France, Qatar, and the New World Disorder

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / January 25th, 2013

According to investigative journalist Silvia Cattori, the barbaric bombing of Aleppo University on January 15 has been officially claimed by the terrorist group the Al Nousra Front. This confirmation should not come as a surprise to those who have been following closely events in the Levant since March 17, 2011, when unknown snipers opened fire in the Southern Syrian town of Deraa killing several policemen and innocent protestors.

Since then, snipers and jihadist death squads from Libya, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and even France and the UK inter alia, backed by Nato intelligence and Gulf petro-monarch cash, have waged a genocidal non-conventional war upon the Syrian people which has relied heavily on a sophisticated international disinformation campaign in the corporate controlled press, whereby all crimes committed by the terrorists are systematically blamed on the Syrian government.

Eighty-two students in Aleppo University were murdered on Tuesday January 15 from a missile launched by the Western media’s beloved “rebels”: these gangs of convicts, drug-smugglers, rapists, child abusers, and common thugs presented to the gullible Western public as “revolutionaries.”

Since 2011, over 2000 schools and educational centres in Syria have been destroyed by the Western-backed jihadists, who are attempting to annihilate the Syrian state in order to construct a “New Middle East” that accords with Nato and Gulf state geopolitical objectives. When will this nightmare of terrorism end?

Meanwhile, there was an icy silence in Paris, London, and Washington, not a word of condemnation after last week’s Aleppo atrocity.

Unlike the Houla Massacre last year, committed by the rebels but blamed on the Syrian government, there were no calls from Paris, London and Washington for an international investigation after the Aleppo bombing. Everybody knows who the perpetrators are. So there is silence. Cowards hide. Cowards prey on the weak and defenseless. Cowards dissemble and use cover for their actions. The Western military-intelligence establishment are despicable cowards. They hide behind pompous newspeak about human rights and democracy while committing the most heinous crimes known to man. They bomb other countries while pushing buttons in computers, thousands of miles from the action. They send in drugged psychopaths to kill, rob and destroy the people of countries who get in their way.

The callous silence of the Western governments at the massacre in Aleppo contrasted sharply with the strong and unequivocal condemnations that came from Brazil, Venezuela, Russia, and China. The emerging powers in the world are bearing witness to the self-destruction of Western civilization through an excess of hubris, greed and megalomania.

There are no words in any language to describe the atrocities NATO‘s contras are committing against the people of Syria. But the world is looking on in horror and outrage. Large parts of Latin America know what is going on. Large parts of Asia and Russia too, know who is behind the violence in Syria. The truth will out in time. The balance of power in the world is shifting and sooner or later, the criminals behind these neo-colonial wars and their vast network of collaborators will be brought to justice. There are signs that Jordan may realign itself with Iraq, Iran, and Syria after signing new energy deals with Iraq on January. This could be fatal for the terrorists in Western Syria, as Jordan has hitherto been used as a base for the terror campaign. The Syrian state is strong enough to survive. The spirit of the Syrian people is indomitable. The illusions of the Arab Spring have faded. No one can argue now that the Arab Spring was about democracy and human rights. The Muslim Brotherhood have taken power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya with Western support. No one can pretend any more that the conflict in Syria is about democracy.

The French military-industrial-media complex is currently buzzing with orgiastic delight as French troops re-conquer mineral and gas-rich Mali, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, while French Special Forces train and facilitate Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists in Syria — a geopolitical theatre of the absurd worthy of Ionescu!

France is one of the most culturally and politically literate civilizations in the world, and has a long and militant left-wing tradition. Yet, the only cause that rallies the official “left-wing” intelligentsia in Paris today is gay marriage. The French “left” are due to march on the streets of Paris soon in support of a new law permitting gay marriage. The French government bombed and destroyed two African countries in 2011. France is engaged in an endless colonial war in Afghanistan, while the “patrie de droits de l’homme” has been conducting a covert war in Syria since last year and is now attempting to bomb its way back into Mali with a view to destroying Algeria. Uranium-rich Niger will be next. In short, neo-colonial aggression by the French government has led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people and has ruined the lives of millions of others; it is complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity and is leading us closer to world war, yet the French “left “are only concerned about gay marriage rights! Furthermore, domestic repression in France is on the increase with more and more troops being brought out onto the streets of Paris to “protect” the population from potential “Islamists” the French government’s Gulf friends are financing, while France’s African and Magreb immigrant minorities are constantly stopped and harassed for no reason by the police. But who cares, as long as homosexuals can marry!

On a more positive note, there are some encouraging signs of increasing political dissent emanating from the more moderate officials of French imperialism. It would appear that the US strategy of chaos, the nihilistic policy of supporting Islamic terrorists in order to destroy one state while claiming to fight them in another is becoming impossible to ignore. Former French foreign minister Dominique De Villepin told radio France Inter on January 18 that the cause of the destabilisation in Mali was Nato’s war on Libya in 2011. De Villepin conceded that Libya is now overrun by jihadist militia.

Responding to a question from a caller concerning Qatar’s role in funding Islamist groups, De Villepin seemed to indicate that it was possible that “certain Gulf states” were financing Islamist extremist groups in Mali and Syria. It is unfortunately impossible to reproduce De Vilepin’s exact response to the question concerning Qatar’s role in Syria and Mali as France Inter edited this from their podcast version. They also edited out De Villepin’s highly significant suggestion that France should enter into negotiations with Russia in an effort to resolve the geopolitical impasse in Syria. In short, the three most important contributions by the former French foreign minister were edited outby the war propagandists running France’s state radio. In these strange, belligerent times even the voices of moderate imperialism are anathema to the roaring dogs of war.

Qatar’s financing of Islamist terror in Mali, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere and the incestuous relationship between the absolutist Gulf emirate and the Quai d’Orsay is now no secret to the more informed sections of the French public. Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far right party Front National told France Info on January 18: “I would like to point out an incoherence here. We are allies of Qatar, a country which is arming terrorists all over the world.” As I pointed out in previous articles, the absence of a genuine, anti-imperialist Left is opening the door to far right opportunism. Marine Le Pen is a clever operator. She understands that a significant portion of the French public are baffled by Quai d’Orsay’s love affair with the Gulf despots. Le Pen alludes to this but does not explain the real reasons for this relationship. The real reasons for the French elite’s love affair with gulf despotism has to do with the convergence of class interests. The Gulf despots support neo-liberal capitalism. They are authoritarian and neo-feudal. There is nothing Western capitalists love more than authoritarian regimes who comply with western economic interests and crush all dissent. For example, Qatari poet Mohammed Al-Ajami was imprisoned for life recently for the crime of criticizing the Emir of Qatar.

The Far Right will never explain the class basis for the West’s alliance with Wahhabite terrorism. That is because the Far Right represents the same class as their “moderate” Right and “Centre” Left opponents. Therefore, Le Pen will use her access to mainstream media to hoodwink disaffected French citizens into supporting her candidacy for the next presidential election. By then, the chaos wrought by Hollande’s government in the Middle East and throughout Africa will set the stage for Le Pen’s fascist programme to “restore order.” Once in power, the true nature of the Front National’s tyranny will be unleashed on what is left of genuine left-wing opponents in France.

As in the 1930s, a weak “social democracy” paves the way for the ascendance of the Far Right. Only this time there is no communist party to fight them.

Instead there are farcical characters such as Jean-Luc Mélanchon, leader of the “left-wing” coalition known as Front de Gauche. Mélanchon also spoke toFrance Inter on January 18, where he simple expressed reserve at the legitimacy of the French intervention. However, when asked if he agreed with ultra-conservative Gisgard d’Estaing’s comment that the French intervention was “neo-colonialism,” Mélanchon said he would not use such terms. One should not forget that Mélanchon supported France’s bombing of the Libyan people in 2011 and also supports France’s covert war on Syria. Yet, this is a man who claims to be “left-wing” and an admirer of genuine anti-imperialist leaders such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela! Cherchez l’erreur!

This is not the first time Qatar’s funding of Islamic terrorism has been admitted by the mainstream French media. The widely read satirical journal Le Canard Enchainé published an article in June 2012 confirming the fact long exposed by the alternative media that France’s closest “partner” in the Middle East was in fact a state-sponsor of Islamist terrorism. Alain Chouet, the former chef de service of the French intelligence agency has also confirmed the role of Qatar in financing Islamic terrorism in Syria and Mali. It is now becoming impossible to ignore the horrible reality behind France’s foreign wars, as more and more officials and mainstream journalists are exposing the French government’s complicity in terrorism. Using the Special Forces and terrorist groups of the petro-monarchies to destabilize resource rich nations and attain geo-political objectives; only fools and simpletons could fail to see the devastating reality of this insane quest for global hegemony.

After the repression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the reactionary French government of Adolphe Thiers promoted the Catholic religion in education as a means of deflecting the desires of the French working class away for social justice towards piety and obedience to the bourgeois state. A similar policy was adopted in Ireland by the British imperial state after the failure of the Young Irelander uprising of 1848. Catholic seminaries proliferated and Irish workers were told to put up with their fate in this life in order to secure deliverance in the next. This is the current policy of many European governments, who are allowing the feudal monarchies of the Gulf to take control of their Muslim populated, proletarian suburbs. Thus Qatar is now the chief foreign investor in France’s poor suburbs where young, ignorant Muslims are indoctrinated in neo-feudalist obscurantism, thereby deflecting them from the path of class struggle and social liberation.

The absurdity of current French foreign policy becomes glaringly apparent when one considers the fact that secular, Baathist Syria, more than any other country in the Middle East, has deep cultural ties with France. Until last year, French tourists flocked to Syria’s hundreds of breath-taking historical and archeological sites. The Syrian government has always been a keen promoter of French culture. Syria is one of the few Arab countries where books by atheist authors are widely read. Secularism is as fundamental to modern Syria as it is to France.

In this sense, Bachar Al-Assad’s Syria is ironically the most pro-Western country in the Middle East and France could have no greater ally against Islamist terrorism than the Syrian Arab Republic, yet Paris backs the Islamists! Both the Syrian president and the Syrian UN Ambassador Dr. Bashar Ja’afari speak French. In spite of this, Dr. Ja’afari has never been invited to speak on French TV or radio. Not once has the Syrian government been allowed to present its side of the story to the French public. Paris’s corrupt elites are only interested in talking to the semi-literate thugs of the Gulf States who keep their own people in ignorance, while promoting the most barbaric form of anti-Islam around the world. After all, the state of bondage which subjects of these countries experience represents a model society for the degenerate transatlantic oligarchs.

Notwithstanding the efforts of some of France’s most authoritative Arabists such as world-renowned Franco-Syrian scholar Bassam Tahhan to inform the French public about the true nature of events in Syria, the French ruling elite continues to mask its crimes in palid pronouncements on human rights and democracy. Blogger Alain Jules puts it eloquently when he writes:

Storm and fury lurk behind a kneaded facade of goodness. The permanent refusal to shake hands, the dictat, the violence and the perpetual, morbid and mortifying logos.

Describing the French political scene in Paris during the 1930’s, Micheal Jabara Carley writes: “This was the “Republic of Pals” where “rigorously honest men were on good terms with fairly honest men who were on good terms with shady men who were on good terms with despicable crooks.”¹

Despicable crooks are still running this world and as Malcolm X understood too well, their media servants in all languages work over time to make us love the crooks and hate their victims.

1. Carley, Micheal Jabara, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was And the Coming of World War II, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999) p.15. [↩]

Gearóid Ó Colmáin was born in Cork, Ireland, and is currently based in Paris. He is a former bilingual columnist with Metro Eireann. His interests include geopolitcs, globalisation, philosophy and the arts. He is a member of Pôle de renaissance communiste en France (PRCF) a political movement which advocates Marxism-Leninism and the formation of a revolutionary communist party in France. Read other articles by Gearóid, or visit Gearóid's website.

Syrian civil war: No end in sight

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By Gwynne Dyer, Special to the BDN

Posted Jan. 14, 2013, at 11:22 a.m.
Last modified Jan. 14, 2013, at 12:41 p.m.

The most frustrating part of covering the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) was that after a while, there was nothing left to say. Syria is starting to feel just the same. It’s horrible, but atrocities are a daily event in all civil wars. It’s not going to stop any time soon, but you can only say that so many times before people get bored and move on. Except for the people who actually live near Syria’s borders, the audience for “news” about Syria has already moved on.

Consider, for example, last week’s exhaustive study by the United Nations Human Rights Commission concluding that 60,000 Syrians have been killed in the civil war since March, 2011. That’s considerably higher than the previous estimates of deaths in the war, which were running around 40,000, and the UNHRC hoped that this new number would finally galvanise the rest of the world into action, but it changed nothing.

Last month’s “news” was that the Russians were on the brink of abandoning their Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, which would surely bring about his rapid downfall. “One must look the facts in the face,” said Mikhail Bogdanov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister and Middle Eastern envoy. “Unfortunately, the victory of the Syrian opposition cannot be ruled out.”

However, Bogdanov did not actually say that a rebel victory was desirable. On the contrary, he said that it would not happen for a long time, if ever, and that such a victory would ruin Syria. Then, the spokesman of the Russian foreign ministry, Alexander Lukashevich, announced that the media had simply misunderstood Bogdanov: “We have not changed our position, and we will not change it.”

And so to this week’s piece of theatre: a widely touted speech in Damascus in which President al-Assad would propose a way to end the conflict peacefully. He did no such thing, of course, instead declaring his eternal refusal to negotiate with the “terrorists” who are fighting his army. He will only talk to the “puppet-masters” (an unholy alliance, he claims, between Israel, Western governments and al-Qaeda), not to the puppets.

Well, what did you expect? He and his Alawite sect are convinced that they must go on ruling Syria or face destruction. He’s not actually losing the war, either. Syrians are deeply divided by sect and ethnicity and class, and enough of those groups are on Assad’s side that he can probably hold out for a very long time. By the time he finally loses (or wins), perhaps years from now, Syria will indeed be ruined.

So why doesn’t everybody else “do something about it”? Because what “everybody else” really means is “somebody else, but not me.” No government is going to order its soldiers to risk their lives in a military intervention abroad unless it has reasonable confidence that their sacrifice will not be futile. That assurance is simply not available to governments that might contemplate intervention in Syria.

It has been a quarter-century since the first dictatorial regimes were overthrown by non-violent revolutions, and the remaining ones have all had time to study the phenomenon. They have unanimously and quite correctly concluded that their best chance of survival is to push the protesters into violence. In a civil war, everybody is in the wrong, and the side with the greatest ability to inflict violence (the regime) may win.

Some regimes, like the Communists in eastern Europe or the apartheid regime in South Africa, decided that they would not impose a civil war on the country even if the alternative was losing power. Others, like the Egyptian regime two years ago, could not trust the army to fight a civil war on their behalf. But the senior commanders of the Syrian army are almost all Alawites, and they were actually willing to fight rather than surrender power.

Now they have their war, and it will go on for a long time. By the end, there may not even be a unified Syrian state any more. And no outside force is going to stop it.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose commentary is published in 45 countries.

swastika geometry

In Palestine, Olive Trees are so Much More

In Palestine, Olive Trees are so Much More

Joharah Baker

October 8, 2012 When my grandfather was alive, he had two things he cherished most in this world: his family and his olive trees. He tended to those trees as if they were babies, tenderly pruning them, caring for the saplings like newborn infants and offering a respect and reverence to the aged trees for their endless giving, for the years of rich, oily wealth they bestowed upon him and his loved ones. When he passed, his beloved olive trees remained strong and proud, just like my grandfather had been in life. His sons were sure to protect his legacy, caring for the trees which continued to offer their bounty for all the years since. To Palestinians, olive trees are a lifeline, a symbol of their love for the land and a source of pride; they are their Achilles heel too, and Israel’s settlers know it. The olive harvest is upon us. Some Palestinians with olive groves close to Israeli settlements have already begun picking the fruit in the hopes that they may, at least this year, escape the settlers. But of course, this is too much to hope for. The havoc has already begun; settlers from Nahla’el attacked residents of Beit Illu, a village northwest of Ramallah, attacking the olive pickers and burning down dozens of trees. Palestinian sources say around 300 olive trees have been cut down in Beit Illu alone in the past month. This is by far not the only incident. Around the year, settlers cut down, steal and burn Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank. According to the International Solidarity Movement, over half a million olive and fruit trees have been destroyed by Israeli settlers and the army since 2000. Thousands of olive trees are cut down, burned or stolen each year by Jewish settlers who steal the fruit and the trees or burn them down with the long-term goal of usurping the land. What is so disturbing is that the Israeli army almost always arrives on the scene but it does not deter the settlers. Palestinians, who both depend on olive trees for their livelihood and are bound to them spiritually, are crushed when they are destroyed. Not only are the olive trees cut down, burned, bulldozed and sometimes sold or stolen to be replanted in illegal Israeli settlements, but the land on which they were planted is suddenly inaccessible to its owners. The land is either taken over by settlers or it is gradually fenced off and annexed to nearby settlements by way of a military order. Without delving into the legal [or illegal] ramifications of this olive tree theft, or even the larger unjust premise of the Israeli occupation which allows and even urges on such vigilante behavior, it is the sheer cruelty of the act that must not go unnoticed. Palestinians are inherently connected to their land and to their olive trees in particular. We all understand that settlers attack the trees and the owners while they pick the fruit to intimidate the Palestinians in the hopes of driving them off of their own land. And the best way to do that is to hit them where it hurts the most. For a farmer who has tended these precious trees for years and whose fathers and forefathers have done the same, this is the heart of the struggle. This is also why Palestinians fight back so hard when their trees are attacked. It is a main source of income, true, but olive trees are also part of their identity and their legacy. Apart from their children, these trees and the land are what they love. International solidarity groups and Palestinians from all over Palestine have for years, joined farmers during the olive harvest to pick their fruit and protect them from settler attacks. It does not always work, but the sign of solidarity is heartwarming. We do not expect the Israeli government to halt it vigilante settlers because if it were not for this government’s acquiescence with these criminals, the problem would not exist. Besides, the Israeli government has no qualms over maintaining the military occupation of someone else’s land, planting illegal Israeli settlers and extremist settlers to boot to keep the colonialist project alive and well. In addition, these settlers are determined to break the Palestinian spirit by striking at the heart of what they hold dear. In Palestine, the death of their children and the destruction of their olive trees make grown men cry. While I am grateful that my grandfather did not have to experience either before he passed, it pains me to watch others endure this rape of their land. The question is not whether Palestinians can endure more of this same abuse – they have proven that they can – but how long the world will continue to allow it to happen. Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy(MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

Tom Engelhardt-Overwrought Empire

Overwrought Empire
The Discrediting of U.S. Military Power

by Tom Engelhardt

October 8, 2012 Americans lived in a "victory culture" for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real "American Century" -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious.  Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush.  It was victory with a capital V.  The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet.  It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a "rogue state," on the horizon.  It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless.  Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as "the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome." And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different.  Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now "threats" against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them.  Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and yet -- in case the paradox has escaped you -- nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest. At one level, the American situation should simply take your breath away.  Never before in modern history had there been an arms race of only one or a great power confrontation of only one.  And at least in military terms, just as the neoconservatives imagined in those early years of the twenty-first century, the United States remains the "sole superpower" or even "hyperpower" of planet Earth. The Planet’s Top Gun And yet the more dominant the U.S. military becomes in its ability to destroy and the more its forces are spread across the globe, the more the defeats and semi-defeats pile up, the more the missteps and mistakes grow, the more the strains show, the more the suicides rise, the more the nation’s treasure disappears down a black hole -- and in response to all of this, the more moves the Pentagon makes. A great power without a significant enemy?  You might have to go back to the Roman Empire at its height or some Chinese dynasty in full flower to find anything like it.  And yet Osama bin Laden is dead.  Al-Qaeda is reportedly a shadow of its former self.  The great regional threats of the moment, North Korea and Iran, are regimes held together by baling wire and the suffering of their populaces.  The only incipient great power rival on the planet, China, has just launched its first aircraft carrier, a refurbished Ukrainian throw away from the 1990s on whose deck the country has no planes capable of landing. The U.S. has 1,000 or more bases around the world; other countries, a handful.  The U.S. spends as much on its military as the next 14 powers (mostly allies) combined.  In fact, it’s investing an estimated $1.45 trillion to produce and operate a single future aircraft, the F-35 -- more than any country, the U.S. included, now spends on its national defense annually. The U.S. military is singular in other ways, too.  It alone has divided the globe -- the complete world -- into six "commands."  With (lest anything be left out) an added command, Stratcom, for the heavens and another, recently established, for the only space not previously occupied, cyberspace, where we’re already unofficially "at war."  No other country on the planet thinks of itself in faintly comparable military terms. When its high command plans for its future "needs," thanks to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, they repair (don’t say "retreat") to a military base south of the capital where they argue out their future and war-game various possible crises while striding across a map of the world larger than a basketball court.  What other military would come up with such a method? The president now has at his command not one, but two private armies.  The first is the CIA, which in recent years has been heavily militarized, is overseen by a former four-star general (who calls the job "living the dream"), and is running its own private assassination campaigns and drone air wars throughout the Greater Middle East.  The second is an expanding elite, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military, members of whom are now deployed to hot spots around the globe. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carrier task forces, is dominant on the global waves in a way that only the British Navy might once have been; and the U.S. Air Force controls the global skies in much of the world in a totally uncontested fashion. (Despite numerous wars and conflicts, the last American plane possibly downed in aerial combat was in the first Gulf War in 1991.) Across much of the global south, there is no sovereign space Washington’s drones can’t penetrate to kill those judged by the White House to be threats. In sum, the U.S. is now the sole planetary Top Gun in a way that empire-builders once undoubtedly fantasized about, but that none from Genghis Khan on have ever achieved: alone and essentially uncontested on the planet.  In fact, by every measure (except success), the likes of it has never been seen. Blindsided by Predictably Unintended Consequences By all the usual measuring sticks, the U.S. should be supreme in a historically unprecedented way.  And yet it couldn’t be more obvious that it’s not, that despite all the bases, elite forces, private armies, drones, aircraft carriers, wars, conflicts, strikes, interventions, and clandestine operations, despite a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that never seems to stop growing and into which we pour a minimum of $80 billion a year, nothing seems to work out in an imperially satisfying way.  It couldn’t be more obvious that this is not a glorious dream, but some kind of ever-expanding imperial nightmare. This should, of course, have been self-evident since at least early 2004, less than a year after the Bush administration invaded and occupied Iraq, when the roadside bombs started to explode and the suicide bombings to mount, while the comparisons of the United States to Rome and of a prospective Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East to the Pax Romana vanished like a morning mist on a blazing day.  Still, the wars against relatively small, ill-armed sets of insurgents dragged toward their dismally predictable ends.  (It says the world that, after almost 11 years of war, the 2,000th U.S. military death in Afghanistan occurred at the hands of an Afghan "ally" in an "insider attack.")  In those years, Washington continued to be regularly blindsided by the unintended consequences of its military moves. Surprises -- none pleasant -- became the order of the day and victories proved vanishingly rare. One thing seems obvious: a superpower military with unparalleled capabilities for one-way destruction no longer has the more basic ability to impose its will anywhere on the planet.  Quite the opposite, U.S. military power has been remarkably discredited globally by the most pitiful of forces.  From Pakistan to Honduras, just about anywhere it goes in the old colonial or neocolonial world, in those regions known in the contested Cold War era as the Third World, resistance of one unexpected sort or another arises and failure ensues in some often long-drawn-out and spectacular fashion. Given the lack of enemies -- a few thousand jihadis, a small set of minority insurgencies, a couple of feeble regional powers -- why this is so, what exactly the force is that prevents Washington’s success, remains mysterious.  Certainly, it’s in some way related to the more than half-century of decolonization movements, rebellions, and insurgencies that were a feature of the previous century. It also has something to do with the way economic heft has spread beyond the U.S., Europe, and Japan -- with the rise of the "tigers" in Asia, the explosion of the Chinese and Indian economies, the advances of Brazil and Turkey, and the movement of the planet toward some kind of genuine economic multipolarity.  It may also have something to do with the end of the Cold War, which put an end as well to several centuries of imperial or great power competition and left the sole "victor," it now seems clear, heading toward the exits wreathed in self-congratulation. Explain it as you will, it’s as if the planet itself, or humanity, had somehow been inoculated against the imposition of imperial power, as if it now rejected it whenever and wherever applied.  In the previous century, it took a half-nation, North Korea, backed by Russian supplies and Chinese troops to fight the U.S. to a draw, or a popular insurgent movement backed by a local power, North Vietnam, backed in turn by the Soviet Union and China to defeat American power.  Now, small-scale minority insurgencies, largely using roadside bombs and suicide bombers, are fighting American power to a draw (or worse) with no great power behind them at all. Think of the growing force that resists such military might as the equivalent of the "dark matter" in the universe.  The evidence is in.  We now know (or should know) that it’s there, even if we can’t see it. Washington's Wars on Autopilot After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in Washington.  After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the limits of its power increasingly evident.  And yet, here’s the curious thing: two administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems.  In other words, we are not just a classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating on some kind of militarized autopilot.  Lacking is a learning curve.  By all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t be one. Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further what once were known as "American interests." Take Libya, as an example.  It briefly seemed to count as a rare American military success story: a decisive intervention in support of a rebellion against a brutal dictator -- so brutal, in fact, that the CIA previously shipped "terrorist suspects," Islamic rebels fighting against the Gaddafi regime, there for torture.  No U.S. casualties resulted, while American and NATO air strikes were decisive in bringing a set of ill-armed, ill-organized rebels to power. In the world of unintended consequences, however, the fall of Gaddafi sent Tuareg mercenaries from his militias, armed with high-end weaponry, across the border into Mali.  There, when the dust settled, the whole northern part of the country had come unhinged and fallen under the sway of Islamic extremists and al-Qaeda wannabes as other parts of North Africa threatened to destabilize.  At the same time, of course, the first American casualties of the intervention occurred when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in an attack on the Benghazi consulate and a local "safe house." With matters worsening regionally, the response couldn’t have been more predictable. As Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post recently reported, in ongoing secret meetings, the White House is planning for military operations against al-Qaeda-in-the-Magreb (North Africa), now armed with weaponry pillaged from Gaddafi’s stockpiles.  These plans evidently include the approach used in Yemen (U.S. special forces on the ground and CIA drone strikes), or a Somalia "formula" (drone strikes, special forces operations, CIA operations, and the support of African proxy armies), or even at some point "the possibility of direct U.S. intervention." In addition, Eric Schmitt and David Kilpatrick of the New York Times report that the Obama administration is "preparing retaliation" against those it believes killed the U.S. ambassador, possibly including "drone strikes, special operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden, and joint missions with Libyan authorities."  The near certainty that, like the previous intervention, this next set of military actions will only further destabilize the region with yet more unpleasant surprises and unintended consequences hardly seems to matter.  Nor does the fact that, in crude form, the results of such acts are known to us ahead of time have an effect on the unstoppable urge to plan and order them. Such situations are increasingly legion across the Greater Middle East and elsewhere.  Take one other tiny example: Iraq, from which, after almost a decade-long military disaster, the "last" U.S. units essentially fled in the middle of the night as 2011 ended.  Even in those last moments, the Obama administration and the Pentagon were still trying to keep significant numbers of U.S. troops there (and, in fact, did manage to leave behind possibly several hundred as trainers of elite Iraqi units).  Meanwhile, Iraq has been supportive of the embattled Syrian regime and drawn ever closer to Iran, even as its own sectarian strife has ratcheted upward.  Having watched this unsettling fallout from its last round in the country, according to the New York Times, the U.S. is now negotiating an agreement "that could result in the return of small units of American soldiers to Iraq on training missions. At the request of the Iraqi government, according to General Caslen, a unit of Army Special Operations soldiers was recently deployed to Iraq to advise on counterterrorism and help with intelligence." Don’t you just want to speak to those negotiators the way you might to a child: No, don’t do that!  The urge to return to the scene of their previous disaster, however, seems unstaunchable.  You could offer various explanations for why our policymakers, military and civilian, continue in such a repetitive -- and even from an imperial point of view -- self-destructive vein in situations where unpleasant surprises are essentially guaranteed and lack of success a given.  Yes, there is the military-industrial complex to be fed.  Yes, we are interested in the control of crucial resources, especially energy, and so on. But it’s probably more reasonable to say that a deeply militarized mindset and the global maneuvers that go with it are by now just part of the way of life of a Washington eternally "at war."  They are the tics of a great power with the equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome.  They happen because they can’t help but happen, because they are engraved in the policy DNA of our national security complex, and can evidently no longer be altered.  In other words, they can’t help themselves. That’s the only logical conclusion in a world where it has become ever less imaginable to do the obvious, which is far less or nothing at all.  (Northern Chad?  When did it become crucial to our well being?) Downsizing the mission?  Inconceivable.  Thinking the unthinkable?  Don’t even give it a thought! What remains is, of course, a self-evident formula for disaster on autopilot. But don’t tell Washington. It won’t matter. Its denizens can’t take it in. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.  Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

Iraq sends crucial fuel oil to Syria

Iraq sends crucial fuel oil to Syria

By Lina Saigol in London and Michael Peel

October 8, 2012 Iraq is quietly shipping vital supplies of fuel oil to Syria in a deal that has triggered concern in Washington and exposes Damascus’s difficulties keeping its economy afloat in the face of a growing civil war and economic sanctions. Nouri al-Maliki’s Baghdad government agreed in June to supply 720,000 tons of fuel oil to Syria in monthly shipments as part of a one-year, renewable supply contract, according to commercial documents seen by the Financial Times. In June and July, Baghdad’s oil ministry delivered two shipments of fuel oil, which is used for power generation, worth US$14m in total, to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Syria paid in cash, the documents show. While the figures to date are relatively small, the deal highlights the ad hoc efforts Mr Assad’s embattled regime is having to make to keep shortages at bay as the war spreads. It also underlines the more active role Iraq is now playing in the region. The revelations come a month after US officials complained publicly that Baghdad was allowing aircraft carrying Iranian arms to fly over its territory en route to Syria. A state department official said the fuel shipment did not violate US and EU sanctions but he indicated surprise at Iraq’s involvement. Iraq abstained from an Arab League vote in 2011 to suspend Syria’s membership and impose sanctions; it has also rejected attempts to bring down the Syrian regime by force, fearing a wider crisis in the region. Iraq’s Shia-dominated government is close to Iran. Tehran is the Syrian regime’s chief Middle Eastern ally. "Perceptions matter, so we encourage countries trading with Syria to be open about their legal and non-sanctionable exchanges," a US state department official said. "If this is going to continue, we think the Iraqis should be up front about it." The deal showed the Syrian regime was desperate for fuel and was depleting what is left of its hard currency cash reserves to import it, the official added. The documents show that the state-backed Syria Trading Oil Company (Sytrol), which handles Syria’s fuel imports, agreed to pay cash into an account with the Trade Bank of Iraq before each delivery, or provide an irrevocable letter of credit. Iraq offered Syria a discount of 50 per cent below the market price, plus a $5 discount per metric ton, according to the contract. Syria paid $505.909 per ton for the fuel, compared with today’s market price of $800 per ton. Mr Alaa Kidher Kadhum, one of the signatories for Baghdad’s state oil marketing organisation, or SOMO, sits on the board of the Trade Bank of Iraq, according to the documents. Mr Kadhum did not respond to questions from the FT nor did any official from the Iraqi oil ministry. Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister, said he did not know of any such deal. Syrian officials also did not comment. The contract, dated June 28 and written in Arabic on Iraqi oil ministry letterhead, specifies the fuel oil would be loaded in trucks at Iraq’s North Refinery Company, via Syria’s western border. The EU and the US have had sanctions against Sytrol since 2011, which bar any EU or US company from importing, purchasing or transporting Syrian oil, including refined products. The US imposed fresh sanctions on Sytrol in July 2012, specifically for having provided gasoline to its strategic ally Iran.

'Political arrests' plague Palestinians

'Political arrests' plague Palestinians

Jillian Kestler-DAmours

People demonstrate in Ramallah against political arrests [Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/Al Jazeera] October 8, 2012 Rights groups complain of abuses by Hamas and PA amid tit-for-tat detention of rival activists in Gaza and West Bank. A'sira, West Bank - Alaa Shuli still has the scars to remind him of his time in prison. Hung from a wire affixed to the ceiling, with his toes barely touching the ground and his hands tied behind his back, Shuli says he was left that way for hours on end. He remembers prison guards repeatedly beating his legs and arms with a wooden stick, hurling taunts at him, insulting his family members, and sometimes preventing him from praying. Most often, the 35-year-old says he was held alone in windowless, two-metre squared cells, with barely any light penetrating the cement walls. "If I go into the details of the torture, it's still very difficult," Shuli said. Stories of mistreatment and torture in prison are widespread in Palestinian families across the occupied territories. But Shuli's case has a crucial difference: He wasn't tortured by Israeli prison guards, but by Palestinian Authority(PA) jailers. "From the Israelis it's expected. But from your own people?" Shuli said from his home in the West Bank town of A'sira, in the northern Nablus district. "It's wrong." Widespread political arrests  Shuli has been in and out of both Israeli and PA-run prisons since 1997. He says he's been arrested four times by the Israelis and 11 times by the PA, and has spent a total of approximately eight years in jail. From 2007 until today, he says the PA has summoned him for interrogation 170 times. "If you're a journalist belonging to Hamas, the eye of the [PA] security forces will be on you more than others " -  Sami Radi Alassi, journalist "What happened in Gaza [with Hamas winning the 2006 election] is reflected in the West Bank, and I belong to Hamas," Shuli says, attributing politics as the reason behind his frequent imprisonments. His latest arrest took place on September 24 and was part of large-scale PA arrest campaign that saw approximately 130 people taken into interrogation from across the West Bank. Almost all the people who were detained - including students, journalists, teachers and human rights workers - were members of Hamas. Some remain in prison, and others were released. The PA has denied that the recent arrests were politically motivated. "All the recent arrests were on a legal basis, and originated with the public prosecution and Palestinian judiciary," PA security forces spokesperson Adnan Dmeiri told Palestinian news agency Ma'an. "The Hamas leadership is attempting to threaten Palestinian civil peace through its alliance with chaos, which is clear from Hamas' statements in Gaza," Dmeiri added. But according to Randa Siniora, the executive director at the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) in Ramallah, the arrests were carried out without respecting the proper legal procedures. "We're seeing arbitrary arrests which are for political affiliations. This has been very consistent since 2007. We have seen a lot of arrests being taken without proper legal proceedings," she said Siniora said that the non-implementation of court rulings is a major problem in the West Bank. For example, the PA security forces often doesn't release a prisoner from jail despite a court ruling ordering them to do so, she explained. "I think it won't be resolved without political reconciliation among the parties [Fatah and Hamas]. We will continue suffering from it and the human rights situation will not improve." Exacerbated internal divisions Following Hamas' victory in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, tensions grew as the PA refused to acknowledge the Hamas government and the two sides failed to come to a power-sharing agreement. Violence quickly ensued - including a bloody coup attempt in the Gaza Strip. Since 2007, the Palestinian territories have been divided along sectarian lines, with the PA controlling the West Bank and Hamas governing Gaza. The two factions first signed a reconciliation agreement in May 2011 after months of negotiations, but discussions over how to implement the plan quickly disintegrated. In February 2012, Hamas representative Khaled Meshaal signed a new agreement with PA President Mahmoud Abbas to end the division, but this too has stalled. Today, the rift between Ramallah and Gaza persists, and arbitrary arrests and torture on both sides have only made the situation worse. "Both the Hamas government in Gaza and the government in the West Bank violate human rights and they deny having political prisoners," explained Hamdi Shaqqura, deputy director of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). "The background [of these arrests] is a political background. This is not security grounds. We are talking about political grounds." Shaqqura added that a reciprocal process is in place, where a PA arrest of Hamas-affiliated people in the West Bank will lead to a Hamas arrest of Fatah-affiliated people in Gaza, and vice-versa. Sami Radi Alassi says  he was arrested by PA forces for taking pictures of a Hamas rally [Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/Al Jazeera] "It's a kind of action and reaction, both ways. Who pays the price? The Palestinian society at large. Who pays the price? Activists from both sides - the activists of Hamas in the West Bank [and] activists of Fatah in Gaza. Who pays the price? The Palestinian cause in general," Shaqqura said. On October 3, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report detailing the serious abuses Palestinians face in the Hamas-run criminal justice system in Gaza, including arbitrary detention, torture, civilians being tried in military courts, and denying detainees access to lawyers or communication with their families. Hamas has also failed to hold its security service officials accountable for allegations of wrongdoing and abuse, and has allowed a widespread system of impunity to grow in Gaza, HRW found. Islam Shahwan, spokesman for the Hamas interior ministry in Gaza, said the HRW report was "politically motivated" and stated it "relied, in part, on guessing rather than on facts", Reuters reported. Still, Joe Stork, HRW deputy Middle East Director, stated "there is ample evidence that Hamas security services are torturing people in custody with impunity and denying prisoners their rights. The Gaza authorities should stop ignoring the abuse and ensure that the justice system respects Palestinians' rights." Freedom of expression compromised Palestinian journalist Sami Radi Alassi was arrested earlier this year; he believes he was arrested for taking a photograph at a Hamas-affiliated march through Nablus and posted it on Facebook. A former radio and television reporter who now writes for local newspapers and websites, Alassi has been in and out of Israeli and PA prisons since 2004. His arrests, he said, are both because of his journalism work and his affiliation with Hamas. "If you're a journalist belonging to Hamas, the eye of the [PA] security forces will be on you more than others," Alassi said. He said that when he was released in 2010 after three years in Israeli prison, the PA called to tell him that he only had ten days to spend with his family before they would arrest him themselves. "The direct impact is to enhance the self-censorship among the journalists, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza." - Riham Abu Aita, public relations officer "It's not like before," Alassi said, about continuing his work as a journalist in the West Bank after these numerous arrests. "I can't go to all events. I can't speak as freely. I don't feel safe." Despite this, he said he wouldn't abandon the profession. "I can't leave my work as a journalist because of pressure from the PA or anything else. I love my work, especially because it's about being close to people and talking to people." According to Palestinian media freedom group MADA, nine Palestinian journalists were arrested in the occupied Palestinian territories since the beginning of 2012. Over the past four years, MADA reported a total of 113 arrests and 371 violations of media freedoms committed by the Palestinian authorities. "The direct impact is to enhance the self-censorship among the journalists, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza," Riham Abu Aita, MADA public relations officer, said. "When there is no atmosphere or horizon for reconciliation between the parties that is reflected on journalists and on freedom of expression." According to Palestinian human rights group Al Haq, the arrests signal the failure of the PA "to adhere to all principles essential to a society that aspires to democracy". "Chief amongst these is an abiding respect for freedom of association. Arbitrary arrest and detention without charge or trial have no room in such an environment," Al Haq said in a statement.

Interfaith Dialogue No Answer to Israel’s Racism

Interfaith Dialogue No Answer to Israel’s Racism

By Stuart Littlewood

October 8, 2012 So the Albuquerque Episcopalians got jumpy and 'disinvited' the Friends of Sabeel who had booked their cathedral for a conference. Sabeel is an international peace movement which calls itself the Voice of Palestinian Christians. Why would one Christian group snub another? The excuse for turning away the conference was concocted by the Dean of the Cathedral, the Very Rev. J. Mark Goodman. "We said our prayers and deliberated thoughtfully and purposefully," he explained. It seems he and his Episcopalian colleagues didn't like the way the conference would be dealing with "a political issue that has polarized people in ways that we felt were unhelpful. We did not want to introduce a polarized issue into the life of the Cathedral that would have the potential to divide rather than unite. Our decision was not based upon anti-Palestinian positions. In fact, many on the Vestry [i.e. the church directors] are very sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, yet they were concerned about the rhetoric of the literature from Sabeel." He denied they were put under pressure from Zionists. Nevertheless they had invited a local rabbi to come and speak to the Vestry, a rather odd thing to do when, presumably, they were all acquainted with the endless crimes committed by the Jewish State against the Christian communities in the Holy Land. Do they usually turn to rabbis for advice? Goodman also said Vestry members had attended his recent Forum classes, after which they had misgivings about serving as conference hosts. "This summer at General Convention, I served on a committee that dealt in a focused way with resolutions about the conflict between Israel and Palestinians," he went on. "It was my personal prayer that we would craft resolutions that were balanced and offered a way forward with positive engagement with each side, seeking a way forward that would bring security, dignity and peace to a region that has known strife for too long. I believe we succeeded." Note the reliance on "positive engagement". What exactly does that mean – more interfaith dialogue? "We succeeded", he says. But how does he measure success? And why is he not pressing for the enforcement of international and humanitarian law and the implementation of UN resolutions, the only route to justice? The Episcopalian approach implies that some sort of equivalence, or level playing field, already exists between the powerful aggressor and the weak victim, the robber and the robbed, the armed occupier and his unarmed dispossessed prisoner. How did these churchmen, far removed from the rotten reality, become experts on "security, dignity and peace" in the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom? Have they been there, rolled up their sleeves and immersed themselves in the snakepit that the Holy Land has been allowed to become? What makes him and his mates think they’ve found a way forward while Palestine remains under brutal occupation? The mission statement provided by Goodman's church says: "The Cathedral continues to honor its responsibility to be a good steward and shepherd in the community and the world." A huge and worthy commitment indeed. However, the cathedral’s own relatively peaceful community and inconsequential little world have been rudely rocked by scandal following claims that it was headed for bankruptcy and members were deserting. The cathedral accountant blew the whistle and allegations were made about the misuse of collection money, liberal imbibing of expensive wine and Vestry members "trashing the cathedral’s endowment by $2 million through complacency, and of not disciplining the dean". The regional bishop moved quickly to hush it up in an operation that local church workers said was "like a quiet version of the Spanish Inquisition". If only this sort of tomfoolery were all that Christian churches in the Holy Land had to worry about. Unfortunately the Episcopalians seem pretty confused, or downright ignorant, about the depths of evil to which the Israeli occupation has sunk. This is from their official report 'Israel-Palestine: Convention supports positive investment - Bishops agree to postpone indefinitely debate on corporate engagement', "Bishop John Tarrant of South Dakota urged opposition to Resolution C060 [which calls on the church to engage "in corporate social responsibility by more vigorous and public corporate engagement with companies in the church’s investment portfolio that contribute to the infrastructure of the Occupation"]. He spoke about the town of Rawabi, currently under construction north of Ramallah in the West Bank, that will provide opportunities for affordable home ownership, employment and education. Tarrant said that the project, envisioned by a group of Palestinian businessmen, would inject about $80 million into the Israeli economy. "'It gave me the sense that there are Palestinians that understand the importance of mutuality if the two states are going to exist side by side,’ he said. "He reminded the house of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s charge for Episcopalians 'to go as emissaries…to go into the world of God’s dream’. 'I believe there are Palestinians and Israelis now that are going into the world with God’s dream.’" Has Bishop Schori been to the world of God’s dream and seen what’s there? And why would Bishop Tarrant want to inject all those $millions into the Israeli economy when Israel has been strangling the Palestinian economy to death, seizing its land and water and withholding Palestine’s tax revenues? Bishop Charles Bennison of Pennsylvania said the movement to support boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel was unwise. "We need more, not fewer, economic ties to Israel. The more isolated Israel becomes the more dangerous the situation becomes." It turns out that Episcopalians are against boycott and divestment. Instead the bishops have supported a resolution on positive investment in the Palestinian Territories, as if that will do the slightest good while the illegal occupation and blockade continue. Meanwhile they agreed to postpone indefinitely the conversation on corporate engagement. To them, it seems, going as emissaries into God’s dream involves kicking the can down the road like the rest of wretched Christendom (with a few honourable exceptions). Was anybody at the Convention truly concerned with right versus wrong, good versus evil, the rule of international law versus the rule of the gun-butt, the F-16, the helicopter gun-ship, the tank shell, illegal detention and the hard-to-get permit to go anywhere. Their Own Bishop Victim of Israel’s Apartheid Policies The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem himself is a classic victim of the machinations of the cruel occupation. Suheil Dawani is Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, which is a part of the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and The Middle East. This covers Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. He was installed in April 2007, but in March 2011 Israel cancelled his residency permit making it well nigh impossible for him to carry out his duties. As a non-Israeli he needs a temporary residence permit. The Israelis played fast and loose, granting a permit initially then turning him down. Here’s the explanation: "The bishop is a native of the Holy Land and has spent most of his life and ministry there, but cannot obtain either citizenship or legal residence in Israel, since he was born in Nablus, in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since 1967, but has not been annexed to Israel. East Jerusalem, on the other hand, where the Anglican Cathedral and Diocesan offices are situated, was also occupied at the same time, but Israel annexed it and considers it part of its national territory (although no other country in the world recognizes this annexation). Therefore, Bishop Dawani is considered by Israel to be a foreigner who can only visit – let alone live in – East Jerusalem with a special permit, which the Israeli authorities can either grant or deny at their sole discretion." Get it? There's a religious war going on in the Holy Land and Dawani was wide open to this sort of dirty trick. After six months of aggravation and international pressure, during which Israel's Interior Ministry accused him of "improper" land dealings on behalf of the church and the Palestinian Authority, the illegal occupiers granted residency permits to the bishop and his family. But here's the catch... those permits will have to be renewed when they expire, whenever that may be or whenever the Israelis choose. So the Israelis have the bishop's balls in a vice. Keep quiet Dawani and all you Anglicans/Episcopalians while we carry on with our ethnic cleansing. Keep quiet while we trash the Palestinian economy, confiscate their lands and water resources, continue the blockade, erase their culture and humiliate their families, drive out the Christians and Muslims and disrupt the religious life of those who stubbornly remain. Keep quiet or we'll revoke your permit again. The Catholics similarly walk on eggshells and are mercilessly bullied in their homeland. Their priests are harassed and obstructed and often prevented from going about their pastoral duties. Many are 'imprisoned’ in their parish – if they leave it to visit relatives or holiday in another part of the Occupied Territories or in neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon, the Israelis may not let them back in. So imagine what it’s like for the Muslims. The simple truth is that the Jewish State is the world leader in rampant lawlessness and interfaith bullying, while the wet and wimpish Anglicans respond with their clapped-out formula of interfaith dialogue and other verbal diarrhoea. For 64 years it has got us and our Palestinian brothers and sisters precisely nowhere. The good folks of Sabeel must now be wondering what they’ve done to deserve same-faith friends like the Albuquerque Episcopalians. - Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, can now be read on the internet by visiting www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk.