Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Drops The "H-Bomb"

I'm not talking about that other H-bomb, the one that the US government dropped on innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, I'm talking about Adolph Hitler, yes, that H-Bomb. Every time our leaders want to justify a war against another people they whip out the Hitler's name. He is our Great Satan, the face of incomprehensible evil. There is nothing to be understood about Hitler, he was made of pure brimstone and, therefore, whenever he is reincarnated - which happens fairly often - he must be wiped out utterly and completely.

It's rather convenient and closes the door off from any sort of critical thinking at a moment when critical thinking should be at an absolute premium - prior to war. So, it has been used to label Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe and that favourite of mine "Islamofascism", which tars an entire religious tradition with being Hitler. This time, of course, it is the incomparably stupid and opportunist Canadian foreign minister, John Baird, who whipped it out after his fanboy tour of Israel.

“Obviously when the influential leader of Iran said [Friday] that he wanted to remove a cancer from the Middle East and remove Israel from the map, obviously you can understand why the Jewish people, why Israel would take him seriously,” he said. “Hitler wrote Mein Kampf more than a decade before he became Chancellor of Germany and they take these issues pretty seriously here. But it’s not just an Israeli question. The fear in the Arab world, in the entire region, the Gulf, and the entire Middle East is palpable on this issue. And it’s increasingly a significant security threat for the West: for Canada, the United States and our allies in Europe.”

And there you have it. Israel equals the Jews, Iran wants to eliminate Israel therefore Iran wants to eliminate the Jews. Adolph Hitler wanted to eliminate the Jews. Iran is like Nazi Germany and its leadership is like Hitler. Bombs Away!

Except that it's rather more complex than our Tory friend, apparently, can fathom. First off there is no necessary identity between Jewishness and Zionism or Israel as John Baird - a tireless promoter of Israel - demonstrates. But, on the other side, Jews have been some of the most vocal opponents of Israel and its policies, from Norman Finklestein to Noam Chomsky to Shlomo Sand. Zionism and the founding of Israel was one amongst several political responses to anti-Semitism in Europe prior to World War Two.

Secondly, Baird demonstrates his inability to understand context. The Middle East is not Europe or North America, where Jews were historically terribly oppressed, particularly in Eastern Europe where pogroms were too often a matter of course - not to mention the ultimate pogrom, the terror of the Holocaust. That is not the history of the historic Jewish communities of the Middle East. The antipathy towards Israel is rooted rather in the fact that Israel is a settler-state, whose existence is founded upon the displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population and whose continued existence is premised upon its service to the American empire as a Sparta - an armed camp - to control uncooperative Arab regimes... like that in Iran.

Thirdly, Iran poses no threat to Europe or North America, unless we're talking about imperial interests in the Middle East. Iran's leadership are no radical democrats or serious anti-imperialists. They rule their country like our rulers rule theirs: in the interests of a ruling class who own and control all the levers of political and economic power. Iran has democratic elections - just like us. And it suppresses rights that are inconvenient, just like us. It's true that Iran is rather more repressive than, say, Canada. But it is a matter of degrees as the participants in the Occupy Oakland protests found out, or the G20 protestors in Toronto. But, in any case, even if Iran is qualitatively more repressive than North American governments it would be simple hypocrisy to suggest that we have any problems with dictatorships - after all, Stephen Harper has been touring China - a much more repressive regime - sucking up to any Communist Party bigwig that he could in order to sell our natural resources to them. Then there are "our allies" in the Middle East, like the Saudi dictatorship and the former dictator of Yemen. We have not a single problem with dictatorships.

And the idea that there is "palpable fear" in Israel is just so much bunk. How many countries has Iran attacked or invaded since the Iranian revolution in 1979? Zero. How many has Israel? Well, they bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 in a rather deja vu claim about it being intended for military purposes.

Iraq and France claimed that the Iraqi reactor was intended for peaceful scientific research.[8] Agreements between France and Iraq excluded military use. The American private intelligence agency STRATFOR wrote in 2007 that the reactor "was believed to be on the verge of producing plutonium for a weapons program". In a 2003 speech, Richard Wilson, a professor of physics at Harvard University who visually inspected the partially damaged reactor in December 1982, said that "to collect enough plutonium [for a nuclear weapon] using Osirak would've taken decades, not years". In 2005, Wilson further commented in The Atlantic: the Osirak reactor that was bombed by Israel in June of 1981 was explicitly designed by the French engineer Yves Girard to be unsuitable for making bombs. That was obvious to me on my 1982 visit.

In addition to the Iraq bombing, Israel invaded Lebanon (for the second time) in 1982 and again in 2006. They invaded Gaza in 2008-2009, leading to widespread human rights abuses and destruction - which the Palestinians have been prevented from repairing by the Israeli blockade. Of course, if we went back farther we'd see that since Israel's founding (and since the majority of Jews at the founding were Europeans, one could easily argue that this was the first invasion) it has invaded Syria in 1951, Egypt in 1956, and in 1967 Israel attacked Syria, Egypt and Jordan. It is also likely that Israel is involved in the present covert (and illegal) operations against Iranian nuclear scientists and infrastructure. It's also worth noting that this, the most belligerent country in the region, is the only one that has nuclear weapons.

So, John Baird's H-bomb is meant as nothing more than mere handwaving to distract us from the truth of the situation in the region. It's job is to put the question of Iran outside of rational discourse. To even question the bellicose rhetoric is an admission that you WANT TO KILL THE JEWS! The idea is so stupid as to be utterly laughable, were it not so terribly dangerous and were it not for the fact that they are playing with the lives of tens of thousands of people. But then, who would expect anything less from people who would use the memory of the Holocaust for such cynical ends.

Baird compares Iran’s threats to Hitler's racist book - The Globe and Mail:

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Shafia Becomes An Excuse For Anti-Muslim Racism

Of course the horror of the multiple murders of three young girls and their mother by the father, son and second wife ought to be condemned. It ought to be the focus for a public discussion about the plight of women who are too often the focus for familial violence.

But that is not what is happening with this trial. Instead the trial is being used to blame immigrants in general and Muslims in particular for violence against women and children. It's posed as "honour" killings, using a symbology that has already been constructed as distinctly foreign and Islamic.

However, while it is certainly the truth that some murderers of women will use Islam to justify their acts, others will use whatever ideology is at hand - Christianity, male supremacy - or none at all. Violence against women is a social, not an Islamic, problem. By deflecting the blame onto the "Muslim community" not only is it deepening the idea that somehow Muslims are preternaturally more likely to harm and oppress women but also that it is a problem confined to that community. The rest of us can rest safe and feel no need to look more deeply at the root causes of violence.

Yet, what is certain is that Robert Picton, who systematically slaughtered dozens of sex trade workers from the streets of Vancouver was not a Muslim. Nor was Paul Bernardo, who raped and murdered numbers of women.

More mundanely, as the statistics demonstrate, large numbers of women across the country face abuse at the hands of spouses as a matter of course. In 1997-98 there 90,792 admitted to the 413 battered women's shelters across Canada. In 2001 69 men were accused of killing their wife or ex-wife. And there were 183 family related homicides in 2001. While the ethnicity and religion of the victims and culprits is not available in these statistics, it is almost certain that the vast majority of family killings were of white, Christian men killing white, Christian women.

And, yet, there is no call for the "Christian community" to wake up and deal with the issue of Christian violence. Even after we have seen repeatedly the scandal of Catholic priests sexually abusing children there was no outrage about the complacency of the Catholic community. There is, in fact, a double standard rooted in racism and the justification necessary for the ongoing war in Afghanistan and for beating the war drums about Iran and, previously, Iraq.

Instead of blaming Muslims for this heinous crime, the conversation ought to be about eliminating the real source of oppression of women. It ought to be about addressing lack of funding for social services that make women dependent upon men - like lack of daycare or attacks on women's right to abortion. It ought to address the fact that women are still paid less than men, which is a concrete manifestation of the belief that women are of less value than men. The list could go on.

But, of course, that won't happen. The federal, provincial and municipal governments are all on an austerity binge and, inevitably, the people who suffer the most are those who are already vulnerable - women, immigrants, the poor. Then, when the insurmountable pressure of cuts and demonization leads to acts of interpersonal violence or eliminates escape routes for women, the demonization is simply further ramped up. It means that the tragedy of these murders will not end with the deaths of four women - it will be doubled and trebled by ignorance and misdirection.

Shafia trial a wake-up call for Canadian Muslims - The Globe and Mail:

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Torture Used To Catch Bin Laden, Proving Hypocrisy Is King

Luckily I'm not an NDP MP, so I have no fear saying that it is absolutely the height of stomach-churning hypocrisy that the head of the CIA, soon to be US Defense Secretary, can happily declare the use of waterboarding to catch and kill bin Laden.

Now, before every right-wing moron who can read starts putting up stupid shit about how I support terrorism, here's my categorical denial: I oppose terrorism - not only because it is an ineffective way to bring about progressive social change, since it excludes the consent or participation of the vast majority of the population to be "liberated" but also because it inevitably leads to the unnecessary deaths of innocents. I will say that I don't believe that guerilla struggle - or asymmetrical warfare in Pentagon jargon - is the same as terrorism and I have supported and will support in the future the military struggles of oppressed people against more heavily armed state actors (to use another bit of jargon). For these reasons, I'm not a supporter of bin Laden and the attacks on the World Trade Center were abhorrent for precisely the reason I state above - who died: secretaries, restaurant workers, maintenance workers, firefighters, office workers, etc. etc. And all it did was give the USA the excuse to blow the hell out of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

Back to the point at hand, not one single newspaper or politician sees the obvious contradiction that the USA has arrogated to itself the right to kill whomever it wants, in whatever quantities it deems necessary or desirable; to violate the sovereignty of nations outside of international laws that they helped write; and to violate human rights through torture and extra-legal detention - in order to defend all those things. How can killing bin Laden, responsible at most for the deaths of several thousands of people, justify the horror show that has been visited upon the world? It doesn't. And a closer examination of US actions from Riyadh to Gaza to Tripoli and beyond, reveals that bin Laden's real crime was not that he was sexist, a fundamentalist or a murderer. His real crime was that he wasn't using those qualities in the service of the US of A.

Glad I got that off of my chest; guess it means the end of my political career.

Waterboarding detainees yielded clues that helped find bin Laden: CIA - The Globe and Mail

Afghanistan, Drugs & Bank Bailouts

EVER WONDER WHERE SOME OF THE BANK BAILOUT MONEY CAME FROM? According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it came from the Afghan opium trade. Foreign Policy in Focus has a fascinating article analyzing the recent UNODC study on the drug trade, entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium."
While the original study headlines the role of the Taliban in the Afghan opium trade, the FPF article notes that buried deep in the study is the admission that the Taliban receives less than 15% of its funding from drugs and that it likely only benefits from 4% of the Afghan drug trade. Poppy farmers, for instance, take about 21% of the drug trade's earnings. And the rest?

"...the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers — in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade."

Besides "our" allies being the main beneficiaries - not surprising since many of the people NATO and the USA put into power in 2001 were widely recognized to be warlords with large stakes in the drug trade. In comparison, the Taliban had outlawed poppy cultivation in 2000 based upon a promise from UNODC to provide aid to offset the revenue losses that would result from the ban. That aid never arrived:

That basic logic prompted UNODC to open negotiations with the Taliban once they had gained control over much of Afghan territory, using Executive Director Pino Arlacchi's hollow offer of USD 250 million as bait and raising unrealistic expectations about international recognition. In September 2000, two months after Mullah Omar's decree, Arlacchi announced that, instead of compensation, UNODC would close down all operational activities in Afghanistan. The decision took even UNODC staff in the country by surprise. They learned about it from a BBC broadcast. The Taliban were understandably angry: "We have fulfilled our obligations. We demand that the agreement we made should be fulfilled up to the end," said Abdel Hamid Akhundzada, director of the Taliban's High Commission for Drug Control. "We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our farmers through immense difficulties. We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were punished with additional sanctions" (Transnational Institute, 2001).

It is likely that the UN backed off on the aid under direction from the US which was in secret negotiations with the Taliban until five weeks before September 11 to build gas and oil pipelines from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, to a Pakistani port. The Taliban were resisting the US conditions and US negotiators were at turns offering threats and rewards to them. According to the French author of the widely read book "Bin Laden: the forbidden truth", US negotiators told the Taliban that "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." However, Colin Powell, US Secretary of State at the time, did provide a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) grant of US$43 million - a drop in the bucket - to aid Afghan farmers who lost significant revenue from their traditional cash crop. One is tempted to see this as an incentive to submit to the conditions offered to win the release of further aid.
As a result of the Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, Afghanistan went from providing 75% of global opium to zero almost overnight - a drop of 4,000 metric tons. Besides demonstrating just how much the US/NATO invasion has transformed Afghanistan into a "narco-state", to use DEA parlance, it also demonstrates, once more, just how craven and dishonest was UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair is now all over the media saying that if the WMD justification hadn't worked he would have invaded Iraq in any case. The same dishonest - and deadly - method of international relations applied to Afghanistan. Blair stated that they would "bomb their poppy fields" even though there were none. And Downing street backed up this fiction:

“A senior Downing street aide said: ‘We have reliable information that the Taliban are planning to use money from drugs to finance military action, and that bin Laden has ordered farmers to step up production…”

But if the Taliban have never been the major beneficiaries of the Afghan drug trade, there have certainly been others. In particular, western banks have used drug money to lubricate the interbank credit system during the 2008 credit crisis. According to the UNODC report, somewhere between US$400-$500 billion in drug money has found its way into the banking system.

In fact, Antonio Maria Costa [UNODC exec. director] was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original).

While the UNODC report may have attempted to provide a cover to further justify the war in Afghanistan, their use of stats that counter the report's headline claim actually reveals one more sordid truth about the war in Afghanistan. In addition to the death, destruction and destabilization of the region, the war has facilitated a massive growth in the Afghan poppy trade. From 200 tons in 1980, Afghanistan last year produced 6,900 tons and now controls 90% of the global opium trade. Upwards of 1.5 million Afghans are employed in poppy cultivation. And it reveals an irresolvable contradiction for the US: the more they attack the drug trade, the more they attack their own allies, some of whom - like Hamid Karzai's brother - are on the US' payroll. And most of all it hurts poor Afghan farmers who rely on the poppy trade to sustain their livelihood. It is they who will fill the ranks of the insurgency.

Nobel Prize Hypocrisy Or How Obama Made Me Spray My Coffee

IN THE WORLD OF 1984 THE FUNCTIONARIES OF THE ENGSOC STATE have developed many tools for control of the population. One of them is doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one's head simultaneously, believing both of them. Newspeak was the expression of that contradiction by talking shit. Or, as Wikipedia puts it (in part):

The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.

Well, what could possibly be a better example of double-thinking, newspeak horseshit than giving President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize a week after he ordered the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Thanks to the USA, war truly has become peace. And the icing on the cake of Obama's acceptance speech, the one that made me spit my coffee had to be this doozy:

“Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this,” Mr. Obama said. “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Say f***in what? Mistakes? Well, my friend, if Vietnam was a "mistake" then I'd hate to see the USA act with malice aforethought. Up to 3 million Vietnamese died as a result of that mistake, along with 60,000 young Americans. Indeed, if that was a mistake what do we call The School of the Americas,  with its death squad training programs. Or the Pinochet dicatorship, or the overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or President Arbenz of Guatemala, or Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh. In fact, I could go on all day detailing the dictatorships that the US has set-up, propped up, justified and armed. But, pardon me, I'm interrupting the President:

"And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend."

He conveniently neglects that the US maintains a "black prison" at Bagram where torture continues, that it breaks international law when it send pilotless drones into Pakistan and kills civilians. It continues to cover-up for the brutal treatment in Guantanamo, in particular the deaths of three inmates in what was claimed to be a group suicide. And, of course, the US gets around the Geneva Conventions by using private contractors, mercenaries, that are not accountable to the Conventions or by simply redefining what they are doing to exclude these activities from consideration. But the President continued with proposals for how peace can be achieved and maintained:

"Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one."

I think that this is a great idea. After all, Israel - just off the top of my head - continues to illegally occupy land granted to Palestine in 1948 (we won't even get into the founding of Israel) and further, to illegally settle that land, in breach of the Geneva Conventions. It is also a nuclear power, though it has never signed the non-Proliferation Treaty and isn't subject to IAEA inspections, unlike Iran. Israel should face sanctions, and yet the US gives Israel a lot of money:

By FY2013, we will be sending Israel $3.15 billion a year (or an average of $8.6 million a day) and will continue to provide military aid at that level through 2018... In addition to military aid, the United States continues to provide Israel with additional aid and benefits. The numbers are not yet available for FY2009, but are likely to be significant.

But this is typical of US hypocrisy which sees lawbreakers everywhere and yet none in its own home and family. It is, in fact, astonishing that Obama could say any of this with a straight face.

"The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma -- there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy -- but there must be consequences when those things fail."

We could again point to Israel, of course but we needn't fetishize there. Just across the border we find Egypt, which receives billions in US aid and is a de facto dictatorship. There are few civil rights, certainly no right to organize into independent unions or real opposition parties. It is a police state, funded by the Americans. Across the ocean in Latin America, the Colombian government continues to fund death squads and the USA continues to fund Colombia. It also has plans to build bases there. Skip to China, well, the US owes China a lot of money so you can't expect them to say much about that. In this case it is about "quiet diplomacy". As he said:

In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable -- and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies.

Apparently China can kill thousands of its citizens, deny them any semblance of democratic rights but they get the soft glove whereas Iran gets the fist of sanctions. You'll excuse me for sensing some financially based double-standards. And so when Obama wrapped up his speech with an inspirational call to arms that pointed to the inspiration of people fighting against injustice and to feed and educated themselves, I could only think about the $1 trillion the US will spend on its military this year. Obama will never say that the US promotes wars through the sales of arms, through military aid and, most insidiously of all, by sustaining a system that ensures inequality, poverty and scarcity in a world of plenty. And nothing promotes war more than the fight over scarce resources. For all these reasons, Obama didn't deserve this award and his receipt of it only demonstrates that it is bankrupt. But then, why should we expect any more from an award that was created by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish arms dealer and the inventor of dynamite.