The mass extermination techniques that would be used against Jews and other groups in Hitler's Germany were perfected decades earlier against black Africans in Southwest Africa (Namibia)
“I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the
Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit
that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger
race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way,
has come in and taken their place.”
“I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
“I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror.”
"Sir" Winston Churchill
Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill was literally responsible for deliberately
starving millions of people to death
Among his numerous debaucheries, Winston Churchill promoted eugenics, torture, chemical warfare, and was literally responsible for deliberately starving millions of people to death: "The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it
rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past
imperialist crimes against humanity."
By Garikai Chengu
Sunday marked the anniversary of the death of one of the most lionized leaders in the Western world: Sir Winston Churchill.
The current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has called Churchill “the greatest ever Prime Minister”, and Britons have recently voted him as the greatest Briton to have ever lived.
The story that British schoolbooks tell children about Churchill is of a British Bulldog, with unprecedented moral bravery and patriotism. He, who defeated the Nazis during World War II and spread civilisation to indigenous people from all corners of the globe. Historically, nothing could be further from the truth.
Noam Chomsky on Winston Churchill and Racism
To the vast majority of the world, where the sun once never set on the British empire, Winston Churchill remains a great symbol of racist Western imperialist tyranny, who stood on the wrong side of history.
The myth of Churchill is Britain’s greatest propaganda tool because it rewrites Churchill’s true history in order to whitewash Britain’s past imperialist crimes against humanity. The Churchill myth also perpetuates Britain’s ongoing neo-colonial and neo-liberal policies, that still, to the is day, hurt the very people around the world that Churchill was alleged to have helped civilize.
The same man whose image is polished and placed on British mantelpieces as a symbol of all that is Great about Britain was an unapologetic racist and white supremacist. “I hate Indians, they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, he once bellowed. As Churchill put it, Palestinians were simply “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung.”
In 1937, he told the Palestine Royal Commission: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
It is unsurprising that when Barack Obama became President, he returned to Britain a bust of Churchill which he found on his desk in the Oval office. According to historian Johann Hari, Mr. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch, for daring to resist Churchill’s empire.
Apart from being an unrepentant racist, Churchill was also a staunch proponent of the use of terrorism as a weapon of war.
During the Kurdish rebellion against British dictatorship in 1920, Churchill remarked that he simply did not understand the “squeamishness” surrounding the use of gas by civilized Great Britain as a weapon of terror. “I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilized tribes, it would spread a lively terror,” he remarked.
In the same year, as Secretary of State for War, Churchill sent the infamous Black and Tans to Ireland to fight the IRA. The group became known for vicious terrorist attacks on civilians which Churchill condoned and encouraged.
While today Britons celebrate Churchill’s legacy, much of the world outside the West mourns the legacy of a man who insisted that it was the solemn duty of Great Britain to invade and loot foreign lands because in Churchill’s own words Britain’s “Aryan stock is bound to triumph”.
Churchill’s legacy in the Far East, Middle East, South Asia and Africa is certainly not one of an affable British Lionheart, intent on spreading civilization amongst the natives of the world. To people of these regions the imperialism, racism, and fascism of a man like Winston Churchill can be blamed for much of the world’s ongoing conflicts and instability.
As Churchill himself boasted, he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon,” thereby placing many Jordanians under the brutal thumb of a throneless Hashemite prince, Abdullah. Historian Michael R. Burch recalls how the huge zigzag in Jordan’s eastern border with Saudi Arabia has been called “Winston’s Hiccup” or “Churchill’s Sneeze” because Churchill carelessly drew the expansive boundary after a generous lunch.
Churchill also invented Iraq. After giving Jordan to Prince Abdullah, Churchill, the great believer in democracy that he was, gave Prince Abdullah’s brother Faisal an arbitrary patch of desert that became Iraq. Faisal and Abdullah were war buddies of Churchill’s friend T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Much like the clumsy actions in Iraq of today’s great Empire, Churchill’s imperial foreign policy caused decades of instability in Iraq by arbitrarily locking together three warring ethnic groups that have been bleeding heavily ever since. In Iraq, Churchill bundled together the three Ottoman vilayets of Basra that was predominantly Shiite, Baghdad that was Sunni, and Mosul that was mainly Kurd.
Ask almost anyone outside of Iraq who is responsible for the unstable mess that Iraq is in today and they are likely to say one word, either “Bush” or “America”. However, if you asked anyone within Iraq who is mainly responsible for Iraq’s problems over the last half century and they are likely to simply say “Churchill”.
Winston Churchill convened the 1912 Conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British Middle Eastern mandate and T.E. Lawrence was the most influential delegate. Churchill did not invite a single Arab to the conference, which is shocking but hardly surprising since in his memoirs Churchill said that he never consulted the Arabs about his plans for them.
The arbitrary lines drawn in Middle Eastern sand by Churchillian imperialism were never going to withstand the test of time. To this day, Churchill’s actions have denied Jordanians, Iraqis, Kurds and Palestinians anything resembling true democracy and national stability.
The intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict can also be traced directly back to Churchill’s door at number 10 Downing Street and his decision to hand over the “Promised Land” to both Arabs and Jews. Churchill gave practical effect to the Balfour declaration of 1917, which expressed Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish homeland, resulting in the biggest single error of British foreign policy in the Middle East.
Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.
Of greater consequence to truth and history should be a man’s actions, not merely his words. Whilst Churchill has become one of the most extensively quoted men in the English speaking world, particularly on issues of democracy and freedom, true history speaks of a man whose actions revolved around, in Churchill’s own words, “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”.
One such war was when Kikuyu Kenyans rebelled for their freedom only to have Churchill call them “brutish savage children” and force 150,000 of them into “Britain’s Gulag”.
Pulitzer-prize winning historian, Professor Caroline Elkins, highlights Churchill’s many crimes in Kenya in her book Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Professor Elkins explains how Churchill’s soldiers “whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects”, all in the name of British “civilization”. It is said that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured from Churchill’s men.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved how in Bengal in 1943 Churchill engineered one of the worst famines in human history for profit.
Over three million civilians starved to death whilst Churchill refused to send food aid to India. Instead, Churchill trumpeted that “the famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Churchill intentionally hoarded grain to sell for profit on the open market after the Second World War instead of diverting it to starving inhabitants of a nation controlled by Britain. Churchill’s actions in India unquestionably constituted a crime against humanity.
Churchill was also one of the greatest advocates of Britain’s disastrous divide-and-rule foreign policy.
Churchill’s administration deliberately created and exacerbated sectarian fissures within India’s independence movement, between Indian Hindus and Muslims that have had devastating effects on the region ever since.
Prior to India’s independence from Britain, Churchill was eager to see bloodshed erupt in India, so as to prove that Britain was the benevolent “glue holding the nation together”. For Churchill, bloodshed also had the added strategic advantage that it would also lead to the partition of India and Pakistan. Churchill’s hope was this partition would result in Pakistan remaining within Britain’s sphere of influence. This, in turn, would enable the Great Game against the Soviet empire to continue, no matter the cost to innocent Indian and Pakistanis. The partition of India with Pakistan caused the death of about 2.5 million people and displaced some 12.5 million others.
According to writer, Ishaan Tharoor, Churchill’s own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, compared his boss’s understanding of India’s problems to King George III’s apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries Amery vented that “on the subject of India, Churchill is not quite sane” and that he didn’t “see much difference between Churchill’s outlook and Hitler’s.”
Churchill shared far more ideologically in common with Hitler than most British historians care to admit. For instance, Churchill was a keen supporter of eugenics, something he shared in common with Germany’s Nazi leadership, who were estimated estimated to have killed 200,000 disabled people and forcibly sterilised twice that number. Churchill drafted a highly controversial piece of legislation, which mandated that the mentally ill be forcibly sterilized. In a memo to the Prime Minister in 1910, Winston Churchill cautioned, “the multiplication of the feeble-minded is a very terrible danger to the race”. He also helped organise the International Eugenics Conference of 1912, which was the largest meeting of proponents of eugenics in history.
Churchill had a long standing belief in racial hierarchies and eugenics. In Churchill’s view, white protestant Christians were at the very top of the pyramid, above white Catholics, while Jews and Indians were only slightly higher than Africans.
Historian, Mr. Hari, rightfully points out, “the fact that we now live in a world where a free and independent India is a superpower eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest – and a sweet, ironic victory for Churchill at his best.”
Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
Churchill is indeed the Greatest Briton to have ever lived, because for decades, the myth of Churchill has served as Britain’s greatest propaganda tool to bolster national white pride and glorify British imperial culture.
Is Australia really a multicultural safe haven of equal opportunity? Or is racism more prevalent than ever before? Stan Grant took to the stage for the last IQ2* debate of 2015. His speech is widely acknowledged to be one of the most powerful ever heard at IQ2.
*Intelligence Squared is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. Intelligence Squared U.S. was
founded in 2006 to restore civility, reasoned analysis, and constructive
public discourse to today’s often biased media landscape.
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Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream: Full Debate at IQ2
The only island continent on earth was taken from
its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry
Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest
land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as
“a whispering in our hearts”.
British colonizers brought disease and genocide to an Island off the coast of Australia called Tasmania in 1803. There were as many as 15,000 Aboriginals on the island at the time. By the 1860's only four Tasmanians were left on Tasmania. Truganini (above) was thought to have been the last full-blooded Tasmanian when she died but about four others (including Fanny Cochrane Smith) were eventually discovered living on other islands. After she died Truganini's bones were dug up and placed on display against her expressed wishes. A century later, Truganini's remains were finally cremated and scattered according to her wishes.
By John Pilger
On
26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated
in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the newspapers owned
by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and
displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.
__________
The Voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith, now considered the last Tasmanian. When she did the Tasmanian language died with her.
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For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my
lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish
society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to
call “New Australians” often choose 26 January, “Australia Day”, to be
sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces
from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.
It
was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with
Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney
Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where
others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s
“First Fleet” dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment
the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the
euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest
Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history.
He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our
hearts”.
Aborigine at Echo Point, Katoomba (Australia). (Photo by Steve Austin)
The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.
This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile “apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement”. Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.
In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”
He was wrong — up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in “language”: their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.
The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken”. “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.
“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”
Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud — with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing racism.
On Australia Day 2016– Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day– there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of “kaffir”-abusing South Africans.
'I am the living example of what drones are,' says Pakistani who was just a boy when U.S. missile struck his family's home."
Faheem Qureshi, who suffered serious injuries, including the loss of an
eye, in the first drone strike ordered by President Obama. "I had all
the hopes and potential," he says, "and now I am doing nothing and don’t
know what there is for me in the future." (Photograph: Madiha Tahir)
"It’s not about me. It’s about every civilian who has been killed in Waziristan."
Those are the words of Faheem Qureshi who was just a young boy in 2009 when a U.S. drone, on the orders of a newly-elected President Barack Obama, fired a missile that slammed into his uncle's home in the Waziristan region of Pakistan where family and friends were gathered. Though others in the house were not, Qureshi was lucky to survive.
As the Guardian's Spencer Ackerman reports Saturday:
It took nearly 40 days for Qureshi to emerge from a series of hospitals, all of which he spent in darkness. Shrapnel had punctured his stomach. Lacerations covered much of his upper body. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. They could not save his left.
His family kept the worst from him while he recuperated. Two of Qureshi’s uncles, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, were dead. So was his 21-year-old cousin Aizazur Rehman Qureshi, who was preparing to leave the family’s North Waziristan home for work, also in the UAE. Fourteen of Qureshi’s cousins were left fatherless.
Barely a teenager, Qureshi was suddenly an elder male within his family, tasked with providing for his mother, brothers and sisters. Once a promising student who wanted a career in chemistry, his priority would become scrounging a living. The family never had the money to repair the guest lounge.
Obama, now in the twilight of his presidency, wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. In his own telling, as in his final state of the union address earlier this month, he is the man who denuclearized Iran peacefully, who opened Cuba and ended the last vestige of the cold war, who replaced the “dumb wars” he campaigned against with the prudent, precise counter-terrorism of drone strikes.
Now approximately 21-years-old (he doesn't know his exact age), Qureshi has given his first interview with a western journalist in order to let the world know the damage the U.S. drone program has done to his life and those of others in the remote areas of Pakistan that have experienced the most aggressive attacks under the Obama presidency.
"If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me," Qureshi told Ackerman through a translator, "Obama will be put on that list by his drone program."
As Ackerman reports, Qureshi's experience stands out not only because the attack which took one of his eyes and nearly killed him is believed to be first every ordered by President Obama, but also because it, like many others, killed and wounded many innocent people while missing its intended target:
The available evidence suggests the strike was an error. Reporter Daniel Klaidman’s book about Obama’s drone strikes, Kill or Capture, claims that the first January 2009 strike had gone “terribly wrong”, with the targeted Taliban member never having been on the premises. A leaked Pakistani government document records “9 civilians” being killed in a drone strike on 23 January 2009, an apparent reference to the one on Qureshi’s home; an unredacted version seen by the Guardian names his village and his dead uncle.
"There are so many people like me in Waziristan that I know of who were targeted and killed who had nothing to do with militancy or the Taliban," Qureshi said, "so many women who have been killed, children who have been killed, but there is still no answer to this. Forget about the answers, there is not even acknowledgement that we were killed."
Qureshi acknowledged that sometimes drone strikes do, in fact, hit fighters but said the majority of people are like him – regular people with dreams and desires.
"What we know of the US is this is what they do to people like me," he said. "They uproot us, they kill us, they target us, without any reason. They turn our lives upside down. Of course the US is hated in that part of the world, and it’s hated more because of what they’ve done to people like me."
"I am the living example of what drones are," said Qureshi who told Ackerman he wants "acknowledgement, apology and compensation" from the U.S. government for what they did to him and his family.
"I had all the hopes and potential and now I am doing nothing and don’t know what there is for me in the future."
The Israeli government is saturated with psychos who will even attack their own if they won't go along with Israel's apartheid policies.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has surrounded himself with psychos.
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Netanyahu Aide Calls US ambassador ‘Little Jew Boy’ in Escalating Controversy
By Peter Beaumont
The US State Department has moved to back America’s ambassador to Israel in a febrile and escalating row over his remarks on Monday that Israel applied law in the occupied West Bank differently to Palestinians and Israelis.
Ambassador Daniel Shapiro’s unusually critical comments drew harsh criticism from ministers in Israel’s rightwing government – including from Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Shapiro was also publicly lambasted on Israeli television on Tuesday by a former aide to Netanyahu who used the deeply offensive Hebrew word yehudon – which translates as “little Jew boy” – to disparage the ambassador. The term is used by rightwing Israelis against other Jews – particularly against those in the diaspora – whom they regard as not being Jewish or pro-Israel enough.
“We are being subjected to a terrorist onslaught that is simply unfamiliar to the United States, and to pass judgment on us in such a one-sided manner is wrong,” Shaked told Army Radio. “It would be appropriate if he corrected himself, and I hope he does that.”
As the row continued into a third day, US State Department spokesman John Kirby insisted the ambassador was reiterating US policy on Israeli settlement construction. Kirby was speaking after a private meeting between Shapiro and Netanyahu to attempt to paper over the differences.
“Our long-standing position on settlements is clear. We view Israeli settlements activity as illegitimate and counterproductive to the cause of peace. We remain deeply concerned about Israel’s current policy on settlements including construction, planning, and retroactive legalisations,” he said.
The latest row comes against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Israel and various countries and international political groupings.
Last year Netanyahu’s government reduced diplomatic contacts with EU officials following a decision to recommend that member states label products produced in illegal Israeli settlements.
Israel finds itself facing renewed criticism from the European Union for the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a complaint that Shapiro echoed.
By Ben Norton and Jared Flanery
“I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy,” wrote Henry Kissinger in a 2012 letter to “the Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton.” The compliment was included as a handwritten postscript added to the printed letter.
The Feb. 7 letter, which was released in a batch of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a request that she help declassify documents from Kissinger’s time as secretary of state, which he says constitute “a unique record of a critical period in American foreign policy.”
(A scanned copy of Kissinger’s printed message to Clinton)
Critics say Kissinger helped carry out egregious war crimes in this critical period, during which he served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
The late journalist Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire book to detailing the war crimes overseen by Kissinger, who infamously declared “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
In “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Hitchens argues the former secretary of state should be tried “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture.”
Hitchens described Kissinger as a master of “depraved realpolitik” with “a callous indifference to human life and human rights,” who was behind U.S.-backed atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Kurdish Iraq, Iran, South Africa, Angola and more.
Today you have Donald Trump and Ted Cruz competing over how horrible America's torture will be if they get elected - That's because generations of American human rights violators have gone free after they instituted their own programs of assassination, kidnapping and torture.
18 Former Guatemalan Military Officers Arrested for Crimes Against Humanity
By Annie Bird
Guatemalan authorities have arrested at least 18 high-ranking Guatemalan military officers yesterday on charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance, according to local press reports.
The arrests include retired generals Benedicto Lucas Garcia, head of the military under his now-deceased brother and former dictator Romeo Lucas Garcia, and Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas, long known for his high-level positions during the dirty war and his concurrent management of organized crime networks.
The crimes with which they are charged were part of operations conducted from a military base in the department of Coban between 1981 and 1988, including acts that formed part of the Maya Achi genocide. Exhumations at the base in 2012 recovered remains from over 550 victims–a fraction of the tens of thousands of killings the military is believed to have conducted in Alta and Baja Verapaz from that base but an important step in gathering evidence.
Arrests are ongoing. In a press conference Jan. 6, prosecutors declined to provide specific information regarding pending warrants. Journalists suggested that as many as 25 warrants exist. Initial hearings are expected to begin this Friday. There is no possibility of release pending trial on these charges.
These prosecutions are the result of over 20 years of efforts by the victims, coupled with hard-fought gains in cleaning up corruption in the justice system promoted by human rights and judicial reform activists. ADIVIMA, the association of Maya Achi genocide victims, is a co-complainant in the prosecution, along with the national victims associations, the Association of Relatives of the Detained/Disappeeared in Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) and the Mutual Support Group (GAM).
Unearthing Crimes of the Past and Present
The retired general who was in charge of the Coban base during much of the violence, Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, would undoubtedly have been among those arrested today had he not died on January 1, 2016. Mendez Ruiz maintained a high profile in Guatemala over the past several years due to the activities of his son of the same name. The younger Ricardo Mendez Ruiz is director of the Foundation Against Terrorism, which has promoted malicious legal complaints against those pursuing justice for the crimes committed during Guatemala’s dirty war–a form of political persecution backed by influential retired military officers.
[...]
Concern for the safety of those pursuing justice in Guatemala is heightened as the incoming president, Jimmy Morales, a founder of the National Convergence Front (FCN) party, is set to take office on January 14. Guatemala’s last elected president, Otto Perez Molina, was forced to resign in September 2015 to face corruption charges, and his party, the Partido Patriota (PP), partially collapsed in the scandal. Analysts described the FCN as the Plan B for the political networks that formerly backed the PP. The FCN and PP are both dominated by retired military officers.
The newly elected congress convened its first session yesterday. On the first day of the lawmakers four-year term, Congress was asked by prosecutors to impeach the newly elect FCN congressman and former military officer, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, so he can face charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance.
Concerns over the safety of justice advocates have heightened since the arrests. The former military men arrested today have close ties to Guatemala’s organized crime networks. Criminal groups in complicity with politicians operate regionally in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and are largely responsible for some of the highest murder rates in the world.
Growing Support for Ban Despite New Use in Syria, Yemen
By Human Rights Watch
Repeated use of cluster munitions in Syria and Yemen during 2015 has been met by growing international support for the treaty banning the deadly weapons, Human Rights Watch said today. The cluster munition attacks have caused numerous civilian casualties.
Attacks in Syria using air-dropped and ground-launched cluster munitions have increased significantly since Russia began its military operation there on September 30, 2015. In Yemen, a Saudi Arabia-led coalition has used at least four types of cluster munitions in 2015. Yet Russia and Zimbabwe were the only countries to vote against a December 7 United Nations General Assembly resolution in support of the international treaty banning cluster munitions.
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Cluster Munitions Launched from the Air and Ground in Syria
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“Instead of defending cluster munitions, Russia should join the ever-expanding community of nations that reject these indiscriminate weapons,” said Mary Wareham, arms advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The UN resolution, supported even by nearly half the countries that have yet to join the treaty, shows the growing sentiment against cluster munitions.”
In Syria, government forces have used cluster munitions across the country since mid-2012, while Islamic State (also known as ISIS) forces used cluster munition rockets in northern Syria in the second half of 2014. Both Russian-backed rebel forces and Ukrainian government forces have used cluster munition rockets in attacks in eastern Ukraine, but not since a February ceasefire.
On October 1, the international Cluster Munition Coalition, which Human Rights Watch chairs, warned Russia against using any cluster munitions in Syria due to the “foreseeable and preventable” danger posed to civilians. Russia should stop using cluster munitions and start supporting the international prohibition on their use, Human Rights Watch said.
Cluster munitions pose an immediate threat to civilians by scattering submunitions or bomblets over a wide area. Their remnants pose a long-term danger, particularly submunitions that fail to explode upon impact, becoming de facto landmines. Russia is not a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed by 118 countries and ratified by 98. The treaty also requires the clearance of remnants from attacks and assistance to victims of the weapons.
The December 7 UN General Assembly resolution was its first on the Convention on Cluster Munitions. The non-binding resolution passed 139 to 2, with 40 abstentions. Three dozen countries that have not banned cluster munitions nonetheless voted for the resolution, while non-signatories China, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United States were among those abstaining.
Russia acknowledged humanitarian concern about cluster munitions but said it objects to the way the treaty was negotiated by like-minded states outside UN auspices.
On September 9, at the First Review Conference of the Convention on Cluster Munitions since the treaty went into effect on August 1, 2010, more than 100 countries adopted a declaration condemning any use of cluster munitions by any actor.
To date, 28 countries have finished destruction of their stockpiles in accordance with the Convention on Cluster Munitions, destroying more than 1.3 million cluster munitions containing more than 160 million submunitions. As 2015 comes to a close, two more countries have completed the destruction of their stockpiled cluster munitions under the treaty requirements, in both cases well in advance of the treaty’s eight-year stockpile destruction deadline.
Germany once held 573,700 cluster munitions containing 60 million submunitions, the highest number stockpiled by any member of the treaty. It announced the completion of the destruction of the stockpile on November 25, while Italy destroyed the last of its stockpile of 5,113 cluster munitions containing 2.8 million submunitions on October 31.
“By destroying their stockpiled cluster munitions years in advance of the deadline, nations such as Germany and Italy are leading the way in implementation of the ban,” said Wareham, who is also editor of the annual Cluster Munition Monitor report by the international coalition of organizations working to eradicate the weapons. “We expect similar commitment from others that have banned cluster munitions, as the best way to discourage new use of cluster munitions is to destroy them.”
Reprinted with permission from Human Rights Watch.
Prime Minister David Cameron (right) with Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz. Photo by Number 10.
By Oliver Wright The British Government signed a secret security pact with Saudi Arabia and is now attempting to prevent details of the deal from being made public.
The Home Secretary Theresa May agreed to the so-called ‘memorandum of understanding’ with her Saudi counter-part Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef during a visit to the Kingdom last year.
The Home Office released no details of her trip at the time or announced that the deal had been signed. The only public acknowledgement was a year later in a Foreign Office report which obliquely referenced an agreement to “modernise the Ministry of the Interior”.
But now following a Freedom of Information request from the Liberal Democrats, who were in Government at the time, it has emerged that the agreement is far wider than has been acknowledged.
In its grounds for refusing to publish details of the memorandum the Home Office has admitted it “contains information relating to the UK’s security co-operation with Saudi Arabia”.
Releasing the document it says “would damage the UK’s bilateral relationship” with the Kingdom and potentially damage Britain’s national security.
Human rights groups have expressed alarm at the secretive nature of the deal with a regime which has been condemned for its human rights record.
In February the Kingdom adopted a new anti-terrorism law that defines terrorism as words or actions deemed by the authorities to be directly or indirectly “disturbing” to public order or “destabilizing the security of society.
In March, a series of decrees promulgated by the Interior Ministry extended Saudi Arabia’s extended the definition of further to include “calling for atheist thought” and “contacting any groups or individuals opposed to the Kingdom”, as well as “seeking to disrupt national unity” by calling for protests.
By ISABEL KERSHNER A few years after Avihai Stollar had completed his obligatory army service — which coincided with the second intifada — he was approached by a member of Breaking the Silence, a leftist organization of combat veterans that says it aims to expose the grim reality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Mr. Stollar, who served as a platoon sergeant in an infantry unit south of Hebron, said he found himself recounting experiences that he said had seemed “logical” from the perspective of a soldier. As a civilian, he said, “Something opened up. I was in shock.”
These were not “Srebrenica moments,” he said, referring to the massacre of Muslims during the Bosnian war, but mostly the more mundane mechanics of Israel’s occupation, like banning Palestinian vehicles from certain roads to reduce the threat of drive-by shootings, and punishing violators, even though they might have had no other route.
Mr. Stollar, 32, is now the research director of Breaking the Silence, and at the center of a furor that is laying bare Israel’s divisions over its core values and the nature of its democracy.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the group from the podium of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, last week, accusing it of “slandering” Israeli soldiers before audiences around the world. The defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, described the group’s motives as “malicious” and banned it from activities involving soldiers. Naftali Bennett, the education minister in the government that is dominated by rightist and religious parties, barred it from entering state schools.
The condemnations bolstered a new campaign by an Israeli ultranationalist organization, Im Tirtzu, which released a provocative video criticizing leaders of four leftist groups, including Breaking the Silence, for receiving financing from foreign governments and labeling them as foreign agents. President Reuven Rivlin was vilified for appearing recently at an Israeli peace conference in New York where representatives of the group also appeared.
Now some retired generals are leading a counterattack.
“Breaking the Silence strengthens the I.D.F. and its morality,” Amiram Levin, a former commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, wrote in an advertisement that appeared on Friday in the liberal Haaretz newspaper, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. A former chief of the Shin Bet security service and a retired major general of the Israeli police then took out similar advertisements.
Breaking the Silence highlights what it views as the corrosive nature of the occupation of the West Bank on Israeli society by publishing the testimonies of soldiers, mostly anonymously. Abuses like looting and the destruction of Palestinian property, it argues, have become the norm.
Yet nearly half a century after Israel conquered that territory from Jordan in the 1967 war, the subject of the occupation is largely greeted with apathy in Israel. And the increasingly shrill debate about Breaking the Silence is less about the rights or wrongs of military rule in the West Bank and more about what kind of society Israelis want.
“Breaking the Silence is perceived as unfairly attacking the I.D.F. and its conduct,” said Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem. “So they are putting themselves on a collision course with the most valued and respected institution in Israel and with the psyche of Israelis who feel they are in a struggle for survival.”
And at a time Israelis fear for their safety amid a wave of stabbings, shootings and attacks with vehicles by Palestinians, and in the absence of condemnation from the Palestinian leadership, Mr. Plesner added, “There is not much patience for the message that the I.D.F. is in the wrong.”
An Israeli soldier is recorded throwing a knife on the ground, forcing a Palestinian girl to pick it up, and then arresting
her. Numerous Palestinian have been killed in recent weeks "for attacking Israeli soldiers and police with knives" - How
many of those knives were planted? (Screencaptured from video)
By Ali Abunimah
A video has emerged apparently showing an Israeli soldier dropping a knife on the ground and forcing a terrified Palestinian girl to pick it up before she is arrested.
The video was circulated widely in Palestinian media and on social networks on Tuesday, the same day that two more Palestinian teenagers were shot dead by Israeli occupation forces, who claimed that the youths had attempted to carry out stabbings.
Israel further escalated violence on Wednesday by carrying out a revenge demolition of a Palestinian home in Jerusalem.
Forced to pick up knife
The Palestinian news outlet Donia Al-Watan said the video was recorded by a Palestinian who witnessed the incident at an Israeli military checkpoint south of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday.
Several outlets identified the girl in the video as 14-year-old Sabreen Mujahid Sanad.
The 3-minute video appears to have been filmed from a vehicle stopped at the checkpoint. At the beginning, a man in civilian clothes can be seen speaking to the girl next to a white truck. Israeli soldiers are standing nearby and giving orders to others.
The girl is not restrained by the soldiers and walks toward the cab of the white truck. At 1:30, one of the soldiers throws what appears to be a knife onto the ground.
The girl, with her arms raised near her chest, trembles. The soldier then appears to order her to bend down and pick up the knife.
She kneels down and picks it up, and then appears to talk to the soldier as she holds it. As she kneels, a second soldier aims his weapon at her.
A third soldier then approaches and leads her away with her hands behind her back.
As with other similar incidents, the video has fueled widespread suspicions that many of the alleged stabbing attempts in which Palestinians were killed involved the planting of evidence.
U.S. President Barack Obama (left) greets Saudi's Haj Minister Fouad Al-Farsy and Saudi's Oil Minister Ali
al-Naimi (center) Oil Minister upon his arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh June 2009.
(Photo by Tribes of the World)
The richest person in the world isn’t anyone in the Forbes list, which excludes calculations for any heads-of-state, but is instead King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions of dollars. He virtually owns the Saudi Government, which owns the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets.
It was a Rockefeller company then; but no one can say who controls it today. As of 2013 (see p. 56 there), the only two investors that owned more than 0.002 or .02% of Chevron, each owned around 6% of it: Blackrock, Inc., and State Street Corp., and they essentially jointly controlled that company, regarding anything on which the two agreed. But the controlling stockholder of Blackrock in 2013 was PNC Financial Services, at 20.8%. PNC is jointly controlled by Wellington Management, Blackrock and the Vanguard Group, each at more than 5%. Wellington, the main stockholder, is jointly controlled by Blackrock, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Royce & Associates, T. Rowe Price, and Wellington Management itself. Some companies, such as Wellington Management, simply hide their owners. All of this is called ‘democracy.’ (Or, at least, it’s “capitalism” of the fascist sort.)
However, King Salman’s ownership of the Saudi Government is relatively clear, since he controls the Government as his private fiefdom, and since his Government owns Aramco and other assets. Individuals such as Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffett, and Amancio Ortega, are each only around 1/20th to 1/50th as rich as is he.
The officially-given-out figure for Salman’s personal wealth is $18 billion, but Forbessimply omits including him at all. (Bloomberg’s billionaires-list does likewise.) They don’t want to offend the richest people in the world; and heads-of-state who have become enormously wealthy from heisting an entire country prefer to keep the actual size of their heists hidden. (Furthermore, in order to pretend that the basic capitalist myth is true — that accumulation of wealth reflects mainly one’s merit instead of one’s power — they need to play down wealth that’s been accumulated by crime, or by inheritance; and head-of-state wealth tends strongly to be the product of both.)
“The mother of a Saudi protester sentenced to death by beheading and crucifixion has begged Barack Obama to intervene to save her son’s life. In her first interview with foreign media, Nusra al-Ahmed, the mother of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, whose case has made headlines around the world, described the intended punishment as savage and ‘backwards in the extreme’. … She said her son had been detained sometime after joining Shia demonstrators in the eastern coastal city of Qatif seeking equal religious rights in the Sunni-majority country. … Visiting after his arrest, she alleged he had been tortured. ‘When I visited my son for the first time I didn’t recognise him. I didn’t know whether this really was my son Ali or not. I could clearly see a wound on his forehead. Another wound in his nose. They disfigured it. …[When] I started talking to him [he told me that] during the interrogation [he was] being kicked, slapped, of course his teeth fell out … For a month he was peeing blood. He said he felt like a mass of pain, his body was no more.’”
This was/is his punishment for participating in a peaceful demonstration.
This is part of a global war between Sunni and Shiia political leaders. America and its vassal-states (including David Cameron’s Britain) are allied with Sunni-run nations, while Russia and its cooperating nations are allied with Shiia-run nations.
The Saudi royals are the world’s top Sunni force, and they have long been allied with the United States, against post-Shah (post-1979) Iran and all other Shiia-ruled countries, such as Syria, and such as the next-door Yemenese Shiite Houthis, who are being bombed incessantly by the hard-line Sunni Sauds using their U.S. weapons. According to the former bookkeeper of the Sunni organization Al Qaeda, the man who collected all of the financial donations to that organization, virtually all of Al Qaeda’s funding consisted of multimillion-dollar donations, mainly from the Saud family but also from other Sunni Arab royals; and their followers, the terrorists, were mercenaries in their pay, almost as much as they were true-believing fundamentalist Sunnis — they were being paid very well by their royal sponsors, to serve as a ‘volunteer’ army for jihad to bring a globalized version of the ancient Caliphate, or Sunni Empire. Such terrorism can be quite lucrative for a jihadist, even if the bigger payoff is promised to come in his afterlife.
The official religion of Saudi Arabia is the Wahhabist or Salafist fundamentalist Islamic sect of the Sunni version of Islam. It’s the version of Islam that seeks a return of the ancient Caliphate or Sunni Empire, but now on a global level (extending at least as far away from Arabia as Afghanistan and Pakistan) — and, of course, the Saud family (after all their ancient conquests) owns Mecca, in whose direction every Muslim (Sunni or not) is required (according to the standard understanding of the Quran, in Surah “The Cow” or “ Al Baqarah,” 142-143) to bow towards in prayer, every day. So: King Salman controls not only the estimated quarter-trillion-barrels of oil that Aramco has, but also the Mecca for all of Islam. And, of course, he also relies upon the decades-long military backing of the United States Government.
Today we are witnessing the largest global convergence of jihadists in history, as individuals from more than 100 countries have migrated to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq since 2011. Some initially flew to the region to join opposition groups seeking to oust Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but most are now joining the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), inspired to become a part of the group’s “caliphate” and to expand its repressive society. Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have also joined or attempted to fight with extremists in the conflict zone.
5,000 foreign Sunni jihadists in Syria came from Tunisia — it’s how Tunisia managed to get rid of enough of them to be able to establish something of a democracy in their own land. The second-biggest national contingent, 2,275, is from Saudi Arabia itself, the same country that supplied fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists. But the exodus of 2,275 jihadists from Saudi Arabia can’t enable democracy to emerge in Saudi Arabia, because the Saud family’s own Wahhab faith is based upon supporting jihad. Most of the Saudi population aren’t in favor of extending Wahhabism around the world, but the Sauds are. Conveniently, their war to spread Allah’s power happens to be also a war to spread the Sauds’ power. (It’s not spreading the power of the rest of the Saudi population.) The Sauds believe that Allah is on their family’s side. After all: God (and the pillaging that had enabled the Saud family to conquer the country) gave them 260 billion barrels of oil!
These warriors are all doing battle to oust Bashar al-Assad, the most secular (or non-sectarian) leader in the Middle East (far more secular, for example, than is America’s ally, Israel). The Syrian Constitution under his Ba’ath Party has always been non-Islamic, and not only non-jihadist. There is a strict separation of religion from politics. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia, “The Qur’an is declared to be the constitution of the country, which is governed on the basis of Islamic law (Shari’a).” Furthermore, “No political parties or national elections are permitted[2] and according to The Economist’s 2010 Democracy Index, the Saudi government was the seventh most authoritarian regime from among the 167 countries rated.” (Notice that euphemism ‘authoritarian.’ When we were fighting self-declared fascists in World War II, we used instead the honest term for them, “dictatorships.” The Sauds are dictators.) The Sauds are dictators.) TheEconomist rated Syria the fifth-most “authoritarian,” but theEconomist is allied with the Saudi royal family and wants Assad to be overthrown. And, at seventh-worst, Saudi Arabia was actually ranked far worse than any other of the magazine’s listed allies. (The Economist is hardly a trustworthy source, more a mouthpiece of the aristocracy.)
U.S. President Obama has consistently since 2011 argued that, “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” How wonderful to know that our President cares so much about “the Syrian people” as to bomb their government and try to replace it with one more like the Sauds’. The stars-and-stripes waves so proudly around the world. (Actually not — certainly not now.)
Obama said on 2 October 2015, “They’ve been propping up a regime that is rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Syrian population because they’ve seen that he has been willing to drop barrel bombs on children and on villages indiscriminately.” He blatantly lied.
That’s the type of orderly nation the United States can defend. The United States can also support the regime it had installed in a violent February 2014 coup in Ukraine that’sfirebombing the residents of the area that refused to accept the coup-government the U.S. had installed. (Firebombs areworse than barrel bombs.) For some reason, things like this are not what U.S. politicians and ‘news’ media talk about, with ‘our’ ‘free’ press. So, it’s easy for the U.S. public to be unaware of such realities about the ‘democracy’ that ‘they’ ‘elect.’ Out of sight is out of mind; ignorance is bliss. Under such circumstances as this, it’s more comfortable for the public to be ignorant, and America’s aristocrats want their public to be comfortable, at least enough so that the public will vote for the candidates they finance. Just as George W. Bush wanted his torture-operation to be done offshore, Barack Obama also wants the beheadings etc. to besmirch other countries such as Saudi Arabia, not the U.S., which keeps regimes like that in power while demanding that Syria, Libya, Russia, etc., must have “regime change,” in order, supposedly, to bring there the blessings of ‘democracy.’
What ‘blessings of ‘democracy’ has the United States recently brought to the people in Honduras, or in El Salvador, or in Guatemala? The results have been floods of refugees from there, just like the floods of refugees from U.S. bombing campaigns in Libya and in Syria. America and its allies and their ‘news’ media blame the refugees on the countries that America has destroyed. This, too, helps promote, among the public, the ‘bliss’ that is ignorance — or, worse yet, deception — in these ‘democracies’: blaming the U.S.-caused refugees for the refugees-problem (both in the U.S. and in Europe).
America’s rot in international affairs is pervasive. Take for example Obama’s drone-warfare program to kill some Saudi-inspired extremists; it too is full of lies. In a rare example of honest mainstream U.S. journalistic dissent, Jeremy Scahillat Huffington Post reported on October 15th that:
“The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeting killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.” (Yet, even knowing this, Obama continues his drone program.)
Obama was mainly building support there for the Saudi-originated Taliban (they started out as being called the“Mujahideen” and were supplied weapons by the U.S.). Taliban gain support among villagers whose loss of innocent family-members on account of these U.S. drone-strikes drives them to favor the fight against the enemy that has been killing their loved-ones (i.e., against the U.S.). The Taliban are actually allies of the Sauds, who sometimes are even brought in to help persuade them to back off (and another example of that is here). In fact,
So, at the very same time that the U.S. Government tries to fool its public that the U.S. military are focused primarily against the threat from Islamic jihadists (not against Russia), U.S. policies are actually directed instead against the enemies of the Sauds (who are behind Islamic jihadists): that’s to say, against Iran, the leading Shiia power; and especially against Russia, the leading competitor to Saudi Arabia in the oil and gas markets — and the chief country that’s still holding out against takeover by the U.S. aristocracy.
Without continuing U.S. support, the Sauds would be treated by Saudis even worse than Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicholas II, and Benito Mussolini, were: they’d be treated the same way they themselves have treated anyone in Saudi Arabia who has protested their decades-long tyranny. Would the fanatic fundamentalist clergy that the Sauds have shared power with be treated any better? Even from the standpoint of moderating Islamism, the results of overthrowing the Sauds would likely be better than what America — the world-policeman for the imperial Saudi tyrants — has produced. But it would need to be done before the Sauds acquire nuclear weapons.
What needs to be changed first is the American government — its control by an aristocracy that’s firmly wedded to the Sauds. The American aristocracy (especially its three most powerful components: petrodollar Wall Street, oil-and-gas billionaires, and military-industrial-complex billionaires — all of whom benefit from alliance with the Sauds) needs to be defeated in America. The American people need to strip the U.S. aristocracy (at least those three elements of it) of their power over the U.S. Government. It can’t be done unless the news-media start informing the American people of reality. (For example, in neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party Presidential debates has this immense problem, and candidates’ positions regarding it, been even so much as mentioned. That can’t possibly reflect a democratic nation — an authentic democracy.)
Continued dishonesty will lead only to catastrophe. If honesty doesn’t start now, it probably won’t start until such a disaster can’t be avoided. Honesty needs to start now. It starts here, or it won’t start at all.
