

aislin harper israel

Now have a look at some of the Facebook comments this image got and replace the Star of David over the PM’s mouth with a Fleur-de-lys over Pauline Marois’ mouth. Would that be as shocking? Would that be Quebec bashing? How would these illustrious minds of the modern age have responded to such a caricature I ask you? With equal apparent offence? I should think not…

Unless you were living under a rock last week, the Prime Minister an avowed ‘friend of Israel’ had been touring the country like an invited rock star, along with an entourage including businesspeople, MPs, cabinet ministers and religious leaders, a group of about 200 in total. The entire trip is being paid for out of Canada’s general taxation revenue, meaning poor saps like you or I subsidized this ‘love fest’ in the Levant.

Now you’re probably thinking, well, this is what Prime Ministers do, they go to other countries and sign lucrative trade deals, don’t they?

But there’s no trade deal being signed, and we don’t buy much from the Israelis in the first place because they don’t build much of anything we could use.

So why is Harper dropping a significant amount of coin for a ‘Tories-only’ trip to the Holy Land?

Is it to improve relations between the two countries? Hardly. Only Tories were allowed on this trip, no representatives from any other major political party in Canada was allowed to go. And as to the private business types who were allowed, well, they were all major Tory financial supporters. If anything, this entire affair seems to be little more than a carefully crafted media circus dreamed up in advance of the 2015 election.

Don’t believe me? Then watch this video, wherein you can hear Tory MP Mark Adler whining like a little child that he won’t get an opportunity to get in on a photo-op near Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, something the MP describes as the “million dollar shot”:

This is the kind of trash we’ve elected to parliament. What an unfortunate joke.

It’s painfully clear the Tories embarked on this trip for purely political purposes. Fellating the State of Israel is good for the Tories not only because it secures the apparently strategic old-fogey Conservative Zionist vote, but further seeks to remind the Canadian people that Harper’s talking points re: Israel sound to be just about the same as the American President’s or the British Prime Minister’s. And this in turn makes Harper look like he’s a ‘player’ on the world stage.

Mulroney would do the same thing back in the 1980s, ensuring that at every big NATO meeting he had his mug photographed next to Reagan and Thatcher almost as if he needed to prove he was one of the big boys of his day.

Politics is ultimately all about image; some things never change.

Then there’s Israel.

I understand why Tories blindly support Israel. It’s not because all Tories are committed Zionists, far from it. In fact, the old Reform Party, from which the current incarnation of the Tories emerged, used to have a bit of problem signing up Holocaust deniers and other assorted racist scum to run in federal elections, but hey, who the fuck remembers what happened twenty years ago? Tories support Israel because the Yanks and the Brits do, and Tories have never had the confidence to pursue a Canadian-made foreign policy.

Nay, Tories have never had the balls to try and develop our own foreign policy. The Tory mentality is that whatever is locally produced must be deficient. This is why Deifenbaker cancelled the Avro Arrow, why Mulroney sold us out on free trade.

Tories live to cut the legs out from under you and the whole of this nation. For the Conservative Party of Canada, this country only exists as long as other, bigger, more powerful countries count us as one of their friends.

Given this spectacle, it seems as though the PM earnestly believes Israel is indeed bigger and more powerful than us. And this in turn leads to Harper bromancing Benjamin Netanyahu.

harper netanyahu

Why on Earth would Canada care what Israel thinks of us? Why do we need to court Israeli public opinion? Israel isn’t even in the same league as a nation as great as Canada, so why do we give a flying Philadelphia fuck what their current government thinks of us? Why does Stephen Harper need to make a big show of how Israel is our ally?

As friends go, Israel is a really shitty friend.

For one it’s highly likely, though unconfirmed, that Mossad assassinated one of Canada’s greatest engineers and ballistics experts in 1990. Yes, Gerald Bull was a maverick who worked for some of the worst military dictatorships of the late 20th century and certainly shouldn’t have been developing super weapons like Project Babylon or improved SCUD missiles for the Iraqis, who were, to one degree or another, the West’s ally in the Gulf and bulwark against the theocracy which had overtaken Iran throughout the 1980s (it should also be pointed out that Israel sold Iran weapons during the Iran-Iraq War).

But to kill a man who had done nothing to threaten Israel because some people thought he might? What the hell happened to the rule of law?

Either way, if Mossad was concerned about Dr. Bull’s activities, they should have worked out an agreement with us first, he could’ve been designing artillery pieces for our own military from the comfort of the Kingston pen. Israel had no right to assassinate him and have never officially apologized for their actions.

Then there’s the issue of Mossad agents using Canadian passports to freely travel the world assassinating other people the State of Israel finds disagreeable. Yes, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda apparently do the exact same thing – but isn’t this the point? I expect our enemies would do such things, but I’d also expect our friends to respect us more than that.

Let’s not forget, a Canadian passport has always been a symbol of our nation’s international respect. Mossad’s use of our passports to assist in their efforts to go kill people doesn’t do us any good at all, it just means that the Canadian passport is worth scrutinizing even closer and is no longer the international symbol of openness and humanism it once was.

As Toronto Star columnist Tony Burman wrote recently, it’s time for Canada and Israel to stop living in a fantasy land. Israel’s lack of self-awareness, self-criticality and near total disregard of how the state appears from an outsider’s perspective would make the Parti Québécois blush. In fact, I’ve often been surprised Likud and the Parti Québécois aren’t closer, what with the common hatred of local minority groups and the insistence that only the majority’s religion is inoffensive, and that international laws and conventions don’t apply blah blah blah.

Peas in a pod…

This buddy-buddy relationship with Israel truly does nothing for us, though it does remind relatively intelligent people elsewhere that, when we’re governed by the more conservative elements of our society, we suddenly become very myopic in terms of foreign policy.

nuclear weapon

How can a nation such as Canada support one theocracy with secret, unmonitored, uncontrolled nuclear weapons (Israel) while supporting sanctions and eliminating diplomatic relations with another theocracy for their unconfirmed, apparent desire to produce a nuclear weapon (Iran)?

Shouldn’t the message be the same for all theocracies with nukes (i.e. get rid of your nukes, stand-down your military and then we can talk)? What difference does it make if Israel is a quasi-representative democracy, they have nuclear weapons and their deterrence strategy is to launch simultaneous nuclear strikes on any and all enemies if ‘overwhelmed’ by outside aggression, something which they came very close to doing during the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

The Samson Option could include the use of as many as 400 nuclear weapons, many of which are of the thermonuclear variety with a one-megaton yield (fifty times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). They can be launched by ballistic missiles with an 11 000 kilometre range, from cruise-missile armed submarines, from jet fighters or even delivered via suitcases.

The very existence of Israel’s massive nuclear stockpile is in itself a destabilizing factor in the entirety of the Middle East. The way we turn a blind eye towards Israel’s countless foreign invasions (Suez Canal, 1956; all of its neighbours, 1967, all of its neighbours for a second time in 1973, Lebanon in 1982, Lebanon again in 2006, and all this aside from regular military action on Palestinian territory) and the intolerance and racism of the Likud Party and it’s allies is astonishing. What does this say about our own government?

For a truly disturbing mini-doc on contemporary anti-African racism in Israel, see the video posted below:

Harper wasted an opportunity to excoriate the current Israeli government for its human rights abuses, weapons of mass destruction and the not-so-subtle anti-African sentiment that has resulted in more than one instance of sitting members of the Knesset demanding African immigrants be rounded up and put in concentration camps; a law recently passed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party will see undocumented African immigrants held for up to a year without trial. Instead of criticizing these laws, Harper said that anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism.

I should remind the Prime Minister, and anyone else dumb enough to buy that nonsense, that these are two very different things, but neither apply to this article nor any of a torrent of articles recently published about this trip or about Israel broadly speaking. Harper is so loathe to criticize Israel the Tories had the Department of National Defence quietly removed any online traces of a report that a Canadian peacekeeper on a UN deployment was killed by an Israeli artillery strike in 2006. What’s particularly damning is that the IDF was either obscenely careless or bombed the UN outpost deliberately, as it was clearly marked on maps and familiar to IDF personnel operating in the region.

What’s particularly mortifying is that the Prime Minister has confused hatred of a religious group and hatred of nation, but has also posited hatred of a nation/religious group as what underlies criticism of Israel and it’s policies.

Again, I can’t help but draw the parallel to Québec. Criticize the PQ or the charter of values? That’s Quebec-bashing. Criticize the PLQ, CAQ, QS, ON etc. and that’s just politics.

Why is Stephen Harper telling me criticizing Israel’s current government is equal to hating Jews? Is he as dumb as those who endorse him, like world-class idiot Sarah Palin?

It isn’t and never was. Nor is criticizing the PQ and attack on all Québécois. Nor is criticizing the origins of the First World War an attack on any of the soldiers who fought in it.

But this is modern politics, and as long as people would rather react first and think second, Stephen Harper can make statements like this and embark on taxpayer-financed trips such as this without any repercussions. Similarly, Rob Ford can smoke crack right back into the mayor’s office and Pauline Marois may very well win a majority government by institutionalizing racism.

Disturbing, repugnant, ridiculous. But back to the issue at hand…

What kind of friend is Israel? And why must we support them at their worst?

It’s obscene that the Prime Minister can score political points in Canada by sycophantically and uncritically praising the current conservative Israeli government, and by extension support the vilest elements of contemporary Israeli society who conveniently ignore the lessons of the Holocaust and marginalize minorities in their own apparently liberal democratic nation. That members of Likud would use the same rhetoric in attacking Arabs or Africans today as fascists used against Jews throughout Europe and North America in the early 20th century is appalling to say the very least.

Stephen Harper does not speak for Canada. Any pretence he might have to this effect should come to an end well before the next regularly scheduled election. The Conservative Party of Canada is leading this nation down a road I’m quite uncomfortable with, and this campaign stop in the ‘Holy Land’ is just another fantastic reminder why the Tories are wholly unfit to govern.

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In Washington and Ottawa, signs of political unwillingness and inaction for Syrian intervention are beginning to show. All signs suggest a concerted misleading effort to end Syria’s civil war are nothing more than empty rhetoric and political shadowboxing.

Following recent UN reports alleging use of chemical warfare in Syria, UN investigator Carla del Ponte claimed the Syrian opposition is likely behind the deadly use of sarin gas. The Obama administration sees it differently. Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary said:

“We are highly skeptical of suggestions that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” he said. “We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.”

7435925490_c84a93338d_b
Idol images of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad

It would seem unlikely that del Ponte, a former Chief Prosecutor of the UN War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, would cast serious warrantless accusations against the free Syrian army. While moderate opposition factions reject committing atrocities Al-Qaeda operatives in arms with the rebels are  more willingly capable.

Moreover, the situation on the ground is overly exaggerated. Assad is not universally unpopular in Syria as certain secular groups, Alawite and Christians minorities support Assad’s regime, which has protected them from the Suuni majority.

The consternation is that reversing the tide in Syria without a strongman to hold factions together would unleash the floodgate of religious sectarian violence, like in Iraq. Many fear brutal persecution and repression under the Muslim Brotherhood like in Egypt.

Despite contending intelligence, the US remains unwavering in its support for the Syrian rebels. US interests necessitate greater regional alliance following the Arab Spring and decades of US backed dictatorships. Syria, among others, continues to be a US proxy between China, Russia and Iran that are supporting Assad’s regime.

Tehran represents a second Mecca for Shiite Muslims and rising Shiite regional hegemon. Iran’s strategic alliance with Assad, Lebanon, Iraq and other states consolidates an adversarial Shiite Crescent against the Brotherhood’s predominately Sunni centre.

It is unlikely Israel’s air strikes on Syrian targets will bring their American allies into a four-front war to curtail Shiite regional hegemony.

Syrian rebels with a captured Army tank. Image via Freedom House.

Proponents for intervention should err on the side of caution and not expect substantial US involvement. Provided Obama’s past Syrian effort has proven feeble. Particularly last year’s inactivity after discovering mass graves in Aleppo. The atrocity alone constitutes a crime against humanity and justified outside intervention.

Nevertheless, after Obama’s statements, Canada’s Parliament convened yesterday in an emergency session to debate Syria’s situation. In subdued atmosphere, MPs shared few consensus on courses of action. Deepak Obhrai, Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Secretary called for exercising caution and waiting for the civil war to stop before rushing into building Syrian civil society.

NDP Foreign Affairs critic Ève Péclet warned that inaction and undefined action is dangerous for Syrians and blamed Harper’s Government of not renewing support for the UN mission after voting for it. She also remarked that Harper’s failure to secure a seat in the Security Council does not help the situation nor does cutting Canada’s funding to rights and democratic development organizations. She continued to accuse Harper of emphasizing trade with China and Russia over pressuring them to end the Syrian conflict.

Paul Dewar, NDP Foreign Affairs critic, reported that in addition to town-to-town torture, women are being systematically gang raped by a Syrian militia that “insert[s] a live mouse into the woman to destroy any sense of dignity that might have been left for this woman.”

Péclet further explained that rape is used to demoralize Syria’s community and prevent Syrians from speaking out.

Syrian children inherit this trauma. UNICEF now reports 2 million displaced Syrian child refugees. According to Dewar, Damascus has targeted bombs at schools containing children.

Such reports to Ottawa would likely have also been received in Washington. All signs indicate a concerted effort from the Obama-Harper governments to mislead the public into believing that they intend to help end Syria’s civil war.

Péclet words perhaps best summed up last night and two years of political inactivity in Syria: “It is absurd to talk here about Syria without actually doing anything.”

Whatever Washington and Ottawa’s intentions for Syria one should not expect the cat to weep for the dead mice.

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Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza and the West Bank last Thursday to celebrate their historic, but symbolic victory at the United Nations. In a vote of 138 – 9, the general assembly decided to grant Palestine non-member observer status. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank likened the overwhelming majority vote to a Palestinian birth certificate.

The world knows that Palestinian independence can only come through negotiations with Israel, but the vote was a huge step as it acknowledged the legitimacy in the international community of a future Palestinian country. The new status has given Palestinians hope where it has been absent for decades and more importantly it has given them a little bit of power on the international stage.

Israel along with the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic and five other micro-nations decided to vote against the upgrade status simply because the vote was symbolic and didn’t advance the peace process. Not only did these nations vote against the promotion bid, but some are now retaliating against Palestine because of their victory. Many don’t realize that it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who forced Abbas’ hand to go to the UN in the first place.

Three years ago, negotiations broke down between Israel and Palestine after Israel refused to reinstate a ban on the building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Would you negotiate with a party that was in the middle of building houses on your land? Mahmoud Abbas didn’t think so either and took the only non-violent avenue that was open to him, the UN.

You see, the United Nations has something called the International Criminal Court (ICC), an entity that Palestine did not have access to until now. No doubt Abbas has his sights on the court so that he can try and put a halt on Israeli settlement expansion, settlements that have long been deemed illegal under international law. Perhaps he thinks when the settlement building stops, real negotiations can start.

Palestinians celebrate in the West Bank city of Ramallah

The ICC is the only logical reason why Israel and their allies voted against Palestine’s upgraded status. The non-member status is widely considered progress and you don’t vote against progress unless you personally have something to lose, in this case power. Historically, any show of strength, rule or independent action against a controlling power is punished, regrettably for Palestine this time is no exception.

The day following the vote, Israel decided to approve new construction projects in occupied East Jerusalem. This action won’t have much of an effect on Palestinians as they haven’t stopped expansion in the first place. Knowing this, Israel decided to withhold $120 million in Palestinian tax revenue yesterday. This money is used to pay civil servants’ salaries including the police. Without this money, violence might break out in the west bank for the first time since the last intifada ended in 2005, which is perhaps what Israel intends. This action serves no other purpose.

The United States, Israel’s historic ally in the region voted against Palestine’s bid and the US congress was contemplating withholding aid to the Palestinian Authority. The US was quick to show their displeasure in Israel’s new settlement plans, but words are just words and nothing will likely come of it. The US is not about to withhold aid to Israel.

Canada like everything these days decided to follow in America’s footsteps and vote no. Following the vote, Prime Minister Stephen Harper went a step further by having Canada temporarily recall its Palestinian and UN envoys in protest. The Conservative government is also contemplating cutting its aid to Palestine. As furious as the Harper Government has appeared to be with Palestine, they followed the leader again in regards to blasting Israel’s new settlement construction plans and withholding tax payments. Again, their words are just words and like Israel says, they will not be told what to do. Anyone else see the double standard here?

I am 100% certain that history will show these two great western democracies to be on its opposite side. Whether it’s through peace or war, the US and Canada have shown nothing but contempt for Palestinians. The US can no longer be looked at as a bi-partisan mediator (not that it ever could) and Canada’s reputation as peace keepers and unbiased negotiators has all but drowned in the toilet.

When the people of Palestine look at these countries who voted against what was essentially a symbolic creation of their state, why would they take their desire for peace seriously? The aid money might help a little, but it amounts to nothing more than charity. Contrary to what you might think, that is not what they want, they want a country. By voting no last Thursday, not only did nine countries not acknowledge that fact, they voted against it.

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Gaza City after an Israeli airstrike (photo UN/Creative Commons)

In the run up to American Elections on November 6th, Palestinians and Israelis enjoyed relative peace for weeks. Israeli airstrikes and rocket launches in Gaza were nonexistent, just the way it had been four years earlier.

Back in the summer of 2008, Egypt brokered a truce between Hamas and Israel. The armistice lasted until Nov 4th, the same day as Barack Obama’s first election victory. On that day, Israel launched a military strike on Hamas to destroy a tunnel on the Gaza-Israel border. One member of Hamas was killed along with the ceasefire as Hamas retaliated with rocket fire.

The violence escalated for two months until Israel’s invasion of Gaza near the end of December. Israel withdrew its forces less than three weeks before the Jewish state’s national elections in early February. The assault destroyed $2 billion of Gaza assets, left roughly 1400 of its people dead and brought with it a humanitarian crisis. 13 Israeli soldiers along with three civilians died.

Unfortunately nowhere does history repeat itself more than the Middle East. On November 8th 2012, two days after Obama’s reelection and just a couple months away from elections in Israel; a thirteen year old boy was gunned down by an IDF machine-gun near the Gaza/Israel border while playing soccer outside his home. Just like four years prior, the rockets from Gaza started to fly in retaliation and again Israel is threatening invasion.

Ahmad Abu Daqqa – 13 was shot in the stomach by an Israeli soldier on Nov 8th

Barack Obama stated that peace in the region must begin with “no missiles being fired into Israel’s territory,” as if to say the responsibility of the situation rests solely on Hamas. In both instances the IDF was clearly to blame for the outbreak of violence, but the leaders of western nations have twice now pinned the blame on Hamas. The corporate media, even Al Jazeera, aren’t doing any justice by reporting that Israel’s response is to simply defend themselves from rocket attack.

Israel added fuel to the fire last week with the political assassination of Hamas’ military chief Ahmed Jabari. The slaying of Jabari is seen in Israel as on par with Barack Obama taking out Osama Bin Laden. It should serve quite useful to Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection chances in January, but no one mentions that.

Prime Minister Harper, a staunch supporter of Israel said on Friday that “we condemn this terrorist group’s attacks on Israel, we recognize and support Israel’s right to defend itself against such terrorist attacks.” Obama meanwhile made a similar statement on Sunday saying the US is “fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself.”

These similar declarations come from two of the world’s most influential leaders who instead of working toward peace in a non-biased capacity, continue to support the actual aggressors diplomatically and in the US case monetarily and militarily.

The fallacy that angers me most is the double standard people have regarding the circumstances. For some reason, the superpower in the Middle East (funded by the global superpower) has a right to defend itself however it sees fit. On the other hand, a territory occupied for almost half a century with little infrastructure left has no right to armed resistance or self-defense.

The powerful Israeli lobby in Canada and the United States has done a tremendous job of preventing critical commentaries in the political arena and in the mainstream media. Those who have the courage to speak out or condemn the actions of the Jewish state are frequently labeled Anti-Semitic and are refused exposure in the western media.

The media in western democracies has been just as supportive to Israel as it was to the United States in the run up to the war in Iraq. No one questions anything or digs deeper for information. In fact, from what I’ve seen the press in Israel is far more critical of their own country’s engagements than we are. The evidence we receive has such a pro-Israel bias that some Jews I know outside my family now describe Palestinians in the same fashion the Nazis once described Jews, it’s ridiculous.

Peace will never come to the region so long as the powers that be on either side continue to profit either financially or politically from the religious hatred that has long since boiled over. There is money to be made in war along with political capital and all it does is keep the Palestinians in despair and Israelis in fear.

  • As I write this, Israeli air strikes have killed 75 people (including 12 from one family and 18 children).
  • Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai has said, “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages”
  • Hamas’ conditions for a truce include open borders and international guarantees that Israel will halt all attacks on Gaza, including targeted assassinations
  • Three Israelis have been killed by Hamas rocket fire from Gaza
  • The occupation of Palestine is now at 45 years, 5 months and 9 days.

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We’re four women, three Jews and one Muslim (me), exchanging our life stories that lead us to engage in initiatives that gather Jews and Palestinians.

I listen to the three women around me in the bustle of Lafontaine park on the first evening of August. Each, in turn, shares their upbringing, their feeling about her Jewishness, stories from grandparents who survived World War II’s holocaust, their awakening and relationship to the word Zionism and to a place (or to a state) called Israel, and their comprehension of everything they have been told as 20-something-year-olds in Montreal.

It’s a gift.

Years ago, I would fantasize that I would be in such a gathering—listening, discussing and sharing with Jewish peers about their lives, my life, and about how we each feel about the turmoil called Palestine/Israel that we were thrown into involuntarily by past generations.

Voluntarily, we are each climbing out. Together. By talking. Seeking out each other’s company to talk about Palestine/Israel, what it makes of us, and how we can tear down the barrier. The false barrier, in my view.

I am Palestinian and Lebanese—with Kabyle ancestry—and a Montrealer since childhood.

I studied at Marianopolis College, McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal. I met classmates, colleagues and acquaintances who are Jewish, and they dreaded the topic.

It seemed that Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Christians and Jews and Israelis could not speak together about the one thing that ties our fate, the elephant in the room: Palestine/Israel.

Why?

You tell me something cannot be done and I will not let it go until I figure out why. Why can’t any two be able to communicate and be friends? How can two people be enemies or have a reason not to like one another?

I refuse fictitious lines.

In history, it is the same modus operandi: paint a people in a bad light to justify what you do. Palestinians are in the way of a Zionist dream. We were in Palestine, inhabiting a land quietly that was later chosen as a place of solace for Jews to seek refuge from the atrocities of the world against them.

You can choose a land, but what about the people there? Golda Meir said there was no one there. She was wrong.

Most of us—nearing 10 million Palestinians now—built lives outside of Palestine and Israel since The Nakba in 1948. We fled our homeland. We had to. The Palestinians in Palestine and in Israel are living the lives of prisoners, unable to move, work, live.

Back to Montreal. I don’t have a reason not to speak to a Jewish person. I increasingly feel it is necessary. Palestine and Israel depend on Palestinians and Jews in Palestine/Israel to speak with each other and the same is true in Montreal, Québec, Canada. Not argue, not debate, not get angry and emotional.

After a decade-long journey through conferences on the Middle East, I decided that the only way is to speak with Jews about this. What’s going on? What do they believe?

I realised that the similarities are astonishing. We are similar in our experiences of our respective faiths and cultures in Montreal. A Jewish woman raised in her family culture, dating someone who is not Jewish, growing up wondering what is Israel, how she feels about it. Me, growing up Muslim, Palestinian, Lebanese, Arab, in Montreal, wondering what my culture is, how it fits, how it can fit, how I feel about Palestine, how I feel about Israel.

We are similar. When we speak it feels good. When it comes to Palestine, Palestinians, Israel, the navigation to the dialogue is demanding. But worth it. I have scraped my hands a little, walked away exasperated, discouraged, but I come back. I come back to the table, to the discussion, to the living room. We talk, sometimes we stagnate, sometimes it gets a little tense, each tries to diffuse to keep the respect and the harmony.

Through this tug, we feel our humanity and desire to be in one another’s presence.

We need each other. We can only speak with one another. We can only learn from one another. If I don’t know about you, how can you know about me? We have to do so not just through documentaries and plays and films, but also through personal, live interaction that is difficult and worth it.

If you’re interested, the Montreal Dialogue Group and Conversations are two organisations in Montreal making sure that we meet.

*Photo from Wikipedia (Creative Commons).

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The winter of 2012 is still less than a month old and if you had turned on a television since the New Year, you’d have found two seemingly different stories being covered on the news networks. The first being the Republican Primaries that got underway a couple weeks ago, the other would be Iran.

In the past, I would have said that sabre rattling and a looming American election went together like peas and carrots. From the invasion of Iraq, to the liberation of Kuwait, from the invasion of Grenada and beyond, war has played an important part in American politics since the onset of the Cold War.

Is there a difference this time around? That would depend on who you ask; Barack Obama favors bleeding them dry, preferring sanctions over military action, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney would bomb them back to the Stone Age and it would appear Ron Paul wouldn’t do a thing even if Iran attacked Canada.

With all the War the United States has waged in the last decade I would think all but the biggest hawks are weary of never ending conflict, Iran though might be the exception. Other than the USSR, the United States has had no greater enemy over the last thirty-three years and, of course, the USSR is no longer a problem.

Iran/US relations started weakening quickly after the people of Iran overthrew the Shah, a “King” the United States helped to install. It deteriorated completely less than a year after the Iranian (Islamic) revolution when a group of students took hostages at the US embassy. The students accused the embassy’s personnel of being CIA spies who wanted to overthrow the Islamic Republic just as they did to democratically elected Mosaddegh in the 50s. Ayatollah Khomeini backed the students 100%.

The rise of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979

Relations haven’t changed much since those days; aside from the Iran-Iraq war of the eighties both countries have all but ignored each other… until 2002. In President George Bush’s State of the Union Address that year he labelled Iran, Iraq and North Korea part of an Axis of Evil. The following year Bush invaded Iraq as he deemed it to be the greatest threat of the three.

After this threat backed up by the use of force, North Korea quickly developed nuclear weapon capabilities as a deterrent to what they saw as American aggression, Iran I would imagine is trying to do the same thing. While some people say that Iran’s military might is a threat to Israel as well as its neighbours, Iran’s military budget is only 2% compared to that of the United States. A nuclear weapon is therefore its only defense; even so Iranian officials still claim its nuclear program to be strictly for energy and medical purposes (an argument most of the west, including myself, does not believe).

Assassinated Nuclear Scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan

In the past few weeks, Obama has introduced harsh new sanctions that aim to cripple the Iranian economy and its oil exports; we’ve seen another assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist and continued tough language coming from western countries. Tehran in the same time span has begun to enrich uranium in an underground bunker, threatened briefly to close the Strait of Hormuz and sentenced an Iranian-American citizen to death on espionage charges.

I am by no means a supporter of Iran or their cause; in fact I despise any country that uses religion to guide its policies, democratic or otherwise. I worry though, when a man gets backed into a corner and has nothing left to lose, this man won’t necessarily give up and die. Desperate times call for desperate measures and autocratic regimes never give up so easily. Iran just might be lured into starting a war it had no intention of fighting.

So, I’m still left with an unanswered question: Is Barack Obama’s sudden tougher stance on Iran just to help his re-election aspirations or is the Iranian threat a clear and present danger? Perhaps it’s just good timing? I’ll leave the answer to you and time will tell. One thing is certain however, if war breaks out not much good will come of it.

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NewsPoliticsQuiet Mikes Mumblings

The Israeli Government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems to be on a one way ticket to oblivion. His right-wing hawkish stances are jeopardizing peace in a region where the Arab Spring is still going strong heading into autumn. To make things worse, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting Israel’s socio-economic problems.

The  UN recently released its  report into  Israel’s raid of the Gaza-bound ship in which nine Turkish demonstrators were killed last year. The 105-page  report stated that  Israel’s actions were “excessive and unreasonable.” Turkey has since downgraded diplomatic ties with Israel, expelling the Israeli ambassador and suspending military co-operation between the countries because of the lack of an apology from the Netanyahu Government. Turkey has been at peace with Israel since 1948.

On another front, the Arab Spring has so far seen the overthrow of several long time autocracies including that of long time Israeli ally Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Most Egyptians are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but still recognize Israel’s right to exist and have no desire for confrontation unless provoked.

Two weeks ago while chasing down Palestinian militants, the IDF accidently killed four Egyptian soldiers and police officers patrolling the border. Egypt recalled their ambassador to Israel in response putting a strain on a peace agreement in effect since 1979’s Camp David peace treaty. The damage could yet be worse if Israel’s perceived aggression plays out in Egypt’s upcoming elections.

Israel’s tangible rapport with Syria will end as soon as President Bashar al-Assad goes down the same road as Mubarak. He has no love for Israel, but he has been a force for stability on Syria and Lebanon’s border with Israel. This leaves only Jordan with a strong peace treaty and even that is a little shaky.

The UN vote on a Palestinian State should take place on Sept 20th

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his right wing coalition is moving closer and closer to bringing the country back decades in foreign policy and all on the heels of a vote on Palestinian Statehood at the United Nations.

Netanyahu is of course vehemently against a UN vote and says that if they dare to take their case to the United Nations he may declare the Oslo agreement of 1993 null and void, meaning they would be enemies once again. People don’t remember the noteworthy aspect of that agreement; Israel had recognized Palestinian rights and the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist. I can’t help but ponder how many of Israel’s current problems would be helped by a “Yes” vote… of course that’s only if Israel acknowledges it.

The truth is, Netanyahu would rather sacrifice years of progress by maintaining the status quo in order to keep the settlers and religious base happy. His ideology is now starting to weigh in on the domestic side as well; his Tea Party-style economics are driving hundreds of thousands into the streets in protest.

A half-million people took to the streets on Saturday in various Israeli cities to complain about huge housing prices, privatization (Israel’s once heavily state-run economy has been heavily privatized) and government pervaded commercial corruption. The protests are going into their third month with nothing more than a non-binding inquiry into the country’s domestic problems.

It would seem to me that Netanyahu is doing everything in his power to avoid peace when it is clearly in his best interest (and everyone else’s for that matter). Imagine taking all that money in aid and investing it in its own people instead of bombs, fences and illegal settlements. They have yet to truly acknowledge this point, but I wonder how many of those protesters realize it.

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