Another
horrific jihadi attack today, this time on a Radisson Blu hotel in Mali. 27 killed. Here’s
an excerpt from the New YorkTimes coverage:
Mali has
been crippled by instability since January, 2012, when rebels and Al Qaeda-linked
militants — armed with the remnants of late Libyan leader Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi’s arsenal — began advancing through the country’s vast desert in
the north and capturing towns.
In other
words, the jihadi gangs in Mali are a direct result of American/French/NATO
regime change in Libya, executed by the Obama administration, spearheaded by
"We came, we saw, he died" Hillary Clinton.
In 2010, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any
country in Africa (UN Human Development Index). Ghaddafi's Libya employed many
Malians. It was an anchor of stability in North Africa. The US/France/NATO put
an end to that, under entirely phony pretexts, against fundamental international
law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification.
The executioners and beneficiaries of that US/France/NATO strategy where the
jihadis who shoved a stick up Ghaddafi's ass and are now rampaging throughout
Mali.
Ha, Ha. Maybe she can get a gig at the Comedy Club in the Radisson.
Fighters of al-Nusra front driving through Aleppo 26 May (AFP)
“The
President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize
a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or
imminent threat to the nation” — candidate Barack Obama, December, 2007
The United
States just went to war with Syria. With the confirmation today that American
planes will shoot down Syrian planes attacking USDA-approved
"rebels," the United States is now overtly engaged in another
criminal attack on a sovereign country that poses no conceivable, let alone actual
or imminent, threat to the nation. This is an act of war.
Please don’t
try any not-really-war “no-fly zone” or “safe zone” bullshit. As the Commander
of NATO says,
a no-fly zone is “quite frankly an act of war and it is not a trivial
matter….[I]t’s basically to start a war with that country because you are going
to have to go in and kinetically take out their air defense capability.” Or as
Shamus Cooke puts
it: “In a war zone an area is
made ‘safe’ by destroying anything in it or around that appears threatening.” Inevitably, “U.S. and Turkish fighter jets
will engage with Syrian aircraft, broadening and deepening the war until the
intended aim of regime change has been accomplished."1
Does anybody doubt that
this is exactly what’s intended? Perhaps Obama will soothe the discomfort of his
purportedly peace-loving progressive fans with some assurance like: “broadening
our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” He’ll be
lying, as he was four years ago when he said that about Libya.
As an
aggressive, unprovoked war, this is totally illegal under international law,
and all the political and military authorities undertaking it are war
criminals, who would be prosecuted as such, if there were an international
legal regime that had not already been undermined by the United States.
In my February post on The
SYRIZA Moment (and in a revision of that piece, forthcoming in Canadian Dimension), I expressed great skepticism about the Syriza leadership’s
commitment to the radical change the party promised to enact.
I pointed out that the leadership, as represented by Alex Tsipras and
Yanis Varoufakis, refuses on principle to have a strategy for “replacing
European capitalism with a different, more rational, system.” In Varoufakis’s
own words, they are “tirelessly striv[ing] in favour of schemas the purpose of
which is to save” the current “indefensible …anti-democratic, irreversibly
neoliberal, highly irrational,” European socio-economic system. All this,
because, as he understands it, “it is the Left’s historical duty…to save
European capitalism from itself.” Varoufakis’s whole negotiating strategy, I
suggested, was centered on persuading the masters and mistresses of the
Eurozone, through his brilliant “immanent critique” of their own capitalist
economic theories, that it would be in their own, and capitalism’s, best
interest to help Greece restore some semblance of social democracy.
Certainly, the left factions of the party sincerely wanted it to be an “anticapitalist,”
“class-struggle” formation that would be unlike “any European social democratic
party today,” and that would have “an agenda of really breaking with
neoliberalism and austerity,” and the capitalist TINA (There Is No Alternative)
consensus. These currents defined Syriza’s 40-Point Program and its Thessaloniki
Program, upon which it ran for election, and which promised a “National
Reconstruction Plan that will replace the [Troika] Memorandum as early as our
first days in power, before and
regardless of the negotiation outcome.”
But even the hopeful left militants recognized that the party leadership,
under Tsipras, was increasingly prone to ignore the base, and cultivated a “creative
ambiguity” about crucial issues. Tsipras’s message to the base was a rejection
of illegitimate and unpayable debt, and a radical break with austerity; his
message to the Eurozone ruling class was a firm commitment to staying in the
Euro and playing by the rules of capitalist finance. The message to the
electorate was: We can do both of those
things. And if we can’t… Well, yes we can!
This was a deeply dishonest deception and self-deception. It was the
worst kind of electoral evasion, promoting false hopes that so many wanted to
hear, and burying the need to prepare for the inevitable fight that was
coming—thus virtually guaranteeing that the fight would be lost.
The Wanted 18 is a
funny and serious documentary by Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan and Palestinian multimedia
artist Amer Shomali. It’s showing today at the Human Rights Watch International
Film Festival in New York.
The
film is about an episode of creative, constructive, and non-violent resistance
in Beit Sahour, a Christian town near
Bethlehem during the First Intifada.1 In 1988, activists in the occupied
town wanted to boycott Israeli milk, and instead produce it on their own. They
went to a “peacenik farmer” on a nearby kibbutz, and bought 18 cows, one of
which was named Goldie. Then they sent a local student
to the United States to learn the arcane techniques of dairy farming, and began
to produce their own milk.
Which
caused the Israeli occupation authorities to, yes, Have a cow.
Why?
Because, for Israel, it is anathema for Palestinians to create any – even the most elementary – institutions that
would support their self-sufficiency and independence, and undermine their subjugation
to Israeli authority. Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s what the Israeli
military governor said:
We had a strict directive on dealing with those who formed
the neighborhood committees with all the necessary force, and all legal means
at our disposal in order to control them so as to prevent the possibility of
their setting up an administrative apparatus which was ultimately designed to
replace our own.
And the cow
project had indeed created a sense of accomplishment and energized the Beit Sahour community. As Jalal Qumsieh, who bought the cows, said: “The
moment I saw the cows at the farm, I felt as if we had started to realize our
dream of freedom and independence.” The colonial authorities can’t have
that. Qumsieh recalls, “word-for-word,” the
Israeli military response: “These cows are dangerous for the security of the
State of Israel.”
Cut
to today, where the Palestinian filmmaker, Amer Shomali, who had been to many
festivals throughout the world, is prevented by Israel from getting a visa to
attend the premiere of his film, because he, like the cows, is a “national
security threat.”2Gotta keep him penned in.
There are just so many security threats that must
be denied to Palestinians, like 4G phone service and digging a well:
And it’s
crazy, but 'til today, all of those insane things happening in Palestine under
the label of security, security threat—for example, …we’re not allowed to have
3G network on our mobiles. The Israelis have 4G; we are not allowed to have 3G.
… because they said having frequency for the Palestinians is security threat.
So everything can be a security threat, like digging a well to water natural
reserve in the Palestinian cities is security threat. Everything can be labeled
as a security threat...
So Amer took a more circuitous route, going to
Amman to get a visa from the American Embassy there. Unfortunately, he couldn’t
get one there, either, because their “visa machine was broken” or something. Though
Amer suspects “there’s a kind of coordination” between Israeli military and American
diplomatic authorities regarding visas, he believes the Americans have the best
intentions, and will give him a visa in time to get to Los Angeles for the next
screening on June 19th. When asked what the “technical difficulties”
in the Amman embassy were, he said: “I have no idea. Something with the system,
system collapse. I don’t know. I have no idea. But they were smiling when they
said that, so I have—I believe they have good intention.”
Amer does not think this “system collapse” is a
cowardly and despicable ruse by the Americans to hide their connivance with
Israel in preventing a real Palestinian from accompanying and amplifying the
real story of creative resistance his film tells to American audiences.
Amer is a more trusting soul than I. We’ll see.
La Vache Qui Fait Rire
As Julia Bacha, Brazilian filmmaker and impact
producer of The Wanted 18, says:
We really
want communities, particularly here in the United States, to start thinking
about what are the stories that we are hearing from the region and what are the
stories about resistance that arrive to us. I think historically we have been
told that Palestinians only used violence to achieve their aims, when in fact
there’s a very long history of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance,
which this film is one example of. And for Amer to be able to tell this story
with some humor, we hope we’ll be able to attract more people to join.
That, the Israeli authorities and their American
accomplices know, is a real threat to their ongoing enterprise of milking
sympathy for Israel by demonizing and erasing Palestinians.
Did I mention it’s the Human Rights Watch Film Festival he was prevented from attending?
1
I hate to emphasize that word, but I think it’s unfortunately the case that
many Americans need to be reminded that all Palestinians are not Muslims, and Muslims
are not the only victims of, and fighters against, Israeli colonialsm.
2
He was actually refused permission to travel from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where
he would get a visa from the American Consulate. Travelling from the West Bank
is very complicated, and very strictly controlled by Israel. Here's how Amer tells it:
Basically, I applied for an American visa at the
American Consulate in Jerusalem. And in order to get to Jerusalem, you need to
cross a main checkpoint blocking the road between Ramallah, where I live, and
Jerusalem, where the American Consulate is. And to get that permit, you need to
apply for the Israeli army. And my permit was rejected for security reasons.
And it’s not a special case, like there’s tens of thousands of Palestinians,
young Palestinians, who are labeled as a security threat to the state of
Israel. And it’s quite frustrating. Jerusalem is just 25 minutes away from
here. From this studio, it’s like 10 minutes. But you still can’t reach there.
The American Embassy in Jerusalem does not offer any facilities for
Palestinians who can’t get there. And they even ask you, even if you thought of
sneaking to Jerusalem illegally, without a permit, to attend your interview,
they will ask you, "Where is the Israeli permit?" as if there’s a
kind of coordination. Anyway, I missed my appointment—
Obama quoted her inspirational words about "the exercise of liberty" at the White House correspondents' dinner.
She was an early critic of the Nazis and the first reporter to be expelled by Hitler.
She was the second most admired woman in the US after Eleanor Roosevelt.
She was the model for the Katharine Hepburn character in "Woman of the Year."
She was one of the most respected and celebrated 20th-century American journalists, male or female.
She was married to well-known American author Sinclair Lewis.
She is a "fascinating woman who deserves to be an icon of the feminist movement." Yet today she is "unknown and unremembered... rarely, if ever, mentioned as an important female historical figure."
The victory of Syriza in Greece is an important moment.1 Indeed, I think it is going to be a historic turning point for Europe and the world, for better or for worse. Syriza defines itself explicitly as “as a party of the democratic and radical Left,” and radical it is. It’s comprised of “many different ideological currents and left cultures,” “has its roots in popular struggles for Greek independence, democracy and labour and anti-fascist movements,” and includes serious and influential socialist, marxist, and generally anti-capitalist currents.2 As Catarina PrÃncipe remarks: “The success of Syriza is the success of the Left that refused compromises with liberalism.”3 Thus the rise of Syriza corresponds to the collapse of Pasok [acronym for Panhellenic Socialist Movement], the Greek “Socialist”--i.e., liberal capitalist—party, which went from the largest party in Greece to 13% of the vote (2.6% among 18-24 year olds). It’s a sudden and dramatic shift of working-class voters to the left. To put this in American terms, imagine the Green Party winning the next election, with the Democrats reduced to 20% of the vote.
Everyone understands, then, that Syriza’s victory represents the Greek people’s rejection of the devastating austerity program that has been imposed on Greece and Europe by all the major capitalist-to-the-core political parties, no matter what name they go by.
In a wide-ranging interview with Jacobin (which I recommend to everyone), Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of Syriza’s Central Committee and its Left Platform, emphasizes Syriza’s radicalism thusly:
[W]hat
Syriza is putting forward has very
little to do with any agenda of any European social democratic party today.
It is an agenda of really breaking with
neoliberalism and austerity. Syriza appears as bringing a type of political
culture that is linked to a social, political, and even ideological radicalism
still very much inscribed in the DNA of the party….
Syriza is an anticapitalist
coalition that addresses the question of power by emphasizing the dialectic
of electoral alliances and success at the ballot box with struggle and
mobilizations from below. That is, Syriza and [its component] Synaspismos see
themselves as class-struggle parties, as formations that represent specific
class interests.4
So there we have Kouvelakis’s portrait of the radical Syriza as a new type of political movement that will use a synergistic dialectic of electoral victories and popular mobilizations to break with neoliberalism and austerity.
