Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)

Great interview. This is only the first part of a three-part interview. There are Jews in the world, as you may know already, who are not Zionist & actively reject Israel's claim, & the resultant brutality & occupation, of Palestine. 

I loved the last part of the interview where it shows that the only way a human being discards or reduces the humanity of another human being is through ignoring that there IS that another person who is like me. This ignorance can happen at international level (America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia etc.) & it always happens wartime, e.g. the only way Saudis can bomb Yemenis & keep blockade on, is by thinking of Yemenis as something not human, or American soldiers bombing & firing at Iraqis, all the while laughing & enjoying, can only happen when those soldiers think of those Iraqis as not being living & breathing humans. This attitude of ignorance also takes place domestically when rich elites keep hoarding money & resources while their compatriots are dying of hunger, thirst, unavailability of medical facilities, no education etc., & this also takes place at individual level where a husband treats badly his wife because he thinks she is not a human but something less than a human.

We need to develop empathy & conscience to think & see as the other person as a human being with the similar needs & wants as ourselves. A Palestinian or Kashmiri or Chechen or a Yemeni or an Afghani needs & wants as an Israeli or an Indian or a Russia or a Saudi or an American; food, water, freedom, education, medical facilities, job, safety for his family & future etc.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbvJ0DfJSM

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: I was born in the Soviet Union, in the former Soviet Union, in Kiev. And then, when I was six, we moved to Israel. We moved to the heart of the West Bank, into a settlement called Ariel, the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. So, while the global community was getting involved in our conflict and trying to divide the two halves of the land into two states, we moved into the middle of what would become the Palestinian state, into a settlement that used the guise of all of these negotiations to double the numbers and then triple the numbers.

And that’s really the story of the failed peace process. While America was busy shuffling envoys back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, we were growing as a settlement movement, getting more and more empowered by the total impunity.
...

And the reason why we moved there is because my mother wanted to contribute back to Zionism, because my family is from the Soviet Union. As Jews, we’ve encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. Also, members of our family died in gulags. Most of the family was killed in the Holocaust in World War II fighting the Nazis. So all of this history is very prominent in our identity. And so we moved to Israel. And after 31 years of Soviet anti-Semitism, my mother is basically being told, it’s your turn to serve Zionism, to serve the Jewish national homeland. And so she says, what can I do? The settlements? Let’s do it. So we move to the settlements. And that’s where I grew up ...

... I was the only Jew in my kindergarten in the Soviet Union. That’s what to me is a Jew is my kindergarten teacher hated Jews. She made sure everybody knew that I was the Jew. And as the only Jew–and in Russia, it’s a visible minority. So, visibly, looking at me, they would know I’m not a Russian, I’m a Jew. ... And in Israel-Palestine, ... we are the powerful, but we identify ourselves as the not that, not the local.

And that’s particularly poignant when you look at the majority of Israelis, who are Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi meaning Orientals. But Mizrahi Jews are basically Jews that came from Spain in 1492 and settled in North Africa, as well as Jews that have been living in the Middle East and in Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. And so, for them, they moved to Israel in the first years of the state. They come from the Arab world. They speak Arabic. A lot of their traditions are inspired by Arabic culture. And within a few years, they’re Ashkenized, they’re Europeanized. And their kids don’t speak Arabic, their grandkids don’t speak Arabic, they don’t identify as Arabs, and they identify very strongly with Israel. All of a sudden, the falafel becomes the Israeli food, you know, hummus becomes houmous.
...

Yeah. That was amazing. But, I mean, I moved to Israel when I was six. I was more preoccupied with the fact that three months after we moved there, the first Gulf War started, and we spent the first months–my first memories of Israel are sitting under sirens in a gas mask waiting for Saddam to bomb us with gas. Like, these are the things I remember. I remember being–because in Israel, yes, I was now a Jew amongst Jews, but Israel is a very racist society. So, from being the stinking Jew in the Soviet Union, I became the stinking Russian in a Jewish state.

So these are my memories. I mean, as a child, you don’t have an analysis of your identity or of politics. So, for me, what I cared about is my relationship with people my age. And in Ariel, everybody was a Russian, or a lot of the people who lived there were Russians, so you immediately felt like you were part of something. Plus, being part of a closed, gated community in the middle of the Palestinian West Bank, it’s another layer of segregation and insularism. And being in a country that is a Jewish Europe style country in the middle of the Middle East, in the middle of Arab countries, is another layer of that. And so Israel is a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and inside of all of that is the settlement right-wing movement.

And so those years in the settlements were the happiest years of my life, because I finally felt like I belonged to something, I was a part of something. And I never thought in bigger terms.

And, in fact, the first time I was ever called a settler, I was in my 20s. I was studying in university in Canada, and a Middle East correspondent called Jon Elmer came to speak on my campus, and I thought that he was very biased, and I was going to teach him what it’s all about, and asked him some kind of really ignorant question, and he just said, I’m so sick of you settlers coming to my talks and telling me I’m wrong. You go to Gaza. And I said to myself, what do you mean I’m a settler? I’m not a settler. And that’s when I started digging what does the settler mean.

I’ll tell you, one thing that is characteristic of ethnocracies, and particularly colonial ethnocracies that we see a lot in Israel, is a number of very strong contradictions. So Israeli identity is a mixture of the strong, the invincible, the strongest among the nations, we are the strongest army in the region and one of the strongest armies in the world, coupled with we are persecuted, we are hated, we are victims. Now, both of those things are true, and both of them work off of each other, and both of them are absolutely necessary for the ethnocratic project.

And what’s more important to me is not the colonialism that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and in Gaza; what’s more important to me is the ethnocratic regime inside of Israel, because ethnocracies such as Israel, such as the former Balkan states, such as Sri Lanka and Macedonia used to be and South Africa used to be, are–this is the frontier of the global laboratory of how to deal with globalization. And this is why there is a rise of fascistic and extreme-right movements in the United States and in Europe and a lot of these Western places where they want globalized capital without globalized migration. And Israel is a laboratory for a lot of that, as well as weapons, but also a lot of those ideas. And that’s what I stay up at night worrying about.

And for that identity, for that national identity, you need a number of things. You need the justification for endless war. That’s where the victim identity comes from. You also need to inspire people. You need a story of success, of heroism. And this has been the story of Israeli military conquests throughout the last 67 years, to the point where if you ask an Israeli which war did Israel lose, they would say none. Maybe ’73, but none. No, we always win wars.

That’s complete bullshit. We have lost most of our wars, definitely in the last 20 years. We lost Lebanon I, we definitely lost Lebanon II, we lost the intifadas and these perpetual conflicts. Even this last summer attack–I was covering it for you, and I was out there on the ground every day covering what was happening all around us–Hamas didn’t just shock the Israeli military establishment in its ingenuous ways of combating this giant military machine with the tunnels, with the sneaking in through the sea, with rockets, with smuggling weapons from Libya after the 2011 civil war, and so on, and the number of things that they did that they pulled out of their hat of tricks that surprise us, but they forced us–and this nobody–nobody could have predicted this–they forced mighty Israeli into a negotiation with Hamas, a terrorist nothing group that was on its knees before the war started, was falling apart before the war started. And today, while everyone on the street was against Hamas before the war started, you won’t find a single person critical of Hamas. My point is we are perpetual war losers, and yet we have to perpetuate this identity that we are invincible.

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: It may be that–I mean, it depends what you consider winning, because it wasn’t clear the objective was to get rid of Hamas, ’cause I think Israel feared what the alternative would be. But in terms of the relationship of Israel and the Israeli state to the Palestinians, right now they’re winners. I mean, the occupation looks like it’s endless.

TARACHANSKY: It’s true. Let me explain what I mean by win and lose. As I’m sure you know, since World War II, we haven’t had many wars where you have a clear winner and a clear loser. And Israel is not fighting an army. And so there isn’t never going to be a checkmark–you won and you lost. We’re fighting a civilian, largely civilian population.

I’m talking about Israeli public identity, this point at which you can get to the Israeli public, average Israeli thinks, we won that war. And the average Israeli today thinks, we’ve lost the last 12 years of war. And that’s incredibly important, because, yes, on the ground we have the West Bank, we can bomb Syria if we want to, we can bomb Lebanon if we want to, we can do anything we want.
...

... At this point, my intellectual identity was already very much questioning of the Zionist project. But to physically be there surrounded by these Palestinian villages is completely different than to understand something from watching the news and so on and so forth. And to physically be in that space and to realize that I had grown up here, I’d spent my happiest years here, and here comes “Allāhu Akbar”, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m hearing the sound that I had somehow–and the call to prayer happens five times a day. Israel is surrounded by villages whose names I didn’t even know, all around, each village, five times a day, the call to prayer, and I somehow didn’t even register hearing the sound. And when I turned around to point out to you what is a settlement and what’s a Palestinian village and what’s a settlement, what’s a Palestinian village, I was naming them to you, but in my mind I was thinking, I don’t even remember them being there.

You’re so busy constructing your identity, you’re not even paying attention to what’s right in front of you. And that is in essence the representation of collective denial. That is what Stanley Cohen, on whose work I did my documentary, exactly what he describes. What do two people looking at the same object, how can it be that they see two different things? And what do they do to that knowledge? And what does that knowledge do to them? For me, that changed my life, and I know that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to fight not just the Zionistic idea of Jewish exclusivity to the land, but I’m going to have to stand up against what’s going on in Israel-Palestine until there is justice for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life; it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my free time. This is my responsibility, just like it is the responsibility of every person in America to stop police brutality against the largely people of color minority. It is your responsibility. It’s not about right and wrong. You have to do this. You don’t have a choice.

And that’s what I realized in that moment is that implicated in my own guilt for having enjoyed colonialism on this land, this land that does not belong to just one group, it is now my responsibility to fight it forever. And this is the effect that this seeing and hearing for the first time had on me.

And I have to tell you the truth. Since have been the best years of my adult life, understanding that, having the clarity of thought to finally lay out not just the historical narrative, but also understand so many things that I was afraid to ask questions about, to finally look beyond my fear and go to the West Bank and have friends in Gaza and sit on the phone with them as they were being bombed by, supposedly, my army, and hear each other’s humanity, and have them tell me, Lia, I know this is not you, I know you’re in solidarity; I’m here with you, I’m sorry that there’s people sending rockets at you, it’s not my intention. My privilege to be able to see across these walls, it was a direct result of being able to have that moment.

And I wish for everyone in my country, I wish for all my people to have that moment, because it’s only once we look past these walls that we can see the humanity of the other and we can move out of this collective trauma.

How The Military Fails US Veterans

People, all over the world, will fight with their lives on the line, when there's a worthy cause to fight for. Those people who win that fight or battle or war will also be able to survive better, knowing full well that they fought for a solid purpose & achieved that worthy purpose. Besides, the biggest judge of all our actions is our own conscience, which will also be at peace, even though, there were deaths & destruction in that battle or war.

What American veterans are going through, currently, mentally & physically, is more of a matter of how their own conscience is restless & making them relive that nightmare of killing or injuring thousands upon thousands of innocent people, including senior people, women, & children. Heck, even hospitals & UN-recognized shelters were not spared from these vets' actions.

Coupled that mental anguish & physical suffering with the knowledge that all these wars & invasions were not for wiping out terrorism from the face of the Earth. These wars were pure & simple genocidal actions against innocent people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, & several other countries, & their only purpose was for military-industrial complex to keep earning its blood-soaked profits.

So, regardless of how many Presidents come & go, these veterans & their PTSD-fuelled actions, & suicides, are simply "chickens coming home to roost" for America.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA2QSlYZ9Jk

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I got a book from a gentleman who started a project called [Waking Up from War]. And what he's done is assess the programs that the DA and the DOD and those two in combination, though they rarely are in sync, offer for veterans coming home primarily from Afghanistan and Iraq and the bloody wars there. And the manuscript not only describes the Coming Home Project and how successful and effective it has been, but it also describes why other programs run by the services, run by DOD in general, run by the VA are not working or are causing more problems than they're helping to solve. And in a very comprehensive sense, he comments on the backdrop of all of this, which is a nation, supposedly a democratic federal republic, interminably at war and how that exacerbates all of this.

And, of course, it's a positive manuscript, in terms of he wants to say how we get out of this, both the larger problem, interminable war, and the problem it breeds, which is a lot of Americans, millions of Americans, who were sent off to do their nation's business and who are now back seriously harmed, seriously injured psychologically and physically, sometimes both. And we're not doing a very good job of taking care of them.

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: So what are some of his suggestions? How do we kind of get out of this vicious cycle of failing our veterans and our soldiers once they come home from serving?

WILKERSON: I think the first thing we have to do--and I agree with him 100% on this--is we have to take a long-term approach to it. You cannot cure these veterans by giving them the magic elixir, the antidepressant or the cocktail of drugs that the military sometimes would like to give them to get them off its books and out of its hair. What this is doing in many cases is giving them situations, depression and so forth, that leads to suicide. As you probably know, the suicide rate is off the charts in all the military services. So this is an ancillary problem connected with this, though.

The most important thing you have to do in that sustained approach is give the veteran a sense of community. You have to give them a sense of coming home to something that really cares for them, that wants to deal with their problems, that will deal with their problems, that doesn't accuse them in any way, that is not something that is a handshake in the Atlanta airport, for example, and a trite welcome home, thank you for your service, but is a serious effort to deal with their problems, physical and psychological, that will last over time and not quit until they're back being meaningful members of their community again.

And I'll give you an anecdote of my own experience that sort of demonstrates this in crushing detail. I was at Walter Reed National Medical Center recently and met a triple amputee, and older young man, about 32. He was an EOD, an ordinance disposal technician, and he'd been disposing of IEDs in both Iraq and Afghanistan when one of them went off and took off both his legs below the knees and his right arm. And this was a young man who was being visited by a congressional delegation that morning, and I was visiting with him around lunchtime after that. And he told me, he said the delegation came in--dog and pony show, he called it--and he said they thanked him for his service. And that was the first thing they said, almost in unison. And he cut them off and he said, don't thank me for my service; thank me for my sacrifice, which you can clearly see. My service I'm conflicted over.

And this takes us into the second dimension of this manuscript, which is so eloquent and so well written in terms of this, and that is a nation that is interminably at war, and arguably at war that many of these veterans don't understand the purpose of. They don't understand what their sacrifice was for. The Iraq War comes to mind immediately as an illegal war, a war we should never have participated in. Many of these veterans feel that way about it. And this makes their healing burden, if you will, all the more challenging, makes the problem, the challenge that we have to welcome them home and to deal with their problems, their challenges, all the more difficult, because they don't feel like the sacrifice that they made--in many cases catastrophic sacrifices--was for anything meaningful, for anything worthwhile. So we have to cure that problem too. And the first thing, of course, we have to do is stop this business of interminable war.

One of the quotations in the book that just grabbed me by my heart was from a Marine, active-duty Marine general, two-star general. He was speaking over the 30,000-plus graves in the San Francisco national Cemetery on the northern slope of the Presidio--beautiful place in California. And he said, ... the costs of war are so great that we just have to find a better way to resolve our problems and our disputes than killing one another.

And, now, that's a truism of the very first order. We have to start doing things through political, diplomatic, and other means, other parts of our national power, than through the military means. It simply is not a sustainable way to do things. And these veterans are testimony to that.

DESVARIEUX: And how do these veterans feel about lawmakers? Some people kind of make this criticism that they don't even have skin in the game, they don't have their kids serving, things of that nature. What's their take on that? What's been the book's perspective on that?

WILKERSON: That's a precise point, Jessica. It's a very important point. If you don't have skin in the game, if you don't have your family members under duress, in harm's way, if you don't go there yourself--one of the vets, for example, says something to this effect: when the king led his forces into battle, there was less battle. Well, just think about that for a moment. When is Lindsey Graham and John McCain going to mount their Charger and go out and get in front of the forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and in Syria? And you say, well, John McCain's a veteran, he's done his service, and so forth. Well, shut up, then. We don't need people mongering for war. We don't need people asking the president and others to lead this nation into yet more conflicts, for example a war with Iran ... . We need less war. And we need less veterans.

DESVARIEUX: Larry, remind our viewers: what is the name of that manuscript and the author?

WILKERSON: [Waking Up from War], and the author is Joseph Bobrow.

Bombs, War Crimes & Our Diminished Sensitivity

A great opinion piece on how bombing & killing innocent civilians, at the push of a button, has become just a video game for the strong & "civilized" nations.

2 Hague Conventions banned the senseless aerial bombing of civilians but the fine print was that these bombings were banned during the wars between "civilized nations." Since, the Global West has always considered itself "civilized," aerial bombing of civilians was never banned during wars when an "uncivilized" country needs to be taught a lesson.

Although, today's world has several different kinds of international institutions, beside the UN, where, countries are supposedly on an equal footing, but when it comes to politics, wars, & the ensuing value of human lives, there is still a huge divide between the strong Global West / North & Global East / South. The Global West / North still consider itself "civilized" & above any international law, whatsoever, whereas, the Global East / South has to be policed & berated like a little naughty baby.

Most of the general public in the Global West has a diminished sensitivity towards illegitimate wars & chaos their countries are creating in other countries. News of innocent civilians being killed for no reason than just being alive either don't make to the Western news media or if they do, the public just brushes it away like some kind of unwanted annoyance. There was a time when huge protests were organized in the streets of American streets against the Vietnam war, but when American drones are easily killing innocent civilians in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc., the public is all fine & dandy with it.

Ironically, as the emir of Afghanistan implied, so-called "civilized" nations have not only mastered the art of killing innocent civilians for no reasons, whatsoever, they have also lost any sensitivity or guilt towards falsely creating wars & then killing people in other countries. In the West, when someone kills someone else without any remorse, he / she is labelled a psychopath. But when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed by a "civilized" nation, it's all in the name of peace & justice. Prosecution of war crimes are never done against them & everyone goes on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Then, the Western public wonders why the people of "uncivilized" nations hate us? They don't hate you. They hate the double standards of international bodies like UN. They hate double sensitivities of the general public. They hate how the value of an Iraqi life is far less than a French one, for instance. The general public cries a river if a few die in the West, but a thousand killed in the East don't even register a small tear.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/10/bombs-war-crimes-diminished-sensitivity-151013101634047.html

On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso read the front-page headlines in L'Humanite: "One thousand incendiary bombs dropped by Hitler and Mussolini's planes reduce the city of Guernica to ashes. An incalculable number of dead and wounded. For how long can the world tolerate the terrifying exploits of international fascism?"

Though generally not much affected by political events, Picasso was devastated by the aerial bombing of civilians in his native country & immediately began to work on an enormous painting of protest & memorial. Executed in the same black-and-white as the harrowing newspaper pictures, Guernica was immediately adopted as both emblem & fund-raiser for international anti-Franco activism.

In the ensuing decades, it became so iconic an image of the horrors of war that a tapestry facsimile was placed in the lobby of the United Nations. In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the US' case for military intervention in Iraq, this tapestry was covered with a blue curtain. As the New York Times commented at the time, "Mr Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children …"

Picasso's masterpiece emerged from his epoch's general repugnance towards aerial bombing (in the streets, one million Parisians protested the Guernica bombing while he was painting inside), a now-diminished feeling that we would do well to revive.

Last resort

As HG Wells' 1908 novel, War in the Air, showed, it was not civilian air travel that people envisioned in the wake of the Wright brothers' early successes, but bombs. And, as was immediately recognised, the dominance of the skies by "air navies" would herald a different kind of warfare. Forget those soldierly qualities celebrated since Homer - courage, valour, chivalry & the like; in the future, you could defeat a people without emotion & without danger to yourself. Even generals demurred at a prospect both so brutal & so cowardly, & aerial bombing of civilian targets was banned by both Hague Conventions in 1899 & 1907.

But the Hague Conventions only governed the conduct of war between "civilised nations", which implied that such crude tactics could be used against those deemed neither "civilised" nor "nations". Therefore, naturally, there were experiments in Europe's empires. In 1920, Britain & France used bombs to terrorise civilians rebelling against their newly-installed regimes in Iraq & Syria, respectively. Britain also dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan, whose emir articulated the paradox that has obtained ever since: "It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act … while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are ... prevalent among civilised people of the West."

Western assumptions about which populations may be targeted with aerial bombardment have remained intact - & no one should be surprised if those populations have stored up a diabolical picture of the West over the course of the intervening century.

What has not remained intact is the basic repugnance towards aerial bombing which made it, even in the old empires, an unpopular last resort. Today, aerial bombing fails to generate the outrage that Guernica did, despite its inordinately more destructive effects. Of course, this is partly because the West now feels it will not itself be the target, which was not the case in the 1930s. But it is also because the great internationalist enterprise of which the Hague Conventions were a part - which included making war less brutal, &, if possible, ending it - has fallen into cynical disrepair, & one of the results is the diminished sensitivities of our era.

The Palace of Nations in Geneva ... is a relic of that enterprise, which sought a new and better world. Visionaries from every continent were united in the feeling that what must replace Europe's empires was some form of inter-national "society of societies": Just as in modern nations, free citizens freely congregated to resolve social disputes & determine their joint future, so in the "society of societies", free nations would do the same. Arbitration would replace war; the sphere of politics would be the world.

In an era threatened by total war, this vision captivated generations of idealists, including such disparate figures as Andrew Carnegie and HG Wells. It resulted in an impressive furniture of international laws, conventions & institutions, some of which still operate today. But it was severely damaged by the Cold War when both the US & the Soviet Union undermined international bodies so they could transform the world in their own interests. Since then, the US & its allies have pursued aggressive private policies on the global stage whose relationship with any residual idea of the international "community" is well expressed by that blue curtain across Guernica. Russia is now returning to a similarly extralegal role.

The envisioned "society" of societies has become instead a gangland, & one where there is no trace of the "democracy" that is its frequent war cry. The attack on the MSF hospital on October 3 is just another example of how battered the old civilising project, a key part of which was the inviolability of medical personnel in war zones, is.

Prosecuting war crimes

As far back as 1864, when a Swiss millionaire who had earlier witnessed the carnage of the Battle of Solferino established in Geneva an international medical force to care for the victims of war, regardless of their nationality, the red cross on the doctors' flag was a guarantee of immunity from attack. The Geneva Convention, at which the new organisation was announced, stated, "Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognised as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick." This provision was updated & expanded in the Hague Conventions & - during that last burst of internationalism before the Cold War - in the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Despite everything, the legal situation has not been diluted since. Any wartime belligerent knowingly attacking neutral medical staff & facilities without notifying them in advance is guilty of a war crime. ...

Our present world crisis is, in great part, a result of the assault over the last seventy years on the ideals & infrastructure designed between 1850 & 1950 to ensure world peace. It may be too late to rebuild them, but we do not have a better hope. The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary & judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless & senseless - & it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak.

An apocryphal story goes like this: Pablo Picasso, living in Nazi-occupied Paris, had his studio searched by the Gestapo. Coming across a reproduction of Guernica, a German officer asked the artist, "Did you do this?" "No," replied Picasso. "You did."

One wonders how such a conversation would go today.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in Delhi. He is the author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi.

Refugees deserve help, but what about the EU poor?

A great opinion piece confirming my own thoughts, which I've been detailing here, on this blog. Ironically enough, the refugee crisis has not ended at all, or even getting close to an end, & the media has moved on; reporting on the refugee drownings in the back pages somewhere, if at all.

The refugee crisis didn't start with Aylan Kurdi's drowning & didn't end with the EU's refugee settlement agreement with Turkey in 2016 or with Canada & US taking a few thousand refugees. The Western media didn't bother to cover refugee crisis when refugees were making dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean & over European lands through 2011 to 2015. Of course, if the media doesn't cover these stories, the Western public is the kind that will keep sleeping, blissfully, in their ignorance. I've never seen such ignored public like the Western public; ignorance coupled with very short-term memory (most of the public has forgotten about the refugee crisis, & has moved on).

On top of the refugee crisis, which the Western countries created in the first place by supporting Assad regime & destroying Iraq, & dithering further in coming up with solutions to resolve the violence & the consequent refugee crisis, they try to absorb as many refugees as they can. Now, as I've said before, helping refugees should definitely be done. No questions about it.

BUT, as a Western government, it also needs to help its own citizens. Forcing your own people to suffer in a very austere economic climate, while doling out millions on refugees, will only going to fan the flames of hatred, animosity, & enmity. The Donald Trumps, Nigel Farages, & Marine Le Pens of the Western political arenas did, & are still doing, exactly that; spreading the hatred of refugees & Muslims (since, refugees are mostly from Islamic countries) by courting to those kinds of groups in their countries who are disenfranchised, marginalised, & left to fend for themselves in this latest economic crisis. Ironically enough, even Islam teaches that an individual has much bigger responsibility of taking care of its family, first & foremost, before it starts to dole out its fortune on all its neighbours.

The last two paragraphs succinctly summarize the whole opinion piece. This refugee crisis is indeed a global humanitarian crisis because refugees are not only Syrians & Iraqis but also in SouthEast Asia (Rohingyas, for example) & in Central Asia (Afghans, Hazaras, Kazakhs etc.) & in South Sudan, Nigeria, Libya, Zimbabwe, Uganda etc. They are all in refugee status because their livelihoods has been taken away from them, with the help of world's powerful countries of the Global North (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, China, Russia etc.) who are selling arms & weapons, by the ship loads to these already-impoverished countries, implementing & enforcing trade rules which help their own trade balances, & are not willing to severely curtail their environmental footprints, which in turn leads to environmental disasters in Syria, Iraq, & the African continent. Did you know that drought & climate change were factors in this Syrian uprising?

It is true that justice cannot be enforced through armed interventions. Every refugee is indeed made because a) he/she is the victim of the "might is right" foreign policies of the Western world & b) that he/she is not getting any justice, whatsoever.

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https://www.rt.com/op-edge/314665-hypocrisy-austerity-refugees-poor/ 

Aylan Kurdi has achieved more in death than he ever could in life. The image of his three-year old body lying just beyond the waves on a Turkish beach, will forever taunt the West with the lie of its claim to being synonymous with civilization & justice.

Ignorance

It says much about the ignorance that permeates Western culture when the picture of one dead child can cause so many to emote over their lattes, compel others to embark on collections & aid missions to refugees in Calais, Hungary, Greece, & Turkey, without eliciting the slightest understanding of why Aylan & countless others like him have perished; & why so many human beings are all of a sudden desperate to come to Europe, despite the huge risk such a perilous journey involves.

The mass exodus of refugees from the Middle East did not begin with the death of this three-year old Syrian boy. He is not the first child to have drowned in the attempt & nor will he be the last. This exodus has been taking place for 3 or 4 years – years in which European governments have extended themselves in doing their utmost to deepen the conflict, societal collapse, & instability that now scars a large swathe of the Middle East & North Africa (MENA).

In this they have been aided by a complicit media, which has succeeded in reducing the world to a struggle between the West - that pillar of human rights, democracy, & civilization - & everyone else, by implication those who are against human rights, democracy, & civilization. This narrative could only succeed with the acquiescence of a populace that has willingly suspended disbelief when it comes to the chaos & conflict that in recent years has been the rule rather than the exception across much of the world.
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Difficult dilemma

Across Western Europe, after the wave of pro-refugee sentiment we are witnessing inevitably dies down, wherein people previously welcomed with the fist of fury are for the first time being treated as human beings in desperate need of help, governments are going to be faced with a difficult dilemma.

Under the policy of austerity that has reigned across Europe over the past few years we have seen workers, the poor, disabled, & the most economically disadvantaged hit with cuts to their incomes, cuts to the public services upon which they depend, resulting in many cases in the imposition of poverty & despair. This has all been done in the name of tackling an economic recession brought to the world courtesy of a banking & financial system that has more in common with a casino on the Las Vegas Strip than institutions entrusted with the pensions & investments of millions of people.

The point is that austerity has been sold & implemented on the basis that there is no alternative, that the money required to fund public services, pay salaries & benefits is no longer available. Yet now, all of a sudden, people forced to suffer the worst under austerity are finding out that this is nonsense - that when it comes to absorbing thousands of refugees from the Middle East there actually is money available.

This contradiction is pregnant with danger inasmuch as the absorption of thousands of refugees from the Middle East & elsewhere, unless accompanied by immediate investment in infrastructure, services, housing, & so on, may only succeed in raising cultural & social tensions, providing ammunition for the far right & those for whom refugees, migrants, & foreigners are deserving of nothing but enmity.

Hypocrisy of mainstream politicians

As for those politicians now clambering to announce they would be willing to invite Syrian refugees into their homes, or into their second homes, how many homeless people do you think they walk or drive past in London, Berlin, or Paris on a daily basis without so much as a thought for the despair so many of their citizens are experiencing each & every day?

This is not to suggest these refugees are not deserving or worthy of help. They clearly are, especially from those countries whose hands are covered in the blood of millions across the Middle East with their role in devastating the region, leading directly to the birth of ISIS & the proliferation of terrorism & the resulting refugee crisis, one that is now biblical in scope.

But by the same token, we cannot allow hypocrisy to prosper. There is a direct & causal relationship between the West’s foreign policy & a world that has never been so polarized & divided between rich & poor, developed & undeveloped. Indeed the wealth of the northern hemisphere is predicated on the poverty & immiseration of the southern hemisphere. As such, it could be argued that those arriving in Europe in their thousands now are merely collecting a debt of obligation that has been long overdue.

Here we come to the most nauseating aspect of this crisis. For years now the West has extended itself in trying to isolate the Assad government, demonizing it as morally equivalent to ISIS & other terrorist groups that have written a new page in history when it comes to barbarity & evil. They have facilitated this evil and until we see a reorientation of Western policy towards Syria, this barbarity will go on & on.

EU now functions in name only

... As for the EU, it now functions in name only, with its disunity, division, & dysfunction incredible to watch. Unable to arrive at a coordinated, cohesive response to this crisis, we now have a situation that demands the involvement of the UN.

This refugee crisis is not a European crisis it is a global humanitarian crisis caused by those in position of power who view the world through a skewed lens, reducing it to one giant chessboard upon which governments can be moved around, removed, & replaced at will.

‘Might is right’ can never supplant justice as the basis of international affairs. Each & every refugee is the victim of the former & a consequence of the absence of the latter.


John Wight has written for newspapers and websites across the world, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal. He is also a regular commentator on RT and BBC Radio. John is currently working on a book exploring the role of the West in the Arab Spring. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnWight1

Iran: A victim of terrorism

Another great opinion piece by Belen Fernandez. With the help of international traditional media & social media, the world has been brainwashed to blame the victims for their actions, while praising & wholeheartedly supporting the actions of oppressors.

As my prior blog posts have stated multiple times, double standards & lies are the norm of Global North / developed economies of North America & Western Europe. One of their citizens get hurt, the world has to come to a standstill, but thousands upon thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Japanese, Palestinians, Nigerians, Nicaraguans, Iranians etc. can die but nary a peep from the media or governments. To add insults to injuries, those countries & those victims get blamed for their deaths.

While the permanent members of UN Security Council sells arms & ammunition around the world, like US did to Israel while it was relentlessly bombing Gaza, which is also known as, "the largest open-air prison in the world," or how UK & Canada are selling their arms & weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is using them to bomb innocent civilians in Yemen, but when Pakistan shared its nuclear technology with Libya & Iran, its top nuclear scientist was house bound & restrictions were placed on the country. While Iran has to pretty much "take off its clothes in public" to keep its nuclear technology & to get rid of economic sanctions, UN Security Council members are trying to out-sell each other in terms of selling their military technology to the whole world, just so more & more innocent civilians die each & every day around the world.

How do you think an Iraqi father would regard an American when he comes to hear Madeleine Albright saying that killing one / most / all of his children was "worth it" due to Iraqi economic sanctions of 1990's? Although, harming / killing an innocent person is wrong everywhere in the world, regardless of where that person lives, but showing no empathy, & even blaming the victims, for actions which he / she didn't commit in the first place, is far more worse. No compassion & empathy would lead to seething anger & then that anger would find a violent outlet & then that outlet would be called "terrorism".

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/09/iran-victim-terrorism-150906053617492.html

"One should have a single, not a double, standard."

These were the (translated) words of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking at a conference I recently attended in Tehran. His observation was in reference to the habit of the United States & Co of decrying terrorism but then applauding terroristic behaviour when it serves their interests.

US mastery of the double standard means that, for example, the word "terrorism" is dutifully applied to situations in which planes are flown into US buildings, but not to ones in which US warships shoot down Iranian passenger jets, killing everyone on board.

A look at reality

While Iran is portrayed in Western & Israeli circles as a relentless supporter of terrorism worldwide, the conference focused on a less politically convenient reality: that of Iran as a victim of terror.

According to Iranian calculations, more than 17,000 persons have perished as a result of terrorist operations in the country since the Islamic revolution of 1979. The majority of these were perpetrated by the anti-government Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK).

Casualties have included three-year-old Fatima Taleghani, who burned to death when MEK members set fire to her room, teenager Zeynab Kamayee, who was reportedly suffocated with her veil, and 35-year-old Dariush Rezaeinejad, one of five Iranian scientists assassinated in recent years - apparently with the help of the Israelis.
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'Material support'

The US government has also demonstrated sympathy for select Iranian terrorists, albeit in a far less noble fashion. In 2012, the US state department delisted the MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), despite reports of continuing terroristic activities.

Prominent journalist & constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald described the delisting as "more vividly illustrat[ing] the rot and corruption at the heart of America's DC-based political culture than almost any episode I can recall".

While still on the FTO list, Greenwald wrote, the MEK had thrown large sums of money at an array of Democratic & Republican personalities, journalists, & other opinion shapers, who then became advocates for the organisation.

Along with previous training sessions in the US for MEK operatives, Greenwald argued that such collaborative arrangements seemed to constitute "material support" for terrorism - a felony under US law.

But the US justice system prefers to reserve this crime for hapless Muslims, like Syed Fahad Hashmi, a US citizen & Brooklyn College graduate sentenced to 15 years in prison - following several years of pre-trial solitary confinement - for allegedly providing material support to al-Qaeda.

What was the exact nature of Hashmi's "support"? Having once provided temporary accommodation in London to a man who happened to supply al-Qaeda members with socks & rain ponchos.

The US on trial

Again, the term "double standard" comes to mind.

And it returns with a recent Wall Street Journal article titled: "Terror Victims Eye Thawing with Iran", which explains that "[o]ver the past two decades, terrorism victims have filed about 100 lawsuits against Iran in US courts", alleging Iranian sponsorship of attacks ranging from the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut to 9/11.

Citing testimonies from the victims' lawyers, the article notes that "lifting just the nuclear sanctions [against Iran] could free up billions of Iranian assets in Europe and elsewhere that victims may attempt to seize as part of their judgements".

The barracks bombing is regularly attributed to the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah - which didn't officially exist at the time. If we follow the above line of reasoning, however, it appears that the US is eligible for a fairly infinite number of lawsuits - in Lebanon & beyond.

Not only did the US rush shipments of weaponry to Israel during its assault on Lebanon in 2006 - an affair that dispensed with approximately 1,200 human lives, most of them civilian - it also contributed financially & morally to Israel's sustained terrorism in Gaza via billions of dollars in annual aid & ceaseless repetitions of the mantra that Israel is engaged in self-defence.

Standard operating procedure

Other US hobbies, like drone strikes & imperialist wars, can also be pretty terroristic in nature. Furthermore, as California-based independent researcher Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich remarked during her presentation at the conference in Tehran: economic sanctions against Iran constitute a form of "UN-sanctioned terrorism" given their detrimental effects on the well-being of innocent civilians.

One of the more glaring examples of the ruthlessness of sanctions is, of course, Iraq. Reports in 1996 that half-a-million children had so far died as a result of the policy elicited the following response from then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "We think the price is worth it."

Indeed, when it comes to terrorising people, the "land of the free" beats the Islamic Republic, hands down. But the victory goes largely unreported in mainstream circles because double standards have become standard operating procedure.


Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

America's wars drag on no matter what officials say

A great opinion piece on how American troops once enter a country never actually leave; be it Germany & Japan (after WWII), South Korea (after Korean War), Vietnam (after Vietnam war), & now, Afghanistan & Iraq. Other than these well-publicized conflicts, American troops entered, & wrecked havoc, in several other countries around the world; in Africa & Latin America.

Regardless of how much American leadership says to their naïve, & ignorant, American public that American troops will be out of a country at some point in the future; in reality, they never do. Those troops become the expense, financial & social, of the host country. The military operations continue on for decades on end. Heck, nowadays, American military hand the military operations to "military contractors" (former military personnel) to offload operational costs to a third party & reduce its own liability in case something goes awry.

Furthermore, America needs a war(s) to keep its own populace in fear, which in turn, helps the government to keep control of the public. These wars are / will always be started & fought over false pretenses & the military-industrial complex needs wars like an addict need its addiction. After all, all those billion-dollar budgets won't be passed by the Congress for the military in absence of a war(s).

One more point the opinion piece makes is that these wars, & their continuation, are done without any input whatsoever from the general public. Isn't that against the basic concept of "democracy"? So, can the American public please enlighten me then what's the difference between a Saudi prince waging a war against a poor country, Yemen, without any input from its general public (since, it's an authoritarian regime) & an American government starting wars against poor countries like Afghanistan, Libya, & Iraq, without any input from its general public (especially since, it's a "democratic" country)?

One last point the opinion piece makes, & which hit home, is that billions are spent, & essentially, are being wasted, in these wars. American troops suffer heavy losses in terms of death (almost 10,000 troops have died in Afghanistan & Iraq in the past decade) & life-long physical & mental disabilities. These recent wars against Afghanistan & Iraq have also pretty much bankrupted one of the richest countries in the world. Its general public work hard & still, millions are merely surviving on meagre incomes. Homelessness has substantially increased in the past decade. Poverty keep increasing & shows no signs of abating in the foreseeable future. But billions are wasted on "foreign fighters" who have no allegiance to America, its ideals, & its people.

But, then, America needs wars like a drug addict needs its drugs.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/america-war-iraq-libya-afghanistan-endless

In all three of the countries where the Obama administration declared US wars “over” in the past few years - Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya - the US military is expanding its presence or dropping bombs at an ever-increasing rate. And the government seems to be keeping the American public in the dark on the matter more than ever.

Pentagon leaders suggested ... that the US military wants to keep remaining 9,800 troops in Afghanistan from withdrawing in 2016, despite the fact that the Obama administration declared combat operations in the country “over” ... months ago. The gradual extension of the Afghanistan War hasn’t been a secret to anyone who’s been paying close attention, but sadly it has happened far away from the pomp & circumstance of Obama’s now embarrassingly false State of the Union announcement that the Afghanistan War had ended.

Shortly after his January speech, the president signed a secret order that would keep the military fighting & killing in the region through 2015, then delayed any troop pull-out through 2016. ...

As the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko remarked: “First it was al Qaeda, then the Taliban, now ISIS will be reason US military remains in Afghanistan.” There’s always going to be someone. What unnamed group will be holding our attention in 2020 when we still have troops fighting & dying there for nebulous reasons?

Away from the headlines, Libya continues to deteriorate since the US & NATO allies bombed the region & deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. ...

As a result, the US military to desperately look to build another drone base near Libya that they can start launching regular drone strikes from - targeting both Libya & “elsewhere in North Africa.” This news comes around the same time as yet another retired US general, former director of the Pentagon’s intelligence unit Michael Flynn, indicated ... that drone strikes are actually creating more terrorists than they’re killing. Flynn’s comments echo the same point that has been made over & over by former generals & many other smart people recently, yet has evoked no change in policy or even public debate.

This potential expansion of the Isis war to a third country has all happened without congressional approval. Hardly anyone seems to care that we’re engaged in a generational war spanning multiple continents that we haven’t legally declared, almost a year after it was started.

Meanwhile in Syria, after months of delay, the first US-trained rebels finally entered the Isis-controlled regions and the process is already being accused of “mission creep” by defense experts, given its further entrenching US into the war there (again, without so much as a formal announcement by the government).

The rebels also come at an astronomical price-tag for the US of $4 million for each rebel, & there is no indication that it will have any effect on the chaos that now engulfs Syria, besides potentially causing more of it. Zenko called the program “one of the more poorly conceived and implausible foreign policy schemes in modern history.”

The Obama administration & CIA knew full well that funding rebel armies in foreign countries almost always ends in disaster, yet did it anyways - & hid the conclusions of a CIA study saying as much from Congress along the way.

What’s troubling about all of this is that it is happening with little debate in Congress & almost no input from public. The US is ramping up its war efforts across the Middle East & now North Africa. They want to increase drone strikes, continue to spend billions to train Afghanistan & Iraqi troops, despite the fact that the last decade of “training” has been a disaster where whole armies have deserted & billions of dollars in US weapons are now in the hands of Isis. And of course, the specter of adding more US ground troops always lurks in the background.

There is growing realization from experts that we’re not going to be able to bomb our way out of this. Is there no one in charge in Washington who is willing to admit that doubling down yet again on military force is only going to keep making matters worse?