When the dark forces of Hindutva fascism in Kashmir and Zionist colonialism in Palestine are mercilessly oppressing and destroying the captive populations of the two countries, it seems the dreams of freedom and independence have also become victims of the long knives of the oppressors.

A famous Afro-American writer and poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) puts the trauma of the oppressed in the following poem.

—

𝐎𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 – 𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐦 𝐛𝐲 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐇𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐬

Now dreams

Are not available

To the dreamers,

Nor songs

To the singers.

In some lands

Dark night

And cold steel

Prevail

But the dream

Will come back,

And the song

Break

Its jail.

–

— Nasir Khan

Israel is the new Golden Calf of Western political establishments. It is eulogised, worshipped and commonly seen as sacrosanct. The ‘Holocaust’ industry is also its big stick with which Israel has subdued the West and many other world regions. No one who holds or aspires to hold any high political or official position in the West can dare to say a word about the way the Zionists have manipulated the event of the Holocaust to justify the colonisation of Palestine and silence any criticism of their brutal occupation, rampant killings and illegal expansion in the occupied territories.

Integrity Lastby William J. Astore, Antiwar. com, Posted on August 28, 2023

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

“Integrity First” is the fundamental core value of the U.S. Air Force. Two other core values speak to “service before self” and “excellence in all we do.” But integrity remains the wellspring, and it’s the U.S. military’s stunning lack of integrity that has cost the American people and indeed the world so dearly over the last half-century.

Tonkin Gulf. My Lai. The Pentagon Papers. WMD in Iraq. Abu Ghraib. The Afghan War Papers. So many instances of “official” lies and distortions. So many lost wars where no senior officers were ever held accountable. Put up, shut up, fuck up, cover up, move up, seems to be the operating manual for success.

Last September, I wrote an article for TomDispatch: “Something is rotten in the U.S. military.” I suggested that integrity was now optional in that military, that lies and dishonor plagued America’s war machine. Evidently, those lies, that dishonor, is working just fine for the Pentagon as its budget continues to soar.

These thoughts occurred to me yet again as I read Seymour Hersh’s retrospective account of Major General Antonio (Tony) Taguba’s withering investigation of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Taguba, a man of integrity, conducted an official – and honest – investigation of torture and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib; his reward for his honesty, his service, his excellence was not a commendation and promotion but threats, ostracism, and the death of his career as an Army officer.

Sy Hersh’s article captures the rot at the core of the Pentagon and the U.S. government. Here Hersh speaks recently to Taguba:

[Taguba] “I was not a whistleblower. I knew I was in trouble when I was given the assignment [to investigate abuse at Abu Ghraib], but when you see those photos what can you do? I was a dead man walking.

“The kids were trained as traffic cops and then were told to transport [Iraqi] detainees. That’s how they got to Abu Ghraib. They weren’t trained for that but they had vehicles and rifles, just undisciplined kids with incompetent leadership and they were on the list to go home. They had all their equipment packed in Kuwait and ready to be shipped. And then they were told to stay behind.”

I [Hersh] asked: Would he do it again? “Sure,” Tony [Taguba] said, “I was hamstrung by the thirty days I had to investigate. I do not think I fulfilled my mission. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was blaming the soldiers, but underneath they had no operational plan” for dealing with the prisoners.

“In hindsight, there was nothing I did to compromise my integrity. But integrity in the military and elsewhere is a bumper sticker. There is no reward for telling the truth.” [Emphasis added]

“There is no reward for telling the truth” in the U.S. military. That statement by retired General Taguba should move all Americans to take action against a military that has so clearly and tragically lost its way.

One suggestion: Cut the Pentagon budget in half and insist that it must pass a financial audit else forfeit all taxpayer funding. That might wake up a few generals and admirals.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.

Open letter calls on governments to urge India to end persecution and targeting of Kashmiri human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters, and political prisoners

Indian paramilitary troopers stand guard on eve of India’s Independence Day in Srinagar, on 14 August 2023 (AFP)

By MEE staff

Published date: 24 August 2023 21:13 BST | Last update:1 day 12 hours ago

Amnesty International and five other rights organisations signed an open letter calling for an end to human rights violations in Kashmir and the release of jailed human rights defenders and political prisoners ahead of the G20 summit scheduled next month in New Delhi, India.

The letter, published on 23 August and addressed to representatives of G20 member countries, guest countries and invited international organisations, brought forth concerns regarding human rights violations occurring in Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK). 

“As your leaders prepare to attend the G20 Summit in September 2023, we urge your government to raise these issues directly and forthrightly with the government of India in accordance with your obligations under international law and call on India to adhere to its international legal obligations,” the letter states.

The letter says that since 2019 – when India revoked Article 370A and Article 35A, stripping Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status – the government has “continued its repressive policies including restricting freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association and failed to investigate and prosecute alleged violations committed by its military, paramilitary, police and other forces”.

Since 1947, both India and Pakistan have asserted their rights to the contested territory, with each nation administering portions of it.

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The letter was signed by Amnesty International; the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances; the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development; CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation; Front Line Defenders; and the Kashmir Law & Justice Project.

In November 2021, prominent human rights defender Khurram Parvez was arbitrarily detained by India’s National Investigation Agency. Parvez, the director of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for “funding terrorism under the garb of protection of human rights”.

In March 2023, the National Investigation Agency summoned noted Kashmiri journalist Irfan Mehra, who had worked with JKCCS, and arrested him for his association with the non-profit organisation. 

“The Bharatiya Janata Party uses extreme law and policy to further forms of coloniality in Kashmir to establish a Hindu nationalist state,” Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, told Middle East Eye.

“Impunity and authoritarian laws are used to repress civilians, disallow bail, silence civil society dissent and social movements, punish expressions of grief, rage and mourning, and harm human rights work and media reportage,” Chatterji said.

UN rapporteur calls on India to end attacks on human rights activists in Kashmir

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In their open letter, the organisations call on governments to urge the Indian government to immediately and unconditionally release Parvez, and Mehraj, as well as to drop all charges against them and end “the ongoing persecution and targeting of Kashmiri human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters, and political prisoners”.

They also called on them to allow civil society to freely operate in IAK and cease their “longstanding obstruction of international civil society and inter-governmental organisations”. 

In March, Mary Lowler, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, lamented about the shrinking landscape of civil society in the Kashmir valley and called for the immediate release and the closing of the investigations against Parvez and Mehraj in a statement. 

“The arrest and detention of persons for exercising their human rights are arbitrary. There must be accountability and remedy where such abusive actions are taken.”

“Time and time again, the government has been called upon to address the fundamental issues with the country’s anti-terrorism framework and its misuse to smear and silence human rights defenders,” Lawlor said.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, 21 August 2023

The ex-Pakistani prime minister had many failings. But a recent leaked cable regarding Imran Khan’s military-backed ouster lays bare how the US government uses its power to influence events around the world and how the mainstream press conceals this from the public.

The saga of ousted Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan is a perfect case study in the way that US power functions in the world, and how the propaganda that’s used to conceal that power is shaped to mislead the general public.

Khan, a former cricket superstar who since his 2018 election win has butted heads with the US government over, among other things, using Pakistan as a launching pad for drone strikes, was removed from the presidency by a no-confidence vote in April 2022, partly fueled by Khan’s attempt to reappoint a friendly spy chief in advance of a coming election against the wishes of the country’s powerful military, partly by disillusionment among his coalition partners over his government’s failings. Those failings were legitimate and very real, including imposing International Monetary Fund–driven austerity after having vowed to avoid the organization.

In any case, Khan has said that the vote was part of a US plot to oust him even before it was held, an accusation he continued to repeat for the next year and a half. Khan claimed to have a document, a copy of a Pakistani diplomatic cable he couldn’t publicly show for fear of revealing government secrets, that showed assistant US secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu pressuring Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States over the no-confidence vote due to Khan’s entreaties to Russia, while warning that leaving him in power would isolate Pakistan from the Western world.

Everyone involved denied it. The Pakistani military did, the country’s information minister and opposition party politician did (“fake propaganda”), and so did the US government, strenuously so. Washington denied Khan’s allegation at least three separate times: deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel insisted “there is not and there has never been a truth to” it, the department’s senior advisor and spokesperson Ned Price called it “propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation — lies,” and spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US government “does not have a position on one political candidate or party versus another in Pakistan.”

The media quickly followed suit, accusing Khan of having simply invented the tale as a cynical ruse to stay in power and widely charging him with shopping around a “conspiracy theory” — a term that’s literally accurate, given that Khan was alleging a foreign conspiracy to oust him, but which in today’s political discourse is a close cousin of “misinformation,” one that effectively means “absurd and nefarious lie.”

Most of this commentary followed the same broad pattern: no evidence had yet emerged for Khan’s claims, and the potentially guilty parties had denied it, so it must not be true; Khan was deliberately spreading an anti-American conspiracy to play to his political base, knowing they would have purchase in Pakistan’s political culture given drone bombings and other long-standing outrages created by US involvement; and that it was ridiculous to think the United States had the power or inclination to do this. Often, a think tank fellow or US-friendly diplomat would be quoted making one or more of these points, lending them authority firmly establishing it an open and shut case.

All of these elements found their way into the Asia Research Centre’s Krzysztof Iwanek’s April 2022 piece in the Diplomat on the subject, which also picks apart the timeline of events to claim that not only could it not have happened, but that it couldn’t have had any connection with Khan’s February 24, 2022, flight to Moscow. “Khan seems to suggest that Washington is capable of changing a government in Islamabad if the US does not like Pakistan’s foreign policy,” he wrote. “But a quick review of relations reveals this as merely fantasy.”

“There was no US conspiracy against Khan,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Center for International Studies research fellow Maham Javaid wrote in the Boston Globe. Khan had simply “turned fiction into fact, at least for his followers.” He was simply “trying to tap into anti-American sentiments to mobilize support” despite having not “a shred of evidence” for his claim, former Pakistan ambassador to the United States and UN Maleeha Lodhi was quoted saying by CNN. “This is nonsense,” wrote Hamid Mir in the Washington Post.

In Haaretz, Hamza Azhar Salam called it an “inescapable conclusion” that Khan had simply invented a conspiracy theory that’s not only anti-American but antisemitic (though the latter was never explained). The Wall Street Journal went further, not just calling Khan’s claim a “conspiracy ploy,” but suggesting that Khan’s diplomatic cable was faked by his team.

Fast-forward a year and a bit. Earlier this month, the Intercept published that very cable in full, leaked to the outlet by a source in the Pakistani military uneasy with its role in Khan’s ouster and the political crackdown that followed, and which is closely in line with what Khan had publicly argued.

According to the cable, Lu pointed to Khan’s visit to Moscow while raising concerns “about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine),” adding that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” Lu then mentioned that “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” but warned that “it will be tough going ahead” if Khan remained in power, and that “isolation of the prime minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.”

In sum, Khan’s maximalist charge — that the entire no-confidence vote was orchestrated by Washington as part of a plot to shunt him from power — is, at least by the evidence released so far, an overstatement. But the US State Department did clearly make use of the existing no-confidence vote, which was born in the first place from Khan’s domestic failings and Pakistan’s internal political machinations, to lean on its government by making a mob boss–like threat, to ensure the vote went the way it wanted.

On top of that, it did so precisely because of Khan’s visit to Moscow and his neutral position on the Ukraine war, a position which Washington at the time was, largely unsuccessfully, trying to dissuade much of the world from taking.

This isn’t surprising. The United States is the world’s most powerful country, its biggest economy, leads a powerful military alliance that is itself one of the world’s biggest and one of its most well-funded military forces, and funds even just the CIA with an amount equivalent to or more than some countries’ GDP. It gives billions of dollars of aid to Pakistan and has a close relationship with its military and security services.

Maybe most importantly, its government has meddled in other countries’ elections dozens of times and even outwardly brags about pulling the strings of political events around the world. Knowing all this, it’s more absurd to believe the United States doesn’t have the ability or inclination to influence political events in Pakistan than to believe it does. And the strenuous State Department denials that there was any US role in this suggest that the Joe Biden administration well understands that Lu’s comments to the ambassador weren’t meaningless and innocent.

Yet as we can see, many commentators — often highly credentialed voices with powerful institutional backing who are published in influential establishment news outlets — rushed to categorically dismiss the idea as fantastical and false and to declare anyone who advanced it as outside the bounds of seriousness. They were themselves spreading misinformation at the same time they were claiming to be correcting the record, taking a strident, absolute position on something that, at that point, it was impossible for them to know with full certainty was true or false.

And because there’s rarely any professional consequences in US media for these kinds of errors if they happen to line up with US government interests, everyone involved will simply move on. Some, in fact, are choosing to double down.

There is a style of dissenting commentary, usually on the Left, that too readily accepts claims of US culpability before all the evidence is out, while sometimes overstating US involvement and level of control of events around the world. But the opposite is far more widespread: commentators and political figures who presume the fact that evidence hasn’t yet surfaced (or simply ignore it if it does) means any such claims are obviously untrue and absurd, and that we should rule them out from the get-go — even though we have a mountain of examples from recent and distant history of the US government carrying out coups, fomenting unrest, and trying to engineer regime change, with documentary evidence often taking years to surface.

There’s one final irony to this. The Biden administration has cast the war over which it pushed for Khan’s ouster as one being waged against imperialism and on behalf of democracy, national sovereignty, and a “rules-based international order.” Yet here the administration is injecting itself into another country’s domestic political dispute and using its sole-superpower status to exert pressure so that it gets the political outcome it wants.

It’s as clear-cut a violation as you can get of every one of these principles. But it does fit neatly with the principle that, sadly, still more or less governs the world: powerful states can more or less do whatever they want on the world stage.

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Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

 Introductory remarks: Ted Snider, a U.S. foreign policy columnist, discusses the horrors of this war and the high numbers of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, which Washington and its Western allies rarely mention. The Zelensky regime keeps a heavy lid of secrecy on the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers but rather emphasizes the heavy losses the Ukrainian army is inflicting upon the Russian fighters. The war is proving a great disaster for the Ukrainians. The only sensible way is to let diplomacy work and the two sides seek an end to the war by negotiations. However, Washington had its objectives in mind, and it prevented Ukraine from entering into any negotiations with Moscow or any compromises to that end.

— Nasir Khan

by Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute, Aug 21, 2023

Getting a count of Ukraine’s dead that isn’t the output of someone’s propaganda machine is difficult to do. But the number of dead is indisputably a horror. Measuring the maiming of Ukraine solely in deaths, though, is an injustice to the depth of the Ukrainian wound.

It is not just that using tens of thousands as the unit in which to measure the dead may be an understatement meant to maintain morale and keep Ukrainians fighting with the political West providing support. Deaths may be the worst way to scar a nation, but they are not the only way to scar a nation.

The promise that the sacrifice of soldiers in the counteroffensive would be worth it has been deflated and hope has been lost. The payment in lives it purchased is little, and a senior western diplomat told CNN that “for them to really make progress that would change the balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely.”

The result is despair. An August 10 report from Kiev in The Washington Post begins with the words, “This nation is worn out” and continues with the hopeless observation that “Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.”

Reports of Ukrainians lining up to fight in the early days of the war have been replaced by reports of Ukrainians doing everything they can to elude the draft. On August 11, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed every director of a regional military recruitment center. Though reports focused on the crackdown of corruption, the real news was what the corruption was selling. Those who were willing to volunteer have gone to the front and fallen; those who are left have seen the price and no longer want to go. The heads of the recruitment centers were fired for taking bribes to help them. They were fired for “exploiting their positions to enrich themselves through draft evasion schemes.” Zelensky described the “cynicism” and “treason” as the “illicit enrichment” and “unlawful benefit” for the “illegal transfer of persons liable for military service across the border.”

But death and despair are not the only costs. So too are loss of limb and loss of mental health. A Washington Post article of August 15 describes “Bodies ripped to pieces. Arms and legs mangled beyond recognition” from mines and “the mental anguish of amputating limb after limb after limb.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians “have lost one or more limbs since the start of the war” before saying that “the actual figure could be higher.”

There are also unconfirmed reports of high numbers of suicides in the Ukrainian armed forces. A New York Times piece called “The Hidden Trauma of Ukraine’s Soldiers” reports on the “crisis of wounded psyches, in addition to broken bodies, among Ukrainian soldiers.” The report says that the need for “treatment for psychological trauma…far outstrips Ukraine’s ability to address it.”

There is no sign of an end to the horror. But what comes next for Ukraine may be worse.

Russia may not stay on the defensive forever. After a counteroffensive comes the next offensive. Russia has been staying on the defensive, allowing Ukraine to walk into their prepared positions and be devoured. As the Ukrainian armed forces become frustrated and reduced, Russia may be biding its time to turn the counteroffensive into the next big Russian offensive.

There has apparently been unofficial chatter in Russia about the inevitability of a future Russian offensive. Former general Konstantin Pulikovsky is said to have commented that “there will definitely be an offensive. But it usually begins when we feel that the enemy is really exhausted.” On August 15, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu told a security conference in Moscow that Russia says was attended by 26 defense ministers and 75 countries that “Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted.”

Writing in Asia Times, Stephen Bryen says that “The Russians have been holding out instead of starting a big push to finish the war, trying to wear down the Ukrainians…But war planners in Moscow know how to count, and it could be they now see opportunities for a big offensive.”

While emphasizing their defensive stance, Russia has reportedly been quietly advancing in the north. Though Russia has not called it an offensive, Ukrainian officials claim Russia is “amassing vast numbers of troops and equipment along the northern frontline in Ukraine,” as well as hundreds of tanks, artillery systems, and rocket launchers.

Military analyst and ret. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis has repeatedly pointed out that, even if Ukraine were to launch and win a counteroffensive, the rate of casualties and deaths would be so high, they would “have spent [their] last remaining force with which to conduct offensives” or future operations, leaving them vulnerable to a Russian offensive.

If the goal, as U.S. President Joe Biden always says, is to put Ukraine in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table,” then that opportunity has twice passed. It passed in the days before the war when Ukraine could have kept all its territory and avoided all of the deaths in exchange for an American promise not to admit Ukraine into NATO when Moscow presented its proposal on security guarantees. It passed again in November 2022 when Ukraine recaptured massive amounts of territory, and military analysts warned of an inflection point at which Ukraine could likely not capture more territory but could lose more territory and more lives.

The third opportunity is now. The counteroffensive is failing and pushing it further may just be setting the battlefield for a Russian offensive.

One day, Ukrainians, every one of whom will have known someone who was killed or wounded in the war, may remember in despair that Russia would likely have called off the war for a promise of Ukraine’s neutrality, which is less than the U.S. demands of Cuba. Zelensky was willing to make that promise in negotiations in the first weeks of the war. Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute, reports that the large majority of Ukrainians opposed joining NATO in every poll that asked the question before 2014. In 2008, when NATO opened the door to Ukraine, 58% of Ukrainians opposed it. As late as May 2022, three months into the war with Russia, still only 59% of Ukrainians said they would vote to join NATO.

They will also remember in despair that all of the territories now annexed by Russia, excluding Crimea but including an autonomous Donbas, could have remained part of Ukraine. Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, a leading scholar on radical movements in Ukraine, says in a recent article that “on the eve of the invasion, the largest opposition party…advocated Ukrainian neutrality and the full implementation of the Minsk Accords.” At the height of the political crisis over the implementation of the Minsk Accords, Ishchenko reports that only 26% of Ukrainians supported the “No” campaign.

Ukrainians may one day remember that, after they had negotiated to their satisfaction in Belarus, again in negotiations with then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and yet again in Istanbul, they fought on in service of a wider American war that led to all their deaths, broken bodies, and broken minds.

If the war goes on, all of this will likely only get worse. If the goal is to negotiate before Ukraine is in an even more vulnerable position and before it is even more wounded, then the time to end the fighting and negotiate a diplomatic settlement is now.

The Israel Lobby’s Useful Idiot

To stand up to Israel has a political cost few, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you do stand up, it singles you out as someone who puts principles before expediency.

By Chris Hedges, Original to ScheerPost, Consortium News, Aug 15. 2023

The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of U.S. dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless.

Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars.

The crude rockets fired at Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations — a war crime because they target civilians — are not remotely comparable to the 2,000 pound “bunker-buster” Mark-84 bombs with a “kill radius” of over 32 yards and which “create a supersonic wave of pressure when they explode” that have been dropped by Israel on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, the thousands of Palestinian killed and wounded and the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure, including electrical grids and water purification plants.

Palestinians in Gaza live in an open air prison that is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. They are denied passports and travel documents.

Malnutrition is endemic in the Occupied Territories. “High proportions” of the Palestinian population are “deficient in vitamins A, D, and E, which play key roles in vision, bone health, and immune function,”according to a 2022 World Bank report. The report also notes that over 50 percent of those aged six to 23 in Gaza and over half of its pregnant women are anemic and “more than a quarter of pregnant women and more than a quarter of children aged 6–23 months [in the West Bank are] anemic.”

Eighty-eight percent of Gaza’s children suffer from depression, following 15 years of the Israeli blockade, according to a 2022 report from Save the Children and over 51 percent of children were diagnosed with PTSD following the third major war on Gaza in 2014. Only 4.3 percent of the water in Gaza is considered fit for human consumption. Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsanitary and overcrowded hovels. They often lack basic medical care. Unemployment rates are among the highest in the world at 46.6 percent.

Zionism’s goal, since before Israel’s inception, has been to displace Palestinians from their land and reduce those who remain to a struggle for basic subsistence, as Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe, notes:

“10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country.

The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew)…

Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants.”

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, 1948. (UN Photo)

These political and historical facts, which I reported on as an Arabic speaker for seven years, four of them as The Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, are hard to ignore. Even from a distance.

I watched Israeli soldiers taunt boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle. The soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. In the Israeli lexicon this becomes children caught in crossfire.

I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on densely packed neighborhoods. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children, lined up in neat rows. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory.

I watched Israel demolish homes and apartment blocks to create buffer zones between the Palestinians and Israeli troops. I interviewed destitute families camped in the rubble of their homes. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.

I stood in the bombed remains of schools as well as medical clinics and mosques. I heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites.

I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.” Ironically, there is evidence of the Israeli military using Palestinians as human shields, which Israel’s High Court deemed illegal in 2005.

There is a perverted logic to Israel’s use of the Big Lie —Große Lüge. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.

There is a heavy political price to pay for defying Israel, whose overt interference in the U.S. political process makes the most tepid protests about Israeli policy a political death wish. The Palestinians are poor, forgotten and alone. And this is why the defiance of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the central issue facing any politician who claims to speak on behalf of the vulnerable and the marginalized.

To stand up to Israel has a political cost few, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you do stand up, it singles you out as someone who puts principles before expediency, who is willing to fight for the wretched of the earth and, if necessary, sacrifice your political future to retain your integrity. Kennedy fails this crucial test of political and moral courage.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at an event in Phoenix in 2017. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Kennedy, instead, regurgitates every lie, every racist trope, every distortion of history and every demeaning comment about the backwardness of the Palestinian people peddled by the most retrograde and far-right elements of Israeli society. He peddles the myth of what Pappe calls “Fantasy Israel.” This alone discredits him as a progressive candidate. It calls into question his judgment and sincerity. It makes him another Democratic Party hack who dances to the macabre tune the Israeli government plays.

Kennedy has vowed to make “the moral case for Israel,” which is the equivalent of making the moral case for apartheid South Africa. He repeats, almost verbatim, talking points from the Israeli propaganda playbook put together by the Republican pollster and political strategist, Frank Luntz. The 112-page study, marked “not for distribution or publication,” which was leaked to Newsweek, was commissioned by The Israel Project. It was written in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009 — when 1,387 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed.

The strategy document is the blueprint for how Israeli politicians and lobbyists sell Israel. It exposes the wide gap between what Israeli politicians say and what they know to be the truth. It is tailored to tell the outside world, especially Americans, what they want to hear. The report is required reading for anyone attempting to deal with the Israeli propaganda machine.

The document, for example, suggests telling the outside world that Israel “has a right to defensible borders,” but advises Israelis to refuse to define what the borders should be. It advises Israeli politicians to justify the refusal by Israel to allow 750,000 Palestinians and their descendants, who were expelled from their country during the 1948 war, to return home, although the right of return is guaranteed under international law, by referring to this right as a “demand.”

Frank Luntz at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, November 2015. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

It also recommends arguing that Palestinians are seeking mass migrations to seize land inside Israel. It suggests mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Iraq, Syria and Egypt, who fled anti-Semitism and violence in the Arab world after the creation of the Jewish state. The document recommends saying these refugees also “left property behind,” in essence justifying the Israeli pogrom by the pogrom Arab states carried out after 1948. It recommends blaming the poverty among Palestinians on “Arab nations” that have not provided “a better life for Palestinians.”

What is most cynical about the report is the tactic of expressing a faux sympathy for the Palestinians, who are blamed for their own oppression.

“Show Empathy for BOTH sides!” the document reads. “The goal of pro-Israel communications is not simply to make people who already love Israel feel good about that decision. The goal is to win new hearts and minds for Israel without losing the support Israel already has.” It says that this tactic will “disarm” audiences.

I doubt Kennedy has read or heard of Luntz’s report. But he has been spoon-fed its talking points and naively spits them back. Israel only wants peace. Israel does not engage in torture. Israel is not an apartheid state. Israel gives Israeli Arabs political and civic rights they do not have in other parts of the Middle East. Palestinians are not deliberately targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel respects civil liberties and gender and marriage rights. Israel has “the best judiciary in the world.”

Kennedy makes other claims, such as his bizarre statement that the Palestinian Authority pays Palestinians to kill Jews anywhere in the world along with falsifications of elemental Middle Eastern history, which are so absurd I will ignore them. But I list below examples from the volumes of evidence that implode the Luntz-inspired talking points Kennedy repeats on behalf of the Israel lobby, not that any evidence can probably puncture his self-serving attachment to “Fantasy Israel.”

Apartheid

A Palestinian boy and Israeli soldier in front of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, August 2004. (Justin McIntosh, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

The 2017 U.N. report: “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” concludes that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.” Since 1967, Palestinians as a people have lived in what the report refers to as four “domains,” in which the fragments of the Palestinian population are ostensibly treated differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from the apartheid regime.

Those domains are:

1. Civil law, with special restrictions, governing Palestinians who live as citizens of Israel;

2. Permanent residency law governing Palestinians living in the city of Jerusalem;

3. Military law governing Palestinians, including those in refugee camps, living since 1967 under conditions of belligerent occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip;

4. Policy to preclude the return of Palestinians, whether refugees or exiles, living outside territory under Israel’s control.

On July 19, 2018, the Israeli Knesset voted “to approve the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, constitutionally enshrining Jewish supremacy and the identity of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” the Haifa-based civil liberties group Adalah explained. It is the supreme law in Israel “capable of overriding any ordinary legislation.”

In 2021 Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published its report “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

The report reads:

“In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another — Palestinians. A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.

Jewish citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding the Gaza Strip). The Green Line means next to nothing for them: whether they live west of it, within Israel’s sovereign territory, or east of it, in settlements not formally annexed to Israel, is irrelevant to their rights or status.

Where Palestinians live, on the other hand, is crucial. The Israeli regime has divided the area into several units that it defines and governs differently, according Palestinians different rights in each. This division is relevant to Palestinians only…Israel accords Palestinians a different package of rights in every one of these units — all of which are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens. “

“Since 1948,” the reports continues, “Israel has taken over 90% of land within its sovereign territory and built hundreds of Jewish communities, yet not one for Palestinians (with the exception of several communities built to concentrate the Bedouin population, after dispossessing them of most of their property rights),” the report reads.

Israeli military forces arriving to demolish the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ein Karzaliyah on Jan. 8, 2014. (B’Tselem, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

“Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the Occupied Territories, dispossessing Palestinians of more than 2,000 km2 on various pretexts. In violation of international law, it has built over 280 settlements in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) for more than 600,000 Jewish citizens. It has devised a separate planning system for Palestinians, designated primarily to prevent construction and development, and has not established a single new Palestinian community.”

[“As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state,” said ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2010.

Three years earlier, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.”

A former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel, put it even more bluntly. “In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state, in the hope that the status quo is temporary, is an apartheid state.”]

Targeting Civilians

Tanzanians in Dar es Salaam protesting the 2008-2009 Gaza bombardment by Israel. (Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)

Contrary to Kennedy’s claims that “the policy of the Israeli military is to always only attack military targets,” the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military, and other branches of the Israeli security apparatus, has been extensively documented by Israeli and international organizations.

The 2010 Goldstone report, which is over 500 pages, investigated Israel’s 22-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from Dec. 27, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. The United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament endorsed the report.

The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than 6,000 homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. Three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets fired into Israel during the assault.

The report’s key findings include that:

“• Numerous instances of Israeli lethal attacks on civilians and civilian objects were intentional, including with the aim of spreading terror, that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields and that such tactics had no justifiable military objective.

• Israeli forces engaged in the deliberate killing, torture and other inhuman treatment of civilians and deliberately caused extensive destruction of property, outside any military necessity, carried out wantonly and unlawfully.

• Israel violated its duty to respect the right of Gaza’s population to an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, water and housing. “

On June 14 of this year, B’Tselem reported that “Top Israeli officials” are “criminally liable for knowingly” ordering airstrikes which were “expected to harm civilians, including children, in the Gaza Strip.”

Contrary to the myth propagated by Kennedy, reports and investigations, both by the U.N. as well as by rights groups, domestic and international, routinely cover suspected or known violations by Palestinian militants when they investigate alleged war crimes. As B’Tselem noted in the same 2019 report, in total, four Israelis were killed and 123 wounded.

Last month, the U.N.’s expert on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Italian international lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese, presented her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. It makes for very grim reading.

“Deprivation of liberty has been a central element of Israel’s occupation since its inception. Between 1967-2006 Israel has incarcerated over 800,000 Palestinians in the occupied territory. Although spiking during Palestinian uprisings, incarceration has become a quotidian reality. Over 100,000 Palestinians were detained during the First Intifada (1987-1993), 70,000 during the Second Intifada (2000-2006), and over 6,000 during the ‘Unity Intifada’ (2021). Approximately 7,000 Palestinians, including 882 children, were arrested in 2022. Currently, almost 5,000 Palestinians, including 155 children, are detained by Israel, 1,014 of them without charge or trial.”

Torture

Around 1,200 complaints “alleging violence in Shin Bet [The Israeli Security Agency] interrogations” were filed between 2001 and 2019, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

“Zero indictments have been brought,” the committee reports. “This is yet another illustration of the complete systemic impunity enjoyed by the Shin Bet’s interrogators.”

Coercive methods include sexual harassment and humiliation, beatings, stress positions imposed for hours and interrogations that lasted as long as 19 hours as well as threats of violence against family members.

“They said they would kill my wife and children. They said they would cancel my mother’s and sister’s permits for medical treatments,” one survivor said in 2016. “I couldn’t sleep because even when I was in my cell, they would wake me up every 15 minutes… I couldn’t tell the difference between day and night… I still scream in my sleep,” another said in 2017.

Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer expressed “his utmost concern” after a December 2017 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court exempting security agents from criminal investigation despite their undisputed use of coercive “pressure techniques” against a Palestinian detainee, Assad Abu Gosh. He called the ruling a “license to torture.”

Abu Gosh “was reportedly subjected to ill-treatment including beatings, being slammed against walls, having his body and fingers bent and tied into painful stress positions and sleep deprivation, as well as threats, verbal abuse, and humiliation. Medical examinations confirm that Mr. Abu Gosh suffers from various neurologic injuries resulting from the torture he suffered.”

Civil Liberties

“Gas the Arabs!” graffiti in Hebron, 2008. (Magne Hagesæter, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

In the November 2022 elections in Israel, a far-right theocratic, nationalist and openly racist coalition took power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power,” party, is the Minister of National Security. Otzma Yehudit is populated with former members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing a “Nazi-like ideology” that included advocating the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as all Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.

His appointment, along with that of other far-right ideologues, including Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal Zionists used to defend Israel — that it is the only democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism.

The new coalition government is reportedly preparing legislation that would be used to disqualify almost all Palestinian/Arab Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament, as well as ban their parties from standing in elections. The recent judicial “reforms” gut the independence and oversight of the Israeli courts. The government has also proposed shutting down Kan, the public broadcasting network, although that has been amended to fixing its “flaws”. Smotrich, who opposes LGBTQ rights and refers to himself as a “fascist homophobe,” said on Tuesday he wouldfreeze all funds to Israel’s Palestinian communities and East Jerusalem.

Israel has promulgated a series of laws to curtail public freedoms, brand all forms of Palestinian resistance as terrorism, and label supporters of Palestinian rights, even if they are Jewish, as anti-Semites. The amendment of one of Israel’s principle apartheid laws, the 2010 “Village Committees Law,” grants neighborhoods with up to 700 households the right to reject people from moving in to “preserve the fabric” of the community. Israel has over 65 laws that are used to discriminatedirectly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the Occupied Territories.

Israel’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Interreligious marriage in Israel is also prohibited.

As explained by Jacob N. Simon, who served as the President of the Jewish Legal Society at the Michigan State University College of Law:

“The combination of the blood line related requirements to be considered Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinical Court and the restriction of marriage requiring religious ceremonies shows an intent to maintain race purity. At its core, this is no different than the desire for pure blooded Aryans in Nazi Germany or pure blooded whites in the Jim Crow Southern United States.”

Those who support these discriminatory laws and embrace Israeli apartheid are blinded by willful ignorance, racism or cynicism. Their goal is to dehumanize Palestinians, champion an intolerant Jewish chauvinism and entice the naïve and the gullible into justifying the unjustifiable. Kennedy, bereft of a moral compass and a belief system rooted in verifiable fact, has not only failed the Palestinians, he has failed us.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

As Ukraine faces “staggering” losses and US public mood shifts, the Biden administration seeks billions more to prolong the war.

Aaron Mate, 14. aug. 2023

The Biden administration is asking Congress for an additional $24 billion for the Ukraine proxy war, more than half of it in military aid. The request comes one week after a CNN poll showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans oppose additional funding to Kiev.

For a White House committed to ensuring a Russian “quagmire” in Ukraine, public opinion is of secondary importance. Two months into a widely hyped yet now faltering Ukrainian counteroffensive, a fresh influx of NATO weaponry appears necessary to prolong the war. In one of several gloomy assessments to appear in US establishment media, a senior western diplomat tells CNN that the prospect that Ukrainian forces can “make progress that would change the balance of this conflict” is “extremely, highly unlikely.” Ukraine’s “primary challenge” is breaking through Russia’s heavily fortified defensive lines, where “Ukrainian forces have incurred staggering losses.” According to Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley, US military assessments of the war are “sobering,” with Ukraine now facing “the most difficult time of the war.”

This picture, CNN’s Jim Sciutto observes, represents “a marked change from the optimism at the start of the counteroffensive,” with Western officials now acknowledging that “those expectations were ‘unrealistic.’” The battlefield reality is so dire that it is even “now contributing to pressure on Ukraine from some in the West to begin peace negotiations, including considering the possibility of territorial concessions.”

But as Biden’s new spending request suggests, there is no sign that the US is among those Western states applying pressure for peace. After all, the stated US aim, as top officials have made clear, is not to defend Ukraine and its long-term future but to instead “weaken” Russia (Lloyd Austin) and ensure “a strategic failure for Putin,” so that Russian can “pay a longer-term price in terms of the elements of its national power.” (Jake Sullivan)

Whereas CNN’s Western sources now allow themselves to admit that their publicly voiced “optimism at the start of the counteroffensive,” was “unrealistic”, it was in fact, dishonest. As Pentagon leaks and subsequent disclosures have confirmed, US officials were well aware that Ukraine was not prepared to take on Russia’s heavily fortified defenses, but kept that assessment under wraps. Accordingly, while Ukraine’s battlefield losses are indeed “staggering”, what is perhaps most “sobering” is the fact that the Biden administration both anticipated and encouraged them.

But just like souring US public opinion, Ukrainian casualties are also a secondary concern, as the Biden administration’s more candid neoconservative proxy war partners continue to make clear.

To push through the new spending package , the White House is “counting on help from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader,” the New York Times reports. At a public event, McConnell detailed his rationale: The US, he explained, hasn’t “lost a single American in this war,” – not accurate if one counts mercenaries and private citizens, but correct in its implicit recognition that Ukraine has lost tens of thousands of lives on its American sponsors’ behalf. According to McConnell, there are additional benefits of the war that do not extend to ordinary Ukrainians: “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”

Therefore, according to prevailing Biden-McConnell policy, the US must continue to fund a war that will sacrifice many more Ukrainian lives, all so that domestic war profiteers can reap taxpayer largesse for “replenishing weapons”, and so that the US – not having its soldiers die in Ukraine – can use the opportunity for “improving our own military” for a war that it might actually fight.

Although US officials have reportedly “expressed frustration” at Ukraine’s efforts to minimize military casualties, the Zelensky government does appear to be a willing partner in McConnell’s sacrifice ritual. Ukrainian defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov is said to have told US officials that flooding Ukraine with weapons allows NATO allies to “actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”

For the benefit of weakening Russia, enriching US military contractors and serving as a NATO “testing ground,” Ukrainian lives are not the only staggering sacrifice. According to the Wall Street Journal, “20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost one or more limbs since the start of the war,” a scale unseen for a Western military since the First World War, and a potential undercount “because it takes time to register patients after they undergo” surgery.

According to veteran State Department bureaucrat Aaron David Miller, the Biden administration has no other choice but to continue sacrificing Ukrainians. The US, he explained, “is in an investment trap in Ukraine with no clear way out. Chances of a military breakthrough or a diplomatic solution are slim to none; and slim may have already left town. We’re in deep and lack the ability to do much more than react to events.” The key term here is “investment trap”: having invested in a proxy war aimed at bleeding Russia, the US is therefore obliged to continue it.

But if the US were driven by other concerns – such as Ukrainian well-being – it could consider supporting the diplomatic opportunities that it has blocked to date. Prior to Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration encouraged the Ukrainian government to crack down on political opponents; further integrate its military into NATO; avoid implementing the Minsk accords for ending its post-2014 civil war; and assault the Russian-allied Donbas. When Russia submitted detailed proposals in December 2021 to address its concerns, the White House effectively balked. And after Russia’s invasion, the US blocked a tentative peace deal that would have seen Russia withdrew to its pre-February 2022 lines. More recently, the US has pushed Ukraine into a counteroffensive that it knew had no chance, and rejected a Ukrainian NATO bid that it had long encouraged for the apparent purpose of baiting Moscow.

In short, the Biden administration has provoked this war and is now seeking a new influx of taxpayer money to prolong it. Even the latter goal is now openly admitted. At last month’s NATO summit in Lithuania, the New York Times reported, “several American and European officials acknowledged” that their “commitments” to Ukraine “make it all the more difficult to begin any real cease-fire or armistice negotiations.” Additionally, US-led “promises of Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO — after the war is over —create a strong incentive for Moscow to hang onto any Ukrainian territory it can and to keep the conflict alive.”

So long as keeping the conflict alive comes predominantly at the cost of Ukrainian lives, then Washington’s bipartisan proxy warriors clearly have no qualms about forcing a war-weary public to foot the bill.

The Biden administration ignoring public opposition to more funding for the Ukraine war follows a bipartisan tradition of Washington ignoring the public in favor of special interestsby

by Jon Reynolds, Antiwar. com, August 14, 2023

Less than a week after a CNN poll found a majority of Americans oppose sending more money to Ukraine, the Biden administration announced that it will be seeking another $24 billion in funding. If approved, the total amount spent by the US since 2022 on its proxy war against Russia will reach about $137 billion.

“We have we have seen throughout this war solid support from the American people, solid support from the Congress in a bipartisan and bicameral way for continuing to support Ukraine and we’re going to stay focused on that,” National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told CNN regarding the poll. “It’s not just important to the people of Ukraine, but it’s important to our European allies and partners, particularly our NATO allies, given that this fighting is on the on the doorstep of many of those NATO allies.”

Kirby’s comments echo those of Bush-era Vice President Dick Cheney, who, in 2008, was confronted with polling data showing a vast majority of Americans opposed the war in Iraq, and infamously responded: “So?”

Cheney continued by adding that we “cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Such blatant disregard by elected officials regarding views of the majority is clearly nothing new, but what makes it particularly dystopian is the recent emphasis by cable news channels about the merits of – and threats to – “our democracy”.

What democracy?

For years now, a majority of Americans have supported legalizing marijuana, and yet the drug war continues to rage on without an end in sight.

Polling data in 2012 – and again in 2018 – showed a majority of Americans supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and yet the US nonetheless remained in the country until 2021.

More recently, a 2023 poll showed a majority of Americans don’t want Trump or Biden to run for office next year, and yet they persist in haunting us with their unwanted presence. It was the same story back in 2016 when the choices were Trump vs Hillary Clinton, who were the “two most unpopular presidential candidates in more than 30 years of ABC News/Washington Post polling.”

Examples like these are truly endless. Time and time again, we see a majority of Americans supporting or opposing a policy and politicians blatantly ignoring them in favor of the monied interests which brought them to power.

The drug war continues – in the face of overwhelming public opposition – because special interests profiting from it spend millions every election year to support their preferred drug warrior.

Unwanted wars such as the one in Afghanistan, the one in Ukraine, or the one in Iraq – where the US still has troops as of 2023 – continue because of what has become known as the “military industrial complex” – a network of defense companies which spend millions every election year to support their hawk of choice.

There’s nothing democratic about any of this, and the talking heads on cable news networks who make repeated comments about our “democracy” are either totally oblivious and out of touch with reality or entirely complicit and invested in propping up illusions of a system that doesn’t actually exist.

In 2014, a Princeton study took data from nearly 2,000 public opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was that the opinions of the bottom 90% had no impact at all.

The study’s authors concluded that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

And while the study may have its limitations, the writing is on the wall and has been for a long time. Special interests donate millions to Biden, Trump, Mickey Mouse, or whoever, because they see it an investment opportunity – because they expect something in return when that politician gets into office.

After every election, both of the major parties repeatedly make it clear that they care more about wealthy donors than the everyday voters coming out to support them on Election Day. Sadly, the Biden administration’s support for sending billions more to Ukraine – despite what appears to be a shift in public opinion – is just more proof.

Jon Reynolds is a freelance journalist covering a wide range of topics with a primary focus on the labor movement and collapsing US empire. He writes at The Screeching Kettle at Substack. Reprinted with permission.

Consortium News, August 9, 2023

Pakistan has imposed a media blackout over the deposed prime minister and thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. Condemnation in the U.K. and U.S. has been non-existent.

Imran Khan in February 2023. (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.UK

Given the large population in the U.K. of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.

Imran Khan was last week sentenced to three years in prison — and a five-year ban from politics — for alleged embezzlement of official gifts. This follows his removal as prime minister in a C.I.A.-engineered coup, and a vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters.

It is currently illegal in Pakistan to publish or broadcast about Khan or the thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. There have been no protests from the U.K. or U.S. governments.

Imran Khan is almost certainly the least corrupt senior politician in Pakistan’s history — I admit that is not a high bar. Pakistan’s politics are — to an extent not sufficiently understood in the West — literally feudal. Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.

There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resources. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.

Imran Khan’s incredible breakthrough in the 2018 National Assembly elections shattered normal political life in Pakistan. Winning a plurality of the popular vote and the most seats, Khan’s PTI party had risen from under 1 percent of the vote in 2002 to 32 percent in 2018. 

The dates are important. It was not Khan’s cricketing heroics which made him politically popular. In 2002, when his cricket genius was much fresher in the mind than it is now, he was viewed as a joke candidate. 

In fact, it was Khan’s outspoken opposition to the United States using Pakistan as a base, and particularly his demand to stop the hundreds of dreadful U.S. drone strikes within Pakistan, that caused the surge in his support.

The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the U.S.A. had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the “War on terror,” it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the C.I.A. and U.S. military.

Safety Valve

Protesting U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan in Hong Kong, July 8, 2012. (Yu Pong, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the U.S., which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.

In power, Khan proved much more radical than the C.I.A., the British Tories and the Pakistani military had hoped. The belief that he was only a playboy dilettante at heart was soon shattered. A stream of Khan’s decisions upset the U.S. and threatened the income streams of the corrupt senior military.

Khan did not only talk about stopping the U.S. drone programme, he actually stopped it. 

Aircrew from the California Air National Guard’s 163rd Attack Wing flies an MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft in 2018. (US Air Force/Senior Airman Crystal Housman)

Khan refused offers of large amounts of money, also linked to U.S. support for an IMF loan, for Pakistan to send ground forces to support the Saudi air campaign against Yemen. I was told this by one of Khan’s ministers when I visited in 2019, on condition of a confidentiality which need no longer apply.

Khan openly criticised military corruption and, in the action most guaranteed to precipitate a C.I.A. coup, he supported the developing country movement to move trading away from the petrodollar. He accordingly sought to switch Pakistan’s oil suppliers from the Gulf states to Russia.

Relentless Hit Piece

The Guardian, the chief neo-con mouthpiece in the U.K., on Sunday published an article about Khan so tendentious it took my breath away. How about this for a bit of dishonest reporting:

“… in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.”

“Aides say”: What is this implying? 

Khan had himself shot in the legs as some kind of stunt? It was all a joke? He wasn’t actually shot but fell over and grazed a knee? It is truly disgraceful journalism.

It is hard to know whether the article’s astonishing assertion that Khan’s tenure as prime minister led to an increase in corruption in Pakistan is a deliberate lie or extraordinary ignorance. 

I am not sure whether Emma Graham-Harrison, the author of the article, has ever been to Pakistan. I suspect the closest she has been to Pakistan is meeting Jemima Goldsmith at a party.

The author, left, during a recent trip to Pakistan, where he went to Karachi, Abbottabad and the Afghan border. (Craig Murray)

“Playboy,” “dilettante,” “misogynist” — The Guardian hit piece is relentless. It is an encapsulation of the “liberal” arguments for military intervention in Muslim states, for overthrowing Islamic governments and conquering Islamic countries, in order to install Western norms, in particular the tenets of Western feminism.

I think we have seen how that playbook has ended in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, amongst others. The use of the word “claim” to engender distrust of Khan in The Guardian article is studied. He “claimed” that his years living in the U.K. had inspired him to wish to create a welfare state in Pakistan.

Why is that a dubious comment from a man who spent the majority of his personal fortune on setting up and running a free cancer hospital in Pakistan?

Khan’s efforts to remove or sideline the most corrupt generals, and those most openly in the pay of the C.I.A., are described by The Guardian as “he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.” How entirely unreasonable of him! 

Literally thousands of members of Khan’s political party are currently in jail for the crime of having joined a new political party. The condemnation by the Western establishment has been non-existent.

It is difficult to think of a country, besides Pakistan, where thousands of largely middle-class people could suddenly become political prisoners, while drawing almost no condemnation. It is of course because the U.K. supports the coup against Khan. 

But I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India.

We should not forget New Labour have also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Pervez Musharraf. 

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.UK.