just commentary january 2015
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Vol 15, No.01 January 2015
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ARTICLES
PARIS-A DASTARDLY ACT OF TERROR
By Chandra Muzaffar
. VIVA CUBA!
BY MIKE FAULKNER.......................................P 6
.THE NANJING GENOCIDE AND THE FUTURE OF ASIA
BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.....................................P3
.THE MASSACRE IN PESHAWAR
BY HASSANAL NOOR RASHID...........................P5
. PUTIN TO DONATE 50,000 TONS OF RUSSIA COAL
DAILY TO UKRAINE FOR HEAT
BY ERIC ZUESSE...............................................P 10
.FIGHTING “ISLAMIC STATE” IS NOT THE ISRAELI PRIORITY
BY NICOLA NASSER.........................................P 10
. ANOTHER MH17 COVER-UP: HIDING A KEY
AUTOPSY
BY ERIC ZUESSE...........................................P 13
. THE OIL PRICE CRASH OF 2014
BY RICHARD HEINBERG.................................P 14
STATEMENTS
. PAKISTAN: A FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND
BY MARYAM SAKEENAH...............................P 17
It is not surprising that Muslim
governments, organizations and
individuals right across the globe have
condemned the heinous murder of 12
persons — 10 journalists and two
police — at the headquarters of the
satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, in
Paris in the late morning of the 7th of
January 2015. This dastardly act of
terror, allegedly carried out by two
Muslims, violates every norm in the
Islamic faith.
If it is true that the killers were trying to
avenge the sanctified memory of the
Prophet Muhammad who has been the
subject of continuous ridicule and
contempt in the weekly, murdering its
cartoonists and editors is clearly an
abomination. One should respond to
satirical cartoons with cartoons and
other works of art that expose the
prejudice and bigotry of the
cartoonists and editors of Charlie
Hebdo. One should use the Charlie
Hebdo cartoons as a platform to
educate and raise the awareness of
the French public about what the
Quran actually teaches and who the
Prophet really was and the sort of
noble values that distinguished his life
and struggle. To assassinate those
who mock the Prophet in such a
barbaric manner shows that the
terrorists have no understanding at
all of how the Prophet himself
responded to those who poured their
venom and hatred upon him when
he was conveying the message of
justice and compassion that is the
kernel of Islam to the people of
Mecca and Medina in the early 7th
century.
Of course, provoking the six million
Muslims in France and the larger
1.8 billion Muslims worldwide
through constant insults and
indignities directed at the Prophet
and the religion — albeit through
the medium of cartoons — isnot
only utterly reprehensible but also
an affront to inter-religious
harmony and social stability. It is
an example of the reckless abuse
of the freedom of expression which
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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continued from page 1
L E A D A R T I C L E
brings much grief to everyone.
Freedom of expression is not the
freedom to denigrate and desecrate
a Prophet who is so deeply cherished
by millions and millions of Muslims.
If the advocates of human rights
regard the freedom of a handful of
cartoonists as crucial for human
civilization, they should also show
some appreciation for the honor and
dignity of an entire people. Surely, the
right to protect one’s dignity — the
dignity of a collectivity — is also a
fundamental human right.
The Charlie Hebdo episode has
underscored yet again the importance
of exercising freedom with a deep
sense of responsibility. Restraints are
part and parcel of rights. It is by
balancing rights with restraints that
one ensures the well-being of the
whole.
This balance is especially critical at a
time like this in Europe. Negative
feelings towards non-European
migrants are getting stronger in
various parts of the continent.
Islamophobia is part of this though
as a phenomenon it is centuries old.
If attitudes towards Muslims and
migrants in general have hardened in
recent years, it is partly because of
rising unemployment and stagnating
economies. As it often happens in
such situations, the “outsider”
becomes the scapegoat.
If in the midst of all this, elements from
the majority, established community
in Europe continue to provoke a
minority which by and large views
religion from a different perspective
than the majority, and if some
individuals from that minority react to
the provocations through mindless
violence, tension and conflict will
become the order of the day. This is
why both sides should be responsible
and restrained.
Indeed, both the majority and the
minority should realize that acts of
terror can also be manipulated to
serve the agenda of some political
actor or other. In the context of
Charlie Hebdo, shouldn’t we ask if
the killing spree on the 7th of January
was also a message of sorts to the
French ruling elite? Was some group
sending a warning to the elite that it
should not have supported
Palestine’s recent failed bid in the UN
Security Council toobtain
endorsement for its goal of
establishing an independent,
sovereign state within a short time
frame?Was that group the master-
mind behind 7th January?
Questions of this sort strengthen the
case for an independent investigation
preferably under the aegis of the UN
Secretary-General into the Paris
massacre. The truth behind the
massacre may tell us a great deal
about terrorism itself in our time.
9 January 2015.
POSTSCRIPT.
Since the above was written, there
has been a major development in the
Paris massacre. The two brothers
responsible for the massacre, Cherif
and Said Kouachi, were gunned
down by the French police on the
9th of January, as they emerged from
a small printing firm in the Northeast
of Paris where they were hiding after
their widely condemned act of evil.
A third person, purportedly an
accomplice, who was holed up in a
supermarket elsewhere in the city was
also killed by the police.
By killing these terrorists — which
may have been inevitable from a
security standpoint — it has now
become more difficult to find out if
the three acted on their own or if they
were part of a larger group and
supported by an ideologically driven
network. Were they, especially the
Kouachi brothers, motivated solely
by a desire to punish Charlie Hebdo
for its despicable cartoons of the
Prophet as claimed by one of them
according to the media or were they
also fulfilling some other cleverly
concealed agenda, unknown to
them?
This is a valid question to ask
because the cartoons which have
enraged a lot of French Muslims have
become a regular feature of the
Charlie Hebdo weekly for at least
eight years now. There has been no
report of any specific cartoon in
recent days eliciting a particularly
potent reaction from any section of
the French Muslim community.
Incidentally, the weekly also
lampoons revered personalities from
other religions.
It has been suggested that it was not
just the cartoons that incensed the
terrorists. France’s aggressive role in
fighting so-called Islamic jihadists in
central Africa may have also been a
factor. This argument is somewhat
compromised by the fact that the
French government was directly and
indirectly on the side of the jihadists
in Libya in the brutal overthrow of
the secular Muammar Gaddafi in
2011. Even more significant, the
French clearly share the same trench
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S T A T E M E N T S
as Islamic rebels of different shades
who have been fighting another secular
leader, President Bashar Al-Assad of
Syria, for almost four years now. So
there is no reason to believe that it is
France’s adventures in other parts of
the world which have angered Islamic
jihadists. This story about the country’s
stand against jihadists in other lands may
have been deliberately put out by the
media to divert attention from some
other more plausible explanation for the
Charlie Hebdo massacre.
The massacre may well be a Mossad
operation to arrest the growing tide of
support and sympathy for the
Palestinians in their struggle for
statehood among people in France and
in a number of other European
countries. This is the one really
momentous development of the last few
months that has impacted upon the
Israeli government and global Zionism.
continued from page 2 Parliaments in Sweden and Spain to
Ireland and Britain have adopted
resolutions endorsing the Palestinian
struggle. France has also taken a similar
step. In my main article I alluded to the
French vote in the UN Security Council
which some analysts have described
as the culmination of a major shift in
the public mood vis-a-vis the Israel-
Palestine conflict within Europe.
By staging a massacre which once
again reinforces the image of the
Muslim as a terrorist opposed to
civilized values such as the freedom of
expression and incapable of living in
harmony with the majority population,
Mossad and the Israeli government
may be seeking to drive a wedge
between the majority European
citizenry and the Muslim minority.
The aim may be to dissuade
governments and citizens in Europe
from moving any further along their
newly discovered path of
engagement with Palestinians who
they are now beginning to see as
victims rather than as aggressors
which is how they have been
portrayed all these years by the Israeli
elite and the Zionist controlled media.
What better way of doing this than by
reviving that deeply entrenched image
of the Muslim in the European mind as
a violence prone creature hell-bent on
wiping out the innocent?
What has always enabled the Mossad
and Israel to achieve their objective is
the readiness of some Muslim groups
to resort to violence in order to redeem
the honor of Islam which invariably
leads to the vilification of the religion
and the denigration of its adherents.
10 January 2015
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the
President of the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST)
THE NANJING GENOCIDE AND THE FUTURE OF ASIA
STATEMENT
By Chandra Muzaffar
For the first time in its history, China
commemorated the Nanjing
genocide on the 13th of December
as a National Memorial Day.
The mass killings and systematic
rapes perpetrated by some
Japanese soldiers against civilians
and disarmed combatants in
Nanjing, then the capital of China,
for a period of six weeks or so,
starting on the 13th of December
1937, is undoubtedly one of the
most brutal chapters in the history
of 20th century Asia. This genocide
occurred in the thick of the
Japanese invasion of China.
Though estimates differ, it is
generally accepted that between
140,000 and 300,000 Chinese
perished at the hands of the
Japanese during those six weeks
of incredible moral depravity and
unspeakable human cruelty.
The Nanjing genocide is not just
recorded in Chinese archives and
etched in the collective memory of
the Chinese people. There are
numerous well-documented
accounts of what happened in
Nanjing by Western doctors,
missionaries, businessmen,
journalists and diplomats who were
living there at that time. Japanese
writers and activists have also
attempted to tell the truth and some
have been campaigning for justice
for the people of Nanjing and
China for decades.
continued next page
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S T A T E M E N T S
I had some exposure to some of
these individuals when I was a
guest lecturer on a Japanese Peace
Boat — an NGO committed to the
promotion of peace — in February
2005. The passengers, almost all
of whom were Japanese, were
deeply concerned about their
country’s role in Nanjing. Their
concern, I gathered from the
organizer of the peace voyage, was
a reflection of how a lot of
Japanese felt about a dark blot in
their history.
It is important for Japanese who
are aware of Nanjing to become
more vocal and get more organized
at this juncture in the nation’s
politics. This is because right-wing
nationalists are more emboldened
now to push for their agenda since
the prevailing political climate in
Japan appears to favor them. A
number of these elements continue
to argue that the genocide never
took place!
They have forgotten that two
tribunals established after the
Second World War, the
International Military Tribunal for
the Far East and the Nanjing War
Crimes Tribunal, had convicted
some of the men responsible for the
Nanjing genocide of war crimes
and put them to death. And, on
the 15th of August 1995, on the 50th
anniversary of Japan’s surrender at
the end of WW 2, the then Prime
Minister, TomiichiMuruyama,
apologized publicly for Japan’s
aggression, including the atrocities
committed in Nanjing, and for the
“great suffering” his country had
inflicted upon the people of Asia.
He should have also provided a
continued from page 3 written apology.
Muruyama’s successors have failed
to build upon his outstanding
initiative. Instead, some of them
have hardened their position on
Japan’s past misdeeds. A couple
of them have visited the Yasukuni
Shrine where the remains of some
‘Class A’ war criminals including
those implicated in the Nanjing
genocide are preserved.
If Japanese leaders are sincere
about removing one of the
longstanding causes of friction
between their country and their
neighbors in Asia, they should
cease making these visits
immediately. It would assure Asian
societies that were victims of
Japanese aggression seven
decades ago that Japan has finally
repudiated its militaristic past. The
present Japanese leadership
should also make a much more
earnest attempt to resolve its
territorial dispute in the East China
Sea over what it calls the Senkaku
Islands and what the Chinese call
the Diaoyu Islands.
At this moment, in the wake of the
APEC Summit in Beijing in
November 2014, there is a slight
thaw in the otherwise tense
relations between the Japanese
and Chinese governments. That
thaw offers some hope for dialogue
in view of Chinese President Xi
Jinping’s mature approach to the
commemoration of the Nanjing
genocide. He made it very clear in
his speech at the commemoration
that one should not “bear hatred
against an entire nation because of
a small minority of militarists who
had launched aggressive wars.”
Given this positive signal from
President Xi, can ASEAN, which
is geographically, politically and
economically close to both Japan
and Chinaplay a role in reducing
the differences and narrowing the
gap between these two Asian
neighbors? Can ASEAN as a
collective entity encourage the
two countries to address the
thorny issues that separate them
through a carefully planned stage
by stage dialogue? Shouldn’t
Malaysia as the incoming ASEAN
Chair for 2015 craft a mechanism
for Sino-Japanese dialogue which
could lead to a lasting peace
between two nations whose
di l igence , d isc ip l ine and
dynamism (3Ds) when applied in
unison could well change the
world?
Peace between China and Japan
is therefore vital for the future of
Asia and indeed the world. We
should do all we can to achieve
this precious peace within a short
span for an obvious reason. There
are actors within and without the
region who are already exploiting
Sino-Japanese tensions in pursuit
of their own agendas. We should
not a l low them to succeed
through default.
22 December 2014.
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THE MASSACRE IN PESHAWAR
By Hassanal Noor Rashid
A R T I C L E S
The International Movement for a
Just world (JUST) joins together
with many other organizations,
enraged individuals and
communities in condemning the
Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) for the
barbaric and mindless massacre of
145 people in a Pakistani school
in Peshawar on the 16 th
December 2014. The vast majority
of the victims—132 to be exact—
were school children between the
ages of 12 and 16. This is what
makes the cruel massacre — the
worst in Pakistani history —
utterly reprehensible.
The actions of the gunmen who
had commit ted these v i le
atrocities, which have notably
been criticised by the Taliban in
Afghanistan, are representative
of a virulent ideology and a
perverse view of Islam which
utilizes the religion to justify the
actions of brutal murderers.
The misrepresentation of the
Islamic faith by these groups is
an increasingly worrying trend
that has resul ted in many
unwarranted tragedies, but like
in many other instances of events
such as these, religion is not the
core driving motivation.
The rationalization given by the
group responsible for this heinous
act was to avenge the killings of
hundreds of innocent tribesmen in
provinces such as South
Waziristan, North Waziristan and
the Khyber Agency according to a
spokesperson of the TTP.
The military actions by the
Pakistani government within these
provinces are reflective of its
flawed approach to the fight against
terrorism, an approach
continuously found within the
rhetoric of various Washington
pundits that persists in the post- 9/
11 political environment, 13 years
later.
The government’s response to
these perceived terrorist threats has
been one where laws are
introduced which curtails civil
rights, andlegitimizes the use of
torture and assassinations.
All these have created a political
and social environment which in
fact diminishes security and endows
extremists with a sense of
perceived legitimacy to carry out
their morally disengaged and ill-
conceived actions.
The injustices that have befallen the
Palestinian people which have also
been a large part of the Muslim
world’s conscious reality, have
served to be an ideological focal
point for many militants and has
contributed further to the rise of
militancy.
These terrorists’ worldview is
ultimately an ideological response
to the invasive activities of countries
like the United States of America
and its allies, who are seeking to
dictate and influence how the
structures of power in the region
benefit their own interests and
agendas.
These countries and their nefarious
hegemonic agendas are as much
responsible for facilitating the rise
of extremist militancy, as they are
in many ways responsible for the
brutal slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of people at the hands
of the extremists.
The victims of this ideological
dogma however, as this incident has
shown, are rarely Western civilians.
They tend to, more often than not,
be other Muslims, who are seen by
these militants as colluding with the
foreign aggressor and therefore
traitors to the nation and the
religion.
So long as these policies and
practices continuously persist, and
alternative actions are not
implementedto engage with these
threats more effectively and
sustainably, atrocities like these may
well become a political-social norm.
Justice demands we never let that
happen, and Muslims all over have a
responsibility to not allow Islam to be
hijacked by peddlers of violence.
20 December 2014
Hassanal Noor Rashid is
Programme Coordinator at JUST.
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A R T I C L E S
VIVA CUBA!By Mike Faulkner
ARTICLES
“Cuba and the United States have
quite a curious – in fact, unique
status in international relations. There
is no similar case of such a sustained
assault by one power against another
– in this case the greatest superpower
against a poor, Third World country
– for forty years of terror and
economic warfare.” — Noam
Chomsky. Rogue States: The Rule of
Force in World Affairs. 2000.
Chomsky wrote that more than
fourteen years ago. Nothing much
has changed since then. The punitive
US blockade of Cuba is still in place.
In October 2014, for the 23rd
successive year the UN General
Assembly voted overwhelmingly in
favour of the Cuban draft resolution
calling for the lifting of the blockade.
Unsurprisingly for the 23rd year the
United States voted against the
resolution. Perhaps more surprisingly
for those uninformed about this
annual event, will be the fact that the
US casts its vote against Cuba in
almost complete isolation.
Since 1992 no more than three
member states have ever voted with
the US against the Cuban resolution,
but until the late 1990s significant
numbers abstained. There were, for
example, 71 abstentions with 59 in
favour in 1992. In recent years there
have been only a handful of
abstentions – between 1 and 3 – and
since 2012 a consistent voting pattern
has emerged: 188 for the Cuban
resolution: 2 against: 3 abstentions.
The only ally the US now has in its
vindictive hostility towards Cuba is
Israel. Even lickspittle lackeys such
as Albania, Romania and Uzbekistan
have deserted. Israel, however, has
never faltered, standing steadfast
with Goliath against David every year
since 1992.
If one needed an object lesson in
imperial arrogance, hypocrisy and
impunity one need look no further
than the US treatment of Cuba since
1959. Actually, the bullying started
much earlier than that – as far back
as the beginning of the 20thcentury.
But after the triumph of the revolution
in 1959 US hostil i ty became
remorseless, aimed at the overthrow
of the new government and
restoration of the status quo ante. The
US has never been reconciled to the
Cuban revolution. Failure to destroy
it by armed intervention and terrorist
assassination plots against its leaders
during the 1960s and 1970s did not
lead to abandonment of the mission.
US power has been used relentlessly
to impose the most draconian
economic blockade, to deny the
country its sovereign right to trade
freely, and to intimidate and penalise
national states, commercial
companies and individuals who are
deemed to be in breach of the policy
of extra-territorial sanctions imposed
unilaterally by the US in the 1960s
and stil l in force. The
extraterritoriality underpinning the
blockade violates the United Nations
Charter, the Organization of American
States and the fundamentals of
international law. All US
administrations invoke “The
International Community”, in whose
interests they claim to act. Yet in this
vicious and vindictive exercise of
overweening power by one state
against another (which is without
parallel in modern history) the United
States has persistently ignored the
wishes of the overwhelming majority
of member states of the United
Nations. And the allies of the United
States who vote to lift the blockade
of Cuba, do nothing to take their
disagreement with the superpower
beyond the politics of pain-free
gesture. Annually for the past 47
years US presidents have extended
the Trading with the Enemy Act
(TWEA) against Cuba. The TWEA
dates back to 1917 when it was
enacted by President Wilson on the
eve of US entry into the First World
War, in order to prohibit or regulate
trade with a wartime adversary. It is
the basis of all the sanctions against
Cuba, a country with which the US
has never been formally at war. In
September of this year President
Obama extended TWEA for another
year. It is estimated by the Cuban
government that over the past 55
years the economic sanctions,
measured in current prices, have
cost the country US$116.8 billion in
lost trade. When the depreciation of
the dollar against the price of gold is
taken into account, the figure is
US$1.11 trillion. This reality reveals
the purpose of the economic
blockade- to cripple Cuba
economically.
Ronald D. Godard, US Senior Area
Adviser for Western Hemisphere
Affairs, opposing the Cuban draft
resolution at the UN, stated bluntly
that the Cuban economy would not
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thrive until the government “permits
a free and fair labour market, freely
empowers Cuban
entrepreneurs….opens state
monopolies to private competition and
adopts the sound macro-economic
policies that have contributed to the
success of Cuba’s neighbours in
Latin America”. This means that the
economic blockade will not be lifted
until Cuba abandons its efforts to
build a socialist society and submits
to the untrammelled operation of the
neo-liberal “free market”. In referring
to Cuba’s Latin American
neighbours, he evidently did not have
in mind countries such as Bolivia,
Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua and
Venezuela that have in recent years
rejected that model. He must have
been referring to those like Cuba’s
close neighbours in Central America
who have not: Guatemala and
Honduras, the two countries
suffering from the most extreme
social inequality in the hemisphere.
But in spite of the crippling impact
of US sanctions, Cuba, with a
population of 11 million has once
again provided the world with a
glowing example of selfless
internationalism. In early October
Cuba sent 63 doctors and 102 nurses
to Sierra Leone in response to the
Ebola crisis. They joined a team of
23 Cuban doctors who were already
working there. Another 300 health
workers are being trained and will
soon join their colleagues. The WHO
has praised the Cuban contribution,
pointing out that while other
countries have offered money, no
other country has matched the
numbers of health professionals sent
from Cuba to work in the most
difficult circumstances. Soon the
Cubans plan to have an aid presence
in Guinea and Liberia. The 461
selected for the task were from a
larger group of 15,000 health care
workers who volunteered. Cuba’s
response to the Ebola crisis is the
latest in a long record of aid given to
other nations at time of need. 2,465
health workers went to Pakistan to
provide emergency care in the wake
of the Kashmir earthquake; in 2010
Cuba was the first country to
responds to the devastating
earthquake that hit Haiti . The
Independent reported (26. December
2010) that Cuba’s “doctors and
nurses put the US effort to shame.”
“A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans
is operating all over earthquake-torn
and cholera-infected Haiti as part of
Fidel Castro’s international medical
mission which has won the socialist
state many friends but l i t t le
international recognition…Amid the
fanfare and publicity surrounding the
arrival of help from the US and UK,
hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses
and therapists arrived with hardly a
mention.”
As far as the British media is
concerned the same may be said of
Cuba’s response to the Ebola
epidemic in West Africa. Apart from
an early report in the Observer ,
which echoed the New York Times,
there has been almost no mention of
Cuba’s involvement. It is difficult to
believe that this is not deliberate.
Either that or the equally damning
conclusion that so deeply ingrained
is the anti-Cuban bias in the
consciousness of supposedly
objective journalists that they do not
consider the extraordinary
contribution of this small Caribbean
island in the face of a humanitarian
crisis to be worthy of mention.
Because most of the communications
media in Britain, together with the
British government, are so
subservient to the US government,
particularly in matters of foreign
policy, it is worth recalling a few of
the pivotal episodes in the 55 year
history of implacable US hostility
towards Cuba. This will draw largely
on an account (Cuba and the United
States: A Personal Reflection on
Thirty-Five years of Conflict) by this
writer, published in Monthly Review
in February 1996:
“In the distorted account of the
breakdown of US-Cuba relations it
is suggested that Eisenhower ’s
administration broke off relations
with Cuba as a consequence of
Castro’s embracing Marxism-
Leninism. This turns the truth on its
head. In 1960 Fidel’s ‘26th July
Movement’ had no organizational
links with the small Communist Party
and the members of that movement,
formed during the guerrilla war
against the Batista dictatorship,
explicitly denied that they were
communists. But Fidel was branded
a communist on his first and only visit
to Washington in 1959; a visit
undertaken to win US aid. He was
snubbed by Eisenhower and virtually
ignored by Vice-President Nixon,
who, when told about the planned
agrarian reform concluded that
Castro was ‘obviously a Red.’ Nixon,
who a year earlier had warmly
embraced the butcher Batista on a
visit to Havana to boost US arms
supplies to the embattled dictator,
thus set the scene for his
government’s future relations with
Castro.
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continued from page 7
“The land reform which was the
most thorough and the most popular
ever undertaken in Latin America, was
denounced as ‘Communist.’ In the
spring of 1960 the Cubans purchased
cheap Soviet crude oil in the teeth of
hostil i ty from the Western oil
companies. When the Western-
owned refineries refused to refine the
Soviet oil, Castro, with mass popular
support for his actions, took over the
refineries. This was the decisive
turning point which put Cuba on a
collision course with the United
States. The Eisenhower
administration responded to this
exercise of sovereignty by a small,
poor country by cancelling the sugar
quota, which meant that 70 percent
of Cuba’s sugar production was left
without a market. The intention was
clear: to cripple Cuba economically
in the shortest possible time and to
bring down Castro.
“I was in Cuba shortly after this
episode. The tension was palpable.
Khrushchev…agreed to buy the sugar
that the US had refused to take. The
USSR became very popular
overnight, but still, for the majority
of Cubans, this didn’t mean that they
had chosen Communism, or that they
considered that it was being imposed
upon them. A popular expression of
sentiment in Cuba at the time was
‘Sin Cuota; Sin Amo’ (without quota;
without bosses). At the time US
newspapers were still available in
Havana. I recall in Early August of
1960 reading the most crude
distortions of what was happening in
Cuba. Most of the US press was
claiming that Castro was clamping a
Communist dictatorship upon an
unwilling, oppressed people.
“One of my most vivid recollections
from that time was attending a mass
rally on August 6. (1960) in the
Havana Sports stadium Fidel
addressed a crowd of about 70,000.
There was nothing dragooned (or
restrained) about the audience. It was
composed of people of all ages;
workers’ and peasants’ milit ia,
students’ militia, men and women –
many armed. The rally marked
another decisive stage in the
radicalization of the Cuban revolution
and in Cuba’s relations with the United
States. cubaFidelSpeech-098It was
the occasion on which he announced
the expropriation of all US companies
and assets in Cuba. The crowd went
wild with delirious excitement. The
next day (or rather, later the same day,
as the rally didn’t end until 5 am on
August 7), the streets of Havana were
thronged with thousands of people
celebrating their freedom from
‘Yanqui imperialism.’ Numerous
buildings were festooned with
banners announcing that ‘this
company is the property of the people
of Cuba.’ Young militia women, rifles
slung over their shoulders, stood
guard in front of the buildings. Feeling
somewhat apprehensive about how
Uncle Sam might react to this
demonstration of sovereignty by its
small and ‘uppity’ Latin neighbour, we
frequently asked people whether they
were worried that the marines might
come ashore soon. The response was
almost always immediate and uniform:
‘Let ‘em come! We’ll deal with them!’
“In late August the United States
tightened the screws further. At a
conference of the Organization of
American States in Costa Rica, the
State Department, through its
manipulation of many Latin American
delegations, secured Cuba’s
expulsion from the OAS and
demanded in the so-called
‘Declaration of San Jose’ that Castro
open his country to an OAS
inspection. The Cubans, aware of the
debacle that had just occurred in the
newly independent Congo,
supposedly under the auspices of
the U.N., had no intention of
complying.
“While working [as members of the
first ever international work brigade
to visit Cuba] with picks and shovels
in the Sierra Maestra [on the
construction of the first residential
school in that remote area] we read
reports in the New York herald
Tribune of a State Department
document presented to the Cost Rica
conference claiming that our work
brigade was in fact a Soviet trained
international communist guerrilla
force, smuggled into Cuba to
reinforce the supposedly
demoralized Castro militia and help
to spread red revolution throughout
the hemisphere. It was, the
statement claimed, a common Soviet
ruse to disguise such contingents as
‘work brigades’. This was the kind
of ‘evidence’ the State Department
invented in order to swing their Latin
American client states into line
against Cuba.
“On September 2 the Cuban
government answered the
accusations emanating from the
State Department via the OAS
meeting. Fidel spoke at a rally in
Havana attended by 1 million
peoplewho enthusiastically packed
the Plaza Civica [now the Plaza de
la Revolution]. From that historic
meeting came the first ‘Declaration
of Havana’ which was essentially a
declaration of independence and an
assertion of the right to formulate a
foreign policy without pressure or
interference from the United States
or anyone else. Each clause of the
declaration was submitted for the
approval of the ‘assembly of the
Cuban people.’ In this fashion
Cuba’s foreign policy alignment
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changed overnight. I remember
listening to that address, relayed
from Havana, in a Cuban army barrak
near the top of the highest mountain
in the Sierra Maestra. The
proceedings went on until the elrly
hours of the morning, depriving us
of much needed sleep.
“Our work schedule at the Camilo
Cienfuegos site was frequently
interrupted whether by invitations to
this or that celebration or by visits
from this or that delegation. The most
memorable of these events was a visit
by Che Guevara, who was at that
time Minister of Industry.
Representatives of a dozen or more
countries packed into a fairly small
building to listen to him and to ask
questions. My impression was that
he differed from all the other political
leaders I had listened to in Cuba (and
by that time I had heard many) in his
less volatile delivery, and the cool,
completely undemagogic way he
dealt with questions. I did not know
then that he was an Argentinian and
not a Cuban, though whether this in
any way accounted for his style, I
have no idea.
“We met hundreds of young people,
mainly women, from Santiago,
Havana and elsewhere, enrolled as
‘agrarian instructors’ in the first
stage of the albeto campaign, which
resulted a few years later in the virtual
elimination of illiteracy in Cuba –
many years short of the time the UN
predicted it would take. It was almost
inconceivable that anyone but the
most bone-headed reactionary bigot
could have failed to be impressed and
deeply moved by the Cuban
revolution in those early years. But
few of i ts achievements were
reported in the western world.
“Successive US administrations,
Republican and Democratic, have
treated Cuba’s attempts to break free
from US tutelage and build a socialist
society as a criminal offense to be
punished with the utmost severity.
The catalogue of real offenses
perpetrated against Cuba is endless.
Distortions of fact, lies and chicanery
have been the commonplace
accompaniments of the thirty-five
year old vendetta against Castro and
his country. In 1961 the Bay of Pigs
invasion organized by the CIA was
preceded by a clumsy provocation
involving the mendacious claim that
the Cuban air force had rebelled; CIA
terrorism and sabotage against Cuba
was routine in the 1960s and the
numerous well-documented attempts
to assassinate Castro sit uneasily with
the US public opposition to terrorism;
the so-called missile crisis of 1962
seems to have had its immediate origin
in a secret planned invasion of the
island that became known to the
Cubans; the retention to the present day
of the provocative base on Cuban soil
at Guantanamo is in blatant violation
of Cuban sovereignty and against the
expressed demand of the Cuban
government for its removal. But worst
of all perhaps is the 34 year old
blockade of the country, which, until
1990 guaranteed Cuba’s heavy
dependence on the Soviet bloc.
“The US treatment of Cuba doesn’t
differ in any essentials from its
treatment of other cases of radical
nationalism in the hemisphere.
Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican
Republic in 1963, El Salvador and
Nicaragua, Chile and Grenada – all
examples of what happens when
attempts are made to overthrow
oppressive puppet regimes. Radical
reforming governments or movements
in these countries have, like Cuba, been
subjected to political and economic
destabilization, murderous terrorism by
US armed and trained death squads,
sabotage, embargo, blockades, US
backed military coup and outright
invasion. In each case the pretense has
been to ‘restore democracy’.
That was written nearly twenty years
ago. Much has changed since then.
But if the prospects of real, radical
change in the Latin America now
seem brighter than they were then,
it is no thanks to any change of heart
on the part of the United States.
Changes in the balance of class
forces in countries such as
Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and
Ecuador and less radical, but
nonetheless encouraging signs of
resistance on the part of countries
such as Brazil and Argentina
encourage the hope that the tide is
turning and that the challenge to the
neo-liberal model imposed on so
many countries will permanently
weaken the economic hegemony of
US imperialism in the hemisphere.
And, for all the difficulties it still
faces, Cuba is no longer alone. Its
example has been an important factor
in stimulating the determination of
millions to fight for the better world
which is possible. Viva Cuba!
07 December, 2014
Mike Faulkner is a British citizen.
He lives in London where for many
years he taught history and political
science at Barnet College, until his
retirement in 2002.
Source: Greanvillepost.com
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PUTIN TO DONATE 50,000 TONS OF RUSSIA’S COAL DAILY TO UKRAINE
FOR HEAT
By Eric Zuesse
On Saturday, December 27th, Russian
President Vladimir Putin decided that
though Ukraine cannot now pay for coal
and will soon go bankrupt, so that any
‘sale’ of coal to Ukraine will be a
donation, Russia will nonetheless supply
50,000 tons of coal per day to Ukraine
in order to help them through the winter.
The official announcement said that “this
is a demonstration of good will of
President Vladimir Putin to provide real
support for the Ukrainian people.”
In a bill that had passed both houses of
the U.S. Congress, with more than 98%
support from members of both houses,
and which U.S. President Barack Obama
then signed into law on December 18th,
the United States has made available to
the Ukrainian Government the possibility
of up to $450 million to aid its war against
the residents in Ukraine’s far-eastern
region, Donbass. The Ukrainian
Government is killing the residents there
because the vast majority of them don’t
recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. coup
on 22 February 2014 that overthrew
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych,
for whom the people in that now-
rebelling region had voted 90%. Obama
has said that this military aid will not
immediately be supplied, and that he will
hold this expense and threat in abeyance
for the time being.
So, the Ukrainian Government either is,
or will be, receiving donations, or
possible donations, from the taxpayers
in both the United States and Russia.
An earlier announcement from Russia’s
Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Kozak,
said that Russia would supply Ukraine
with “up to a total of 1 million tons of
coal per month, … to remove energy
problems that arise in that country.”
President Putin has decided instead on
1.5 million tons per month. He did this
despite Russia’s own economic
hardships from the Obama-imposed
economic sanctions against Russia, and
from the Saudis’ agreement with U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry in
September to flood the global markets
with oil in order to drive down oil prices
enough to hurt Russia, which both the
U.S. and Saudi aristocracies want to
destroy. Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the
U.S. are all major exporters of oil and
gas. The Saudi and American
aristocracies want to control the
aristocrats in Russia, who are currently
controlled by Russia’s President Putin,
whom U.S. and Saudi aristocrats want
to replace.
Putin seems to be saying that the
Americans and the Saudis will not dictate
his policies, and that he is more interested
in ameliorating the extreme hardships
that are being suffered by the victims of
Obama’s February coup in Ukraine.
Perhaps this response from Putin will
anger Obama even more, but what can
Obama do about it?
Probably, things are not playing out in
the way that things had been gamed
out inside the U.S. White House at the
time when the Ukrainian coup was
being planned by President Obama,
Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of
State John Kerry, CIA Director John
Brennan, and the other Obama
advisors. However, only future
historians will be able to write about
that; no reporter today can.
28 December, 2014
Eric Zuesse is the author, most
recently, of They’re Not Even Close:
The Democratic vs. Republican
Economic Records, 1910-2010.
Source: Countercurrents.org
FIGHTING THE “ISLAMIC STATE” IS NOT THE ISRAELI PRIORITY
By Nicola Nasser
Defying a consensus that it is a priority
by the world community comprising
international rivals like the United
States, Europe, Russia and China and
regional rivals like Iran, Syria and Saudi
Arabia, Israel, like Turkey, does not eye
the U.S. – led war on the IS as its
regional priority. Nor fighting Israel is
an IS priority.
The Israeli top priority is to dictate its
terms to Syria to sign a peace treaty
with Israel before withdrawing its
forces from the occupied Syrian Golan
Heights, Palestinian territories and
Lebanese southern lands.
For this purpose, Israel is determined
to break down the Syria – Iran alliance,
which has been the main obstacle
preventing Israel from realising its
goals. Changing the ruling regime in
either Damascus or Tehran would be
a step forward. Towards this Israeli
strategic goal the IS could not be but
an Israeli asset.
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continued from page 10
“To defeat ISIS (The Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria as the IS was previously
known) and leave Iran as a threshold
nuclear power is to win the battle and
lose the war,” Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu told the UN General
Assembly last September.
Therefore, “it should not come as a
surprise that the (Benjamin) Netanyahu
government has not yet taken any
immediate steps against IS,” according
to Amos Harel, writing in Foreign
Policy on September 15.
However, information is already
surfacing that Israel is “taking steps”
in the opposite direction, to empower
the IS and other terrorist groups
fighting and infighting in Syria.
Israeli daily Haaretz on last October 31
quoted a “senior Northern Command
officer” as saying that the U.S. – led
coalition “is making a big mistake in
fighting against ISIS … the United
States, Canada and France are on the
same side as Hezbollah, Iran and
[Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad.
That does not make sense.”
Regardless, on September 8 Israeli
daily The Jerusalem Post reported that
Israel has provided “satellite imagery
and other information” to the coalition.
Three days later Netanyahu said at a
conference in Herzliya: “Israel fully
supports President [Barack] Obama’s
call for united actions against ISIS …
We are playing our part in this
continued effort. Some of the things
are known; some of the things are less
known.”
Obama’s call was the green light for
Israel to support Syrian and non- Syrian
rebels. Syrian official statements claim
that Israel has been closely coordinating
with the rebels.
Israeli statements claim theirs is
confined to “humanitarian” support to
“moderate” Syrian opposition, which
the U.S. has already pledged to train
and arm in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Turkey. A significant portion of the $64
billion earmarked for conflicts abroad
in the budget legislation signed by
Obama on December 19 will go to
these “moderates.”
Both Israel and the U.S. have no
headaches about whether the
“moderates” would remain as such
after being armed with lethal weapons
or whether it remains appropriate to
call them “opposition.”
But the Israeli “humanitarian” claim is
challenged by the fact that Israel is the
only neighbouring country which still
closes its doors to Syrian civilian
refugees while keeping its doors wide
open to the wounded rebels who are
treated in Israeli hospitals and allowed
to return to the battle front after
recovery.
IS close to Israeli borders
The Israeli foreign ministry on last
September 3 confirmed that the U.S.
journalist Steven Sotloff whom the IS
had beheaded was an Israeli citizen as
well. In a speech addressed to Sotloff’s
family, Netanyahu condemned the IS
as a “branch” of a “poisonous tree”
and a “tentacle” of a “violent Islamist
terrorism.”
On the same day Israeli Defense
Minister Moshe Ya’alon officially
outlawed the IS and anyone associating
with it.
On September 10, Netanyahu
convened an urgent security meeting
to prepare for the possible danger of
the IS advancing closer to the Israeli
border, a prospect confirmed by the
latest battles for power between the IS
and the al – Nusra Front on the
southern Syrian – Lebanese borders
and in southern Syria, within the
artillery range of Israeli forces.
On November 9, Ansar Bait al-Maqdis
(ABM), which has been operating
against the Egyptian army, released an
audio clip pledging allegiance to the IS
to declare later the first IS Wilayah
(province) in the Egyptian Sinai
Peninsula, south of Israel.
On last November 14 The Israeli Daily
quoted Netanyahu as saying in a private
defense meeting that the IS is
“currently operating out of Lebanon …
close to Israel’s northern border. We
must take this as a serious threat.”
However, “in truth, as most of Israel’s
intelligence community has been quick
to point out, there are no signs that
anything of the sort is actually
happening,” according to Amos Harel,
writing in Foreign Policy five days later.
Moshe Ya’alon told journalists in
September that “the organization
operates far from Israel” and thus
presents no imminent threat. Israeli
peace activist Uri Avnery, on November
14, wrote: “The present and former
generals who shape Israel’s policy can
only smile when this ‘danger ’ is
mentioned.”
Israel “certainly does not see the group
as an external threat” and the “Islamic
State also does not yet pose an internal
threat to Israel,” according to Israeli
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L DA R T I C L E S
12
continued from page 11
journalist and Associate Policy Fellow
at the European Council on Foreign
Relations, Dimi Reider, writing in a
Reuters blog on last October 21.
What Netanyahu described as a
“serious threat” in the north does not
yet dictate any Israeli action against it
because “we must assume that
Hizballah,” which is allied to Syria and
Iran, “does not have its house in order,”
according to the Israeli premier.
The presence of the IS Wilayah on its
southern border with Egypt is
preoccupying the country with an
internal bloody anti-terror conflict that
would prevent any concrete Egyptian
contribution to the stabilization of the
Arab Levant or support to the
Palestinians in their struggle to end the
Israeli occupation of their land, let alone
the fact that this presence is already
pitting Egypt against Israel’s
archenemy, Hamas, in the Palestinian
Gaza Strip and creating a hostile
environment that dictates closer
Egyptian – Israeli security coordination.
Therefore, Israel is not going to
“interfere” because “these are internal
issues of the countries where it is
happening.” Israel is “informally …
ready to render assistance, but not in a
military way and not by joining the
(U.S. - led) coalition” against the IS,
according to the deputy head of the
Israeli embassy in Moscow, Olga Slov,
as quoted by Russian media on
November 14.
Jordan is another story
However, Israel’s eastern neighbours
in Jordan and Syria seem another story.
“Jordan feels threatened by IS. We will
cooperate with them one way or
another,” ambassador Slov said.
Jordanian media has been reporting that
more than 2000 Jordanians had already
joined al-Qaeda splinter the IS, al-
Qaeda’s branch al-Nusra Front or other
rebels who are fighting for an “Islamic”
state in Syria. Hundreds of them were
killed by the Syrian Arab Army.
The Daily Beast on last June 27 quoted
Thomas Sanderson, the co-director for
transnational threats at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, as
saying that Israel considers the survival
of Jordan as “a paramount national
security objective.”
If Jordan requested Israeli assistance
in protecting its borders, Israel would
have “little choice” but to help, the
Beast quoted the director of the Israeli
National Security Council, Yaakov
Amidror, as saying.
As a precaution measure, Israel is
building now a 500-kilometre “security
fence” on its border with Jordan.
While Israel is willing and getting ready
to “interfere” in Jordan, it is already
deeply interfering in Syria, where the
real battle has been raging for less than
four years now against terrorists led
by the IS.
A few weeks ago The Associated Press
reported that the IS and the al-Nusra
had concluded an agreement to stop
fighting each other and cooperate on
destroying the U.S. – trained and
supported rebels (The Syrian
Revolutionaries Front and the Hazm
movement) as well as the Syrian
government forces in northern Syria.
But in southern Syria all these and other
terrorist organizations are coordinating
among themselves and have what Lt.
Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the
Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) called
“a gentleman’s agreement” with Israel
across the border, according to Colum
Lynch in Foreign Policy on June 11.
Last October, Al-Qaeda branch in
Syria, al-Nusra, was among the rebel
groups which overtook the only border
crossing of Quneitra between Syria and
the Israeli – occupied Golan Heights.
Israel has yet to demonstrate its
objection.
“Many Sunnis in Iraq and the Gulf
consider ISIS a bullet in their rifles
aimed at Shiite extremism, in their bid
to restore their lost standing,” Raghida
Dergham, a columnist and a senior
diplomatic correspondent for the
London – based Arabic Al-Hayat daily,
wrote in the huffingtonpost on
September 19.
A political public agreement between
Israel and the Gulf Arabs has developed
on a mutual understanding that the
dismantling of the Syria – Iran alliance
as a prelude to a “regime change” in
both countries is the regional priority,
without loosing sight of the endgame,
which is to dictate peace with Israel
as the regional power under the U.S.
hegemony. The IS is “the bullet in their
rifles.” From their perspective, the U.S.
war on the IS is irrelevant, for now at
least.
24 December, 2014
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab
journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank
of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian
territories.
Source: Countercurrents.org
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ANOTHER MH17 COVER-UP: HIDING A KEY AUTOPSY
By Eric Zuesse
Decisive evidence as to how the July
17th shooting-down of the MH17
Malaysian airliner occurred is being
hidden by the four-nation team that’s
doing the official ‘investigation’ into the
plane-downing incident.
This decisive evidence is the coroner’s
report on the corpse of the airliner’s
pilot. If the pilot was killed by bullets,
then the standard ‘explanation’ of the
downing (that the plane was downed
by a ground-fired missile) isn’t just
false, it’s an outright hoax. So: where’s
the pilot’s autopsy?
This investigation is important because
stringent economic sanctions against
Russia were instituted immediately
after the downing; these sanctions were
based upon never-substantiated
charges from the Ukrainian
Government, and from its sponsor the
U.S. Government, alleging that the
plane had been downed by rebels who
were supported by Russia. (The “Buk”
missile launcher charged by Ukraine as
the cause was actually manned by
Ukraine’s soldiers.)
The same Government, the U.S., that
had lied its way into invading Iraq,
might now be orchestrating still-more-
dangerous frauds, with the potential
even for a nuclear war against Russia.
The four nations doing the official
investigation and report into the airliner-
downing are: Ukraine, Australia,
Belgium, and Netherlands. All four are
U.S. allies; and, one of them, Ukraine,
is one of the two main suspects in this
case, the other being separatists against
the Ukrainian Government. (They’re
not represented in this ‘investigation.’)
The United States and Ukraine say that
the airliner was downed by separatists
who mistakenly thought that they were
shooting down a Ukrainian bomber
instead of an airliner. (Even if that had
been true, the U.S. would still have
been the ultimate cause of the downing.
The whole cover-story was designed
to be believed only by fools.)
However, the Ukrainian Government,
which until now has maintained
steadfastly that there is only one
possible explanation for the downing
— their explanation, that it had been
downed by a “Buk” ground-fired
missile controlled by the rebels —
finally changed their tune on December
21st, and announced that maybe it
wasn’t. Apparently, the other three
nations on the team are refusing to sign
their names onto a joint report from all
four (according to the secret agreement
signed by them all on August 8th, this
report will be unanimous or else it
won’t be at all) that commits to
Ukraine’s ‘explanation,’ because the
real evidence is overwhelmingly against
it — as will herein be explained and
documented.
According to London’s Daily Mail on
December 5th, a video documentary
from a Russian journalist “suggested”
that, “pieces of 30mm rounds were
found in the bodies of the pilots.”
30mm bullets are the same size of
bullets that come from the types of
fighter-jet planes that are in the
Ukrainian Air Force, including the
following jets: Su-25, Su-27, and Mig-
29. 30mm bullets are very different
from missile-shrapnel, which the U.S.
and Ukraine allege had brought down
this airliner.
A retired Lufthansa pilot, Peter
Haisenko, examined a remarkably clear
photo of the key piece of evidence on
the downing, which is the side-panel
of the fuselage right next to the pilot;
this panel was riddled with what he
said were 30mm bullet holes, shot right
into the spot where the pilot’s belly
would be. Apparently (if Haisenko is
correct), the airliner ’s pilot was
machine-gunned to death, his belly was
ripped into by a hail of bullets, after
which the attacking jet or jets fired a
missile into the airliner’s body, and the
airliner then promptly plummeted to
earth. No ground-fired missile was
involved. (The ground-fired “Buk”
would have been 33,000 feet below,
much too far away for precise
targeting at the plane’s pilot; and
shrapnel-holes are not round; they’re
very different from bullet-holes.)
What’s in question is whether the
approximately two-foot-diameter gash
into the fuselage right next to the pilot
was the result of hundreds of bullets
fired into the pilot’s belly, as Haisenko
alleges. If any bullets at all were
involved in this downing, then the
Ukrainian Government is the guilty
party in it, because only they have an
Air Force; the separatists do not. The
separatists had no way to machine-gun
the plane’s pilot to death. The
separatists were never that close to the
airliner.
Because of the allegation in the Daily
Mail, I consulted the source of that
allegation, which was a documentary
film that had been made by Russian
journalist Andrei Karaulov. Because it’s
in Russian, I engaged a Russian
translator, who found that the source
of the Daily Mail’s allegation was at
3:50-5:00 on this video.
It says there:
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“Judging by the cockpit fragments
photos, the cockpit was shot by 30-
mm cannon projectiles. There should
be plenty of them in the pilots’ bodies.
As announced, the bodies of the
passengers were transferred to
relatives, but the bodies of both main
and support jet crews (currently kept
in the Netherlands), were in bad
condition due to (1) heavy shelling
targeted at the cockpit, and (2) crashing
to earth. The projectiles must have been
found by now, most certainly. Their
type must have been definitely
ascertained. Why are these findings not
announced? There is but one inference:
the high professionals on the
international investigation board are
severely pressured by some powers,
which don’t want certain of the
findings to be publicly disclosed.”
“One month ago [from the time of
shooting the video] the international
commission announced that it found
certain ‘objects’ in pilots’ bodies. I
believe these were 30mm cannon
projectile particles. When we were in
Copenhagen, we were told by the
international investigation commission
that investigation results would be
made public on 9 October. To this day
it hasn’t been done.”
So: Where’s this crucial autopsy-
report? We’ve seen the side-panel with
its bullet-holes; were bullets lodged in
the corpse?
(Here are photos of the Pilot’s coffin
and funeral-procession.)
What we have gotten instead is the
Ukrainian Government backing away
from the ‘explanation’ that U.S.
President Barack Obama, who installed
their regime, endorsed, and used as his
excuse for the EU to hike sanctions
against Russia — an act of war, which
now has been followed by the President
and Congress virtually declaring war
against Russia by taking over Ukraine
on Russia’s very border. Based totally
on lies.
Evidently, Obama believes that if
George W. Bush could fool the
American public into invading Iraq,
Obama can fool them into invading
Russia. Can it be: he’s aiming to out-
do even Bush?
PS: a note that my translator wants to
append:
I have now read the Daily Mail article
for the first time — what a distortion
of the facts stated in the
documentary!!!
1. They claim that, according to the
Russian media, the air traffic controller
and the pilot fled together, which was
never said (nor even suggested) in the
documentary. This was apparently
done in order to make the
documentary look ridiculous and far-
fetched, which it is not.
2. They forget to mention, that
authorities of Borispol [the airport]
tower, when contacted by A.
Karaulov’s team, said they never had
anyone by the name of Anna Petrenko
[the alleged fighter-jet’s alleged
girlfriend] on staff, when the opposite
was said by lower rank employees.
And when the journalists contacted
some unnamed boss, s/he just hung
up the phone on them.
3. The article doesn’t give any proof
of the girl and the pilot still being alive,
which makes it seem even more
sinister [i.e.: did the Government kill
them, to silence them?].
24 December, 2014
Eric Zuesse is the author, most
recently, of They’re Not Even Close:
The Democratic vs. Republican
Economic Records, 1910-2010.
Source: Countercurrents.org
THE OIL PRICE CRASH OF 2014By Richard Heinberg
Oil prices have fallen by half since late
June. This is a significant development
for the oil industry and for the global
economy, though no one knows exactly
how either the industry or the economy
will respond in the long run. Since it’s
almost the end of the year, perhaps this
is a good time to stop and ask: (1) Why
is this happening? (2) Who wins and
who loses over the short term?, and
(3) What will be the impacts on oil
production in 2015?
1. Why is this happening?
Euan Mearns does a good job of
explaining the oil price crash here.
Briefly, demand for oil is softening
(notably in China, Japan, and Europe)
because economic growth is faltering.
Meanwhile, the US is importing less
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petroleum because domestic supplies
are increasing—almost entirely due to
the frantic pace of drilling in “tight” oil
fields in North Dakota and Texas, using
hydrofracturing and horizontal drilling
technologies—while demand has
leveled off.
Usually when there is a mismatch
between supply and demand in the
global crude market, it is up to Saudi
Arabia—the world’s top exporter—to
ramp production up or down in order
to stabilize prices. But this time the
Saudis have refused to cut back on
production and have instead unilaterally
cut prices to customers in Asia,
evidently because the Arabian royals
want prices low. There is speculation
that the Saudis wish to punish Russia
and Iran for their involvement in Syria
and Iraq. Low prices have the added
benefit (to Riyadh) of shaking at least
some high-cost tight oil, deepwater,
and tar sands producers in North
America out of the market, thus
enhancing Saudi market share.
The media frame this situation as an
oil “glut,” but it’s important to recall
the bigger picture: world production of
conventional oil (excluding natural gas
liquids, tar sands, deepwater, and tight
oil) stopped growing in 2005, and has
actually declined a bit since then. Nearly
all supply growth has come from more
costly (and more environmentally
ruinous) resources such as tight oil and
tar sands. Consequently, oil prices have
been very high during this period (with
the exception of the deepest, darkest
months of the Great Recession). Even
at their current depressed level of $55
to $60, petroleum prices are still above
the International Energy Agency’s high-
price scenario for this period contained
in forecasts issued a decade ago.
Part of the reason has to do with the
fact that costs of exploration and
production within the industry have
risen dramatically (early this year Steve
Kopits of the energy market analytic
firm Douglas-Westwood estimated that
costs were rising at nearly 11 percent
annually).
In short, during this past decade the
oil industry has entered a new regime
of steeper production costs, slower
supply growth, declining resource
quality, and higher prices. That all-
important context is largely absent
from most news stories about the price
plunge, but without it recent events are
unintelligible. If the current oil market
can be characterized as being in a state
of “glut,” that simply means that at
this moment, and at this price, there
are more willing sellers than buyers; it
shouldn’t be taken as a fundamental
or long-term indication of resource
abundance.
2. Who wins and loses, short-term?
Gail Tverberg does a great job of teasing
apart the likely consequences of the oil
price slump here. For the US, there will
be some tangible benefits from falling
gasoline prices: motorists now have
more money in their pockets to spend
on Christmas gifts. However, there are
also perils to the price plunge, and the
longer prices remain low, the higher
the risk. For the past five years, tight
oil and shale gas have been significant
drivers of growth in the American
economy, adding $300 to 400 billion
annually to GDP. States with active
shale plays have seen a significant
increase of jobs while the rest of the
nation has merely sputtered along.
The shale boom seems to have resulted
from a combination of high petroleum
prices and easy financing: with the Fed
keeping interest rates near zero, scores
of small oil and gas companies were
able to take on enormous amounts of
debt so as to pay for the purchase of
drilling leases, the rental of rigs, and
the expensive process of fracking. This
was a tenuous business even in good
times, with many companies subsisting
on re-sale of leases and creative
financing, while failing to show a clear
profit on sales of product. Now, if
prices remain low, most of these
companies will cut back on drilling and
some will disappear altogether.
The price rout is hitting Russia quicker
and harder than perhaps any other
nation. That country is (in most
months) the world’s biggest producer,
and oil and gas provide its main sources
of income. As a result of the price
crash and US-imposed economic
sanctions, the ruble has cratered. Over
the short term, Russia’s oil and gas
companies are somewhat cushioned
from impact: they earn high-value US
dollars from sales of their products
while paying their expenses in rubles
that have lost roughly half their value
(compared to the dollar) in the past five
months. But for the average Russian
and for the national government, these
are tough times.
There is at least a possibility that the
oil price crash has important
geopolitical significance. The US and
Russia are engaged in what can only
be called low-level warfare over
Ukraine: Moscow resents what it sees
as efforts to wrest that country from
its orbit and to surround Russia with
NATO bases; Washington, meanwhile,
would like to alienate Europe from
Russia, thereby heading off long-term
economic integration across Eurasia
(which, if it were to transpire, would
undermine America’s “sole
superpower” status; see discussion
here); Washington also sees Russia’s
annexation of Crimea as violating
international accords. Some argue that
the oil price rout resulted from
Washington talking Saudi Arabia into
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continued next page
flooding the market so as to hammer
Russia’s economy, thereby neutralizing
Moscow’s resistance to NATO
encirclement (albeit at the price of
short-term losses for the US tight oil
industry). Russia has recently
cemented closer energy and economic
ties with China, perhaps partly in
response; in view of this latter
development, the Saudis’ decision to
sell oil to China at a discount could be
explained as yet another attempt by
Washington (via its OPEC proxy) to
avert Eurasian economic integration.
Other oil exporting nations with a high-
price break-even point—notably
Venezuela and Iran, also on
Washington’s enemies list—are
likewise experiencing the price crash
as economic catastrophe. But the pain
is widely spread: Nigeria has had to
redraw its government budget for next
year, and North Sea oil production is
nearing a point of collapse.
Events are unfolding very quickly, and
economic and geopolitical pressures
are building. Historically,
circumstances like these have
sometimes led to major open conflicts,
though all-out war between the US and
Russia remains unthinkable due to the
nuclear deterrents that both nations
possess.
If there are indeed elements of US-led
geopolitical intrigue at work here (and
admittedly this is largely speculation),
they carry a serious risk of economic
blowback: the oil price plunge appears
to be bursting the bubble in high-yield,
energy-related junk bonds that, along
with rising oil production, helped fuel
the American economic “recovery,”
and it could result not just in layoffs
throughout the energy industry but a
contagion of fear in the banking sector.
Thus the ultimate consequences of the
price crash could include a global
financial panic (John Michael Greer
makes that case persuasively and, as
always, quite entertainingly), though it
is too soon to consider this as anything
more than a possibility.
3. What will be the impacts for oil
production?
There’s actually some good news for
the oil industry in all of this: costs of
production will almost certainly decline
during the next few months.
Companies will cut expenses wherever
they can (watch out, middle-level
managers!). As drilling rigs are idled,
rental costs for rigs will fall. Since the
price of oil is an ingredient in the price
of just about everything else, cheaper
oil will reduce the costs of logistics and
oil transport by rail and tanker.
Producers will defer investments.
Companies will focus only on the most
productive, lowest-cost drilling
locations, and this will again lower
averaged industry costs. In short order,
the industry will be advertising itself
to investors as newly lean and mean.
But the main underlying reason
production costs were rising during the
past decade—declining resource
quality as older conventional oil
reservoirs dry up—hasn’t gone away.
And those most productive, lowest-
cost drilling locations (also known as
“sweet spots”) are limited in size and
number.
The industry is putting on a brave face,
and for good reason. Companies in the
shale patch need to look profitable in
order to keep the value of their bonds
from evaporating. Major oil companies
largely stayed clear of involvement in
the tight oil boom; nevertheless, low
prices will force them to cut back on
upstream investment as well. Drilling
will not cease; it will merely contract
(the number of new US oil and gas well
permits issued in Novemberfell by 40
percent from the previous month).
Many companies have no choice but
to continue pursuing projects to which
they are already financially committed,
so we won’t see substantial production
declines for several months. Production
from Canada’s tar sands will probably
continue at its current pace, but will
not expand since new projects
willrequire an oil price at or higher than
the current level in order to break even.
As analysis by David Hughes of Post
Carbon Institute shows, even without
the price crash production in the
Bakken and Eagle Ford plays would
have been expected to peak and begin
a sharp decline within the next two or
three years. The price crash can only
hasten that inevitable inflection point.
How much and how fast will world oil
production fall? Euan Mearns offers
three scenarios; in the most likely of
these (in his opinion) world production
capacity will contract by about two
million barrels per day over the next
two years as a result of the price
collapse.
We may be witnessing one of history’s
little ironies: the historic
commencement of an inevitable,
overall, persistent decline of world
liquid fuels production may be ushered
in not by skyrocketing oil prices such
as we saw in the 1970s or in 2008, but
by a price crash that at least some
pundits are spinning as the death of
“peak oil.” Meanwhile, the economic
and geopolitical perils of the unfolding
oil price rout make expectations of
business-as-usual for 2015 ring rather
hollow.
20 December, 2014
Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow
at the Post Carbon Institute
Source: Post Carbon Institute Blog
PAKISTAN: A FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND.
continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
17
By Maryam Sakeenah
The Peshawar school attack is a
tragedy that sends senses reeling, an
enormity that confounds the senses.
It does not help however, to dismiss
the people who committed this foul
atrocity as ‘inhuman’, or to say they
were not really Muslims. It is a
convenient fiction that implies a most
frustrating unwillingness and inability
to understand how human beings are
dehumanized and desensitized so they
commit such dastardly acts under the
moral cover of a perverted religiosity.
This unwillingness and inability to
understand is deeply distressing
because it shows how far away we
are from even identifying what went
wrong, and where- and hence, how
far we are from any solution.
The international media has reflected-
not surprisingly- a superficial, flat
and ludicrously shallow grasp of the
issues in Pakistan. The CNN (and
other channels) repeatedly portrayed
the incident as ‘an attack on children
for wanting to get an education. ’ In
fact, the UK Prime Minister himself
tweeted: “The news from Pakistan is
deeply shocking. It’s horrifying that
children are being killed simply for
going to school.” It actually reeks of
how the media’s portrayal and use
of Malala’s story has shaped a rather
inaccurate narrative on Pakistan.
Years ago shortly after 9/11, former
CIA analyst Michael Scheuer had
lamented Western politicians’ dim-
witted understanding of terrorism and
the motives behind it . Scheuer
highlighted how dishonestly and
dangerously Western leaders
portrayed that the terrorists were
‘Against Our Way of Life’; that they
were angry over the West’s progress
as some deranged barbarians battling
a superior civilization out of rank
hatred. This rhetoric from Western
politicians and the media ideologized
terrorism and eclipsed the fact that
terror tactics were actually a reaction
to rapacious wars in Muslim (and
other) lands often waged or
sponsored by Western governments.
It diverted focus from the heart of
the problem and created a misleading
and dangerous narrative of ‘Us versus
Them’, setting global politics on a
terrible ‘Clash of civilizations’ course.
Today, I remembered Scheuer again,
browsing through responses to the
Peshawar tragedy both on local social
media as well as from people in
positions of power- most reflected a
facile understanding of the motives
of terrorism. The Taliban spokesman
Umar Khorasani states: “We selected
the army’s school for the attack
because the government is targeting
our families and females. We want
them to feel the pain.”
Certainly, this is twisted and
unacceptable logic. What is most
outrageous is his attempt to give
religious justification to it by twisting
religious texts.
Certainly, the leadership of the TTP
is guilty of a criminal abuse of
religious sources to legitimize its vile
motives and sell i t to their
conservative Pashtun following who
are on the receiving end of Pakistan’s
military offensive in the tribal areas.
The TTP leaders have hands
drenched in innocent blood. Even the
Afghan Taliban have rejected the use
and justification of such means by
the TTP as unacceptable by any
standards in an official statement.
But I wonder at those human beings
chanting Arabic religious expressions
who blew themselves up for the
‘glorious cause’ of taking revenge
from innocent unsuspecting school
children. I wonder how they had
gone so terribly, terribly wrong in
their humanity, their faith. Certainly,
they were taken in with the TTP’s
malevolent ideological justification
for the rank brutality they
committed. Certainly, they allowed
themselves to be taken in because
they perceived their miserable lives
had no intrinsic worth except in being
given up in order to exact vengeance.
I understood too when I heard a
victim student writing in pain,
vowing revenge. ‘I will grow up and
make their coming generations learn
a lesson’, he said. In that line, I
understood so much about human
psychology and the psychology of
victimhood, and the innate need for
avenging wrongdoing.
The problem with the public
perception of the war in Pakistan is
that we see only part of it: we see
the heartrending images from
Peshawar and elsewhere in the urban
centres where terrorists have struck.
But there is a war that we do not see,
hidden from public view. This is the
war in the tribal north. The familiar
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I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
18
images we see from the war divide
the Pakistani victims of this war into
Edward Herman’s ‘worthy’ and
‘unworthy’ victims- both, however,
are innocent victims- the ones we see
and the ones we do not. But because
some victims are unworthier than
others, the unworthy victim claims
worth to his condemned life in dying,
misled into thinking that death by
killing others can be a vindication.
But sometimes the ones we are not
allowed to see, make themselves
visible in horrible, ugly ways; they
become deafeningly loud to claim
notice. And in the process, they make
other victims- our own flesh and
blood... And so it is our bloody
burden to bear for fighting a war that
was not ours, which has come to
haunt us as our own.
The work of some independent
journalists has highlighted the war we
do not see in Waziristan- their work,
however, has not made it to
mainstream news. Such work has
brought to light enormous ‘collateral
damage’ figures. Some independent
journalists have also focused on the
plight of IDPs who feel alienated and
forgotten by the Pakistani state and
nation. It must be noted, however,
that there is no access to the media
in the areas where the army’s
operation is going on. The news we
get from the war zone is solely
through the Pakistan Army- there is,
hence, absolutely no counternarrative
from Waziristan. And hence our one-
sided vision eludes a genuine
understanding.
This unwillingness and inability to
understand reflects in our
uninsightful militarist approach to the
problem in Waziristan. While the
necessity of using military means to
combat a real and present danger is
understood, the need for it to be
precisely targeted, limited in scope
and time, and planned to eliminate or
at least substantively minimize
collateral damage is equally
important. The need to efficiently
manage the fallout of such an
operation and rehabilitate affectees
cannot be overemphasized. On all
these counts, we need to have done
more.
But perhaps the most vital
understanding is that military
operations are never the enduring
solution. They may be needed to
achieve specific necessary targets,
but only with the aforementioned
conditionalities to minimize the
fallout. Moreover, the bigger, deeper
problems have to be dealt with
through a wider, more insightful non-
military approach: listening and
understanding, dialogue, mutual
compromise and reconciliation,
rehabilitation and peacebuilding.
There are numerous examples in the
past- even the recent past- of how
war-ravaged communities drenched
in the memory of oppression and
pain, seething with unrelenting hate,
have successfully undertaken
peacebuilding. There have been
temporary respites in this war in
Pakistan whenever the two sides
agreed to a ceasefire. That spirit
ought to have lasted.
I understand that this sounds
unreasonable on the backdrop of the
recent atrocity, but there is no other
way to give peace a chance.
Retributive justice using force will
prolong the violence and make more
victims.
Since religion is often appealed to in
this conflict, its role in peacebuilding
has to be explored and made the best
of. To break this vicious, insane cycle,
there has to be a revival of the spirit of
‘Ihsan’ for a collective healing- that is,
not indiscriminate and unrelenting
retributive justice but wilful, voluntary
forgiveness (other than for the direct,
unrepentant and most malafide
perpetrators). This must be followed
by long-term, systematic peacebuilding
in Pakistan’s war-ravaged tribal belt in
particular and the entire nation in
general. Such peacebuilding will
involve religious scholars, educators,
journalists, social workers and other
professionals. Unreasonable as it may
sound, it is perhaps the only enduring
strategy to mend and heal and rebuild.
The spirit of ‘Ihsan’ has tremendous
potential to salvage us, and has to be
demonstrated from both sides. But
because the state is the grander
agency, its initiative in this regard is
instrumental as a positive overture to
the aggrieved party.
But this understanding seems to have
been lost in the frenzy, just when it was
needed most pressingly. I shudder to
think what consequences a failure to
understand this vital point can bring.
The Pakistani nation has already paid
an enormously heavy price.
17 December, 2014
Maryam Sakeenah is a Pakistan-
based independent researcher and
freelance writer on International
politics, human rights and Islam.
Source: Countercurrents.org
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