This time it was Brussels. Europe has become a battlefield in which terrorists can roam free and undetected. Of course we mourn the victims. But it is way past the time to talk honestly – Europe’s experiment with limited sovereignty is negligent and endangers citizens. And NATO’s conflicts of choice in the Middle East generate war refugees, migrants, but also terrorists of all kinds. It is time for action.
CrossTalking with Pepe Escobar, Gilbert Doctorow, and John Laughland.
Soldiers patrol in the streets of Brussels as the Belgian capital remains on the highest possible alert level. (Photo: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP)
By Alexander Mercouris
These terrorist attack now happen in Europe with the regularity of clockwork. In 2015 Paris witnessed two. Now it is the turn of Brussels.
The pattern of response to each of these terrorist attacks is always the same. Western governments express shock and outrage. Security is tightened. The weeks pass and everything goes back to what it was before.
Never is any discussion allowed of Western policies that might have played a role in creating conditions for the terrorist attacks.
The policies are those the Western powers have followed in the Middle East for decades.
The first is the failure to promote a viable solution to the long running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The second is the disastrous policy of regime change Western governments have pursued in the Middle East since 2000.
The third is the West’s habit of manipulating local jihadi terrorists in order to achieve its geopolitical goals.
The key Western country is the US and though its key allies — Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Turkey — have all played their part it is to the US that one must look for a rethink.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed difficult. However the reason it has festered for so long — poisoning the whole Middle East in the process — is because the US has never really sought a solution to it.
Instead of being genuinely even-handed it has tilted towards Israel, in the process strengthening the hardliners within Israel whilst undermining those many Israelis who support a compromise.
The regime change policy meanwhile involves overthrowing those very Middle Eastern governments that have been the major force of stability in the region. This despite the fact that most of them were or wanted to be the US’s friends.
President Putin set out the consequences in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly:
“Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention rashly destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.”
The chaos has in turn created a power vacuum the jihadis have filled.
Whereas in 2000 the jihadis were an isolated fringe, today they control territories the size of countries and have a presence in every state of the Middle East and beyond.
Worse still despite all the evidence of their anti-Western violence the Western powers seem incapable of dropping their habit of trying to manipulate them.
We are now seeing this most starkly in Syria and Yemen where the Western powers have effectively allied themselves with Al-Qaeda affiliates in their battle to overthrow local secular governments as part of the regime change policy.
This is a pattern which goes back all the way to the catastrophic policy of supporting violent jihadis to overthrow the secular Soviet backed government of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
As President Putin also put it in his speech to the UN General Assembly:
“It is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade.”
It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you’ll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them.
I’d like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it’s a big question: who’s playing who here?
This is the sort of clear-headed thinking that is needed if the very real threat jihadi terrorists pose is to be overcome.
It is a bitter truth that in the West it is nowhere to be found. Until it is the risk jihadi terrorists pose will not go away and all the protestations of shock and outrage we will shortly hear from Western governments following the latest terrorist attacks in Brussels will amount to nothing.
Source: Sputnik International
The Afghan tradition of recruiting young boys for sex.
In Afghanistan’s male-dominated society women face many restrictions. Among the many prohibitions, they are not allowed to go to parties or dance. That female social vacuum has led to an old tradition of “bachas” – dancing boys who dance in women’s clothes at men-only parties but the boy’s job description involves more than dancing. After the party, the men choose their favourite boy for sex. Premarital sex is forbidden for women so many men seek the company of rent boys. Here, sex with a boy considered less of a sin than having sex with an unmarried woman, and male child prostitution is seen as a lesser evil than women selling their bodies.
Often, boys who need to feed their families become bachas from as young as 12. Some continue for years, while for others, it’s a temporary occupation. The practice is illegal in modern Afghanistan, officially, but the men who keep and recruit bachas, known as “playboys”, are well connected and rich, essentially placing them beyond the law. Besides, it’s a long-standing tradition that is unlikely to go away any time soon. In fact, it appears to be undergoing a revival.
In poverty-stricken Afghanistan, where women are forbidden to work, making men the only breadwinners, boys often have to provide for their families from a very young age. Many are tempted by the money that being a bacha can give them while their families are often too busy trying to survive, to object, or even notice where the money comes from.
RT Doc goes to Afghanistan to ask how the bachas became rent boys and goes to a private party where the boys dance and meet their customers. Boys, handlers and punters all speak openly about this outlawed, yet widely practiced, sexual tradition.
Source: RT Documentary Channel Films
The third and last documentary film in the Zeitgeist series.
While the majority of the world today have slowly come to see some basic flaws in the economic system we share, as large scale debt defaults, inflation, industrial pollution, resource depletion, rising cancer rates and other signposts emerge to bring the concern into the realm of “public health” overall, very few however consider the economic paradigm as a whole as the source. The tendency is to demand reform in one area or another, avoiding the possibility that perhaps the entire system is intrinsically flawed at the foundational level. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward presents the case that it is, indeed, the very foundational mechanics of this system that generates the patterns of behavior and unsustainable methods of conduct that are leading to the vast spectrum of detrimental consequences both personal, social, and environmental and the longer they go on, the worse things will become.
Top Russia Scholar Stephen F. Cohen – the Man the US Should Be Listening to on Russia.
The Obama administration’s and NATO’s recent ramp up of forces on the Russian border has raised many questions on why the mainstream media and the presidential campaigns have failed to acknowledge the growing military presence in the region. RT’s Ed Schultz speaks with Stephen F. Cohen, professor and author of The Nation article called “The Obama Administration Recklessly Escalates Confrontation With Russia,” about the situation.
Roger Waters: ‘I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite’ (Getty Images)
American musicians who support boycotting Israel over the issue of Palestinian rights are terrified to speak out for fear their careers will be destroyed, according to Roger Waters.
The Pink Floyd star – a prominent supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel since its inception 10 years ago – said the experience of seeing himself constantly labelled a Nazi and anti-Semite had scared people into silence.
“The only response to BDS is that it is anti-Semitic,” Waters told The Independent, in his first major UK interview about his commitment to Israeli activism. “I know this because I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years.
“My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel]. There’s me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street Preachers, one or two others, but there’s nobody in the United States where I live. I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared s***less.
“If they say something in public they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed. I’m hoping to encourage some of them to stop being frightened and to stand up and be counted, because we need them. We need them desperately in this conversation in the same way we needed musicians to join protesters over Vietnam.”
Waters likened Israeli treatment of Palestinians to apartheid South Africa. “The way apartheid South Africa treated its black population, pretending they had some kind of autonomy, was a lie,” he said.
“Just as it is a lie now that there is any possibility under the current status quo of Palestinians achieving self-determination and achieving, at least, a rule of law where they can live and raise their children and start their own industries. This is an ancient, brilliant, artistic and very humane civilisation that is being destroyed in front of our eyes.”
Full article at The Independent
Discussion published on Nov 3, 2014, but just as relevant today as back then.
What is Washington’s strategy against the Islamic State? Is the Islamic State a creation of the United States? Is the war on terror really a war on Islam? Will the US make amends with Iran in order to defeat the Islamic State? What is Wahington’s endgame?
CrossTalking with Ken O’Keefe, Majid Rafizadeh, and Peter van Buren.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis (image: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty)
By Pepe Escobar
Seven months after resigning as the finance minister of Greece, self-described “erratic Marxist” Yanis Varoufakis is resurfacing (out of the Aegean Sea?) with a bang.
This past Tuesday, at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin, Varoufakis launched a new project: the DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), whose aim is to ultimately transfer power from Europa’s unaccountable, fiercely authoritarian elite and distribute it – fairly – among European citizens.
Greek myth? Why not? And exactly when Europa badly needs a new foundation myth. Varoufakis bets that the movement will eventually reach a “basic consensus” on what to do to really introduce democratic practices into how the European behemoth is run. And then, onwards to parliamentary democracy, via elections.
The diagnostic by Varoufakis would resonate among every sound minded EU citizen. It features unaccountable European elites; “big finance” and “big industry” forming the “unholy cartel” that is the “main driver of EU policy”; the European Central Bank (ECB) propping up the “cartel” by printing money like there’s no tomorrow through quantitative easing (QE); Italy as the new Greece, suffocated by its debt repayments; the fallacy of the theoretically apolitical ECB controlling interest rates across vastly disparate countries; and the Mafia behavior of the Eurogroup (comprising the 19 finance ministers of eurozone members).
Not surprisingly, the fallacy of this “model” of running the eurozone has produced devastating unemployment and facilitated the rise and rise and rise of the extreme right.
The concept of DiEM25 is inspired by what people across Europe should have done in the 1930s, before the ascension of Nazism and fascism; a pan-European, trans-political democratic movement. Varoufakis identifies all the toxic trends of the 1930s in the current, abysmal turmoil engulfing Europa.
He wants DiEM25 to be more than “just a think-tank and… an internet community”.
At the same time he’d like the movement to be essentially leaderless. And there’s the rub; Europa may not need heroes, but as it stands it definitely needs true leaders.
Full article at RT Op-Edge
The pseudo-documentary film World War Three: Inside the War Room was described in advance by the BBC as a ‘war game’ detailing the minute by minute deliberations of the country’s highest former defense and security officials facing an evolving crisis involving Russia. What gave unusual realism and relevance to their participation is that they were speaking their own thoughts, producing their own argumentation, not reading out lines handed to them by television script writers.
The mock crisis to which they were reacting occurs in Latvia as the Kremlin’s intervention on behalf of Russian speakers in the south of this Baltic country develops along lines of events in the Donbas as from the summer of 2014. When the provincial capital of Daugavpils and more than twenty towns in the surrounding region bordering Russia are taken by pro-Russian separatists, the United States calls upon its NATO allies to deliver an ultimatum to the Russians to pull back their troops within 72 hours or be pushed out by force. This coalition of the willing only attracts the British. After the deadline passes, the Russians ‘accidentally’ launch a tactical nuclear strike against British and American vessels in the Baltic Sea, destroying two ships with the loss of 1200 Marines and crew on the British side. Washington then calls for like-for-like nuclear attack on a military installation in Russia, which, as we understand, leads to full nuclear war.
The show was aired on 3 February by BBC Two, meaning it was directed at a domestic audience, not the wider world. However, in the days since its broadcast it has attracted a great deal of attention outside the United Kingdom, more in fact than within Britain. The Russians, in particular, adopted a posture of indignation, calling the film a provocation. In his widely watched weekend wrap-up of world news, Russia’s senior television journalist Dimitri Kiselev devoted close to ten minutes denouncing the BBC production. He cited one participant (former UK Ambassador to Russia Sir Tony Brenton) expressing pleasure at the idea of ‘killing tens of thousands of Russians.’ This segment was later repeated on Vesti hourly news programs during the past week. Kiselev asked rhetorically how the British would react if Moscow produced a mirror image show from its War Room.
Full article at Russia Insider
Watch the full documentary here, or download the torrent file from here.
The documentary I posted last week (Kiev: The Masks of Revolution), unfortunately turned out to be the wrong one. Not that it’s a bad film, but here’s the right one below with English subtitles. Sorry for the confusion 🙂
In Kiev’s Independence Square, a battle rages on between a makeshift army of Molotov cocktail-throwing protesters who are demanding the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovich and his government, and a phalanx of black-clad Berkut state riot police. The protesters insist that their country has been betrayed by a corrupt government that has chosen to align itself with Russia and halt Ukraine’s aspiration to build closer ties with the European Union. However, as the death toll continues to rise and smoke from the flames of burning vehicles hangs over the very heart of the capital, many questions are left unanswered. Just who are these protesters, and why is “Euromaidan” so much more ugly and violent than the Orange Revolution of nine years ago? What role is the ultra-nationalist “Right Sector” playing in this uprising, and who is paying for its expenses?
Against the Grain 