Without the technology and hands-on assistance of IBM and its consultants the Nazi persecution of Jews could never have reached such extreme "efficiency"
Left: Holocaust survivor Rose Schindler shows the prisoner number tattoo on her arm. We can thank IBM for that ID system. Right: Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany, December 19, 1938. (Left and Right Photos from Wikimedia Commons)
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IBM And The Holocaust:
The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation
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.
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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.
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.
The armed militia members occupying a federally owned wildlife outpost
in eastern Oregon have demanded that the land be "returned" to them. But
who really has claim to this forest? We speak with Jacqueline Keeler, a
writer and activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage who wrote
about the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff for The Nation and is now working on
a new piece which in part examines the history of the Paiute tribe’s
treaty rights to the forest currently occupied by the nearly all-white
militia.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The Obama—we’re going to talk for a moment about the land dispute that’s going on in Oregon. Jacqueline Keeler is with us. We are going to turn to the issue now of land rights. The armed militia members have demanded that the land be, quote, "returned" to them. But who really has a claim to this area?
We’re joined in Portland, Oregon, by Jacqueline Keeler. She’s a writer and activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage who wrote about the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff for The Nation magazine and is now working on a new piece, which in part examines the history of the Paiute tribe’s treaty rights to this very forest currently occupied by the nearly all-white militia.
Jacqueline, it’s great to have you on with us from Portland. Can you talk about what you found so far? Tell us the history of this area in eastern Oregon.
JACQUELINE KEELER: Yes. Well, I’d like to start off saying that today, in January, this is the 137th anniversary of when 500 Paiutes were loaded onto wagons and walked, under heavy armed guard, from their—from the lands where the Bundys are right now holding it and to the Yakama Reservation in Washington state, some 300 miles, knee-deep in snow. And they were forced to march, shackled two by two. And so, that’s some of the background there.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, continue. Take us through to today. What happened to this land? How did it change hands?
JACQUELINE KEELER: Well, the area called the—now called the Malheur, it was called the Malheur Reservation, and it actually constituted nearly 1.7 million acres of land. But with incursions from white settlers, they basically pressured the federal government to open it up to settlement. And so, in 1876, President Grant did that. And then, after there was an uprising with the Bannock Indian War in 1878, due to issues of starvation and deprivation in the middle of winter again, the Bannock and the Paiute rose up, and then that’s when they were force-marched out of the area and lost most of the land. I mean, they actually were allowed to return five years later, but they didn’t really have a land base. So they were working for local ranchers and—until 1928, when the Egan Land Company gave the Burns Paiute 10 acres of land just outside the city. And the land was an old city dump, which the Indians cleaned and drilled a well to make ready for houses.
AMY GOODMAN: When you were writing about the Cliven Bundy standoff in 2014, you wrote, "If the Nevada rancher is forced to pay taxes or grazing fees, he should pay them to the Shoshone." Explain.
JACQUELINE KEELER: Yes. The Shoshone—most of Nevada is actually covered under the Treaty of Ruby Valley, and that was signed 1863. And it did allow for passage, you know, of military and also settlers crossing the land. But it did not give up any land. So, the Shoshone have never officially signed a treaty to give up land.
AMY GOODMAN: Jacqueline Keeler, I want to thank you for being with us—just a little bit of history is always helpful—writer and activist of Dineh and Yankton Dakota heritage. Her forthcoming book is titled Not Your Disappearing Indian. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to our next segment.
Big Time Drug Wholesaler "Freeway" Rick Ross (left), his CIA cocaine connection, Oscar Danilo Blandon (middle) and Reporter Gary Webb. The US Congress outlawed the use of government money in the funding of the CIA's mercenary army which was being used to attack the government of Nicaragua. So the CIA trafficked massive quantities of cocaine to
dealers like Rick Ross and used the proceeds to fund it's proxy army known as the "Contras." The result was the crack epidemic. Rick Ross and Oscar Blandon both admitted that at their "peak" they were moving over 200 pounds of cocaine a week in the United States. US intelligence agencies have used drugs to fund their operations long before there was a CIA. Gary Webb blew the lid off of the story and was promptly attacked and ostracized by his fellow "journalists" working for big-time newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Some of the reporters who attacked Webb's reputation have since apologized, but not before Gary Webb was found with two .38 caliber bullets in his head on December 10, 2004. The coroner ruled Webb's death a "suicide." —Ronald David Jackson
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Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of the Reporter Who Exposed Its Role in the Crack Epidemic
With their cocaine smuggling the CIA managed to kill two birds with one stone: 1) They funded and armed right-wing terrorist in Latin America, 2) They crippled the black community and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of black people.
Jeremy Renner stars as Gary Webb, in the new film, Kill The Messenger. (Screen capture from YouTube video)
The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.
Kill The Messenger - Trailer
These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.
On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story.” Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the document offers a unique window into the CIA’s internal reaction to what it called “a genuine public relations crisis” while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry.
Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” the CIA’s Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.
(Dujmovic’s name was redacted in the released version of the CIA document, but was included in a footnote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Intelligence. Dujmovic confirmed his authorship to The Intercept.)
Webb’s troubles began in August 1996, when his employer, the San Jose Mercury News, published a groundbreaking, three-part investigation he had worked on for more than a year. Carrying the full title “Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion,” Webb’s series reported that in addition to waging a proxy war for the U.S. government against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s, elements of the CIA-backed Contra rebels were also involved in trafficking cocaine to the U.S. in order to fund their counter-revolutionary campaign. The secret flow of drugs and money, Webb reported, had a direct link to the subsequent explosion of crack cocaine abuse that had devastated California’s most vulnerable African American neighborhoods.
Derided by some as conspiracy theory and heralded by others as investigative reporting at its finest, Webb’s series spread through extensive talk radio coverage and global availability via the internet, which at the time was still a novel way to promote national news.
Though “Dark Alliance” would eventually morph into a personal crisis for Webb, it was initially a PR disaster for the CIA. In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic minced no words in describing the potentially devastating effect of the series on the agency’s image:
The charges could hardly be worse. A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA–reminiscent of the 1970s–abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.
Dujmovic acknowledged that Webb “did not state outright that CIA ran the drug trade or even knew about it.” In fact, the agency’s central complaint, according to the document, was over the graphics that accompanied the series, which suggested a link between the CIA and the crack scare, and Webb’s description of the Contras as “the CIA’s army” (despite the fact that the Contras were quite literally an armed, militant group not-so-secretly supported by the U.S., at war with the government of Nicaragua).
[...]
But newspapers like the Times and the Post seemed to spend far more time trying to poke holes in the series than in following up on the underreported scandal at its heart, the involvement of U.S.-backed proxy forces in international drug trafficking. The Los Angeles Times was especially aggressive. Scooped in its own backyard, the California paper assigned no fewer than 17 reporters to pick apart Webb’s reporting. While employees denied an outright effort to attack the Mercury News, one of the 17 referred to it as the “get Gary Webb team.” Another said at the time, “We’re going to take away that guy’s Pulitzer,” according to Kornbluh’s CJR piece. Within two months of the publication of “Dark Alliance,” the L.A. Times devoted more words to dismantling its competitor’s breakout hit than comprised the series itself.
The CIA watched these developments closely, collaborating where it could with outlets who wanted to challenge Webb’s reporting. Media inquiries had started almost immediately following the publication of “Dark Alliance,” and Dujmovic in “Managing a Nightmare” cites the CIA’s success in discouraging “one major news affiliate” from covering the story. He also boasts that the agency effectively departed from its own longstanding policies in order to discredit the series. “For example, in order to help a journalist working on a story that would undermine the Mercury News allegations, Public Affairs was able to deny any affiliation of a particular individual — which is a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual’s alleged CIA ties.”
The document chronicles the shift in public opinion as it moved in favor of the CIA, a trend that began about a month and a half after the series was published. “That third week in September was a turning point in media coverage of this story,” Dujmovic wrote, citing “[r]espected columnists, including prominent blacks,” along with the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, The Weekly Standard and the Washington Post. The agency supplied the press, “as well as former Agency officials, who were themselves representing the Agency in interviews with the media,” with “these more balanced stories,” Dujmovic wrote. The Washington Post proved particularly useful. “Because of the Post‘s national reputation, its articles especially were picked up by other papers, helping to create what the Associated Press called a ‘firestorm of reaction’ against the San Jose Mercury News.” Over the month that followed, critical media coverage of the series (“balanced reporting”) far outnumbered supportive stories, a trend the CIA credited to the Post, The New York Times, “and especially the Los Angeles Times.” Webb’s editors began to distance themselves from their reporter.
Gravestones at the Srebrenica Genocide memorial.(Wikipedia/public domain)
By Brandon Tensley
In Bosnia, avoiding everyday reminders of war isn’t easy: Buildings punctured by bullet holes pepper the landscape. It is estimated that there are dozens of undiscovered mass graves scattered across parts of the country. It was in Bosnia two decades ago that an ethno-national land grab between Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Yet dig deeper and twenty years belies the knotty legacy of war in Bosnia, especially for the village-turned-massacre site of Srebrenica. In July 1995, the small salt mining town was shelled and then occupied by the (Bosnian-Serb) Army of Republika Srpska – even though it had been declared a “safe zone” by the United Nations. The occupiers killed some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. Many consider the Srebrenica massacre, which in 2004 was ruled genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, to be Europe’s worst civilian slaughter since the Second World War. But as has happened every year since 1995, this year’s ceremony for the massacre is conjuring up bitter controversy in and beyond Bosnia.
So, how did Srebrenica become a perennial flashpoint, and what does it mean to have commemoration steeped not in contrition but in contention? Though the answer doesn’t lend itself to easy explanation, it’s best to start with a look at the postwar blueprint for Bosnia.
The Dayton Agreement, drawn up by international actors in 1995, ended the three-year conflict, but it also gave rise to a stalemate hinged on ethnic lines. A key feature of the peace settlement was what some have called apartheid geography or Bosnia’s division into two ethnic territories: the (Bosnian-Serb) Republika Srpska on the one hand, and the (Bosniak-Croat) Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the other. The three-member presidency, shared among the three ethnic groups, has also structurally incentivised ruling elites to engineer ethno-national rivalries. Far from being a sort of seasonal illness, ethnic tensions have metastasized to most areas of public life in Bosnia, from citizenship to political office, and Srebrenica isn’t immune.
Observers continue to investigate Bosnia’s ethnic fault lines. Still, little attention is paid to how these ethnic enmities have primed Srebrenica to defy popular narratives of memory politics.
As a point of general contrast, in Germany, another country that was involved in an ethnically motivated European conflict where occupying powers enforced the peace for years, guilt for the Holocaust is stitched into national culture. Germany has never had the ethnic diversity that Bosnia still has, and it has faced its own challenges on the road to reconciliation. But years of hard soul-searching have made Germany the darling of successful postwar political transitions in Europe. Sarajevo-born Balkans analyst Jasmin Mujanovic put it to me another way, saying in an interview that when it comes to reconciliation “Bosnia is everything Germany wasn’t.”
In short, past and present aren’t so neatly sewn together in Srebrenica.
Milorad Dodik, currently the leader of the Bosnian-Serb dominated territory of Republika Srpska, where Srebrenica is located, paid a historic visit to the village’s memorial in April of this year. But he quickly attracted criticism when he told local media that the crime has been “politicised.” Indeed, during the three-way war, both Bosnian-Croats and Bosnian-Serbs launched brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosniaks, who in turn carried out violence against Croats and Serbs, though to a lesser extent. Yet many courts, such as those of the Hague Tribunal, define only Srebrenica as genocide, which Dodik rejects. He’s become infamous for snubbing the massacre’s recognition as genocide, arguing that genocide had actually been committed against Serbs.
Seemingly a problem of semantics, the polemics surrounding Srebrenica, often snagged on claims of half-truths by all sides, shine a light on broad incompatibilities in Bosnian discourse. This has made agreeing on what took place in Srebrenica more than a local problem.
“I believe this is a basic civilised responsibility of all people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the world to support [a] resolution which condemns genocide and the killings of innocent people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and this is the minimum we can do to create preconditions for reconciliation in this country,” said Mirsad Mesic, a Minister of Parliament who helped to introduce such a resolution this year. The resolution will most likely be sidelined, however, further demonstrating differences between national groups’ fractured perspectives.
But while Srebrenica still divides Bosnia, it seems to work like a tenacious glue for the larger international community. Samantha Power, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and also a young freelancer in Bosnia when Srebrenica fell, quipped in a Voice of America interview that there’s a broad global consensus on what happened in Srebrenica two decades ago – and that those who deny these facts “only embarrass and humiliate themselves”.
Of course, at a time when foreign actors seem particularly hungry for justice, it’s critical to take stock of how memory plays out in post-conflict areas. Even something as deceptively apolitical as supporting the construction of a memorial can undercut attempts to keep Bosnia together, because the same historical event often has wildly different meanings for different groups. “Commemoration”, Mujanovic explained, “can mold a victimisation culture, so it’s crucial to be mindful of how words animate antagonisms”. Looking forward, the international community must not only establish relationships with political players who won’t manipulate wartime memories to shore up their own power but who will also help to build the capacity of local communities. Perhaps it must also admit that there’s more than one narrative being told on the ground.
And these different narratives told in Srebrenica and throughout Bosnia keep the chapter of controversy open year after year. Srebrenica is the result of national grievances over memory, and it’s become an indelible part of Bosnia’s local and international identity. In a region where barbed images of state dismemberment are still fresh, this year’s ceremony for the Srebrenica massacre illuminates how the past shouldn’t be forgotten, –but it also speaks to a salient, sobering lesson that a country is, sometimes, only as divided as its memory of this past.
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Samahar Masalmeh, with child conceived with imprisoned husband.
By Alessandra Bajec
More cases of Palestinian prisoners becoming fathers via sperm smuggling have come out since the first successful artificial insemination of its kind was reported in 2012. Just over a month ago, the wife of a prisoner in Israeli custody gave birth after being inseminated with her husband’s smuggled sperm. No longer unusual or objected, these births are seen by Palestinians as an act of resistance against Israel’s control over Palestinian life.
End of September, Samahar Masalmeh delivered little Kareem at al-Ahli hospital in Hebron. Samahar conceived the baby boy through IVF (in vitro fertilization) using a sperm sample of her husband smuggled from prison two years ago.
Nabil Masalmeh has been inside an Israeli high-security prison for the last 15 years. That’s how long he and his wife Samahar have had no physical contact. There’s no surprise that he arrival of Kareem came as a blessing for the Masalmeh family.
Sitting in her home in Beit Awa, near Hebron, in the West Bank, Samahar explained he and his husband wanted to give a brother or sister to their two other children, who were born before Nabil was jailed.
“We made up our minds on having another baby few years ago, after we heard about other prisoners trying to become fathers through vitro fertilization,” Samahar said delighted, holding her new baby.
For Samahar, waiting for her husband to get out of jail would have meant being too old to bear children.
Wouter Basson testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The so- called "Doctor of Death" led South Africa's development of bio weapons that targeted native Africans, and he got lots of help from the United States (Screen capture from YouTube video)
By Daniel Taylor
Operating out of South Africa during the Apartheid era in the early 1980’s, Dr. Wouter Basson launched a secret bioweapons project called Project Coast. The goal of the project was to develop biolunogical and chemical agents that would either kill or sterilize the black population and assassinate political enemies. Among the agents developed were Marburg and Ebola viruses.
Basson is surrounded by cloak and dagger intrigue, as he told Pretoria High court in South Africa that “The local CIA agent in Pretoria threatened me with death on the sidewalk of the American Embassy in Schoeman Street.” According to a 2001 article in The New Yorker magazine, the American Embassy in Pretoria was “terribly concerned” that Basson would reveal deep connections between Project Coast and the United States.
Wouter Basson is described as "unrepentant." — So what is he and his white supremacist cronies up to nowadays?
In 2013, Basson was found guilty of “unprofessional conduct” by the South African health council.
Bioweapons expert Jeanne Guillemin writes in her book Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, “The project‘s growth years were from 1982 to 1987, when it developed a range of biological agents (such as those for anthrax, cholera, and the Marburg and Ebola viruses and for botulinum toxin)…“
Basson’s bioweapons program officially ended in 1994, but there has been no independent verification that the pathogens created were ever destroyed. The order to destroy them went directly to Dr. Basson. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The integrity of the process rested solely on Dr. Basson’s honesty.”
Basson claims to have had contact with western agencies that provided “ideological assistance” to Project Coast. Basson stated in an interview shot for the documentary Anthrax War that he met several times with Dr. David Kelly, the infamous UN weapons inspector in Iraq. Kelly was a top bioweapons expert in the United Kingdom. He was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire in 2003. While the official story claims he committed suicide, medical experts highly doubt this story.
In a 2007 article from the Mail Online, it was reported that a week prior to his death, Dr. Kelly was to be interviewed by MI5 about his ties to Dr. Basson.
Dr. Timothy Stamps, Minister of Health of Zimbabwe, suspected that his country was under biological attack during the time that Basson was operating. Stamps told PBS Frontline in 1998 that “The evidence is very clear that these were not natural events. Whether they were caused by some direct or deliberate inoculation or not, is the question we have to answer.”
Stamps specifically named the Ebola and Marburg viruses as suspect. Stamps thinks that his country was being used as a testing ground for weaponized Ebola.
“I’m talking about anthrax and cholera in particular, but also a couple of viruses that are not endemic to Zimbabwe [such as] the Ebola type virus and, we think also, the Marburg virus. We wonder whether in fact these are not associated with biological warfare against this country during the hostilities… Ebola was along the line of the Zambezi [River], and I suspect that this may have been an experiment to see if a new virus could be used to directly infect people.”
The Ghanaian Times reported in early September on the recent Ebola outbreak, noting connections between Basson and bioweapons research. The article points out that, “…there are two types of scientists in the world: those who are so concerned about the pain and death caused to humans by illness that they will even sacrifice their own lives to try and cure deadly diseases, and those who will use their scientific skill to kill humans on the orders of… government…”
Indeed, these ideas are not new. Plato wrote over 2,000 years ago in his workThe Republic that a ruling elite should guide society, “…whose aim will be to preserve the average of population.” He further stated, “There are many other things which they will have to consider, such as the effects of wars and diseases and any similar agencies, in order as far as this is possible to prevent the State from becoming either too large or too small.”
As revealed by The Age, Nobel prize winning Australian microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet secretly urged the Australian government in 1947 to develop bio weapons for use against the “overpopulated countries of South-East Asia.” In a 1947 meeting with the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee, the group recommended that “the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group.”
This information gives us an interesting perspective on the recent unprecedented Ebola outbreak. Is it an organic natural phenomenon? Did this strain of Ebola accidentally escape from a bioweapons lab? Or, was it deliberately released?
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
Author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz speaks about her book on the true
history of how the United States became a nation and the Eurocentric
racism used to justify it.
Killers Among The Elite: Theodore Roosevelt, Walt Whitman and Andrew Jackson (Photos from Wikimedia Commons)
The
false narrative of Columbus "discovering" the Americas still pervades
history books and the Eurocentric mindset of the United States. Learn
the true history of what author and Professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls
the legacy of Columbus's voyages: the annihilation and conquest of
Native-Americans. Read "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United
States" now.
"It's essential to remember that the United States had been involved
in overseas imperialism from the beginning," author and Professor
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes. That policy was forged as the original 13
colonies expanded westward and committed genocide against Native
Americans. Many of the empire-building acts of the United States
throughout its history - including at the current moment - can be
explained by its war on indigenous inhabitants of North America that was
justified by Eurocentric racism and "manifest destiny."
The following is an extensive interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on
the true history of how the United States became a nation, occupying
land it did not own by decimating native residents. It's an eye-opening
account that thoroughly debunks jingoistic and false history taught in
the vast majority of US schools.
____________________
Mark Karlin: Here it is October and the nation celebrated the
13th of this month as Columbus Day, "honoring" Columbus for
"discovering" the Western Hemisphere. Many people, at least now, have
the alternative of celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day, including those
of us at Truthout. Isn't it a bit galling that Columbus Day is still a
federal holiday, given that it reinforces a false narrative that
resulted in a magnitude of death and barbarity that is almost
incompressible?
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Yes. As the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. said, "Our nation was born in genocide. . . . We are
perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to
wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic
experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not
permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful
episode."
Continuing to celebrate Columbus's first voyage is an example of what
Dr. King refers to as elevating genocide to a noble crusade. Columbus'
voyage on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, endorsed by the Holy Roman
empire, marked the onset of modern colonialism as well as the beginning
of the African and Native-American slave trade. And capitalism. Marx
aptly described the process of primary accumulation of capital: "The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement
and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of
the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into
a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are
the chief moments of prior accumulation." - Karl Marx, from Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
By Jonathan Cook Israeli officials were caught in a revealing lie late last month as the country celebrated the Jewish New Year. Shortly after declaring the most popular boy’s name in Israel to be “Yosef”, the interior ministry was forced to concede that the top slot was actually filled by “Mohammed”.
That small deceit coincided with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ speech at the United Nations. He outraged Israelis by referring to Israel’s slaughter of more than 2,100 Palestinians – most of them civilians – in Gaza over the summer as “genocide”.
Both incidents served as a reminder of the tremendous power of a single word.
Most Israelis are barely able to contemplate the possibility that their Jewish state could be producing more Mohammeds than Moshes. At the same time, and paradoxically, Israel can point to the sheer number of “Mohammeds” to demonstrate that at worst it is eradicating the visibility of a Muslim name, certainly not its bearers.
As distressing as it is, hundreds of dead in Gaza is far from the industrial-scale murder of the Nazi Holocaust.
But the idea that Israel is committing genocide may not be quite as hyperbolic as is assumed. Last month a “jury” featuring international law experts at a people’s court, known as the Russell Tribunal, into Israel’s recent attack on Gaza concluded that Israel was guilty of “incitement to genocide”.
The panel argued that Israel’s long-term collective punishment of Palestinians seemed to be designed to “inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group”.
Israeli soldiers arresting a 8-year-old Palestinian child. (Screen capture from YouTube video)
By William I Robinson
Just days before the seven-week siege of Gaza this past July and August that left some 2,000 Palestinians dead, 11,000 injured and 100,000 homeless, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, a senior figure in the Jewish Home Party that is part of Israel's ruling coalition, posted on Facebook that "the entire Palestinian people is the enemy . . . including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure." The post went on to declare that "behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."
Shaked's Facebook post was shared over 1,000 times and received nearly 5,000 "likes." A few weeks later, on August 1, The Times of Israel published an op-ed piece by Yochanan Gordan titled "When Genocide Is Permissible." Gordan claimed that "there's going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings." He went on: "What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel . . . If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?"
Echoing these sentiments, the deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament Moshe Feiglin, a member of Netanyahu's Likud Party, urged the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave. "Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel's humanitarian efforts," Feiglin said. "The IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. . . . The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave."
These calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide are increasing in frequency. The political climate in Israel has continued to shift so sharply to the right in the past few years that a fascist discourse is now palpable in the daily life of the country. In Tel Aviv in August, some of the right-wing protesters who beat leftists demonstrating against the siege of Gaza wore T-shirts bearing neo-Nazi symbols and photos, including T-shirts bearing the slogan "Good night left side," a neo-Nazi slogan popular in Europe at rock concerts featuring far-right bands, as a response to the original anti-fascist slogan: "Good night white pride." Nearly half of the Jewish population of Israel supports a policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and major portions of the population support complete annexation of the occupied territories and the establishment of an apartheid state, according to a 2012 poll.
Fear that fascism is on the rise in Israel led 327 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide to publish an open letter in The New York Times on August 25 expressing alarm over "the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch." The letter continued: "We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people."
The Zionist project may have been founded - we now know from the spate of historical studies that have emerged in recent years - on systematic ethnic cleansing and terrorism against the Palestinians. Article II of the UN Convention of 1948 defines genocide as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." There is little doubt that we are seeing pre-genocidal activity in Israel-Palestine. What are the underlying structural roots in the Israeli political economy bringing about such genocidal pressures?
Israeli Major-General Giora Eiland has urged that all food and water be cut off to Gaza’s nearly 1.8 million Palestinian residents – a major war crime and precisely the “starve or surrender” policy which the United States has condemned when used in Syria.
Eiland, the Israeli government’s former national security adviser, argues that Gaza should be considered an enemy “state.”
“Since Gaza is in fact a state in a military confrontation with us, the proper way to put pressure on them is to bring to a full stop the supplies from Israel to Gaza, not only of electricity and fuel, but also of food and water,” he wrote in a Hebrew-language op-ed on Mako, a website affiliated with Israel’s Channel 2 television.
“A state cannot simultaneously attack and feed the enemy, while he is shooting at you, because this gives the other country a breathing space – and again I am referring to Gaza as a country, because the regime there is supported by its people,” Eiland adds.
Israel legally obliged to supply Gaza population
Eiland appears to believe that the fiction that Gaza is a sovereign “state” would somehow lessen culpability for what would amount to massive war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Under Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”
Under international law, Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza has not ended its military occupation of the territory because Gaza remains under the “effective control” of Israel.
Yet Israel has long violated its obligation by deliberately restricting the basic needs of Gaza’s population and deliberately destroying their food sources including agricultural land, poultry and dairy farms.
Israel’s deliberate attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has created a “water disaster,” already depriving every single person of access to a safe and secure supply of water.
Israel’s brutal siege is precisely what the Palestinian resistance in Gaza is currently fighting to end.
Possible genocidal intent
Eiland recently argued in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper, that because they elected Hamas, the people of Gaza as a whole “are to blame for this situation just like Germany’s residents were to blame for electing Hitler as their leader and paid a heavy price for that, and rightfully so.”
General Eiland’s call – which may amount to incitement to genocide – as well as to war crimes and crimes against humanity – is only the latest exterminationist proposal from an Israeli leader.
Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for instance, recently called for the population of Gaza to be moved to concentration camps and then expelled so that Gaza could be resettled with Jews.
“Starve or surrender” mirrors Syria policy
The United States government, Israel’s chief sponsor, has not expressed any criticism of Eiland’s proposals, nor done anything to end Israel’s siege. However, it views “starve or surrender” as a grave crime when used against opposition-held areas by the government in Syria.
Last month, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding that “all Syrian parties to the conflict,” including the government and the opposition, “shall enable the immediate and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance directly to people throughout Syria,” immediately “removing all impediments to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”
By contrast, the so-called “international community,” led by the United States, has supported and justified Israel’s siege of Gaza for almost eight years.
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
