Justin Trudeau withdraws fighter jets from Syria-Iraq

by Yves Engler / October 30th, 2015

...... But, by citing the Liberal sponsored Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to justify Canadian participation in the US-led bombing, these pundits are revealing the essence of this “humanitarian imperialist” doctrine.

The truth is, human rights rhetoric aside, R2P is an effort to redefine international law to better serve the major powers. While the less sophisticated neoconservatives simply call for a more aggressive military posture, the more liberal supporters of imperialism prefer a high-minded ideological mask to accomplish the same end. Those citing R2P to pressure Trudeau to continue bombing Iraq-Syria are demonstrating an acute, but cynical, understanding of the doctrine.

British police are to be given the power to view the entire Internet history of everyone in the U.K. in a new surveillance bill to be published next week, reports say.

Under the proposed plan, telecoms and Internet service providers will be legally required to retain all Web browsing history for all customers for a period of 12 months, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The Guardian reports that “senior officers want to revive the measures similar to those contained in the ‘snooper’s charter,’ which would force telecommunications companies to retain for 12 months data that would disclose websites visited by customers.”

It comes as David Cameron, the Prime Minister, announced moves to strengthen its treaty with America to ensure Internet companies based there hand over requested data on suspects.

Some of the largest companies have been increasingly reluctant to supply customer communications in the wake of the claims of mass surveillance programmes by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden.

On Friday, Oct. 23,] a rabbi named Arik Ascherman was chased by a masked man trying to stab him near the Itamar Israeli settlement. On Oct.,22, a Jerusalem man named Simcha Hodedtov was shot and killed by police as a terrorist. On Oct. 18, a 29 year old named Haftom Zarhum was shot and then beaten to death by a mob in Beersheba. On Oct. 13, Uri Rezken was stabbed in the back while shopping. He screamed “I am a Jew, I am a Jew” to his attacker, but was stabbed four times anyway.

This list of incidents above is selective, though not exhaustive. It consists solely of attacks by Israelis against Israelis who were mistaken for (or in Ascherman's case thought to be too close to) Palestinians. It does not include the vast majority of deaths and injuries in this latest round of violence, deaths and injuries of Palestinians attacked by Israeli security forces, accompanied by horror stories of children shot while seeking help; children imprisoned without trial; planted weapons after shootings. Nor does it include massive, organized attacks by mobs of settlers against Palestinian villages. It also does not include the deaths and injuries of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the knife attacks that are much more thoroughly covered in the Western media than the much larger numbers of Palestinians killed.

What started this round of violence? Israel's armed settler movement is attempting to change the way that Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque is run. In fact, they want the mosque torn down, like the Babri Mosque was torn down in India in 1992. The Israeli government, which the settler movement has largely taken over, has a strategy that probably involves ultimately dividing the mosque site and banning Palestinians from it, as has been done in Hebron. As with the second intifada in 2000, Israel put pressure on the al-Aqsa site until Palestinians resisted. When Palestinians resisted, Israel escalated with lethal force, and now continues to escalate with no end in sight.

In the midst of this violence, Israel's political leaders are attempting to suppress what a George W. Bush advisor called the “reality-based community” and replace it with a set of racist fantasies. The Israeli Justice Minister who last year brought you the genocidal comment that Palestinian children were “little snakes,” this month has said “there never will be a Palestinian state.”

“By blaming a Palestinian for the Final Solution, Netanyahu has helped his countrymen adjust to the macabre reality. He reassured them that they were not settler overlords or vigilante brutes, but Inglorious Bastards curb stomping SS officers in the woods outside Krakow. And he sent them the message that those Palestinians lurking behind concrete walls and under siege in ghettoes were not an occupied, dispossessed people, but a new breed of Nazis hellbent on Jewish extermination. Netanyahu’s comments about the Mufti were much more than a hysterical lie; they were an invitation to act out a blood soaked fantasy of righteous revenge.”

To be young and Palestinian is to be stateless and voiceless in a cold indifferent world that only sees your face when you wear a mask and carry a slingshot, or when you roar out from behind the flame of burning tires or are covered by a funeral shroud as you are laid to rest to the weep of your family, but the pride of your Nation. To be young and Palestinian is to struggle daily against impossible odds and impediments, none of your own making: to succeed as a writer, educator, artist or human rights’ advocate while the world does not care what you do or that you even exist. To be young and Palestinian is to hear from mostly compromised and passive political leaders mumbling over and over that better days will soon be yours while the walls of despair and disillusionment grow ever so high and painful around your existence day in and day out. To be young and Palestinian is to sense the pain in your parents’ face as they stand powerless to stanch the abuse and degradation your family must endure whenever it passes through endless Israeli manned checkpoints that are controlled with an iron fist and thirst for violence at the West Bank and Erez crossings at Gaza. And, yes, finally, to be young and Palestinian is, at times, to find comfort under blankets of dark denial.

Long ago a legendary African American writer penned a remarkable memorial for all those bound to eternity by hatred, ignorance or greed in their pursuit of justice. Although written at an historic crossroads of controversy and confrontation in U.S. history, its power is no less compelling or applicable to our brothers and sisters in struggle throughout the world today who refuse to be silent in the face of deadly repression. It applies with equal force to those of us who throw caution to the wind in the intractable but necessary age-old battle between those who resist oppression and do so with every breath that is theirs to breathe, and those who impose it.

To the children of Oslo and all our sons and daughters of rebellion no matter where they fight, or have, the epic words of Langston Hughes are eternal and stand for all of us as a proud beacon of hope:

For Kids Who Die

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don’t want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

Listen, kids who die—
Maybe, now, there will be no monument for you
Except in our hearts
Maybe your bodies will be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field,
Or the rivers where you’re drowned like Leibknecht
But the day will come—
You are sure yourselves that it is coming—
When the marching feet of the masses
Will raise for you a living monument of love,
And joy, and laughter,
And black hands and white hands clasped as one,
And a song that reaches the sky—
The song of the life triumphant
Through the kids who die.

In its first full week of a “new” get tough policy, almost 500 young Palestinian demonstrators were injured, shot and maimed, and at least three teens murdered in response to what Israel sees as a rising tide of “militant” resistance against the illegally occupied and, by now, almost completely annexed West Bank. At the same time, the IOF has not only increased its already frequent bombing runs in the embattled, largely defenseless Gaza Strip, but tightened it’s concentration-camp like grip on 1.8 million civilians, reducing even further the trickle of essential goods, food shipments and medicines permitted into the beleaguered territory which has long been central to its criminal policy of collective punishment. Indeed, in Gaza it’s clear that for years civilians have been Israel’s primary targets whether by killing or simply terrorizing them through the destruction of the economic infrastructure of its civilian society. In the years since it was forced to abandon it’s illegal settlements in Gaza with an Hamas government freely elected, Israel has retaliated with applied ruthless psychological pressure and the intentional infliction of physical suffering and destruction of civilian property directed primarily at women, children and the elderly, to punish them for the decisions of their elected government. The cornerstone of this policy has been to mete out cruel punishment that demands of the impoverished enclave, long and expensive reconstruction processes well beyond its ability to absorb.

While Abu Mazen and company continue to posture in what has become by now a yearly ritual played out by the Palestinian Authority of “what’s in it for us,” many thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets throughout Palestine, most notably in Quds, Bethlehem and Tulkarim, in what is now being called the third intifada, or uprising. With the full closure of Al Aqsa, a massive IOF presence throughout the West bank ,including in Ramallah (the seat of PA “political power”, and in Nablus where hundreds of young demonstrators, most in their teens, have been rounded up in the streets or dragged away from their homes in the middle of the night only to be detained indefinitely without formal charges or proceedings with any rights of consequence.

This did not have to happen. Had Exxon been honest and forthright about the dangers inherent in the mass drilling and burning of fossil fuels, humanity might have started decades ago to develop a less carbon-intensive energy system and thereby to avert the multiple catastrophes that beckon today. Shockingly enough, politicians today are still debating the reality and causes of climate change. And we can thank Exxon for that, to no small extent. By the late 1980s, when global warming (something that academic and government and academic scientists started warning policymakers about in the 1960s) became an observed fact, Exxon falsely claimed that science on the causes of climate change was highly uncertain. Nobody really knew if the climate was really changing or what was causing the change if such change was in fact occurring, Exxon insisted. Never mind that its own internally generated scientific evidence showed otherwise.

Exxon did not merely understand the science that contradicted its propaganda, it contributed to that science. Ever since the waning days of the Reagan administration Exxon has been actively undermining its own findings – this even as the data has mounted on climate change’s anthropogenic (capitalogenic) nature and lethality and while the scientific community has started speaking out on the supreme danger with rising urgency and even desperation. Along the way, it has set the climate-denial tone for the rest of the leading oil corporations and portrayed itself as a friend of the environment.

The evil involved in all this is almost beyond belief. As the Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes recently wrote in The New York Times, the rich and powerful firm Exxon not only denied its own findings but also set the deadly propaganda tone for the broader industry

“Exxon had a choice. As one of the most profitable companies in the world, Exxon could have acted as a corporate leader, helping to explain to political leaders, to shareholders and institutional investors, and to the public what it knew about climate change. It could have begun to shift its business model, investing in renewables and biofuels or introducing a major research and development initiative in carbon capture. It could have endorsed sensible policies to foster a profitable transition to a 21st-century energy economy….Instead — like the tobacco industry — Exxon chose the path of disinformation, denial and delay. More damagingly, the company set a model for the rest of the industry. More than 30 years ago, Exxon scientists acknowledged in internal company memos that climate change could be catastrophic. Today, scientists who say the exact same thing are ridiculed in the business community and on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.”

And that’s why I cannot completely escape the dream-like image of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson (a leading force behind Exxon’s climate denial efforts since the 1990s) and other top oil executives being marched up to the gallows in the wake of a world Ecocide Trial. Let the ropes be short and the trapdoor narrow. And then let us return to the bigger and technically feasible task at hand: a comprehensive conversion to renewable energy and a sustainable economy and society before it’s too late.

Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees—a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical." In other words, Exxon needed to act.

...... But, by citing the Liberal sponsored Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to justify Canadian participation in the US-led bombing, these pundits are revealing the essence of this “humanitarian imperialist” doctrine.

The truth is, human rights rhetoric aside, R2P is an effort to redefine international law to better serve the major powers. While the less sophisticated neoconservatives simply call for a more aggressive military posture, the more liberal supporters of imperialism prefer a high-minded ideological mask to accomplish the same end. Those citing R2P to pressure Trudeau to continue bombing Iraq-Syria are demonstrating an acute, but cynical, understanding of the doctrine.

But don’t expect R2P proponents to discuss Libya today. “Since Col Gaddafi’s death in Sirte in October 2011,” the BBC reported in August, “Libya has descended into chaos, with various militias fighting for power.” ISIS has taken control of parts of the country while a government in Tripoli and another in Benghazi claim national authority. The foreign intervention delivered a terrible blow to Libya and has exacerbated conflicts in the region.

Canadian officials also cited R2P to justify cutting off assistance to Haiti’s elected government and then intervening militarily in the country in February 2004. In discussing the January 2003 Ottawa Initiative on Haiti, where high level US, Canadian and French officials discussed overthrowing elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Liberal Secretary of State for Latin America and Minister for La Francophonie Dennis Paradis explained that “there was one thematic that went under the whole meeting… The responsibility to protect.” Similarly, in a highly censored February 11, 2004 cable from the embassy in Port-au-Prince to Foreign Affairs, Canadian ambassador Kenneth Cook explained that “President Aristide is clearly a serious aggravating factor in the current crisis” and that there is a need to “consider the options including whether a case can be made for the duty [responsibility] to protect.”

Thousands of Haitians were killed in the violence unleashed by the coup and the country remains under UN military occupation.

It’s telling that neo-conservative supporters of the discredited Harper government are now the ones invoking R2P.

On n October 6, the finance ministers, central bankers and development ministers from 188 countries convened for the Annual Meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Lima, Peru. The yearly gathering is one of the top scheduled events on the calendar of economic diplomats, bringing them together for private discussions, seminars and press conferences with journalists. And of course it's a big deal for the thousands of private bankers and financiers who are there to cut deals with the chief financial policymakers in those 188 IMF-member nations.

The IMFC’s communiqué following its meeting warned that global economic growth was “modest and uneven” with increased “uncertainty and financial market volatility.” Risks to the global economy “have increased,” it noted, in particular for emerging markets.

Apart from the IMFC and G20, a number of other important meetings took place on the sidelines of the annual gathering, many of which prominently featured bankers. One of the most important gatherings of global financiers was the Annual Membership Meeting of the Institute of International Finance (IIF), a consortium of roughly 500 global financial institutions including banks, asset managers, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, central banks, credit ratings agencies and development banks.

But the true importance of the annual IMF meetings is not what happens in formal proceedings and seminars, but the various secret meetings of finance ministers, central bankers and private financiers that take place on the sidelines of the official conference. In these closed-door events, a select group of government and monetary officials, primarily those from the G7 and G20 nations, were invited to wine and dine with bankers at decadent dinners and lavish parties, and speak to private gatherings of the world’s top investors and money managers. It's here, in these various meetings, where the world’s chief financial diplomats were able to meet, greet and receive praise or criticism from their true constituents: the global financial elite.

These individuals' main interactions were not with the populations in their home nations – the people who suffer under austerity, who have to "adjust" to the restructuring of their societies into "market economies" – but rather with those from whom they have the most to gain: bankers, billionaires and financiers. And rest assured, when the officials retire from their central bank and finance ministry positions, they will be stepping out of their membership in the G7, G20 and IMFC, and into the boardrooms of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Barclays and Deutsche Bank. They will be well rewarded, with large salaries and bonuses for a job well done while in public office. And the revolving door of global economic governance will keep turning.

If we were to believe the fairy tales of capitalism, we would have to believe that 500 multi-billionaires work harder than the entire population of Japan. OK, I know that sounds crazy, but that is nothing more than following capitalist ideology to its intended conclusion: The wealthy are wealthy because their worked harder than you.

The 500 richest people on Earth are worth a collective US$4.7 trillion, Forbes magazine breathlessly informs us, and that total is a little more than the gross domestic product of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy.

The 20 richest people alone are worth a collective $900 billion! There are only 16 countries on Earth that have a larger gross domestic product than that. Quite a feat — 20 people possess slightly more assets than what is produced in an entire year by the 250 million people of Indonesia or the 17 million people of the Netherlands, one of the most highly productive peoples among the world’s advanced capitalist countries.

So these people must work awfully hard to accumulate such riches, right? Let us see: .....

Thus, the era of corporate globalization promises more inequality. In your next life, work harder to be born into the right family.

Just five days after it was revealed that former British Prime Minster Tony Blair and then President George W. Bush had made a pact to attack Iraq and overthrow the country’s sovereign government a full year before the invasion took place – as Blair continued to mislead government and populace stating that diplomacy was being pursued and no decisions made – another snake has slithered from under the hay (as the Arab saying goes) in the form of Sir Jeremy Heywood.

Sir Jeremy, who has been unkindly dubbed “Sir Cover Up” by sections of the media, is Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Secretary, thus the UK’s top Civil Servant.

However:

Sources close to the Iraq Inquiry claim it was held up for months while chairman Sir John Chilcot argued with Sir Jeremy about which documents could be put in the public domain.

In the end, Sir Jeremy insisted that 150 messages between Tony Blair and George Bush in the run-up to the 2003 war must be censored. Only the ‘gists’ of the messages and selected quotes will be released. (Emphasis mine.)

The Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, told BBC Newsnight that Blair could see a war crimes trial over the “illegal Iraq invasion.”

www.arrestblair.org established by journalist George Monbiot “offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against the peace.” So far five credible attempts have been made and around £13,000 paid out.

As events are unfolding there may soon be no more wriggle room for all those involved in the lies and cover ups. Their Nuremberg may yet await. It is owed to those who lost their lives for a pack of lies. For the people of Iraq it is a sacred accounting, a debt of ultimate honour and a woefully inadequate apology which might at least demand reparations.

One day I heard two soldiers complaining when a sergeant intervened with “You shouldn’t have volunteered.” The two quickly pointed out they were drafted, insisting they didn’t volunteer. The sergeant returned, “You could have gone to prison, you could have committed suicide, but no, you volunteered.” Many, of course, “volunteer” because they are poor and have no other place to go.

As a combat veteran, I understand war from the inside. I have seen the suffering and wonder how it is that “winners” can be declared in wars. It seems to me that everyone loses except the capitalists, who appear to love war– the wars are fought, after all, for them

In every war there are writers who warn us of the consequences, some of the most beautiful writing existing.

A favorite of mine is Mark Twain’s The War Prayer. It captures, in very few words, the truth about war– that there is horror for those involved in place of the romance our leaders and corporate media portray. Every young student should be required to read it, as a counter to the ridiculous history our schools propagandize to the young, with their romanticized wars for “freedom” and “democracy,” things our ruling Establishment, in truth, despise and do not allow anywhere, as much as possible.