Thursday 4 April 2013


United States: Greatest purveyor of violence


Many of the youngsters may not be fully aware of Martin Luther King and Vietnam War. However the US war mania is evident today if one looks at the role it has been playing In Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Afghanistan and even Iran and Pakistan. This speech of Martin Luther King may be long but each word has to be read and understood by the US tax payers whose money is used in spreading wars and also by those who are victim of US war mongering.
By 1967, Martin Luther King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 ‑ a year to the day before he was murdered ‑ King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people."

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.
Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
The Importance of Vietnam
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.
Strange Liberators
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.
They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.
Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.
They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.
What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?
Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.
Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.
This Madness Must Cease
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words: "Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:
End all bombing in North and South Vietnam
Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.
Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.
Protesting the War
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.
As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People are Important
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

Courtesy: Information Clearing House

 

Wednesday 3 April 2013


The Long History of Lies about Iran

This article written by Muhammad Sahimi and published by  "Information Clearing House" -"Antiwar" needs to be read carefully by all those who are still trying to find reasons for the assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has a plan to attack at least five countries. Syria and Iran are on the top and name of Pakistan is also there.

There was a flood of articles and analyses on the tenth anniversary of invasion of Iraq on March 19, most of which focused on the lies, exaggerations, and half-truths that the War Party told the American people and the world in the run up to the war. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq have died as a result of the lies. Tens of thousands of people have also died as a result of the NATO aggression against Libya, as well as the war in Syria that is backed by the United States and its allies in that region, namely, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, with the carnage still continuing with no end in sight.
If the lies about Iraq have taught us anything, it is that we must pay due attention to the massive campaign of disinformation and lies that has been waged against Iran for over three decades, in order to “justify” a war with that nation. The campaign began with the hostage crisis after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun by Islamic leftist students on November 4, 1979, and is still continuing. There are still disinformation and one-sided stories about the hostage crisis, the latest of which is the film Argo. The biggest lie about Iran, which has been perpetuated since at least 1984, is that Iran is only a few months or a year or two away from a nuclear bomb, which has not materialized after nearly 30 years.
The campaign is separate from the secret war that has been waged on Iran for at least a decade, consisting of assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, killing of many innocent people by terrorist groups, such as the Jundallah, and waging a cyberspace war against Iran’s nuclear facilities that even a recent NATO study recognized as being tantamount to the use of force and illegal. The campaign of lies about Iran is much deeper and broader than the Iraq campaign, far better organized, and much better funded, with the funding provided by not just the American administrations – such as $400 million provided by the GW Bush administration for destabilizing the Iranian regime – but also the Israel lobby and the War Party. The campaign also includes demonization of Iran by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who haslikened Iran to the Nazi regime, our era to 1938, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler, anoutrageous claim that has been criticized even in certain pro-Israel circles.
Stephen Walt has already listed top ten media failures about Iran. Here is a list of some of the most outrageous lies about Iran, but the list is by no means complete.
1981: One of the most brazen lies is that the U.S. does not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. From the CIA coup of 1953 that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh and installing and supporting the dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for 25 years, to the aforementioned Bush budget for destabilizing Iran, the U.S. has always tried to interfere in Iran. On January 19, 1981, Iran and the U.S. signed the Algiers Accord to end the hostage crisis. In the Accord the U.S. promised that “it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs,” and that it will remove all of its sanctions against Iran. Not delivering on legally-binding promises is by itself a terrible lie.
1984: Jane’s Defense Weekly reported that West German intelligence believed that Iran could have a nuclear bomb within two years. Twenty-nine years later, that bomb has not been produced.
1988: An Iranian passenger airliner carrying 290 people was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the cruiser USS Vicennes, killing all the passengers and crew, including 56 children. To cover up the crime, the U.S. lied twice. It claimed that its cruiser was in the international waters, and that the airliners had been mistaken with a jet fighter. The International Civil Aviation Organization put the cruiser in Iran’s territorial waters, and Admiral William J. Crowe, then Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, also admitted later that the cruiser was in Iran’s territorial water. Newsweek magazine accused the U.S. of a “sea of lies” about mistaking a passenger airliner with a fighter jet.
1996: The Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed, killing 19 U.S. servicemen. For years the U.S. accused Iran of sponsoring the terrorist attack. But, in his book, The Secret History of Al-Qaeda, Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi, detailed the involvement of Al-Qaeda in the attack. The 9/11 Commission reported that Osama Bin Laden was seen being congratulated on the day of the bombing. William Perry, who was Defense Secretary at that time, said in 2007 that he believesal-Qaeda, rather than Iran, was behind the attack, and Saudi Arabia’s interior minister Prince Nayefabsolved Iran of any role in the attack.
1998: In its indictment of Bin Laden, the U.S. declared that Al-Qaeda, “forged alliances . . . with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group [the Lebanese] Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies.” The allegation of a working relation between Iran and Al-Qaeda was repeated by Steven Emerson and the infamous Islamophobe Daniel Pipes in May 2001.
2001: There were allegations that Iran played a role in the September 11 terrorist attacks. But, the fact is that the Sunni/Salafi Al-Qaeda hates the Shiite Iran, and aside from rabid anti-Iran figures, such asKenneth Timmerman and Pipes, no one believes that Iran had any role in the terrorist attacks. Then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was one of the first heads of state to send a message of condolences to the American people. Even George W. Bush and his then Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin said that, “There was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of September 11,” and Western intelligence agencies believe that there is zero chance of Iran helping Al-Qaeda to stage the terrorist attacks. In fact, in 2003 Iran offered to exchange members of Bin Laden family, who had fled to Iran after the U.S. attacked that nation in the fall of 2001, with the leadership of the Mojahedin-e Khalgh (MEK), an Iranian dissident cult who were in Iraq at that time, but the U.S. rejected the offer because the Pentagon wanted to train and use the MEK as a pressure group against Iran.
2002: In January Israel seized a cargo ship, Karine A, and alleged that it was carrying weapons for the Palestinian Authority with Iran’s help, an allegation that was supported by Colin Powell, then Secretary of State. In addition to the fact that Israel changed its history several times, there were also many holes in the official statements and allegations. After sometime, the allegations faded away and were never mentioned again.
2002: George Bush made the moronic declaration about the “axis of evil,” making Iran a charter member of the axis, of which Iran’s archenemy Saddam Hussein and his regime were also member. The absurdity and sheer magnitude of the lie about an alliance between Iran and Hussein’s regime was mind boggling. It was meant to demonize Iran and Iranians.
2005: Shortly after Ahmadinejad was elected Iran’s President in June, it was alleged that he had taken part in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As I discussed elsewhere, Ahmadinejad had in fact been opposed to the takeover.
2005: In October it was claimed by the War Party and the Israel lobby, and aided by the U.S. mainstream media, that Ahmadinejad has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” This was used by the Party and Lobby to push for military attacks on Iran. But, it was shown by many (see here and here, for example) that it was simply a mistranslation of what he had really said. In 2011 even Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy, acknowledged that Ahmadinejad never uttered those infamous words. But, the lie is still repeated.
2006: In May the National Post of Canada published an article by Amir Taheri, an exiled Iranian “journalist” who is close to the necons, claiming that the Iranian parliament approved a law that “envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct color schemes to make them identifiable in public,” hence likening it to the special dress code for Jews in the Nazi regime. The National Post even stated that Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, had said the report to be “absolutely true,” and that Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Center had also confirmed it (though Hier denied it later on). It turned out that the story was a pure fabrication by Taheri, who has a long track record of reporting fictions as facts. Even the National Post retracted the story and apologized for publishing it.
2006: The Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times of London alleged that Iran had tried to secretly import uranium from Congo, similar to George W. Bush’s infamous sixteen words, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” which turned out to be a lie. The report turned out to be a fabrication.
2006: Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the then chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a report in August that claimed, “Iran has conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its IAEA safeguards agreement, and despite its claim to the contrary, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons,” an outrageous lie that prompted the IAEA to send a letter to Hoekstra, rebuking the report, calling it dishonest.
2006: The Daily Telegraph claimed that Iran had tried to get uranium from Somalia’s Islamic forces, another sheer fabrication.
2007: In his infamous diatribes, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” Norman Podhoretz, the Godfather of the Israel lobby, claimed that when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said at one time that, “I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world,” he had meant Israel. This was sheer lie; the Ayatollah had never uttered the words. It was another fabrication by Taheri.
2007: In the same article Podhoretz also claimed that in 2001 former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani had said, “A day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession … application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” This was another lie. I happened to be in Tehran, watching Rafsanjani on Iranian television when he uttered the alleged words. What Rafsanjani said was, “There will never be a nuclear exchange between Israel and the Islamic world, because a day will come when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession….” In other words, Rafsanjani was saying that Israel is wise enough not to want a nuclear war with Muslims, although even this correct observation of his was roundly criticized by Iran’s reformists and democratic groups.
2007: In another attempt to use Hollywood for demonizing Iran, the film 300, pitting Persians (Iranians) versus the Greeks, was produced, which was criticized for its clear anti-Persian stance, and making parallels between the ancient war and the present standoff.
2007: Senators Jon Kyle and Joseph Lieberman tried to declare the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran a terrorist organization. Then Senator Chuck Hagel, the current Defense Secretary, voted against it, saying it is unusual – I say an absurd lie – to declare the regular armed forces of a country a terrorist organization.
2008: The Daily Telegraph claimed that there were “fresh signs” that Iran had renewed work on developing nuclear weapons, which was again a fabrication. Two days later, the paper alleged that the IAEA could not account for 50-60 tons of uranium, which was supposed to be in Isfahan, where “Iran enriches its uranium.” Not only was the claim false, prompting the IAEA to reject the allegations, it was also erroneous in that there is no uranium enrichment site in Isfahan.
2009: The Times of London published a document – later on proved to be forged – that supposedly revealed “a four-year plan [by Iran] to test a neutron initiator [for triggering a nuclear reaction in the bomb." On the same day, the Times’ reporter Catherine Phillips quoted Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, saying brazenly, "Is this the smoking gun? That's the question people should be asking. It looks like the smoking gun. This is smoking uranium."
2010: One of the lies about Iran, perpetuated by successive U.S. administrations, is that the United Nations Security Council and the “international community” – which in reality means the governments of the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany – are “united” against Iran. In reality, two permanent members of the Security Council, China and Russia, and a large number of two important international organizations, namely, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Conference of Islamic Countries do not support the unilateral sanctions against Iran by the U.S. and its allies, nor do they support the constant threats made against Iran. In 2010, when the U.S. began ratcheting up it sanctions, the lie was made more frequently than ever.
2011: Another anti-Iran film, Iranium, was produced by the same Islamophobe group that had produced the films “Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West” and “The Third Jihad.” Iranium was replete with exaggerations and half-truths, if not outright lies, promoted military attacks on Iran, and wascriticized.
2012: Too many false claims on Iran’s nuclear program were reported by George Jahn of the Associated Press, and others. Steven Erlanger, a New York Times reporter, was caught lying about Iran’s nuclear program.
2013: There have already been many hysteric warnings by Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) - also known as Institute for Scary Iranian Stories - and its President David Albright, including a recent one in the Wall Street Journal on stopping an “undetectable Iranian [nuclear] bomb,” a totally absurd notion that anyone with the knowledge that Iran’s uranium enrichment program is under full inspection and monitoring of the IAEA knows is untrue.
2013: Edward Jay Epstein wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Iran can buy nuclear bombs from North Korea “overnight,” another totally absurd notion. The Israelis have also not been silent. They now claim that Iran can make a nuclear bomb in 4-6 months, another dire “prediction.” This is at least “better” than the claim in the Washington Post in 2011 that Iran could produce the bomb in 62 days.
The above list is by no means complete, but it demonstrates clearly that the campaign of lies and exaggerations about Iran has been moving forward with full speed for over three decades. The campaign has nothing to do with the nature of the Iranian regime, which does violate the rights of it citizens, though that is an internal matter for the Iranians, but has everything to do with what General James Mattis, the U.S. Central Command commander said recently, namely, bringing Iran to its knees and removing it as a regional power that can resist the hegemonic will of the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East.

Muhammad Sahimi is Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science and the NIOC Chair in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California. In addition to his regular contributions to antiwar.com, he is also co-founder and editor of the website Iran News & Middle East Reports.


 Indian Response to Gwadar Port Transfer

In a February 27th communiqué to a leading member of the Raj Sabha, India’s upper house of parliament, Indian Defense Minister AK Antony outlined a proposal to establish two new missile test sites for its increasingly-sophisticated arsenal of conventional and nuclear-capable missiles.(http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=92660). The first will be constructed on property near the banks of the River Krishna in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh. The other is planned for Rutland Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India’s easternmost territory in the Bay of Bengal. The new facilities, when completed, would complement the Defence Research and Development Organization’s current location on Wheeler Island off the coast of Orissa, which has been the mainstay of the organization’s missile tests.
Plans to build two additional facilities to accommodate India’s ambitious missile program appear, at first glance, to be a function of necessity. After all, a single missile range may prove inadequate as further tests are required to incorporate India’s newest ballistic and cruise missiles into its military force posture. However, the timing of the announcement (only nine days after the long-awaited transfer of Pakistan’s deep-sea port at Gwadar to China) and the location of the missile test sites (particularly the Andaman and Nicobar Islands near the Strait of Malacca) suggests the announcement serves a broader, more strategic purpose for India.
Why Gwadar Makes India Nervous
Although Chinese control of the Gwadar port came as no surprise to Indian policy makers and regional security analysts, the official ceremony on February 18 transferring operational rights of the deep-sea port to the China Overseas Port Holding Company clearly marked a new chapter for Chinese involvement in South Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari – who attended the signing ceremony along with the Chinese Ambassador in Islamabad and Pakistani Foreign Minister Hinna Rabbani Khar – noted that the Chinese operation of the port provides a “new impetus” to Sino-Pakistani relations. (http://www.presidentofpakistan.gov.pk/index.php?lang=en&opc=3&sel=2&pId=1462&pressReleaseYear=2013&pressReleaseMonth=02)
The significance of the move was not lost on Defense Minister Antony who, in January, claimed the development at Gwadar was “a matter of concern” for Indian the military. (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/chinese-presence-at-gwadar-port-is-a-matter-of-concern-antony/article4386103.ece)
The geopolitical implications of the Gwadar port deal have been clear for some time. Establishing a secure, overland energy route from the Persian Gulf to underdeveloped and energy-starved provinces in western China would alleviate Beijing’s dependence on maritime trade through the vulnerable Strait of Malacca, a narrow sea-lane which could be blocked by an adversary during a crisis. Overcoming this “Malacca Dilemma” would mitigate China’s reliance on the good graces of the U.S. Navy, which has been the guarantor of open sea lines of communication in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean since the fall of Imperial Japan in 1945. As the Chinese economy’s demand for energy expands in the coming decades, ensuring the unabated flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to Chinese consumers will increasingly become a core national interest. (http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1148093/gwadar-seaport-holds-key-chinas-energy-search)
Safeguarding China’s maritime trade routes and Gulf energy supplies will likely compel the PLA-N in the long-term to project power into the Indian Ocean region, long the uncontested domain of the U.S. Navy and, to a lesser degree, the Indian Navy. Operation of the port at Gwadar, in addition to a similar arrangement at the Chinese-built deep-water port at Hambantota on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, may grant the PLA-N future sites for refueling, resupplying, and repairing a future blue-water fleet – all from India’s backyard. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/business/global/16port.html?_r=0)
Andaman and Nicobar Islands: Location, Location, Location
An enhanced capability for the PLA-N in the Indian Ocean aggravates a nightmare scenario for Indian military strategists, in which India must fight a multi-front war against Pakistan and China on land and at sea. Given each country’s sizable nuclear deterrent, such an event is extremely unlikely. Since the stakes are so high, however, India had to respond to the Gwadar deal in a way that reestablished strategic parity with China, while at the same time falling short of overreacting. In the existing geopolitical environment, the planned missile test sites at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands should come as no surprise.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands occupy some of the most valuable strategic real estate in the world. The archipelago sits astride the eastern mouth of the Strait of Malacca, and only 500km separate Port Blair – the territorial capital of the island chain – from the energy-rich Burmese coast. Geography demands that any sea traffic between the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean must pass these islands, conferring a tremendous source of leverage and power projection capability to whoever controls them. Their strategic significance was underscored in 2001, when the Ministry of Defense established the Andaman and Nicobar Command at Port Blair, India’s first integrated theater command. (http://ids.nic.in/WebAbhiIDS/brief.html)
Whether it was a strategic signal or a coincidence that India’s announcement to build a missile test site near the Strait of Malacca came so soon after China took control of the Gwadar port facility, it is nevertheless a noteworthy, if subtle, reminder that the strategic relationship between India and China is becoming increasingly complex. It is likely inevitable that the interests of these two countries – with massive populations and increasingly dynamic economies – will become increasingly incongruous with time. While nothing suggests that the trajectory of the bilateral relationship between Beijing and New Delhi is devolving into an adversarial one any time soon, interests in the Indian Ocean littoral between the two countries are already divergent in key areas.
It remains to be seen whether bilateral relations between China and India remain cooperative or turn into something more combative. While much focus has been paid to long-standing border disputes in Askai Chin and Aruchnal Pradesh as potential flash points  it could turn out that places like Gwadar, Hambontato, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are even greater sources of tension and distrust in the Sino-Indian relationship. History suggests that naval disputes tend to be more benign than conflicts on land, which bodes well for maritime security in the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, if the last few weeks are any indication, the strategic interplay between these two rising powers is likely to continue at sea for some time.

Courtesy: Eurasia Review


US-Saudi-Israeli Proxy War in Syria

Article "The World Must Unite against the US-Saudi-Israeli Proxy War in Syria" written by Tony Cartalucci and picked up from Information Clearing House should be an eye opener for the Muslim Ummah. If Syria is under attack today monarchies of the region can also meet the same fate.
United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have conspired to destroy Syria by way of arming sectarian extremists since 2007. The West now admits it, along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have provided thousands of tons of weapons to militants in Syria – while also conceding that Al Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, Jabhat al-Nusra is the best armed, most well equipped militant front in the conflict.
US, Saudi, Israeli-backed terrorists are now committing a myriad of horrific atrocities against all of Syria’s population, including Sunni Muslims – meaning neither “democracy” nor even “sectarianism” drives the conflict, but rather the destruction of Syria in its entirety. 
US State Department acknowledges Syria faces threat from Al Qaeda, demands blockade of arms/aid from reaching government to fight terrorists the US State Department admits are present in every major Syrian city.
Since 2007, the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have been documented as conspiring to overthrow the Syrian government by way of sectarian extremists, including groups “sympathetic to Al Qaeda,” and in particular, the militant, sectarian Muslim Brotherhood. While the West has attempted to portray the full-scale conflict beginning in Syria in 2011 as first, a “pro-democracy uprising,” to now a “sectarian conflict,” recent atrocities carried out by US-Saudi-Israeli proxies have shifted the assault to include Sunni Muslims unable or unwilling to participate in the destruction of the Syrian state.
Such attacks included a mortar bombardment of Damascus University, killing 15 and injuring dozens more, as well as the brutal slaying of two prominent Sunni Muslim clerics – the latest of which was beheaded, his body paraded through the streets of Aleppo, and his head hung from the mosque he preached in. While the West attempts to mitigate these events by labeling the victims as “pro-government,” the reality is that the forces fighting inside Syria are funded, armed, directed, and politically supported from abroad – and therefore do not represent any of the Syrian people’s interests, including those Syrians who do not support the government.
It is abundantly clear that the West’s goal is neither to institute “democracy,” nor even take sides in a “sectarian conflict,” but rather carry out the complete and permanent destruction of Syria as a nation-state, sparing no one, not even Sunnis.
Such a proxy war exists contra to any conceivable interpretation of “international law.” The world is left with a moral imperative to not only denounce this insidious conflict brought upon the Syrian people, compounded and perpetuated entirely by external interests, but demands that concrete action is taken to ensure that this act of aggression is brought to an end.
The US, UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have admitted to colluding together, flooding Syria with thousands of tons of weapons via Jordan to Syria’s south, and NATO-member Turkey to Syria’s north. And in an otherwise inexplicable conundrum, while the likes of US Secretary of State John Kerry insist this torrent of weapons is being directed to “moderates,” neither the US nor its allies are able to explain why Al Qaeda terror front Jabhat al-Nusra has emerged as the most heavily armed, best equipped militant organization in the conflict.
AP reported specifically in their article, “Officials: Arms shipments rise to Syrian rebels,” that:
US Secretary of State John Kerry said on the sidelines of a Syrian opposition meeting in Italy last month that the weapons are ending up in the hands of secular groups. “I will tell you this: There is a very clear ability now in the Syrian opposition to make certain that what goes to the moderate, legitimate opposition is in fact getting to them, and the indication is that they are increasing their pressure as a result of that,” he said, without elaborating.
But even AP admits that:
Syrian opposition activists estimate there are 15-20 different brigades fighting in and around Damascus now, each with up to 150 fighters. Many of them have Islamic tendencies and bear black-and-white Islamic flags or al-Qaeda-style flags on their Facebook pages. There is also a presence of Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the strongest Islamic terrorist groups fighting alongside the rebels.
The US State Department’s own statement regarding the designation of al-Nusra as a listed Al Qaeda terror organization states:
Since November 2011, al-Nusrah Front has claimed nearly 600 attacks – ranging from more than 40 suicide attacks to small arms and improvised explosive device operations – in major city centers including Damascus, Aleppo, Hamah, Dara, Homs, Idlib, and Dayr al-Zawr.
According to the US State Department, al-Nusra is carrying out hundreds of attacks with a wide array of weaponry, across the entire nation of Syria, indicating a massive front and implying an equally massive network of logistical support, including foreign sponsorship. What’s more, is that the US State Department acknowledges al-Nusra’s presence even in cities close to Syria’s borders where the CIA is admittedly overseeing the distribution of weapons and cash. The New York Times, in their June 2012 article, “C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” reported that:
A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.
And in New York Times’ more recent March 2013 article, “Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A.,” it is admitted that weapons are being funneled into Syria across both its borders with Turkey and Jordan:
With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.
The article would also state:
Although rebel commanders and the data indicate that Qatar and Saudi Arabia had been shipping military materials via Turkey to the opposition since early and late 2012, respectively, a major hurdle was removed late last fall after the Turkish government agreed to allow the pace of air shipments to accelerate, officials said.
Simultaneously, arms and equipment were being purchased by Saudi Arabia in Croatia and flown to Jordan on Jordanian cargo planes for rebels working in southern Syria and for retransfer to Turkey for rebels groups operating from there, several officials said.
The US State Department acknowledges that the well armed, prominent terror front al-Nusra is operating in the very areas the CIA is feeding weapons and cash into.
Image: (Left) West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s 2007 report, “Al-Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq” indicated which areas in Syria Al Qaeda fighters filtering into Iraq came from. The overwhelming majority of them came from Dayr Al-Zawr in Syria’s southeast, Idlib in the north near the Turkish-Syrian border, and Dar’a in the south near the Jordanian-Syrian border. (Right) A map indicating the epicenters of violence in Syria indicate that the exact same hotbeds for Al Qaeda in 2007, now serve as the epicenters of so-called “pro-democracy fighters” and also happen to be areas the US CIA is admittedly distributing weapons and other aid in. 
Such a reality directly contradicts the US State Department’s official position, and no explanation is given as to how “moderates” can be provided with such extensive support, and still be eclipsed militarily and logistically by terror-front al-Nusra. That is, unless of course, the US, British, Saudi, and Qatari weapons aren’t simply just handing the weapons directly to terrorists, precisely as planned as early as 2007.
The Destruction of Syria Began in 2007, Not 2011
While the West has attempted to reclaim Syria as part of its sphere of influence for decades, concrete plans for the latest proxy war were laid at least as early as 2007. It was admitted in 2007 that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel conspired together to fund, arm, and direct sectarian extremists including militants “sympathetic” to Al Qaeda, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, against the governments of Iran and Syria. In Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” the conspiracy was described as follows:
To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
Hersh also cited US, Saudi, and Lebanese officials who indicated that, “in the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction,” and that, “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The report would also state:
Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.
Mention of the Muslim Brotherhood already receiving aid even in 2007 was also made:
The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”
There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.
The Wall Street Journal in 2007 would also implicate the Muslim Brotherhood and more specifically, the so-called “National Salvation Front,” in its article, “To Check Syria, U.S. Explores Bond With Muslim Brothers.” It appears then that the so-called “opposition” is a creation and perpetuation of the West and its ambitions, not the aspirations of the “Syrian people.”
It is clear that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel planned to use sectarian extremists against the nation of Syria starting at least as early as 2007, and it is clear that now these sectarian extremists are carrying out the destruction of Syria with a massive torrent of weapons and cash provided by the US and its regional allies, just as was described by Hersh’s report.
A Moral Imperative to Save Syria 
Syria is under attack by an insidious, premeditated foreign assault, intentionally using terrorist proxies in direct and complete violation of any conceivable interpretation of both national and international law. The world has a moral imperative to support the Syrian people and their government as they fight this assault – both politically and logistically. While US Secretary John Kerry is unable to account for how his nation’s support for moderates has left Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra front the premier militant faction in Syria, he has demanded that Iraq help stem the flow of alleged aid Iran is providing the Syrian government as it fights these terrorists.
Does US Secretary of State John Kerry deny that Syria is fighting a significant (and continuously growing) Al Qaeda presence within their borders, which according to the US State Department’s own statement, is operating in every major city in the country? What conceivable explanation or excuse could be made to justify the blockading of aid sent to Syria to fight Al Qaeda terrorists? In fact, why isn’t the US aiding the Syrian government itself in its fight against Al Qaeda – a terrorist organization the US has used as an excuse to wage unending global war since 2001 when Al Qaeda allegedly killed some 3,000 American civilians?
Does Secretary Kerry believe that further arming “moderates” is a legitimate strategy to counter Al Qaeda’s growing presence in Syria when these “moderates” openly defend Al Qaeda’s al-Nusra? The US’ own hand-picked “Syrian opposition leader,”  Mouaz al Khatib, demanded the US reconsider its designation of al Nusra as a terrorist organization. Retuers reported in their article, “Syrian opposition urges U.S. review of al-Nusra blacklisting,” that:
The leader of Syria’s opposition coalition urged the United States on Wednesday to review its decision to designate the militant Islamist Jabhat al-Nusra as a terrorist group, saying religion was a legitimate motive for Syrian rebels.
“The decision to consider a party that is fighting the regime as a terrorist party needs to be reviewed,” Mouaz Alkhatib told a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Morocco, where Western and Arab states granted full recognition to the coalition seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad.
The US is directly responsible for the emergence and perpetuation of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Syria. The statements of Secretary John Kerry are made merely to maintain an increasingly tenuous “plausible deniability.” The precedent being set by the US and its allies is one of using full-scale proxy invasions that if successful in Syria, will be directed into Iran, up through the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, and even onto China’s doorstep via extremists the West is cultivating amongst the Uighurs. It is also clear that the West is directly responsible for the extremists within their own borders, and that these extremists are being used as a political tool against the people of the West, just as they are being used as a mercenary force abroad.
A united front between nations against this wanton state sponsorship of terrorism is needed – with nations pledging political and logistical support to the Syrian people to defeat this open conspiracy.
Individually, we can identify, boycott, and permanently replace the corporate-financier interests who conceived of and are driving this agenda. Failure to stop such wide scale criminality against the Syrian people now, will only invite greater criminality against us all in the near future.

Tuesday 2 April 2013





Pakistan: Implications of Monsanto Protection Act


Monsanto is today a global leader in the areas of agricultural production, pharmaceuticals and food and nutrition the world over. Based in St. Louis, USA, this $8.6 (US) billion Life Sciences Company has been responsible for many revolutionary products and technological breakthroughs in the agricultural sciences.

On October 01, 1998, Monsanto acquired Cargill hybrid seed business in Pakistan. Monsanto also acquired Dekalb Genetics and Asgrow business worldwide, giving Pakistan an access to wide range of superior genetics. Monsanto deals with proprietary Corn, Sunflower and Forage Sorghum hybrid seeds. As part of a commitment, Monsanto is the only multinational producing and marketing Wheat, Cotton and Rice certified seeds. Monsanto is the first company to invest in research, production, processing, quality assurance and developing a viable marketing infrastructure.

Article Monsanto Protection Act: A Post-Mortem for Our Legal System, written Clay Rossi and circulated by Information Clearing House should be an eye opener for the Government of Pakistan and Pakistanis.

It’s time for a brief postmortem on the events leading to the passage of the Monsanto Protection Act (MPA). Now that President Obama has signed the legislation which included the MPA into law, there are certain facts that need not be forgotten for the next time (and there will be a next time) big business buys itself judicial immunity from Congress.

As a refresher, the MPA prevents federal courts from interfering with the sale or planting of genetically modified seeds regardless of the evidence presented to the court about the health and safety effects of those seeds.

For starters, remember that Monsanto purchased bi-partisan support for this abomination. It was Missouri Senator Roy Blount, a Republican, who worked with Monsanto on crafting the legislation and Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat, who introduced the provision.

Moral of the story is that loyalty to rank-and-file party members or constituents concerns didn’t matter is the face of Monsanto dollars. Also the White House failed to stop the measure despite petitions and protests urging President Obama to stand up against the measure. This is a bleak fact.

Next, remember that the health concerns are real. Those who question the safety of GMO foods are not fringe luddites. How do we know that for sure? Because Monsanto itself refuses to serve GMO food in its company commissaries. When confronted with that troubling fact, the Monsanto position was that “We believe in choice.” How exactly the prohibition on GMO in the food it serves to its own employee is “choice” defies logic.

If Monsanto’s refusal to eat its own product is too circumstantial for your tastes, how about a French study from September which showed that Monsanto GMO corn led to tumors and sever organ damage in lab rats. This same company who is all about “choice” spent over $7 million last year to defeat California’s Proposition 37 which would have provided labeling so that consumers would have a “choice” to eat GMO or not eat GMO.

Finally, the danger of this precedent can be put simply: that “court challenges are a privilege, not a right.” 

Have we truly reached the point where irresponsible corporations can not only buy their way out of trouble, but also where they can buy the right to make trouble (or sickness or environmental devastation) with impunity beforehand? Regardless of whether it is proven that GMO foods are a health risk, Monsanto has already done great harm to our legal system with its efforts to shield itself in the fight against GMO.

Only the future can tell us what is in greater danger, GMO-corn-fed rats or our legal system.


Monday 1 April 2013

 Democracy in Pakistan a Distant Dream

I am obliged to place this article on my blog because it is one of the Indian point of views pertaining to Pakistan’s forthcoming elections. It has been authored by Jagdish N. Singh and originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in). There is also a disclaimer ‘Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.



In the just-completed tenure of an elected civilian government in Pakistan some well-meaning analysts have come to discern the seeds of democracy in the country. Their argument goes that it is for the first time that a civilian government has managed to complete its full tenure surviving a long tradition of the powerful Pakistan Army’s intrigues (for a coup) and a new trend of judicial over-activism. The government to be formed after the forthcoming parliamentary elections in May 2013 would therefore automatically feel far more confident to strengthen democracy.

One, however, finds that democracy continues to be a distant dream in Pakistan. The government that completed its tenure recently was democratic only in form. Like all its predecessors, it miserably failed to promote what a democratic state is supposed to first and foremost, namely, foster the multi-faceted development of all its citizens.

It is well documented that during its five years in office Pakistani citizens have continued to be denied their basic freedoms. There has been little improvement in the life of the minorities — Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, the Baha’is, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Ahmadis, Shias and Mohajirs, that is, both non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims. Pertinently, one of the most disastrous consequences of the continuing denial of freedoms to the minorities is that most of those affected have either resorted to exodus or religious conversion to skip their ordeal. This has altered Pakistan’s religious demography beyond recognition. According to authentic studies, in undivided British India, non-Muslims formed more than a quarter of the population in territories that later became Pakistan. On partition, they came to account for about 14 per cent of Pakistan’s population, albeit concentrated mainly in East Bengal. Today, in a population of 17,56,46,000, Sunni Muslims constitute 77 per cent and Shias 20 per cent. Non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians and others — are three per cent. Hindus constitute about 1.6 percent of the total population.

The predicament of Pakistani citizens can be attributed to the politics of Islamist radicalization in the country. Over the years a notorious Deobandi Sunni stream of the puritanical Wahabi-Salafi order, equipped with a distorted version of Islam, has expanded its social base in the country. In order to capture or retain political power, politicians of all hues as well as the ambitious Army have sought to cultivate or keep in good humour this Islamist social base by accommodating its agenda at the cost of the interests of all other segments of Pakistani society.

In 1956 General Ayub Khan had the constitution of Pakistan declared an “Islamic Republic.” In 1959 he circulated a paper defending the theoretical necessity of an “Islamic Ideology in Pakistan. He had a new course , ‘Islamiyat’ added to the school curriculum, according to which Pakistan was not but the culmination of a ‘dream’ that originated in AD 712, when the first Arab armies landed on the coast of Sind under Muhammad bin Qasim.”

His successor General Yahya Khan promised that the armed forces would be the guardian of Pakistan’s ideological frontiers. In the 1970s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto encouraged the concept of pan-Islamism leading to a close linkage between Pakistan’s radical Deobandis and the Saudi Wahhabis. Bhutto gave Pakistan a constitution declaring Islam as the State religion. In September 1972 he had Christian schools and colleges nationalized. His 1973 constitution had the offices of President and Prime Minister reserved for Muslims, making minorities second class citizens. And Bhutto passed a resolution in 1974 declaring Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

General Zia ul Haq aligned himself with the Jamaat-e-Islami and started Islamizing Pakistan in general and its army in particular. He introduced additional legislation for discrimination against religious minorities in military service, education and the civilian bureaucracy. General Zia also encouraged the madrassas run by Deobandi groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami and other such groups to start indoctrinating the youth. In 1979 the military regime replaced the existing penal codes with the Hudood Ordinance to implement the Islamic Shari’a law discriminatory to women and non-Muslims.

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto created the Taliban in the 1990s. She protected al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. In 1996 she directed her Director General of Military Operations General Pervez Musharraf to rehabilitate bin Laden (who had then been expelled from Sudan) in the Pak-Afghan border area.

In 1998 her successor Nawaz Sharief directed Federal Information Minister Mushahid Hussain Saeed to call on Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed (Ahl al-Hadith orientation) at his headquarters in Muridke. During his second tenure as Prime Minister, Sharief repeatedly evaded US pressure to allow its special forces to mount an operation from Pakistani territory into Kandahar to kill or capture bin Laden.

The civilian government which has just completed its term conformed to the same pattern of behaviour. In order to cultivate the social base of the Islamists, it also preferred to be seen as backing their agenda here and there. For instance, then Prime Minister Gilani said on January 12, 2012 that there would be no amendment to the country’s anti-blasphemy laws. His Railway Minister Ghulam Mohammed Bilfour of the so-called moderate Awami National Party, headed by the grandson of the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, announced that he would pay $100,000 to anyone who killed the California-based Egyptian Copt (the native Christians of Egypt) who posted his blasphemous film ‘Innocence of Muslims’ on YouTube.

Given all this, it is unlikely that the liberal, democratic forces — including in the media, academia and legal fraternity – will be able to assert themselves in the upcoming parliamentary elections and contribute to altering the present pattern of Pakistan’s leadership behaviour.
Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.