Here is my transcription of the late Australian broadcast journalist Richard Carleton's 1970 interview with the Beirut-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) spokesman Ghassan Kanafani, as posted by the Lebanese-American academic Asad Abukhalil (otherwise known as The Angry Arab) on his Twitter feed on 25/6/19.
But first a word from Kanafani's Danish wife Anni to put you in the picture regarding what you are about to read:
"If none of the hundreds of foreign correspondents who filled the by then legendary office at Al-Hadaf [the PFLP's newspaper] were unable to put Ghassan down in a dialogue, it was because the answers he always gave were penetrating, sharp and accurate, the main reason being that the cause which he was defending - the Palestinian revolutionary struggle - is a just one." (Ghassan Kanafani, Palestine Research Center, 1973)
Note also that I have modified some of Kanafani's syntax for greater clarity of meaning:
Richard Carleton: Of the 11 Palestinian movements the most radical of all is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)... It was the Popular Front that hijacked and blew up 3 [sic] jet aircraft at Revolution Airport in the Jordanian desert... The Beirut leader of the Popular Front is Ghassan Kanafani. He was born in Palestine but fled in 1948, as he puts it from Zionist terror. Since then he's been plotting the destruction of both the Zionists and the reactionary Arabs.
Ghassan Kanafani: I know what I know really that the history of the world is always the history of weak people fighting strong people, of weak people, who have a correct case, fighting strong people, who use their strength to exploit the weak.
RC: Turn to the fighting that's been going on in Jordan in recent weeks.* It's your organisation that's been one side of the fight. What has it achieved?
GK: One thing. That we had a case to fight for. That's a lot. This people, the Palestinian people, prefer to die standing than to lose its case. We proved that King [Hussein] is wrong. We proved that this Palestinian nation is going to continue fighting until victory. We proved that our people can never be defeated. We taught every single person in this world that we are a small, brave nation who are prepared to fight to the last drop of blood for justice for ourselves after the world failed to give it to us. This is what we achieved.
RC: It does seem that the war, the civil war, has been quite fruitless.
GK: It is not a civil war. It's a people defending themselves against a fascist government which you are defending simply because King Hussein has an Arafat problem. It's not a civil war.
RC: Well, the conflict...
GK: It's not a conflict. It's a liberation movement fighting for justice.
RC: Well, whatever it might be best called...
GK: Not whatever, because this is where the problem starts. Because this is what makes you ask all your questions. This is exactly where the problem starts. This is a people who are discriminated against fighting for their rights. This is the story. If you say it's a civil war, then your question will be justified. If you say it's a conflict, then, of course, it'll come as a surprise to know what's happening.
RC: Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?
GK: You don't mean peace talks exactly. You mean capitulation, surrender.
RC: Why not just talk?
GK: Talk to whom?
RC: Talk to the Israeli leaders.
GK: That kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck.
RC: Well, if there were no swords or guns in the room, you could still talk.
GK: No, I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement.
RC: But despite this, why not talk?
GK: Talk about what?
RC: Talk about the possibility of not fighting.
GK: Not fighting for what?
RC: Not fighting at all. No matter what for.
GK: People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something. So tell me what is it we should speak about.
RC: Stop fighting...
GK: Or rather what is it we should stop fighting for to talk about?
RC: Talk to stop fighting, to stop the death, the misery, the destruction, the pain.
GK: Whose death, misery, destruction and pain?
RC: Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs.
GK: Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, forced into refugee camps, starved, murdered for 20 years, and forbidden even to call themselves Palestinians.
RC: Better that way than dead though.
GK: Maybe to you, but to us, no.To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our basic human rights, is as essential as life itself.
RC: You call King Hussein a fascist. Who else among the Arab leaders are you totally opposed to?
GK: We consider the Arab governments to be of two kinds. Ones we call reactionaries who are tied to imperialism: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia. Then there are the other Arab governments, which we call the military placebos [?], such as Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria and so on.
RC: Let me get back to the hijacking of the aircraft.** On reflection, do you think that was now a mistake?
GK: We didn't make a mistake in hijacking them. On the contrary, they were one of the most correct things we ever did.
***
Nothing so much as the manner of their lives and deaths, conferred only by an accident of birth, confirms the vast gulf separating the privileged, white colonial reporter from Australia, Richard Carleton (1943-2006), and the exiled Palestinian driven out of his ancestral homeland by Zionist terror gangs in 1948, Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972).
While Carleton returned to Australia to do the kind of work he enjoyed doing, eventually ending up working for Channel 9 television's 60 Minutes program, and dying of a heart attack while on the job at the age of 62, Kanafani, aged just 36 at time of his death, was cruelly incinerated along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees, on July 8 1972 after Israel's Mossad had planted explosives on his car.
You will be interested to know that Richard Carleton is the father of James Carleton who runs ABC Radio National's God Forbid program. To give you the measure of the son, see my 16/7/13 post Our ABC Owned for a transcription of his interview with George Galloway.
[* Carleton here is referring to the period of fighting in Jordan between the armed Palestinian resistance movement, led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah, and allied Palestinian groups such as the PFLP. The fighting ran from 6/9/70 - 17/7/71; **Briefly, Carleton here is referring to the PFLP's hijacking of 5 planes from 6/9/70 to 9/9/70 to Dawson's Field in Jordan. In August 1969, Leila Khaled was one of a PFLP commando unit which hijacked a TWA flight. She ordered the pilot to fly over her ancestral city, Haifa, and land in Syria where the plane was blown up after its passengers were evacuated. In September 1970, she and Patrick Arguello, a Nicaraguan-American, hijacked Israeli EL AL flight 219 from Amsterdam, forcing it to land at Dawson's Field. Patrick was martyred by an Israeli security guard. Leila was captured and flown to a police lockup in Britain. Note that all planes hijacked to Jordan were blown up by PFLP commandos after they had evacuated the passengers.]
Showing posts with label colonialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colonialism. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Tuesday, June 4, 2019
How Good is US/European Imperialism
Jeff Widener is "the American photographer who shot the iconic image of a man standing in front of tanks at the 1989 Tiananmen protests says it's time for the Chinese government to come clean about the bloody events of 30 years ago." ('Tell the truth about Tiananmen', AP/Sydney Morning Herald, 3/6/19)
Who could disagree? But it's the following commentary of Mr Widener's that's prompted this particular post:
"'The United States and European countries have made mistakes throughout history and they've reconciled those problems,' Widener says." (ibid)
Let us deal first with the obvious issue of German reparations to Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust, shall we?
According to US scholar Norman Finkelstein, in his groundbreaking work The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000), "The postwar German government provided compensation to Jews who had been in ghettos or camps," (p 81). He went on to clarify as follows: "The German government sought to compensate Jewish victims with three different agreements signed in 1952. Individual claimants received payments according to the terms of the Law on Indemnification... A separate agreement with Israel subsidized the absorption and rehabilitation of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees. The German government also negotiated at the same time a financial settlement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an umbrella of all major Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Bnai Brith, the Joint Distribution Committee, and so forth." (pp 84-85)
Finkelstein then points out that, despite "the final accord [calling] on the Conference to use the monies 'for the relief, rehabilitation on resettlement of Jewish victims' (p 86), "The Claims Conference promptly annulled the agreement. In a flagrant breach of its letter and spirit, the Conference earmarked the monies not for the rehabilitation of Jewish victims but rather for the rehabilitation of Jewish communities... Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as Yad Vashem showboat pensioning 'righteous Gentiles." (pp 86-87)
Now, back to Widener's assertion. If he could please provide us with details of all of the other US and European "mistakes throughout history," which have been "reconciled," I'll eat my proverbial hat.
Add to the stench of hypocrisy, the abysmal ignorance of these times, ironically referred to as 'received wisdom', and you've just about summed up where we are today.
(I note that, unlike Murdoch's Australian, the non/less-ideological account (Silencing the history of Tiananmen, Kirsty Needham) of the Tiananmen massacre featured in the Sydney Morning Herald of 1/6/19, cites China's Red Cross casualty figures as "likely around 2,600" killed.)
Who could disagree? But it's the following commentary of Mr Widener's that's prompted this particular post:
"'The United States and European countries have made mistakes throughout history and they've reconciled those problems,' Widener says." (ibid)
Let us deal first with the obvious issue of German reparations to Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust, shall we?
According to US scholar Norman Finkelstein, in his groundbreaking work The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000), "The postwar German government provided compensation to Jews who had been in ghettos or camps," (p 81). He went on to clarify as follows: "The German government sought to compensate Jewish victims with three different agreements signed in 1952. Individual claimants received payments according to the terms of the Law on Indemnification... A separate agreement with Israel subsidized the absorption and rehabilitation of several hundred thousand Jewish refugees. The German government also negotiated at the same time a financial settlement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an umbrella of all major Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, Bnai Brith, the Joint Distribution Committee, and so forth." (pp 84-85)
Finkelstein then points out that, despite "the final accord [calling] on the Conference to use the monies 'for the relief, rehabilitation on resettlement of Jewish victims' (p 86), "The Claims Conference promptly annulled the agreement. In a flagrant breach of its letter and spirit, the Conference earmarked the monies not for the rehabilitation of Jewish victims but rather for the rehabilitation of Jewish communities... Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as Yad Vashem showboat pensioning 'righteous Gentiles." (pp 86-87)
Now, back to Widener's assertion. If he could please provide us with details of all of the other US and European "mistakes throughout history," which have been "reconciled," I'll eat my proverbial hat.
Add to the stench of hypocrisy, the abysmal ignorance of these times, ironically referred to as 'received wisdom', and you've just about summed up where we are today.
(I note that, unlike Murdoch's Australian, the non/less-ideological account (Silencing the history of Tiananmen, Kirsty Needham) of the Tiananmen massacre featured in the Sydney Morning Herald of 1/6/19, cites China's Red Cross casualty figures as "likely around 2,600" killed.)
Friday, May 24, 2019
Morrison: Business As Usual at the UN
For example:
"The United Nations general assembly has overwhelmingly backed a motion condemning Britain's occupation of the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The 116-6 vote left the UK diplomatically isolated and was also a measure of severely diminished US clout on the world stage. Washington had campaigned vigorously at the UN and directly in talks with national capitals around the world in defence of the UK's continued control over the archipelago, where there is a US military base at Diego Garcia. The vote was in support of a motion setting a six-month deadline for Britain to withdraw from the Chagos island chain and for the islands to be reunified with neighbouring Mauritius. It endorsed an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February, calling on the UK to relinquish its hold on the territory in order to complete the process of decolonisation." (UK suffers crushing defeat in UN vote on Chagos Islands, Owen Bowcott/Julian Borger, theguardian.com, 23/5/19)
Right... so who comprised this charmless, colonial gang of six who voted against self-determination for the dispossessed and dispersed Chagossian islanders? Wouldn't you know it:
The US, Hungary, Israel, Australia, UK and the Maldives.
Not, mind you, that, with the Murdoch press trumpeting Morrison as The Messiah from The Shire, you'd expect to see this telling information in the Australian msm.
"The United Nations general assembly has overwhelmingly backed a motion condemning Britain's occupation of the remote Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The 116-6 vote left the UK diplomatically isolated and was also a measure of severely diminished US clout on the world stage. Washington had campaigned vigorously at the UN and directly in talks with national capitals around the world in defence of the UK's continued control over the archipelago, where there is a US military base at Diego Garcia. The vote was in support of a motion setting a six-month deadline for Britain to withdraw from the Chagos island chain and for the islands to be reunified with neighbouring Mauritius. It endorsed an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February, calling on the UK to relinquish its hold on the territory in order to complete the process of decolonisation." (UK suffers crushing defeat in UN vote on Chagos Islands, Owen Bowcott/Julian Borger, theguardian.com, 23/5/19)
Right... so who comprised this charmless, colonial gang of six who voted against self-determination for the dispossessed and dispersed Chagossian islanders? Wouldn't you know it:
The US, Hungary, Israel, Australia, UK and the Maldives.
Not, mind you, that, with the Murdoch press trumpeting Morrison as The Messiah from The Shire, you'd expect to see this telling information in the Australian msm.
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
In the Shadow of the Knights Templar
"In his manifesto, the gunman said he was not a direct member of any organisation or group... 'No group ordered my attack, I make the decision myself,' he said. 'Though I did contact the reborn Knights Templar for a blessing in support of the attack, which was given'. Dr Roose said little was known about membership of the reborn Knights Templar, originally a Christian fighting force active in the medieval era. But he said the movement harked back to 'a time of perceived Western superiority'." (From 'vocal ratbags' a deadly threat emerges, Andrew Burrell, Paul Maley, The Australian, 16/3/19)
American singer/songwriter David Rovics, in his brilliant 2011 song, Breivik, could equally have been writing about our own, home-grown Knight Templar/Anders Breivik, the thoroughly medieval Brenton Tarrant:
They say he acted alone for a Europe white and free
A sick and twisted man from an otherwise sane society
The image of Aryan blond, almost iridescent
With a manifesto quoting from the Crusades to the present
But he stood on many shoulders, of this we can be sure
A millenia of xenophobes who slaughter to be pure
Since before the First Crusade, when a mighty Christian band
Hacked and stabbed and burned their way to the Holy Land
They say he acted alone but in his mind he was another
Of those who came before him, his mighty Christian brothers
Who rode, covered in armour, and served their masters well
They vowed to chastity, they vowed to kill the infidel
They marauded west and east in the name of Christendom
They killed Jews, Muslims, pagans, fellow Christians by the thousand
In the name of Jesus, from the Jordan to the Rhine
The red cross on their chest plates, their terrifying sign
In the Shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone, no one said this of the Pope
Whose victims were left burning or hanging from a rope
The Lord's own Inquisition for six centuries
The ethnic cleansing of a continent, a Christian tyranny
European Jews and European Muslims
Fled the Christian Caliphate to be protected by the Sultan
For five hundred years they prospered beneath the Turkish sky
For those left behind: convert or die
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone but he's living in a country
Where the xenophobic right is the second-biggest party
And he's living on a continent that is over-run
With Prime ministers who tell us multiculturalism is done
They brag of their traditions, they swell with Christian pride
For their civilization built on genocide
Anders Breivik pulled the trigger but he didn't write the play
That script was being written a thousand years ago today
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone and they want us to believe
That moderating rhetoric is the best we can achieve
But moderating rhetoric will bring us nowhere near
To the understanding that the problem is right here
European empires, European greed
European Christians, poison European seeds
European racists running European states
European tolerance for European hate
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
Look it up on YouTube.
American singer/songwriter David Rovics, in his brilliant 2011 song, Breivik, could equally have been writing about our own, home-grown Knight Templar/Anders Breivik, the thoroughly medieval Brenton Tarrant:
They say he acted alone for a Europe white and free
A sick and twisted man from an otherwise sane society
The image of Aryan blond, almost iridescent
With a manifesto quoting from the Crusades to the present
But he stood on many shoulders, of this we can be sure
A millenia of xenophobes who slaughter to be pure
Since before the First Crusade, when a mighty Christian band
Hacked and stabbed and burned their way to the Holy Land
They say he acted alone but in his mind he was another
Of those who came before him, his mighty Christian brothers
Who rode, covered in armour, and served their masters well
They vowed to chastity, they vowed to kill the infidel
They marauded west and east in the name of Christendom
They killed Jews, Muslims, pagans, fellow Christians by the thousand
In the name of Jesus, from the Jordan to the Rhine
The red cross on their chest plates, their terrifying sign
In the Shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone, no one said this of the Pope
Whose victims were left burning or hanging from a rope
The Lord's own Inquisition for six centuries
The ethnic cleansing of a continent, a Christian tyranny
European Jews and European Muslims
Fled the Christian Caliphate to be protected by the Sultan
For five hundred years they prospered beneath the Turkish sky
For those left behind: convert or die
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone but he's living in a country
Where the xenophobic right is the second-biggest party
And he's living on a continent that is over-run
With Prime ministers who tell us multiculturalism is done
They brag of their traditions, they swell with Christian pride
For their civilization built on genocide
Anders Breivik pulled the trigger but he didn't write the play
That script was being written a thousand years ago today
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
They say he acted alone and they want us to believe
That moderating rhetoric is the best we can achieve
But moderating rhetoric will bring us nowhere near
To the understanding that the problem is right here
European empires, European greed
European Christians, poison European seeds
European racists running European states
European tolerance for European hate
In the shadow of the Knights Templar
Look it up on YouTube.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Churchill's Twisted, Colonial Logic
Further to my previous post on Churchill, I thought some of his other answers to questions put to him in March 1937 by the Peel commissioners might prove instructive.
Remember, as you read them, that the Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - constituted over 90% of Palestine's population when the Balfour Declaration, giving British backing to a Jewish National Home in Palestine, was issued in 1917, and that, despite the mass immigration of European Jews into Palestine from 1918 on, under the protection of British bayonets, they were still the overwhelming majority in their ancestral homeland in 1937.
Remember, also, that despite Britain's other myriad colonial crimes, stretching from the very beginnings of the empire 'upon which the sun never set and the blood never dried', no other colonised people that I am aware of were subjected to anything like the Kafkaesque nightmare of having their independence indefinitely postponed by a ruling colonial power with the express purpose that they would one day be superseded by another, 'superior' people, bent on the formation of an exclusive, ethnocratic, settler-colonial state.
Behold the Churchillian 'logic' behind this cruel experiment (or as one of the commissioners put it: 'a thing unheard of in history').
Q: What was the meaning and aim of the Jewish National Home?
A: The conception... was that, if the absorbtive capacity over a number of years and the breeding over a number of years... gave an increasing Jewish population, that population should not in any way be restricted from reaching a majority position.
Q: What arrangements would be made to safeguard the rights of the new minority - the Arabs?
A: That obviously remains open, but certainly we committed ourselves to the idea that some day... subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country and to cut them off from that would be a wrong... We said there should be a Jewish Home in Palestine, but if more and more Jews gather to that Home and all is worked from age to age, from generation to generation, with justice and fair consideration to those displaced... certainly... it was intended that they might in the course of time become an overwhelmingly Jewish State.
Q: When you said [in your 1922 White Paper] that the Jewish National Home in Palestine... may become a centre in which the Jewish people may take a pride, what did you mean??
A: If more Jews rally to this Home, the Home will become all Palestine eventually, provided that at each stage there is no harsh justice done to the other residents.
Q: Would this not constitute an injustice to the Palestinian Arabs?
A: Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.*
Q: Isn't continuing Jewish immigration a creeping invasion and conquest of Palestine spread over half a century, which is a thing unheard of in history?
A: It is not a creeping invasion. In 1918 the Arabs were beaten and at our disposition. They were defeated in the open field. It is not a question of creeping conquest. They were beaten out of the place. Not a dog could bark. And then we decided in the process of the conquest of these people to make certain pledges to the Jews. Now the question is how to administer in a humane and enlightened fashion and certain facts have emerged.
I could go on, but I'm sure you've got the idea.
[*Shades of Tony Abbott's words of 15/11/14: "As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it's hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush."]
Remember, as you read them, that the Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - constituted over 90% of Palestine's population when the Balfour Declaration, giving British backing to a Jewish National Home in Palestine, was issued in 1917, and that, despite the mass immigration of European Jews into Palestine from 1918 on, under the protection of British bayonets, they were still the overwhelming majority in their ancestral homeland in 1937.
Remember, also, that despite Britain's other myriad colonial crimes, stretching from the very beginnings of the empire 'upon which the sun never set and the blood never dried', no other colonised people that I am aware of were subjected to anything like the Kafkaesque nightmare of having their independence indefinitely postponed by a ruling colonial power with the express purpose that they would one day be superseded by another, 'superior' people, bent on the formation of an exclusive, ethnocratic, settler-colonial state.
Behold the Churchillian 'logic' behind this cruel experiment (or as one of the commissioners put it: 'a thing unheard of in history').
Q: What was the meaning and aim of the Jewish National Home?
A: The conception... was that, if the absorbtive capacity over a number of years and the breeding over a number of years... gave an increasing Jewish population, that population should not in any way be restricted from reaching a majority position.
Q: What arrangements would be made to safeguard the rights of the new minority - the Arabs?
A: That obviously remains open, but certainly we committed ourselves to the idea that some day... subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country and to cut them off from that would be a wrong... We said there should be a Jewish Home in Palestine, but if more and more Jews gather to that Home and all is worked from age to age, from generation to generation, with justice and fair consideration to those displaced... certainly... it was intended that they might in the course of time become an overwhelmingly Jewish State.
Q: When you said [in your 1922 White Paper] that the Jewish National Home in Palestine... may become a centre in which the Jewish people may take a pride, what did you mean??
A: If more Jews rally to this Home, the Home will become all Palestine eventually, provided that at each stage there is no harsh justice done to the other residents.
Q: Would this not constitute an injustice to the Palestinian Arabs?
A: Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.*
Q: Isn't continuing Jewish immigration a creeping invasion and conquest of Palestine spread over half a century, which is a thing unheard of in history?
A: It is not a creeping invasion. In 1918 the Arabs were beaten and at our disposition. They were defeated in the open field. It is not a question of creeping conquest. They were beaten out of the place. Not a dog could bark. And then we decided in the process of the conquest of these people to make certain pledges to the Jews. Now the question is how to administer in a humane and enlightened fashion and certain facts have emerged.
I could go on, but I'm sure you've got the idea.
[*Shades of Tony Abbott's words of 15/11/14: "As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it's hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush."]
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Mauritius Today, Palestine Tomorrow
A glaring running sore of British colonialism has at last received a measure of justice in the form of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) verdict:
"Mauritius has won a case against Britain at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) involving decolonisation of the strategically important island of Diego Garcia, which is home to a US military base. Britain must give Mauritius control of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the ICJ said on Monday. The court in a majority opinion... said the decolonisation of Mauritius 'was not lawfully complete' when it obtained independence because Britain carved away the Chagos Archipelago from it and retained control over it. The opinion, which is non-binding, handed down by the majority of 13 judges said Britain 'is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible'.
"The sole dissenter was American Judge Joan E. Donoghue. Britain is not represented on the ICJ bench... The court gave the opinion at the request of the United Nations General Assembly made in a 2017 resolution. Vehemently opposed by the US and Britain, the resolution received the vote of 94 countries while 15 voted against it and 65 abstained. Britain opposed the referral to the court saying it was a bilateral matter with Mauritius and indicated it would reject it. There is unlikely to be any challenge to the US Diego Garcia base from Mauritius either... Britain cut off the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 before granting it independence in 1968. The residents of Diego Garcia were forcibly removed by the British colonial administration and it was leased out to the US, which set up its strategic Indian Ocean military base." (ICJ advises Britain to return Diego Garcia to Mauritius, economictimes.indiatimes, 26/2/19)
There are many parallels here with the case of Palestine. Once the Middle East was firmly in Britain's hands after WWI, the entire area should have undergone a natural transition to independence, what US president Woodrow Wilson called at the time, in point 12 of his famous 14 Points, "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development."
Instead, the Middle East was well and truly denied that "unmolested opportunity of autonomous development" by Britain and France, with the former taking control of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, and the latter Syria. France then set about crushing the first representative Arab government, based in Damascus, in 1920, while the British, in defiance of the wishes of Palestine's indigenous Arab majority, proceeded to open Palestine up to mass Zionist immigration and colonisation. Under the protection of British bayonets, these Zionist immigrants were eventually able to reach a point, in 1948, where they were strong enough to take control of Palestine by force of arms, drive out the bulk of its Arab Palestinian inhabitants, and set up a 'Jewish' state. The rest, of course, is history.
In both cases - the Mauritian and the Middle Eastern - indigenous peoples were cruelly denied "an unmolested opportunity of autonomous development" by racist, imperialist powers. The legacy of that denial remains with us today and screams out for the justice of decolonisation.. We applaud the ICJ verdict on Mauritius, and await a similar one in the case of colonised Palestine.
"Mauritius has won a case against Britain at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) involving decolonisation of the strategically important island of Diego Garcia, which is home to a US military base. Britain must give Mauritius control of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the ICJ said on Monday. The court in a majority opinion... said the decolonisation of Mauritius 'was not lawfully complete' when it obtained independence because Britain carved away the Chagos Archipelago from it and retained control over it. The opinion, which is non-binding, handed down by the majority of 13 judges said Britain 'is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible'.
"The sole dissenter was American Judge Joan E. Donoghue. Britain is not represented on the ICJ bench... The court gave the opinion at the request of the United Nations General Assembly made in a 2017 resolution. Vehemently opposed by the US and Britain, the resolution received the vote of 94 countries while 15 voted against it and 65 abstained. Britain opposed the referral to the court saying it was a bilateral matter with Mauritius and indicated it would reject it. There is unlikely to be any challenge to the US Diego Garcia base from Mauritius either... Britain cut off the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 before granting it independence in 1968. The residents of Diego Garcia were forcibly removed by the British colonial administration and it was leased out to the US, which set up its strategic Indian Ocean military base." (ICJ advises Britain to return Diego Garcia to Mauritius, economictimes.indiatimes, 26/2/19)
There are many parallels here with the case of Palestine. Once the Middle East was firmly in Britain's hands after WWI, the entire area should have undergone a natural transition to independence, what US president Woodrow Wilson called at the time, in point 12 of his famous 14 Points, "an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development."
Instead, the Middle East was well and truly denied that "unmolested opportunity of autonomous development" by Britain and France, with the former taking control of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq, and the latter Syria. France then set about crushing the first representative Arab government, based in Damascus, in 1920, while the British, in defiance of the wishes of Palestine's indigenous Arab majority, proceeded to open Palestine up to mass Zionist immigration and colonisation. Under the protection of British bayonets, these Zionist immigrants were eventually able to reach a point, in 1948, where they were strong enough to take control of Palestine by force of arms, drive out the bulk of its Arab Palestinian inhabitants, and set up a 'Jewish' state. The rest, of course, is history.
In both cases - the Mauritian and the Middle Eastern - indigenous peoples were cruelly denied "an unmolested opportunity of autonomous development" by racist, imperialist powers. The legacy of that denial remains with us today and screams out for the justice of decolonisation.. We applaud the ICJ verdict on Mauritius, and await a similar one in the case of colonised Palestine.
Sunday, January 27, 2019
The Simple Truth
In response to this tweet of Bernie Sanders@SenSanders...
The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating. 1/3 (24/1/19)
Asad Abukhalil@asadabukhalil tweeted...
Those who disappoint you on Palestine will disappoint you on Venezuela, and vice versa.
How true.
The Maduro government has waged a violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society, violated the constitution by dissolving the National Assembly and was re-elected last year in an election many observers said was fraudulent. The economy is a disaster and millions are migrating. 1/3 (24/1/19)
Asad Abukhalil@asadabukhalil tweeted...
Those who disappoint you on Palestine will disappoint you on Venezuela, and vice versa.
How true.
Friday, January 25, 2019
Magic Happens, even in The New York Times
Pence backs anti-Maduro moves was the header for The New York Times report recycled in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald.
"US Vice-President Mike Pence," it began, "has declared the United States' 'unwavering support' for planned mass protests in Venezuela against president Nicolas Maduro, the most explicit backing yet by the Trump administration as opposition leaders try to unseat Maduro... 'We are with you,' Pence wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in both Spanish and English, adding, 'We stand with you, and we will stay with you until Democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of Libertad'."
The report went on to cover the ins and outs of the matter. These included the emergence of the president of Venezuela's National Assembly as a touted replacement for Maduro, and Trump's "all options are on the table" speech at the UN last September. All pretty standard fare for the average news junkie.
But then, magic, as the saying goes, happened, and lo and behold, came this truly prophetic, utterly subversive utterance, the third last paragraph:
"Many citizens of Latin America recall a long history of the US supporting coups in the region by right-wing military leaders who then quashed democratic processes and rule of law to maintain power for years and sometimes decades."
Was the nameless journalist - there was no byline - who secreted these timeless words of contextual wisdom in his report trying to tell us something? Something to do with the future of Venezuela if Pence and his cronies have their way?
Was he what!
"US Vice-President Mike Pence," it began, "has declared the United States' 'unwavering support' for planned mass protests in Venezuela against president Nicolas Maduro, the most explicit backing yet by the Trump administration as opposition leaders try to unseat Maduro... 'We are with you,' Pence wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in both Spanish and English, adding, 'We stand with you, and we will stay with you until Democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of Libertad'."
The report went on to cover the ins and outs of the matter. These included the emergence of the president of Venezuela's National Assembly as a touted replacement for Maduro, and Trump's "all options are on the table" speech at the UN last September. All pretty standard fare for the average news junkie.
But then, magic, as the saying goes, happened, and lo and behold, came this truly prophetic, utterly subversive utterance, the third last paragraph:
"Many citizens of Latin America recall a long history of the US supporting coups in the region by right-wing military leaders who then quashed democratic processes and rule of law to maintain power for years and sometimes decades."
Was the nameless journalist - there was no byline - who secreted these timeless words of contextual wisdom in his report trying to tell us something? Something to do with the future of Venezuela if Pence and his cronies have their way?
Was he what!
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
I Read the Guardian Today, Oh Boy
The latest dollop of liberal Zionist claptrap in that media repository of liberal Zionist claptrap, the Guardian, is a little homily by a certain Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre, author of Zero Degrees of Empathy, and yes, brother of Sacha. It is based on the following premise:
"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)
Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.
No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)
Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."
The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.
To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":
"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."
The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.
As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.
Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:
"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.
"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...
"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?
"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First, it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)
So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.
"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)
Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.
No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)
Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."
The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.
To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":
"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."
The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.
As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.
Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:
"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.
"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...
"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?
"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First, it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)
So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.
Sunday, August 19, 2018
The CIA's Regime Change Playbook (1953)
An absolute must-read, 1953 Iran coup - a crime authored in London and Washington, by John Wright (rt.com, 17/8/18):
"This week marks 65 years since the Western-orchestrated coup in Iran. August 19, 1953 is the day that Iranians were taught a hard lesson in the rules of the game when it comes to empire and hegemony. For on this day, the country's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was overthrown at the hands of Washington and London. It was, by any measure, an act of international banditry that continues to cry out for just redress.
"Operation Ajax was planned, organized and unleashed by the CIA in conjunction with MI6 in response to the decision that was taken by Mossadegh - acting with the support of the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) - to nationalize Iran's oil and husband the resulting revenue for the benefit of the Iranian people. Up to this point, the lion's share of the revenue garnered from the exploitation of Iranian oil was sucked out of the country by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) - the British state-owned oil company established in 1908 with this objective in mind and the forerunner of today's global oil conglomerate BP.
"London's colonial assertion of control over Iran's natural resource was undertaken at the point when its Royal Navy was moving from coal to oil-powered engines. In the interests of an empire that covered a quarter of the world at that time, the global reach of the Royal Navy was indispensable. Thus, the domination and exploitation of Iran's oil assumed, for London, a priority of critical strategic importance. None other than Britain's future prime minister, Winston Churchill, proclaimed the importance of Persian [Iranian] oil with customary bombast: 'Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams. Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.' Such an open celebration of the opportunity for national enrichment at another country's expense is so unabashed it would make a low-rent mafia hood blush.
"Over the years of Britain's control of Iranian oil, Tehran received a derisory percentage. It was a one-sided arrangement of such unabashed colonial arrogance that it could only succeed in triggering a rise in national consciousness. And it was on the back of this rise in national consciousness that Mohammed Mossadegh was appointed Iran's prime minister in 1951 by a reluctant shah, upon being nominated for the post by the country's parliament (Majlis) by an overwhelming majority. The young shah, Mohammad Reza, whose father had been forced of the throne in 1941 by the British and the Soviets due to his pro-German sympathies in World War II, sat on the throne as a constitutional monarch during this period.
"Mossadegh and the nationalist current he represented was anathema to the shah's ambitions that were encouraged by the British with the protection of its oil interests in mind, resulting in rising tensions as the country approached a crossroads in its history. Upon coming to power, Mossadegh carried through his plan of nationalizing and seizing control of Iran's oil reserves from the British, while confiscating the assets of the AIOC. Mossadegh justified his actions thus: 'Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries [over a just distribution of oil revenues] have yielded no results... With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.' He went on: 'Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.'
"The British responded by making it impossible for Iran to sell its newly nationalized crude on the world market. However, for a colonial power whose empire had gone into steep decline, this wasn't enough to satisfy its desire for retribution. Lacking the requisite strength and ability to settle accounts on its own, it was then that London turned to Washington, which had been established as the first among equals of Western imperial powers, for assistance. The reasoning employed by London to draw the Americans into their feud with Mossadegh was that Iran was in danger of turning communist, citing the growing popularity of the country's Tudeh (Communist) Party as evidence. With Washington in the throes of anti-Soviet and anti-communist fever, it succeeded and the plan to topple Mossadegh - Operation Ajax - was put in motion with the CIA assuming the lead role. Key to its success was the bribing of senior army and police officers, along with journalists, religious clerics, and members of the Iranian parliament, who were tasked with whipping up anti-Mossadegh sentiment. A smear campaign, designed to inflame the religiosity of a large section of the Iranian population, accused Mossadegh of being a communist.
"According to declassified CIA documents, when it began on August 15, the coup appeared to have failed. Mossadegh's security forces made dozens of arrests and forced the shah, who was also in on the conspiracy, to flee the country. However, utilizing the momentum of mass demonstrations that were organized with money provided by the CIA, on August 19, 1953, Mossadegh was arrested along with thousands of his supporters. Thereafter, the shah returned from exile to become Washington's placeman, ruling the country with extreme brutality and corruption, until the Iranian Revolution removed him and his clique from power in 1979.
"The context to this history is, of course, Washington's unremitting demonization of Iran today. The false depiction of the country as a sponsor of terrorism and a threat to the region has been used to justify the Trump administration's unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal), the tightening of sanctions, and the looming threat of war. The fact that the precise opposite is the case - ie that Iran has been indispensable in combating Western-backed terrorism in the region and stands as a pillar of resistance to the sectarian regional ambitions of key US strategic allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia - has been willfully abstracted in favor of this Alice in Wonderland narrative.
"The CIA- and MI6-orchestrated coup to topple Mohammad Mossadegh reminds us that no region has endured more at the hands of US hegemony than the Middle East. It cements, as well, Mossadegh's place in history as a man with the courage to defy the West. It is a proud legacy of defiance that lives on in the refusal of the Iranian people to submit to Washington's writ in our time. While that will be rightly celebrated in Tehran on the 65th anniversary of the CIA-led coup, the eve of the occasion was marked in Washington this week by the creation of a so-called Iran Action Group, tasked with coordinating its policy towards Iran, and with 'changing its regime's behavior'."
As it happens, Friday's Australian republished a Wall Street Journal piece - part of the propaganda barrage currently softening us up for a hot war with Iran - contained an unctuous column by Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the late King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, Mohammad Reza. Some gems:
"My life's mission is not to assume a personal leadership role in the future state; it is... to serve as a source of hope... for the Iranian people."
On the other hand, if they really want me...
"The Iranian people have a message: we want our country back."
We the people! LOL
"From the inception, the regime has sought to subvert Iran by transforming it from a nation into a cause... It denies our people the right to gather for special occasions at the tombs of their heroes."
What? The tomb of granddaddy, Reza Shah? Certainly not Mossadegh's.
"[Iranians] want to be sought out by other other countries as trusted friends and partners as they take charge of their country and lead it into a new chapter of history."
Reza wants a kiss and a cuddle from USrael, just like his Dad.
"This week marks 65 years since the Western-orchestrated coup in Iran. August 19, 1953 is the day that Iranians were taught a hard lesson in the rules of the game when it comes to empire and hegemony. For on this day, the country's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, was overthrown at the hands of Washington and London. It was, by any measure, an act of international banditry that continues to cry out for just redress.
"Operation Ajax was planned, organized and unleashed by the CIA in conjunction with MI6 in response to the decision that was taken by Mossadegh - acting with the support of the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) - to nationalize Iran's oil and husband the resulting revenue for the benefit of the Iranian people. Up to this point, the lion's share of the revenue garnered from the exploitation of Iranian oil was sucked out of the country by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) - the British state-owned oil company established in 1908 with this objective in mind and the forerunner of today's global oil conglomerate BP.
"London's colonial assertion of control over Iran's natural resource was undertaken at the point when its Royal Navy was moving from coal to oil-powered engines. In the interests of an empire that covered a quarter of the world at that time, the global reach of the Royal Navy was indispensable. Thus, the domination and exploitation of Iran's oil assumed, for London, a priority of critical strategic importance. None other than Britain's future prime minister, Winston Churchill, proclaimed the importance of Persian [Iranian] oil with customary bombast: 'Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams. Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.' Such an open celebration of the opportunity for national enrichment at another country's expense is so unabashed it would make a low-rent mafia hood blush.
"Over the years of Britain's control of Iranian oil, Tehran received a derisory percentage. It was a one-sided arrangement of such unabashed colonial arrogance that it could only succeed in triggering a rise in national consciousness. And it was on the back of this rise in national consciousness that Mohammed Mossadegh was appointed Iran's prime minister in 1951 by a reluctant shah, upon being nominated for the post by the country's parliament (Majlis) by an overwhelming majority. The young shah, Mohammad Reza, whose father had been forced of the throne in 1941 by the British and the Soviets due to his pro-German sympathies in World War II, sat on the throne as a constitutional monarch during this period.
"Mossadegh and the nationalist current he represented was anathema to the shah's ambitions that were encouraged by the British with the protection of its oil interests in mind, resulting in rising tensions as the country approached a crossroads in its history. Upon coming to power, Mossadegh carried through his plan of nationalizing and seizing control of Iran's oil reserves from the British, while confiscating the assets of the AIOC. Mossadegh justified his actions thus: 'Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries [over a just distribution of oil revenues] have yielded no results... With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.' He went on: 'Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.'
"The British responded by making it impossible for Iran to sell its newly nationalized crude on the world market. However, for a colonial power whose empire had gone into steep decline, this wasn't enough to satisfy its desire for retribution. Lacking the requisite strength and ability to settle accounts on its own, it was then that London turned to Washington, which had been established as the first among equals of Western imperial powers, for assistance. The reasoning employed by London to draw the Americans into their feud with Mossadegh was that Iran was in danger of turning communist, citing the growing popularity of the country's Tudeh (Communist) Party as evidence. With Washington in the throes of anti-Soviet and anti-communist fever, it succeeded and the plan to topple Mossadegh - Operation Ajax - was put in motion with the CIA assuming the lead role. Key to its success was the bribing of senior army and police officers, along with journalists, religious clerics, and members of the Iranian parliament, who were tasked with whipping up anti-Mossadegh sentiment. A smear campaign, designed to inflame the religiosity of a large section of the Iranian population, accused Mossadegh of being a communist.
"According to declassified CIA documents, when it began on August 15, the coup appeared to have failed. Mossadegh's security forces made dozens of arrests and forced the shah, who was also in on the conspiracy, to flee the country. However, utilizing the momentum of mass demonstrations that were organized with money provided by the CIA, on August 19, 1953, Mossadegh was arrested along with thousands of his supporters. Thereafter, the shah returned from exile to become Washington's placeman, ruling the country with extreme brutality and corruption, until the Iranian Revolution removed him and his clique from power in 1979.
"The context to this history is, of course, Washington's unremitting demonization of Iran today. The false depiction of the country as a sponsor of terrorism and a threat to the region has been used to justify the Trump administration's unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal), the tightening of sanctions, and the looming threat of war. The fact that the precise opposite is the case - ie that Iran has been indispensable in combating Western-backed terrorism in the region and stands as a pillar of resistance to the sectarian regional ambitions of key US strategic allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia - has been willfully abstracted in favor of this Alice in Wonderland narrative.
"The CIA- and MI6-orchestrated coup to topple Mohammad Mossadegh reminds us that no region has endured more at the hands of US hegemony than the Middle East. It cements, as well, Mossadegh's place in history as a man with the courage to defy the West. It is a proud legacy of defiance that lives on in the refusal of the Iranian people to submit to Washington's writ in our time. While that will be rightly celebrated in Tehran on the 65th anniversary of the CIA-led coup, the eve of the occasion was marked in Washington this week by the creation of a so-called Iran Action Group, tasked with coordinating its policy towards Iran, and with 'changing its regime's behavior'."
As it happens, Friday's Australian republished a Wall Street Journal piece - part of the propaganda barrage currently softening us up for a hot war with Iran - contained an unctuous column by Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of the late King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, Mohammad Reza. Some gems:
"My life's mission is not to assume a personal leadership role in the future state; it is... to serve as a source of hope... for the Iranian people."
On the other hand, if they really want me...
"The Iranian people have a message: we want our country back."
We the people! LOL
"From the inception, the regime has sought to subvert Iran by transforming it from a nation into a cause... It denies our people the right to gather for special occasions at the tombs of their heroes."
What? The tomb of granddaddy, Reza Shah? Certainly not Mossadegh's.
"[Iranians] want to be sought out by other other countries as trusted friends and partners as they take charge of their country and lead it into a new chapter of history."
Reza wants a kiss and a cuddle from USrael, just like his Dad.
Friday, April 27, 2018
Trump's French Poodle
Have we reached an historic moment? Is the formulation of US policy in the Middle East now in the hands of Tel Aviv... and Paris? Has USrael has found, in Emmanuel Macron, its Tony Blair? Has Bush's poodle become Trump's French poodle? Has Dumb found his Dumber? Whatever's going on, the Trump-Macron bromance is truly weird.
Regardez:
"Just a month after another brief flirtation with the idea of withdrawing from Syria, President Trump once again said he wants US troops out of Syria, promising 'big decisions' very soon. His first talk of a pullout was scrapped days later. This time, he backtracked almost instantly. With French President Emmanuel Macron in tow, Trump told reporters that he and his allies are taking a long-term approach to Syria, and that this would involve leaving 'a strong and lasting footprint' within Syria. He said talk of the long-term issues in Syria was 'a very big part' of his discussions with Macron.
"The idea that Macron is driving Trump's decision-making was a big issue last week. Macron claimed credit for Trump agreeing to stay in Syria, but quickly reversed course, and insisted the two had always agreed on the issue." (Trump again backtracks on Syria pullout, vows 'strong and lasting footprint', Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 24/4/18)
Just on the issue of dumbness, how dumb is Macron? By all accounts, tres.
For example, it seems he's completely unaware of the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism: "Addressing Benjamin Netanyahu [last year]... who attended [an event in France to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Vel D'Hiv round-up, in which 13,152 French Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps by the then Vichy French government], the French leader said: 'We will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism." (Emmanuel Macron says anti-Zionism is a new type of anti-Semitism, independent.co.uk, 17/7/17)
In addition to conflating the unconflatable and allowing Netanyahu to make cheap propaganda out of the Vel D'Hiv round-up, thus exploiting the suffering of its Jewish victims, France's appalling colonial record in Syria appears to give him no pause for thought whatever - assuming he's even aware of it that is. Now more than ever, it's worth reviewing the sorry story. The following extract comes from Jeremy Salt's vital book, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, 2008:
"In 1919 [the Syrians] held a congress in Damascus and chose a king (the sharif [of Mecca's] son Faisal) without being fully aware of the extent to which their rights were being bargained away in London and Paris. In 1920 France partitioned Syria by establishing an enlarged Lebanon and giving it a constitutional arrangement that privileged Christians against Muslims. When negotiations with the Syrian government failed, it sent an army across the Lebanon mountains to bring Damascus to heel. The French forces met stubborn resistance all the way, punishing 'rebellious' villages by bombing them from the air or putting them to the torch. At the base of the anti-Lebanon mountains thousands of Syrian nationalists took up defensive positions around the pass at Khan Maysalun. The pitched battle that ensued dragged on for several hours; by the time the nationalists were routed, 150 were dead (including their commander Yusuf al 'Azma) and another 1,500 wounded. French losses were 42 dead and 152 wounded. Faisal fled before the French entered Damascus and began taking over public buildings.
"Over the years the French used the full range of colonial devices to control Syria. The strategic need to anchor the French presence at both ends of the Mediterranean meant not just consolidating a military presence on land and at sea but blocking the growth of religious and national sentiment. Accordingly, the French 'did not conceal their preference for Christians above Muslims and for the mountain minorities (Maronites, Alawites, Druzes and Turcomans) above the majority Sunni Arabs of the coast, desert and cities.' Separate states - effectively colonial protectorates - were established around Damascus and Aleppo; within the state of Aleppo, the coastal sanjak (subprovince) of Alexandretta (Iskanderun) was excluded and given its own autonomous administration before France completely debauched its 'sacred trust' responsibility under the mandate by handing the region over to Turkey in 1939 (the very region it had insisted in 1918 was part of la Syrie integrale); the coastal region of Latakia was given statehood, and in the south the Jabal Druze was given autonomy with its own governor and an elected council. These arrangements were modified over the years, but French interests always had to predominate. Each state or autonomous region functioned under the control of French delegues and departmental advisers; parliaments (in Lebanon as well as Syria) could be prorogued at the high commissioner's discretion and constitutions suspended indefinitely.
"From beginning to end the platform on which this colonial structure was built was force. More than six thousand French soldiers (most of them colonial troops from North or West Africa) had already died suppressing 'rebels' and 'brigands' since 1920 when Sultan al Atrash, angered at the arrest of Druze sheikhs, routed a French column in late July 1925 and besieged the occupied Druze town of Suwayda. When a second column sent to punish the sheikh for the destruction of the first was also scattered, a wave of uprisings spread across the whole of Syria with the speed of a grass fire. The 'great Arab revolt' had begun, and the French moved swiftly to crush it. In October an uprising in Hama led by Fawzi al Qawuqji - later to make his name fighting the British in Iraq and the Zionists in Palestine - was met with aerial bombardment of the market area and ground action by the hated Senegalese levies that left more than three hundred dead. Outside the town 'rebels' set fire to railway stations and pulled up the lines; in the south, eight villages and the town of Majd al Shams in the Golan were left in ruins after French attacks that left tens of thousands of people homeless; attacks on the Druze in one part of Syria led to Druze uprisings elsewhere, with the town of Hasbeyya (in Grand Liban) being recaptured only after an assault by more than three battalions of Algerian infantry backed by cavalry, tanks, field artillery, and air support.
"Inevitably, Damascus had to bear the brunt of French imperial anger. The main point of resistance was the orchard area on the outskirts of the city known as the Ghuta. Already by October 15 about a hundred 'brigands' had been killed in 'clearing operations.' Twenty-four of the bodies were carried into the city by French soldiers and put on public display in the central square, a touch of barbarity that only further inflamed public feeling. On October 17, Druze horsemen arrived at the Ghuta, and the nationalists began moving toward the center of Damascus, bypassing the barricades set up to keep them out. The next evening the French began bombarding the southern quarters of the town before turning their attention to the center the following morning, 'this time with high explosive shells striking in all quarters from the central bazaars down to the middle of the Maydan.' In two days, 1,416 people (including 336 women and children) were killed and much of the central city was ruined by tank and artillery fire and air attack. The Suq Midhat Pasha and the Suq al Hamidiyya markets near the Umayyad mosque were destroyed. Shop fronts were riddled with machine-gun fire. In the biblical 'street called straight' (running alongside the Umayyad mosque), whole buildings collapsed into piles of rubble. The palatial mansions of the urban notables were shattered. The French high commissioner (General Sarrail) had made part of the 'Azm Palace his quarters, and that was quickly besieged by 'rebels.' The general's rooms were pillaged and the selamlik (where official guests were received) was destroyed. 'Very serious damage' was done to the library, 'where valuable and irreplaceable prints and books dealing with Arabic art have either been absolutely destroyed or injured beyond repair.' Tapestries and carpets were looted both from the 'Azm Palace and the mosques of the Maydan quarter by persons unknown, but the nationalists accused French troops of taking them before setting the mosques on fire.
"There were no apologies from the French government, only outrage at the killing of French troops and the destruction of property by 'brigands.' A collective fine (of about P35 per person) was imposed on Damascus, and the city was subjected to a house-by-house search for weapons. In the country, villages 'where brigands are reported to have been harbored and victualled' were torched, yet the resistance continued. More than 200 Druze fighters were killed and more than 200 wounded in fighting with the French around Majd al Shams in April 1926. Suwayda was retaken by the French the same month after a large-scale battle between 12,000 French troops and a Druze force of 4,000 to 5,000, of which number about 600 men were killed and another 800 wounded for perhaps 120 deaths on the French side.
"With resistance slowly being broken in the north and the south, the French were able to concentrate on the center. In February they had made another attempt to crush resistance in Damascus, and on May 7 they struck again: 'In less than 12 hours the French army struck with more intensity than it had either in October [1925] or February. The number of houses and shops destroyed during the aerial bombardment or as a result of incendiaries was estimated at well over 1,000. The death toll was equally staggering, between 600 and 1,000. The vast majority were unarmed civilians, including a large number of women and children: only 50 rebels were reported killed in the attack. Afterwards the troops indulged in pillaging and looting and then paraded their spoils through the streets in the city centre... The French assault made a formerly busy quarter of 30,000 a virtually deserted ruin.'
"On July 8, a further six days of fighting began when the French military command sent some 5,000 troops, backed up by tanks, field artillery, and aircraft, into the Ghuta. Another 1,500 people (an estimate because, like most occupying armies, the French had no interest in counting the people they were killing) died (only a few hundred of them 'rebels') at the cost of about 200 'French' (mainly colonial troops) lives. Druze and other nationalist leaders fled into Transjordan; France was to retain its hold on Syria and Lebanon until 1946, when, weakened by the war and disgraced by a final bombardment of Damascus in which hundreds of people were killed, it was compelled to withdraw under British pressure and transfer the authority given to it by the League of Nations to nationalist governments." (pp 83-86)
And Macron wants the US to stay in Syria?
Regardez:
"Just a month after another brief flirtation with the idea of withdrawing from Syria, President Trump once again said he wants US troops out of Syria, promising 'big decisions' very soon. His first talk of a pullout was scrapped days later. This time, he backtracked almost instantly. With French President Emmanuel Macron in tow, Trump told reporters that he and his allies are taking a long-term approach to Syria, and that this would involve leaving 'a strong and lasting footprint' within Syria. He said talk of the long-term issues in Syria was 'a very big part' of his discussions with Macron.
"The idea that Macron is driving Trump's decision-making was a big issue last week. Macron claimed credit for Trump agreeing to stay in Syria, but quickly reversed course, and insisted the two had always agreed on the issue." (Trump again backtracks on Syria pullout, vows 'strong and lasting footprint', Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 24/4/18)
Just on the issue of dumbness, how dumb is Macron? By all accounts, tres.
For example, it seems he's completely unaware of the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism: "Addressing Benjamin Netanyahu [last year]... who attended [an event in France to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Vel D'Hiv round-up, in which 13,152 French Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps by the then Vichy French government], the French leader said: 'We will never surrender to the messages of hate; we will not surrender to anti-Zionism because it is a reinvention of anti-Semitism." (Emmanuel Macron says anti-Zionism is a new type of anti-Semitism, independent.co.uk, 17/7/17)
In addition to conflating the unconflatable and allowing Netanyahu to make cheap propaganda out of the Vel D'Hiv round-up, thus exploiting the suffering of its Jewish victims, France's appalling colonial record in Syria appears to give him no pause for thought whatever - assuming he's even aware of it that is. Now more than ever, it's worth reviewing the sorry story. The following extract comes from Jeremy Salt's vital book, The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, 2008:
"In 1919 [the Syrians] held a congress in Damascus and chose a king (the sharif [of Mecca's] son Faisal) without being fully aware of the extent to which their rights were being bargained away in London and Paris. In 1920 France partitioned Syria by establishing an enlarged Lebanon and giving it a constitutional arrangement that privileged Christians against Muslims. When negotiations with the Syrian government failed, it sent an army across the Lebanon mountains to bring Damascus to heel. The French forces met stubborn resistance all the way, punishing 'rebellious' villages by bombing them from the air or putting them to the torch. At the base of the anti-Lebanon mountains thousands of Syrian nationalists took up defensive positions around the pass at Khan Maysalun. The pitched battle that ensued dragged on for several hours; by the time the nationalists were routed, 150 were dead (including their commander Yusuf al 'Azma) and another 1,500 wounded. French losses were 42 dead and 152 wounded. Faisal fled before the French entered Damascus and began taking over public buildings.
"Over the years the French used the full range of colonial devices to control Syria. The strategic need to anchor the French presence at both ends of the Mediterranean meant not just consolidating a military presence on land and at sea but blocking the growth of religious and national sentiment. Accordingly, the French 'did not conceal their preference for Christians above Muslims and for the mountain minorities (Maronites, Alawites, Druzes and Turcomans) above the majority Sunni Arabs of the coast, desert and cities.' Separate states - effectively colonial protectorates - were established around Damascus and Aleppo; within the state of Aleppo, the coastal sanjak (subprovince) of Alexandretta (Iskanderun) was excluded and given its own autonomous administration before France completely debauched its 'sacred trust' responsibility under the mandate by handing the region over to Turkey in 1939 (the very region it had insisted in 1918 was part of la Syrie integrale); the coastal region of Latakia was given statehood, and in the south the Jabal Druze was given autonomy with its own governor and an elected council. These arrangements were modified over the years, but French interests always had to predominate. Each state or autonomous region functioned under the control of French delegues and departmental advisers; parliaments (in Lebanon as well as Syria) could be prorogued at the high commissioner's discretion and constitutions suspended indefinitely.
"From beginning to end the platform on which this colonial structure was built was force. More than six thousand French soldiers (most of them colonial troops from North or West Africa) had already died suppressing 'rebels' and 'brigands' since 1920 when Sultan al Atrash, angered at the arrest of Druze sheikhs, routed a French column in late July 1925 and besieged the occupied Druze town of Suwayda. When a second column sent to punish the sheikh for the destruction of the first was also scattered, a wave of uprisings spread across the whole of Syria with the speed of a grass fire. The 'great Arab revolt' had begun, and the French moved swiftly to crush it. In October an uprising in Hama led by Fawzi al Qawuqji - later to make his name fighting the British in Iraq and the Zionists in Palestine - was met with aerial bombardment of the market area and ground action by the hated Senegalese levies that left more than three hundred dead. Outside the town 'rebels' set fire to railway stations and pulled up the lines; in the south, eight villages and the town of Majd al Shams in the Golan were left in ruins after French attacks that left tens of thousands of people homeless; attacks on the Druze in one part of Syria led to Druze uprisings elsewhere, with the town of Hasbeyya (in Grand Liban) being recaptured only after an assault by more than three battalions of Algerian infantry backed by cavalry, tanks, field artillery, and air support.
"Inevitably, Damascus had to bear the brunt of French imperial anger. The main point of resistance was the orchard area on the outskirts of the city known as the Ghuta. Already by October 15 about a hundred 'brigands' had been killed in 'clearing operations.' Twenty-four of the bodies were carried into the city by French soldiers and put on public display in the central square, a touch of barbarity that only further inflamed public feeling. On October 17, Druze horsemen arrived at the Ghuta, and the nationalists began moving toward the center of Damascus, bypassing the barricades set up to keep them out. The next evening the French began bombarding the southern quarters of the town before turning their attention to the center the following morning, 'this time with high explosive shells striking in all quarters from the central bazaars down to the middle of the Maydan.' In two days, 1,416 people (including 336 women and children) were killed and much of the central city was ruined by tank and artillery fire and air attack. The Suq Midhat Pasha and the Suq al Hamidiyya markets near the Umayyad mosque were destroyed. Shop fronts were riddled with machine-gun fire. In the biblical 'street called straight' (running alongside the Umayyad mosque), whole buildings collapsed into piles of rubble. The palatial mansions of the urban notables were shattered. The French high commissioner (General Sarrail) had made part of the 'Azm Palace his quarters, and that was quickly besieged by 'rebels.' The general's rooms were pillaged and the selamlik (where official guests were received) was destroyed. 'Very serious damage' was done to the library, 'where valuable and irreplaceable prints and books dealing with Arabic art have either been absolutely destroyed or injured beyond repair.' Tapestries and carpets were looted both from the 'Azm Palace and the mosques of the Maydan quarter by persons unknown, but the nationalists accused French troops of taking them before setting the mosques on fire.
"There were no apologies from the French government, only outrage at the killing of French troops and the destruction of property by 'brigands.' A collective fine (of about P35 per person) was imposed on Damascus, and the city was subjected to a house-by-house search for weapons. In the country, villages 'where brigands are reported to have been harbored and victualled' were torched, yet the resistance continued. More than 200 Druze fighters were killed and more than 200 wounded in fighting with the French around Majd al Shams in April 1926. Suwayda was retaken by the French the same month after a large-scale battle between 12,000 French troops and a Druze force of 4,000 to 5,000, of which number about 600 men were killed and another 800 wounded for perhaps 120 deaths on the French side.
"With resistance slowly being broken in the north and the south, the French were able to concentrate on the center. In February they had made another attempt to crush resistance in Damascus, and on May 7 they struck again: 'In less than 12 hours the French army struck with more intensity than it had either in October [1925] or February. The number of houses and shops destroyed during the aerial bombardment or as a result of incendiaries was estimated at well over 1,000. The death toll was equally staggering, between 600 and 1,000. The vast majority were unarmed civilians, including a large number of women and children: only 50 rebels were reported killed in the attack. Afterwards the troops indulged in pillaging and looting and then paraded their spoils through the streets in the city centre... The French assault made a formerly busy quarter of 30,000 a virtually deserted ruin.'
"On July 8, a further six days of fighting began when the French military command sent some 5,000 troops, backed up by tanks, field artillery, and aircraft, into the Ghuta. Another 1,500 people (an estimate because, like most occupying armies, the French had no interest in counting the people they were killing) died (only a few hundred of them 'rebels') at the cost of about 200 'French' (mainly colonial troops) lives. Druze and other nationalist leaders fled into Transjordan; France was to retain its hold on Syria and Lebanon until 1946, when, weakened by the war and disgraced by a final bombardment of Damascus in which hundreds of people were killed, it was compelled to withdraw under British pressure and transfer the authority given to it by the League of Nations to nationalist governments." (pp 83-86)
And Macron wants the US to stay in Syria?
Friday, December 29, 2017
Time for Heads to Roll?
This is surely not just negligence. It looks more as though operatives of the Tory governments of prime ministers Cameron and May are on a mission to sanitise Britain's colonial past:
"Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country's National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter - in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced. Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine... " (Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives, Ian Cobain, theguardian.com, 26/12/17)
Nor is this new - see my 6/8/16 post Too Many Skeletons in the Cupboard.
Since we may well be witnessing a cliocidal campaign here, a commission of inquiry would seem to be in order.
"Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country's National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter - in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced. Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine... " (Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives, Ian Cobain, theguardian.com, 26/12/17)
Nor is this new - see my 6/8/16 post Too Many Skeletons in the Cupboard.
Since we may well be witnessing a cliocidal campaign here, a commission of inquiry would seem to be in order.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
The White Man's Burden Rides Again
Check out the abstract for The case for colonialism by Bruce Gilley, published in Third World Quarterly, 8/9/17. Gilley is an associate professor of political science at Portland State University:
"For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch."
So what's next for the TWQ?
Hmm... hey, I've got just the thing: HW Crocker's If you live in freedom, thank the British Empire (PragerU.com):
"Over the last 400 years, what power has done the most to spread the ideals of limited government, an independent judiciary, certain inalienable rights, and free markets. That power would be the British Empire, the largest empire the world has ever known, which made these ideals global aspirations. It was the British Empire, along with America, that defended these ideals in two colossal world wars.
"Freedom was an Englishman's right - and wherever he went, he took that right with him. Whether he was an English colonist in America, governing himself through a locally-elected assembly; or an English adventurer, like Sir Stamford Raffles, creating the free-market city state of Singapore, or an English officer, like T.E. Lawrence, leading Arab tribesmen against the Turks, the British always thought of themselves as liberators, as bringers of freedom. The British believed the final and necessary justification of their empire was a moral one. The British kept the peace; they brought sound, honest administration; and they insisted that basic moral standards were honored.
"The British did not try to nation-build in the way we think of it now. They were under no illusions about making Arabs or Afghans or Zulus into Englishmen. They were more content to leave people alone, to let them be themselves, to govern them with the lightest possible hand.
"In American history, we remember this when we think of the British Empire's so-called 'benign neglect.' We can see it throughout the history of the British Empire. Think about the vast territory of the Sudan - it was governed by 140 British civil-servants. Even Gandhi praised the British Empire, paraphrasing Jefferson, saying that he believed that the best government was the government that governed least, and that he found that the British Empire guaranteed his freedom and governed him least of all.
"In the defense of freedom, the empire drew moral lines. No power did more to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the modern world than did the British Empire. The British treasury spent enormous sums to liberate slaves and compensate slave-owners in the Caribbean. The Royal Navy had, as a primary duty, the eradication of the slave-trade - and, in fact, abolishing the slave trade became a major factor during the expansion of the British Empire. The British enforced a Pax Britannica, putting down pirates, taming headhunters, and keeping the peace between previously warring tribes and religions. While respecting - and often ruling through - local leaders, the British still insisted on certain Judeo-Christian moral standards. They were not, in that respect, multiculturalists. They had a firm sense of right and wrong. When Sir Charles Napier was confronted by the practice of suttee - widow-burning - in India, he told the Brahmin priests involved that he understood it was their custom. But the British had a custom, too: They hanged men who burned women alive, and their goods were confiscated. So, if the Brahmins insisted on continuing their tradition of widow-burning, then he would insist on following his British tradition of hanging the murderers of widows. Widow-burning in India soon ceased.
"But we don't have to dig far into history, into the abolition of slavery and widow-burning, to find the British Empire on the side of moral right and freedom. We can think of events within our own lifetimes or those of our parents and grandparents. When we think of the two deadliest threats to freedom in the twentieth century, we generally think of Communism and Nazism. But how many remember that in 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, and after the fall of France, one power, the British Empire, stood alone in mortal combat against the combined tyrannies of the world.
"Even where the British have merited criticism, as in Ireland, there is more to the imperial story. During negotiations to create the Irish Republic, for instance, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who could speak Welsh, reminded the Irish nationalist and Gaelic extremist Eamon de Valera that the Celts never had a word for 'republic.' It was an idea given to them by the English.
"This is our own history, too. If you love America, you should also love the power that gave us our sense of inalienable rights - rights traceable back to Magna Carta. It all started in America with the British Empire, a great, liberty-loving empire. It is the empire's legacy - the English-speaking world - that remains the great global guardian of freedom today."
"For the last 100 years, Western colonialism has had a bad name. It is high time to question this orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts. The countries that embraced their colonial inheritance, by and large, did better than those that spurned it. Anti-colonial ideology imposed grave harms on subject peoples and continues to thwart sustained development and a fruitful encounter with modernity in many places. Colonialism can be recovered by weak and fragile states today in three ways: by reclaiming colonial modes of governance; by recolonising some areas; and by creating new Western colonies from scratch."
So what's next for the TWQ?
Hmm... hey, I've got just the thing: HW Crocker's If you live in freedom, thank the British Empire (PragerU.com):
"Over the last 400 years, what power has done the most to spread the ideals of limited government, an independent judiciary, certain inalienable rights, and free markets. That power would be the British Empire, the largest empire the world has ever known, which made these ideals global aspirations. It was the British Empire, along with America, that defended these ideals in two colossal world wars.
"Freedom was an Englishman's right - and wherever he went, he took that right with him. Whether he was an English colonist in America, governing himself through a locally-elected assembly; or an English adventurer, like Sir Stamford Raffles, creating the free-market city state of Singapore, or an English officer, like T.E. Lawrence, leading Arab tribesmen against the Turks, the British always thought of themselves as liberators, as bringers of freedom. The British believed the final and necessary justification of their empire was a moral one. The British kept the peace; they brought sound, honest administration; and they insisted that basic moral standards were honored.
"The British did not try to nation-build in the way we think of it now. They were under no illusions about making Arabs or Afghans or Zulus into Englishmen. They were more content to leave people alone, to let them be themselves, to govern them with the lightest possible hand.
"In American history, we remember this when we think of the British Empire's so-called 'benign neglect.' We can see it throughout the history of the British Empire. Think about the vast territory of the Sudan - it was governed by 140 British civil-servants. Even Gandhi praised the British Empire, paraphrasing Jefferson, saying that he believed that the best government was the government that governed least, and that he found that the British Empire guaranteed his freedom and governed him least of all.
"In the defense of freedom, the empire drew moral lines. No power did more to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the modern world than did the British Empire. The British treasury spent enormous sums to liberate slaves and compensate slave-owners in the Caribbean. The Royal Navy had, as a primary duty, the eradication of the slave-trade - and, in fact, abolishing the slave trade became a major factor during the expansion of the British Empire. The British enforced a Pax Britannica, putting down pirates, taming headhunters, and keeping the peace between previously warring tribes and religions. While respecting - and often ruling through - local leaders, the British still insisted on certain Judeo-Christian moral standards. They were not, in that respect, multiculturalists. They had a firm sense of right and wrong. When Sir Charles Napier was confronted by the practice of suttee - widow-burning - in India, he told the Brahmin priests involved that he understood it was their custom. But the British had a custom, too: They hanged men who burned women alive, and their goods were confiscated. So, if the Brahmins insisted on continuing their tradition of widow-burning, then he would insist on following his British tradition of hanging the murderers of widows. Widow-burning in India soon ceased.
"But we don't have to dig far into history, into the abolition of slavery and widow-burning, to find the British Empire on the side of moral right and freedom. We can think of events within our own lifetimes or those of our parents and grandparents. When we think of the two deadliest threats to freedom in the twentieth century, we generally think of Communism and Nazism. But how many remember that in 1940, after the Hitler-Stalin pact, and after the fall of France, one power, the British Empire, stood alone in mortal combat against the combined tyrannies of the world.
"Even where the British have merited criticism, as in Ireland, there is more to the imperial story. During negotiations to create the Irish Republic, for instance, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who could speak Welsh, reminded the Irish nationalist and Gaelic extremist Eamon de Valera that the Celts never had a word for 'republic.' It was an idea given to them by the English.
"This is our own history, too. If you love America, you should also love the power that gave us our sense of inalienable rights - rights traceable back to Magna Carta. It all started in America with the British Empire, a great, liberty-loving empire. It is the empire's legacy - the English-speaking world - that remains the great global guardian of freedom today."
Saturday, September 23, 2017
The Joy of British Imperialism
What a damning indictment of little britain this finding is:
"The British public are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, according to a new poll. At its height in 1922 the British Empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area... YouGov found 44% were proud of Britain's history of colonialism while only 21% regretted that it happened. 23% held neither view... The British Empire is not widely taught in detail in British schools, with history lessons tending to focus on other areas." (British people are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds, Jon Stone, independent.co.uk, 19/1/16)
Trawling through the 320 comments which follow the report, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of little brits wouldn't even know the Balfour Declaration if it hit them in the face. Staggeringly, only one mentioned Palestine, Britain's worst ever colonial crime, and even then referred to it as 'Israel'.
Some examples of the abysmal ignorance of little brits on the subject of British colonialism in general, and the Middle East in particular, are as follows. The first borders on Trumpian parody:
"British Empire. Fantastic. Winners. Changed the world for the better. And made a fortune while doing it. No sitting idle on benefits for them. Technology, the law, exploration - the Brits were at the forefront. But nice to see so many comments from the heirs of so many losers. Obviously not exterminated. Clearly no genocide. To cap it all, the British were thoroughly nice too, freely handing back countries when the natives had gained some modicum of civility. Best Empire ever." (ScottishDanno)
As for the Middle East:
"The Middle East, to it's (sic) benefit would be seeing the rule of secular law right now rather than the vicious rule of religion." (PGwood)
Simple-minded PGwood is obviously blissfully unaware that his country was single-handedly responsible for transforming unsuspecting multi-sectarian Ottoman Palestine into the viciously mono-sectarian Jewish state of Israel.
The only response to PGwood, from NK, missed the opportunity to point this out, asking merely "Why would you want Britain to meddle in how people run their own countries? If reform is to take place there then let it happen from within. Look at the mess in Iraq and Syria right now because of British and US meddling."
PGwood, clearly oblivious to the fact that the Middle East isn't 'next door' to Britain, replied, apropos of nothing: "If your neighbour is throwing rocks at his wife, do you say something about it. or not?"
Coming closer to Britain's meddling in the Middle East, but nonetheless maddeningly vague, is this effort:
"Those getting all misty-eyed about colonialism would to well to reflect on its enduring legacy. No, not cricket and railway networks but the mess that is now the Middle East and North Africa and the human wave that is only starting to rebound on Europe. Empire is (sic) a very long embrace indeed." (lastflightout)
To which came this blame-it-all-on-the-French, blatantly racist reply:
"It didn't endure. It has no legacy. And actually, the Middle Eastern and African countries with most problems seem to have been French, not British. Regardless, when the civilised Europeans left, the natives returned to their brutal, savage and backward ways." (Brad_Humberside)
Which in turn elicited the following rejoinders: "Saudi Arabia? Israel? Yes? Would you like to have another go at defending British barbarism?" (Kay Parlay); "'civilised Europeans' - yes, so civilised they didn't know to wash their behinds after defecating, or wash their hands after that before eating." (adamcrossphoto)
But back to the "problems" of the Middle East. We've already had Brad_Humberside pointing the finger at the French, now we've got this genius blaming the Ottoman Empire:
"The middle east problems were as much caused by the collapse of Ottoman power (only partially nudged over the line by the British and French) and the ungainly carve up afterwards. Not the Empires finest moment maybe but you can only ever deal with the problems in front of you at the time." (RevCr)
Only partially NUDGED over the line!!!??? But let's focus on "the problems in front of you," shall we?
There was, in fact, no problem for the British and French to deal with in the Middle East during World War I or immediately thereafter. Rather, these two imperialist bovver boys created problems for the people of the Middle East:
Britain, for example, who had promised her Arab allies independence in the 1915 McMahon Treaty, betrayed them by agreeing to divide the Arab world between themselves and the French in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. It then went on to compound that treachery by supporting, in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, thus creating the Palestine problem where before there had been no such problem.
"The British public are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, according to a new poll. At its height in 1922 the British Empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area... YouGov found 44% were proud of Britain's history of colonialism while only 21% regretted that it happened. 23% held neither view... The British Empire is not widely taught in detail in British schools, with history lessons tending to focus on other areas." (British people are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds, Jon Stone, independent.co.uk, 19/1/16)
Trawling through the 320 comments which follow the report, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of little brits wouldn't even know the Balfour Declaration if it hit them in the face. Staggeringly, only one mentioned Palestine, Britain's worst ever colonial crime, and even then referred to it as 'Israel'.
Some examples of the abysmal ignorance of little brits on the subject of British colonialism in general, and the Middle East in particular, are as follows. The first borders on Trumpian parody:
"British Empire. Fantastic. Winners. Changed the world for the better. And made a fortune while doing it. No sitting idle on benefits for them. Technology, the law, exploration - the Brits were at the forefront. But nice to see so many comments from the heirs of so many losers. Obviously not exterminated. Clearly no genocide. To cap it all, the British were thoroughly nice too, freely handing back countries when the natives had gained some modicum of civility. Best Empire ever." (ScottishDanno)
As for the Middle East:
"The Middle East, to it's (sic) benefit would be seeing the rule of secular law right now rather than the vicious rule of religion." (PGwood)
Simple-minded PGwood is obviously blissfully unaware that his country was single-handedly responsible for transforming unsuspecting multi-sectarian Ottoman Palestine into the viciously mono-sectarian Jewish state of Israel.
The only response to PGwood, from NK, missed the opportunity to point this out, asking merely "Why would you want Britain to meddle in how people run their own countries? If reform is to take place there then let it happen from within. Look at the mess in Iraq and Syria right now because of British and US meddling."
PGwood, clearly oblivious to the fact that the Middle East isn't 'next door' to Britain, replied, apropos of nothing: "If your neighbour is throwing rocks at his wife, do you say something about it. or not?"
Coming closer to Britain's meddling in the Middle East, but nonetheless maddeningly vague, is this effort:
"Those getting all misty-eyed about colonialism would to well to reflect on its enduring legacy. No, not cricket and railway networks but the mess that is now the Middle East and North Africa and the human wave that is only starting to rebound on Europe. Empire is (sic) a very long embrace indeed." (lastflightout)
To which came this blame-it-all-on-the-French, blatantly racist reply:
"It didn't endure. It has no legacy. And actually, the Middle Eastern and African countries with most problems seem to have been French, not British. Regardless, when the civilised Europeans left, the natives returned to their brutal, savage and backward ways." (Brad_Humberside)
Which in turn elicited the following rejoinders: "Saudi Arabia? Israel? Yes? Would you like to have another go at defending British barbarism?" (Kay Parlay); "'civilised Europeans' - yes, so civilised they didn't know to wash their behinds after defecating, or wash their hands after that before eating." (adamcrossphoto)
But back to the "problems" of the Middle East. We've already had Brad_Humberside pointing the finger at the French, now we've got this genius blaming the Ottoman Empire:
"The middle east problems were as much caused by the collapse of Ottoman power (only partially nudged over the line by the British and French) and the ungainly carve up afterwards. Not the Empires finest moment maybe but you can only ever deal with the problems in front of you at the time." (RevCr)
Only partially NUDGED over the line!!!??? But let's focus on "the problems in front of you," shall we?
There was, in fact, no problem for the British and French to deal with in the Middle East during World War I or immediately thereafter. Rather, these two imperialist bovver boys created problems for the people of the Middle East:
Britain, for example, who had promised her Arab allies independence in the 1915 McMahon Treaty, betrayed them by agreeing to divide the Arab world between themselves and the French in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. It then went on to compound that treachery by supporting, in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, thus creating the Palestine problem where before there had been no such problem.
Wednesday, September 6, 2017
A British Education
Last Monday's Q&A dealt, in part, with the issue of Britain's colonial crimes, particularly in relation to India. Among other things, we learned that discussion of these is absent from Britain's history curriculum:
Tony Jones: I'm just wondering, have young Brits come to terms with their colonial past?
Laurie Penny: No, we haven't at all. Young Brits of every class have no idea about our colonial past. That is being deliberately done. We're deliberately denied or kept away from education about the graphic facts of what the British did around the world, including in this country, to the people of this country. The crimes of the British and the crimes that we've committed and were done in our names, over 400 years of pillage and conquest is something that we don't like to think about. And yet, it is everywhere in modern British history. When people talk about Brexit, it's stunning to me that if you ask British people who voted for Brexit what their major fear is, their fear is people will come to our country and take our things.
Shashi Tharoor: That's exactly right.
Laurie Penny: I just can't... It doesn't compute. We don't know this history. I took history in British schools up to the age of 18. And I got a pretty good grade. And...
Shashi Tharoor: You never learned a line of colonial history, did you?
Laurie Penny: Almost everything you have just said, I learned from your book.*
It should never be forgotten that it was 'Great' Britain's issue of the Balfour Declaration that created the Palestine's Israel problem.
[*Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017)]
Tony Jones: I'm just wondering, have young Brits come to terms with their colonial past?
Laurie Penny: No, we haven't at all. Young Brits of every class have no idea about our colonial past. That is being deliberately done. We're deliberately denied or kept away from education about the graphic facts of what the British did around the world, including in this country, to the people of this country. The crimes of the British and the crimes that we've committed and were done in our names, over 400 years of pillage and conquest is something that we don't like to think about. And yet, it is everywhere in modern British history. When people talk about Brexit, it's stunning to me that if you ask British people who voted for Brexit what their major fear is, their fear is people will come to our country and take our things.
Shashi Tharoor: That's exactly right.
Laurie Penny: I just can't... It doesn't compute. We don't know this history. I took history in British schools up to the age of 18. And I got a pretty good grade. And...
Shashi Tharoor: You never learned a line of colonial history, did you?
Laurie Penny: Almost everything you have just said, I learned from your book.*
It should never be forgotten that it was 'Great' Britain's issue of the Balfour Declaration that created the Palestine's Israel problem.
[*Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2017)]
Friday, July 14, 2017
Great Advances in French Colonialism
Saladin, we're back!
- General Henri Gouraud on entering Saladin's tomb, July 25, 1920
I do not require Assad's departure.
- French President Emmanuel Macron, July 13. 2017
Almost 100 years after the French destroyed Syria's first independent Arab state in 1920, Macron continues to channel the malign spirit of French colonialism. Of course, you can guarantee that this arrogant Gallic fool has never even heard of General Gouraud.
- General Henri Gouraud on entering Saladin's tomb, July 25, 1920
I do not require Assad's departure.
- French President Emmanuel Macron, July 13. 2017
Almost 100 years after the French destroyed Syria's first independent Arab state in 1920, Macron continues to channel the malign spirit of French colonialism. Of course, you can guarantee that this arrogant Gallic fool has never even heard of General Gouraud.
Friday, March 17, 2017
Give Me the Sand Any Day
I notice that Bush of Baghdad's Australian poodle, John Howard, is trumpeting the creation of a Centre for Western Civilisation, "[t]he key goal of [which] will be to facilitate the teaching of Western civilisation as a coherent field of study" (Gift from a true champion of Western civilisation, John Howard, The Australian, 14/3/17), and is, moreover, to be the chairman of its board.
'Civilisation' (along with its mate, 'progress') seems to be experiencing something of a revival these days.
It was, of course, under such diverting rubrics as these that the Zionist colonisers of Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, protected by British bayonets, quietly went about preparing for the day when they could snatch Palestine from the hands of its Arab inhabitants.
Many Britons at that time were entranced by such words, and cheered on the Zionist colonial-settler project in their name. But not all.
As one British observer of the Palestinian scene, the Anglican preacher, suffragist and antiwar campaigner Maude Royden (1876-1956), noted in her 1939 book, The Problem of Palestine:
"Before attempting a solution of the Palestinian problem, it is necessary to consider a question which has up to now hardly been raised: it is the question of the meaning of the word 'civilization'.
"Putting aside the promises made by the British to the Arab and to the Jew, putting aside also our right to make some of these promises at all, let us consider the present situation as realists who wish to make the best of a bad business. Englishmen are apt at this point to reflect that, in any case, the Arabs have a great deal to gain by co-operation with the Jews. The Arabs of Palestine are terribly poor. The Jews have brought with them capital, intelligence and a knowledge of Western science which will make much of the fertile places and at least all that can be made of the barren. Moreover they are deeply concerned with all that improves hygiene and are a modern, progressive and enlightened people. If we admit that the Arabs should have been consulted before the promise of a National Home for Jews was made, did we not after all do them a great service when we made it?
"This was, I admit, my own view when I first looked at the problem. I had realized that the old association of ideas by which Palestine and the Jews were one thing in the minds of people brought up on the Bible as I had been was a misleading one. I had grasped the fact that Arabs and Turks were not the same people in spite of their being both Moslems! I had got hold of the fact that the Arabs had been settled in Palestine for thirteen hundred years and were still there, to the extent of over 90% of the population, at the outbreak of war. I was reasonable enough to perceive that, these things being so, it was monstrous of us to have given away their land to the Jews (who had left it 2,000 years ago) without even going through the form of consulting them first.
"I still believed that we had done them a service, even if unintentionally, and that they were, if within their rights resenting it, foolish and shortsighted to do so.
"My position I believe to be that of a large number of my fellow-countrymen and women. It is based on the assumption that the Jews are offering to the Arabs in Palestine 'a higher civilization'.
"What is meant by this phrase? I find that, unconsciously, one is apt to mean by it 'a higher material standard of life'. This phrase (omitting the word 'material') is quoted in the Woodhead Commission Report from a memorandum 'received from a Jewish source'. The memorandum speaks of 'the two different standards of life' in Palestine; 'that of the bulk of the Arab population and the higher one introduced by Jewish... settlers'. The reference is to 'education and standards of life'.
"Before assuming that the Arabs owe gratitude to the Jews for their efforts to raise the Arab standard of life, it necessary to ask whether the civilization which is based on a simple way of living, on a rural foundation, sustained by agriculture and other farming, is necessarily a lower one than that which is urban, commercial and industrial. This question does not seem to have been put; yet it is worth putting. The advantages of Jewish immigration to Palestinian Arabs may then be seen in a different night."
Royden instances the case of the Zionist-conceived and -built city of Tel-Aviv, just to the north of the ancient Arab port city of Jaffa:
"In Palestine [the Jews] have... created Tel-Aviv on a piece of sand. Both the Royal and the Woodhead Commissioners describe this last feat as 'startling', and certainly it is so. Here is a considerable town, full of life and activity and as purely Jewish as a town can be. It is building schools, houses and places of business, and it is already a port of importance."
Be that as it may, she asks rhetorically, "Is a piece of sand such a frightful spectacle?"
And adds:
"There are some who prefer it to Brighton, just as there are many to whom Brighton is a delight and the seashore a horror unless it be lined with piers and esplanades.
"We may enjoy our own preference without condemning the other. When, however, the urbanized and industrialized civilization is described as the 'higher' one, and the farmer and peasant expected to be grateful to those who thrust it upon him, we are entitled to claim that, on the contrary, he has a right to prefer his own." (pp 108-16)
Such critical thinking, however, would be lost on Howard, with his mindless prattle about "the Judeo-Christian ethic" and Australia's "deep-seated tolerance towards people of different backgrounds."
'Civilisation' (along with its mate, 'progress') seems to be experiencing something of a revival these days.
It was, of course, under such diverting rubrics as these that the Zionist colonisers of Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, protected by British bayonets, quietly went about preparing for the day when they could snatch Palestine from the hands of its Arab inhabitants.
Many Britons at that time were entranced by such words, and cheered on the Zionist colonial-settler project in their name. But not all.
As one British observer of the Palestinian scene, the Anglican preacher, suffragist and antiwar campaigner Maude Royden (1876-1956), noted in her 1939 book, The Problem of Palestine:
"Before attempting a solution of the Palestinian problem, it is necessary to consider a question which has up to now hardly been raised: it is the question of the meaning of the word 'civilization'.
"Putting aside the promises made by the British to the Arab and to the Jew, putting aside also our right to make some of these promises at all, let us consider the present situation as realists who wish to make the best of a bad business. Englishmen are apt at this point to reflect that, in any case, the Arabs have a great deal to gain by co-operation with the Jews. The Arabs of Palestine are terribly poor. The Jews have brought with them capital, intelligence and a knowledge of Western science which will make much of the fertile places and at least all that can be made of the barren. Moreover they are deeply concerned with all that improves hygiene and are a modern, progressive and enlightened people. If we admit that the Arabs should have been consulted before the promise of a National Home for Jews was made, did we not after all do them a great service when we made it?
"This was, I admit, my own view when I first looked at the problem. I had realized that the old association of ideas by which Palestine and the Jews were one thing in the minds of people brought up on the Bible as I had been was a misleading one. I had grasped the fact that Arabs and Turks were not the same people in spite of their being both Moslems! I had got hold of the fact that the Arabs had been settled in Palestine for thirteen hundred years and were still there, to the extent of over 90% of the population, at the outbreak of war. I was reasonable enough to perceive that, these things being so, it was monstrous of us to have given away their land to the Jews (who had left it 2,000 years ago) without even going through the form of consulting them first.
"I still believed that we had done them a service, even if unintentionally, and that they were, if within their rights resenting it, foolish and shortsighted to do so.
"My position I believe to be that of a large number of my fellow-countrymen and women. It is based on the assumption that the Jews are offering to the Arabs in Palestine 'a higher civilization'.
"What is meant by this phrase? I find that, unconsciously, one is apt to mean by it 'a higher material standard of life'. This phrase (omitting the word 'material') is quoted in the Woodhead Commission Report from a memorandum 'received from a Jewish source'. The memorandum speaks of 'the two different standards of life' in Palestine; 'that of the bulk of the Arab population and the higher one introduced by Jewish... settlers'. The reference is to 'education and standards of life'.
"Before assuming that the Arabs owe gratitude to the Jews for their efforts to raise the Arab standard of life, it necessary to ask whether the civilization which is based on a simple way of living, on a rural foundation, sustained by agriculture and other farming, is necessarily a lower one than that which is urban, commercial and industrial. This question does not seem to have been put; yet it is worth putting. The advantages of Jewish immigration to Palestinian Arabs may then be seen in a different night."
Royden instances the case of the Zionist-conceived and -built city of Tel-Aviv, just to the north of the ancient Arab port city of Jaffa:
"In Palestine [the Jews] have... created Tel-Aviv on a piece of sand. Both the Royal and the Woodhead Commissioners describe this last feat as 'startling', and certainly it is so. Here is a considerable town, full of life and activity and as purely Jewish as a town can be. It is building schools, houses and places of business, and it is already a port of importance."
Be that as it may, she asks rhetorically, "Is a piece of sand such a frightful spectacle?"
And adds:
"There are some who prefer it to Brighton, just as there are many to whom Brighton is a delight and the seashore a horror unless it be lined with piers and esplanades.
"We may enjoy our own preference without condemning the other. When, however, the urbanized and industrialized civilization is described as the 'higher' one, and the farmer and peasant expected to be grateful to those who thrust it upon him, we are entitled to claim that, on the contrary, he has a right to prefer his own." (pp 108-16)
Such critical thinking, however, would be lost on Howard, with his mindless prattle about "the Judeo-Christian ethic" and Australia's "deep-seated tolerance towards people of different backgrounds."
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
The Unexamined Life
Bugger STEM, if you don't know and own your (colonial) history, you don't know yourself:
"Algeria experienced an 'Arab Fall' in 1988, which led to a war between armed Islamic groups and the Algerian army and state. Many journalists, intellectuals, artists were among about 200,000 Algerians who died under the blades and bullets of these fanatic murderers. Almost overnight, the face of Algerian society changed and entered one of the darkest times of its history. During the paroxysm of the war in the mid-90s, my parents decided that it was safer to temporarily move to France, as my mother had received death threats. It was a return 'home' for her as she was born and raised in France by immigrant Algerian parents. I remember feeling grateful that I could finally walk down the street without being scared. But yet, I often felt out of place. I encountered racism for the first time and discovered what it was like to be an outsider. I was surprised to discover that Algerians were not exactly well received and welcome. I did not know then, considering my age, the complicated intricacies inherited from colonial times." (America accepted me - an Algerian Muslim - in a way France never did, Melyssa Haffaf, The Guardian, 30/8/16)
"Algeria experienced an 'Arab Fall' in 1988, which led to a war between armed Islamic groups and the Algerian army and state. Many journalists, intellectuals, artists were among about 200,000 Algerians who died under the blades and bullets of these fanatic murderers. Almost overnight, the face of Algerian society changed and entered one of the darkest times of its history. During the paroxysm of the war in the mid-90s, my parents decided that it was safer to temporarily move to France, as my mother had received death threats. It was a return 'home' for her as she was born and raised in France by immigrant Algerian parents. I remember feeling grateful that I could finally walk down the street without being scared. But yet, I often felt out of place. I encountered racism for the first time and discovered what it was like to be an outsider. I was surprised to discover that Algerians were not exactly well received and welcome. I did not know then, considering my age, the complicated intricacies inherited from colonial times." (America accepted me - an Algerian Muslim - in a way France never did, Melyssa Haffaf, The Guardian, 30/8/16)
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
How France 'Shaped' Modern Syria
The following understatement is a classic of its kind:
"'We tend to forget that history is still important,' said Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic Studies and International Studies in Washington. 'France is the country that shaped modern Syria... " (France's colonial history puts it in the sights of terrorists, Julian E. Barnes & Matthew Dalton, The Wall Street Journal/ The Australian, 18/7/16)
France "shaped" Syria.
Before France, Syria was without form and void. After France, hey presto, Syria! (Trot out that mocking line: What didthe Romans France ever do for us?)
So how did La Belle France "shape" Syria?
As follows:
1) In the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, France (& Britain) decided to chop up Greater Syria (today's Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan) with Syria and Lebanon going to France, and Palestine and Transjordan to Britain. (Of course, the British had already promised, in 1915, that most of Greater Syria would become part of an independent Arab nation.)
2) At the San Remo Conference of 1920, under the pretext of 'accepting' a League of Nations' 'mandate', France declared its intention to take control of Greater Syria (minus the British bits). This was despite the existence of a popular, constitutional Arab monarchy under King Faisal based in Damascus. Syrian resistance was promptly smashed by a vastly superior French force at the Battle of Maysalun, and Faisal was forced to flee. General Gourard, the 'hero' of Maysalun, reportedly kicked the tomb of Saladin in Damascus, and said, Wake up, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.
3) Gourard then tore off Mount Lebanon, adding to it the coastal cities of Tyre, Beirut and Tripoli, and the inland Biqa Valley, and proclaimed the new entity Greater Lebanon (Grand Liban).
4) With Palestine and Transjordan already hacked from the bleeding corpse of Greater Syria, and Lebanon likewise, Gourard then set about slicing what was left of it into statelets: the state of Damascus; the government of Aleppo; the autonomous Alawite district; and the autonomous Mountain of the Druzes.
5) A nationalist uprising (1925-26) was brutally quelled, with French forces shelling Damascus twice. Thousands of Syrians died in the process.
6) In 1939, France cut off the northern Syrian province of Hatay, handing it to the Turks to keep them sweet during World War II.
That, in brief, is how La Belle France "shaped" Syria.
"'We tend to forget that history is still important,' said Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic Studies and International Studies in Washington. 'France is the country that shaped modern Syria... " (France's colonial history puts it in the sights of terrorists, Julian E. Barnes & Matthew Dalton, The Wall Street Journal/ The Australian, 18/7/16)
France "shaped" Syria.
Before France, Syria was without form and void. After France, hey presto, Syria! (Trot out that mocking line: What did
So how did La Belle France "shape" Syria?
As follows:
1) In the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, France (& Britain) decided to chop up Greater Syria (today's Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan) with Syria and Lebanon going to France, and Palestine and Transjordan to Britain. (Of course, the British had already promised, in 1915, that most of Greater Syria would become part of an independent Arab nation.)
2) At the San Remo Conference of 1920, under the pretext of 'accepting' a League of Nations' 'mandate', France declared its intention to take control of Greater Syria (minus the British bits). This was despite the existence of a popular, constitutional Arab monarchy under King Faisal based in Damascus. Syrian resistance was promptly smashed by a vastly superior French force at the Battle of Maysalun, and Faisal was forced to flee. General Gourard, the 'hero' of Maysalun, reportedly kicked the tomb of Saladin in Damascus, and said, Wake up, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.
3) Gourard then tore off Mount Lebanon, adding to it the coastal cities of Tyre, Beirut and Tripoli, and the inland Biqa Valley, and proclaimed the new entity Greater Lebanon (Grand Liban).
4) With Palestine and Transjordan already hacked from the bleeding corpse of Greater Syria, and Lebanon likewise, Gourard then set about slicing what was left of it into statelets: the state of Damascus; the government of Aleppo; the autonomous Alawite district; and the autonomous Mountain of the Druzes.
5) A nationalist uprising (1925-26) was brutally quelled, with French forces shelling Damascus twice. Thousands of Syrians died in the process.
6) In 1939, France cut off the northern Syrian province of Hatay, handing it to the Turks to keep them sweet during World War II.
That, in brief, is how La Belle France "shaped" Syria.
Monday, November 2, 2015
The Palestine Problem: 98-years Old Today
98 years ago today saw the issue, by the British war cabinet of David Lloyd George (PM) and Lord Balfour (Foreign Secretary), of the worst foreign policy decision ever made by any Western power in modern times.
Dubbed the Balfour Declaration, it reads as follows:
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights or political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
At the time, 92% or more of the population of Palestine were Arabs - both Muslim and Christian.
Think of the implications of describing the overwhelming majority of a country as EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES.
Then think about the plight of those EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES today, the majority in exile, and the rest under a 'shoot first, ask no questions later' military occupation or living as barely-tolerated 3rd class citizens in a Jews-first state.
Now ponder this.
When required (for his weekly column in The Australian) to come up with an example of British colonial bastardry in the Middle East during World War I, this is the best Philip Adams, one of Australia's leading intellectuals and commentators, renowned for his erudition, humanitarian concern, and avuncular manner, can do:
"Much of the mess in the Middle East is a consequence of colonialism - and the wholly arbitrary designation of nations by bureaucrats from Britain... They'd literally nail a piece of tin on a palm tree and say 'this is Kuwait, the other side's Iraq'." (What is it good for? The Weekend Australian Magazine, 26/9/15)
Dubbed the Balfour Declaration, it reads as follows:
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights or political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
At the time, 92% or more of the population of Palestine were Arabs - both Muslim and Christian.
Think of the implications of describing the overwhelming majority of a country as EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES.
Then think about the plight of those EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES today, the majority in exile, and the rest under a 'shoot first, ask no questions later' military occupation or living as barely-tolerated 3rd class citizens in a Jews-first state.
Now ponder this.
When required (for his weekly column in The Australian) to come up with an example of British colonial bastardry in the Middle East during World War I, this is the best Philip Adams, one of Australia's leading intellectuals and commentators, renowned for his erudition, humanitarian concern, and avuncular manner, can do:
"Much of the mess in the Middle East is a consequence of colonialism - and the wholly arbitrary designation of nations by bureaucrats from Britain... They'd literally nail a piece of tin on a palm tree and say 'this is Kuwait, the other side's Iraq'." (What is it good for? The Weekend Australian Magazine, 26/9/15)
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