Getting Away With Murder Britain to Protect its War Criminals

Every Empire is guilty of war crimes. Executing enemy combatants on the battlefield. Destroying hospitals, watercourses, and infrastructure. Carpet bombing cities. Murdering civilians. Torture. Raping men, women, and children. Starving the enemy into submission. Genocide. Mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing.

The British Empire was no different.

From North America to Australia. From New Zealand to Zimbabwe. From Ireland to Palestine, Britain has been accused of heinous war crimes against indigenous populations while extracting the wealth, minerals, and natural resources of those countries it occupied.

Through military occupation, colonization, and financial supremacy, empires have built vast fortunes, accrued in many countries, while the people’s culture and habitats have been destroyed.

By 1913 the British Empire ruled 23% of the world’s surface and 412 million of its people. A quarter of the globe.

Rarely if ever have these empires been held to account. To the victors go the spoils of war. The winners rewrite history and glorify their achievements in terms of morality, religion, or humanity.

Wars are always about power, money, and profit.

The establishment runs for the enrichment of the few.

We have gone from slavery to zero-hour contracts and the minimum wage.

Those who claim to rule in our name are ofttimes profiteers and corrupt self-serving politicians and monarchies.

They say the first casualty of war is truth.

When governments use propaganda to manipulate the public discourse for war such as the false claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq the truth is simply ignored, hidden, spun, or abandoned.

The truth is what your government tells you to be the truth.

With complicit media and compliant corporations, the truth is disguised and the lie becomes reality.

Malcolm X, famously said, ‘If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people doing the oppressing.’

Britain stands accused of numerous war crimes in the Northeast of Ireland.

Between 1969 and 1998 the British government was at war with the Irish Republican Army and the community from which it drew its support and legitimacy.

Having partitioned Ireland in 1920-1921, the scene was set for a national war of liberation, by the indigenous people, against foreign military occupation and an imposed colonial settler regime.

In 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, many Republicans eschewed the right to resort to armed resistance, to remove the last vestiges of British imperialism in Ireland. They agreed to transition to political action only and to accept a vote for the possible reunification of Ireland at some future unspecified date.

As part of this process, a legacy consultation was begun.

The British army, its locally recruited militia, the Ulster Defence Regiment, its locally recruited police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary now the Police Service of Northern Ireland and its myriad of intelligence services, undercover troops, and informers stand accused of murder, torture, assassinations, political killings and much much more.

The Ballymurphy massacre in West Belfast was perpetrated by the British Paratroop Regiment between 9 -11 August 1971, when Internment without trial was visited upon the Irish people in the North of Ireland.

600 British troops descended on the small community of Ballymurphy and over the course of three days, they shot dead ten civilians while another suffered a fatal heart attack.

The same regiment in Derry on Sunday 30 January 1972 murdered 14 civilians taking part in a peaceful civil rights march.

The Miami Showband killings occurred on 31 July 1975.

A group of musicians traveling home was stopped by a military checkpoint. The soldiers detained the band members while two members of the patrol attempted to plant a bomb on board the minibus under the driver’s seat.

The bomb exploded prematurely killing two of the would-be assassins. The killers were actually members of a notorious murder squad known as the ‘Glenane Gang’ responsible for up to 120 deaths of mainly Catholics and nationalists.

The gang was made up of Police officers and UDR soldiers who were inextricably connected to British military intelligence operations.

When the bomb went off prematurely the decision was made to assassinate the band members.

The sole survivor Stephen Travers whom the gang thought they had murdered, was able to tell an investigation into this heinous crime, that the gang was led by a man with a strong military bearing and British accent.

He believed the bomb was designed to explode as the band continued its journey home.

The blame was to be placed on the band themselves or perhaps the Irish Republican Army.

Pat Finucane a civil rights lawyer was gunned down in front of his family while having their Sunday dinner on 12 February 1989.

Throughout the history of the ‘troubles’ from 1969-1998 persistent rumours of collusion between the state, its security forces, and loyalist terror gangs have surfaced on a regular basis.

Margaret Thatcher, Former British Prime Minister stood accused by the Nationalist/Republican community of “a shoot to kill” policy towards their members.

The indiscriminate use of plastic bullets and deaths caused by the army and police have been a constant source of bitter recrimination. State death squads are something more readily associated with Latin American dictatorships than a European democracy yet those accusations persist.

David Cameron in June 2010 in a prepared statement from the British House of Commons finally acknowledged that all those killed on 30 January 1972 were wholly innocent civilians. He made a formal apology on behalf of the government for the ‘unjustified and unjustifiable killings’ as reported in the Guardian newspaper.

Yet for decades the official Inquiries found those murdered had been armed terrorists and nail bombers.

Only this year after 5 decades, did a coroners court in Belfast in 2021, finally tell the world what the families and friends of those murdered in 1971 in Ballymurphy already knew.

They too were fully vindicated as being unarmed and not a threat to the British soldiers when they were killed. Calls have continued for a full and frank investigation into the murder of Pat Finucane. An inquiry has never been held.

We did not witness the actions of British soldiers running amok in Belfast, Derry, and Armagh.

We have seen the systematic use of force by the British state against its perceived enemies and the community from which they came.

While victims and families were hoping for closure and justice, the British government was proposing legislation that would effectively give the soldiers who committed war crimes against the Irish people, their officers, commanders, and political masters immunity from prosecution.

They were proposing that further investigations would not be mandated. No further inquests by the courts or prosecutions by the state would be forthcoming.

That journalistic investigations which may throw light upon some of these murders may become illegal?

The government is not just absolving the soldier’s, police, military, and intelligence services of all its war crimes but the British government too.

This is unprecedented.

War crimes should have no moratorium. No statute of limitations. No amnesty for state murderers?

In 2013 Leigh Day acted on behalf of 5000 Kenyans who were subjected to torture, castration, rape, and brutality at the hands of the British Colonial administration.

The British government paid out 19.9 million pounds in compensation to its victims.

The British government wants to whitewash the history of its crimes in Ireland.

They have also proposed legislation that would prevent any further claims of compensation or prosecutions for those involved in British war crimes overseas to include Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the British Empire might have crumbled into dust and its only foreign aggression is at the behest of the United States, united in continuing to use military imperialism for resource theft in other sovereign nations. We should not, indeed we must not let these war crimes go unpunished.

We demand the truth. We demand justice. We demand accountability. We demand prosecutions.

No Justice No Peace!

Israeli Omnipotence and Those Eleven Days in May

Israel” projects its omnipotence throughout west Asia and the Middle East. The quality of having unlimited or very great power.

This power is derived from the political and the financial support given to “Israel” by Europe and America.

While the American taxpayer subsidises “Israel” to the tune of 3.8 billion dollars per year, which helps heavily cover the cost of healthcare and education in “Israel”. America has a rising homeless population estimated to be around 600,000 and 1.5 million, no clean water in Flint Michigan and stands accused of a continuing systemic racial war against its afro American citizens.

Europe which extends “Israel” preferential trading status has many universities collaborating with Israeli research ventures. It gives political cover for “Israel’s” perpetual annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the illegal ongoing siege on Gaza.

The mainstream media continues with the decades-long narrative that “Israel” is a small embattled enclave under constant threat of violent destruction from its regional neighbours and needs all the moral, physical and financial resources it can amass to prevent its imminent destruction.

“Israel” has one of the best-equipped armies in the region and militarily occupies Palestinian territory in the West Bank. The Palestinians in Gaza have no army, no air force and no navy to protect themselves from Israeli tanks, fighter jets, attack helicopters, gunboats and nuclear submarines.

The Jewish National Fund has been buying land in Palestine from 1901 onward, encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine. The land bought in particular from absentee Ottoman Turkish landlords was used for Jewish migrants to work the land, build homes and colonise the landscape.

These purchases continued through 1914-1918 when Palestine came under the rule of the British Empire after Turkey’s defeat in the First World War.

These continual flows of Jews thrived under British encouragement with the signing of the secret Balfour Declaration that would permit a Jewish homeland to be created inside the land of Palestine.

The changing demographics and the instability brought by migrants resulted in riots in Jerusalem in the 1920s. The displaced Jewish community refused to integrate with their host nation and continued to build civil structures that would eventually partition Palestine and create a Jewish homeland on the broken dreams, broken bones and broken bodies of the indigenous population.

After the Second World War 1939-1945, a shadow government had been formed by the Jewish terrorist organisations of the Stern gang, the Hagenah and the Irgun. “Israel” was then created by the partition of Palestine via the United Nations. The new “state of Israel” was granted 52% of the land and subsequently expelled by force 750,000 Palestinians. Forced expulsion and genocides were perpetrated against Palestinian people:  the Nakba or Great Catastrophe. Many fled to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Gaza, Jordan and throughout the world. Many of the Palestinian descendants are still living in refugee camps in west Asia and the Middle East waiting to return home, to re-join towns, cities and farms as guaranteed by UN resolution 194. The Israeli government which allows Jews from any nation in the world to immigrate to “Israel”, yet it refuses to allow Palestinians the right of return.

Again in 1967, during the six-day war launched by “Israel” to preserve its military advantage in the region. In an unprovoked war, the remainder of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza were illegally occupied together, with the Golan heights in Syria.

From 1967, “Israel” has systematically colonised The Palestinian Territories, continuing to expel Palestinians from their homes and their land while appropriating their culture.

“Israel” is not the hapless victim it portrays itself to be. It is a political cancer in the host body of west Asia and the Middle East, and like all cancers, if it is not removed it will destroy the host.

‘Israel’ is among the leading armies in the world. It has a population of 8.8 million million. Without American and EU military and financial support, “Israel” would be forced to stop discriminating against the indigenous Palestinian population.

Enter peaceful trade negotiations and nonaggressive treaties with its partners in the region?

It can be argued that “Israel’s” bullying and provocative actions are a direct consequence of its birth parents, the UK and USA that support “Israel” unconditionally.

The occupation of the West Bank is illegal. The siege on Gaza is illegal.

Settling Israeli citizens into newly constructed colonies is illegal under the 4th Geneva convention.

The settlements are illegal.

The theft of Palestinian land is illegal.

Denying the right of Palestinians to obtain medical treatment is illegal.

The continued aggression towards Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran are all illegal.

Bombing Damascus is an illegal act of war. “Israel” routinely targets Syria, and deploys efforts to support Daesh groups, Takfirist mercenaries that are illegally occupying large swathes of  the Syrian territory, in a proxy war that involves America, the EU, Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.

The entire destabilisation of west Asia and the Middle East can be left at the door of the creation of yet another white European colonisation project. This is not in America or Africa but in Palestine.

The comparison between what is happening now in the region is reminiscent of the white European colonization of North America and Canada. The indigenous populations were occupied, then ethnically cleansed, dispossessed and finally marginalised to the point of extinction. The same colonial usurpation occurred in Australia and New Zealand.

Indeed the Wild West forts, homesteads and colonisation were the templates for “Israel’s” annexation and absorption of the occupied West Bank. The only difference was the century during which these devastating occupations occurred.

From the Wild West to the Middle East, the same colonial mind-set is at work. “Israel” may seem omnipotent, all-powerful and invincible. Indeed it is the only country in the region that possesses a nuclear arsenal, and refuses to publicly acknowledge. 

“Israel” was defeated in 1973 when Egypt recaptured the Sinai Peninsula which had been occupied by Israeli army since the 1967 war.

It faced a humiliating defeat due to Hezbollah resistance, when it was forced to retreat from Lebanon under cover of darkness after years of illegal occupation of South Lebanon, although it still occupies the Sheba farms.

The Israeli aggression was mainly designed to fragment and balkanise Arab and Persian neighbours. However, these aggressive and murderous attacks have actually united the opposition that “Israel” was keen to destroy.

With Iranian troops and Hezbollah defending Syria, continuous Israeli aggressions were led against Iran, assassinating its scientists and military leaders. At this level, we have witnessed the emergence of the axis of resistance,

Now Iran, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Hezbollah and more recently with the advancements in Palestinian resistance technology in Gaza, an amazing united opposition against “Israel” has re-emerged.

“Israel” has the military might to confront any country in the region, because its strength is measured by the armament supplied by the American Administration.

While “Israel” hopes to lure America into a military confrontation with Iran with its false flag attacks on maritime shipping in the Gulf by blaming Iran, the possibility of a wider conflict cannot be ruled out.

With Both China and Russia offering support to Iran and Syria, a global explosion could erupt.

By evicting Palestinians from their homes in Sheik Jarrah, “Israel” sets upon peaceful worshipers at Al-Aqsa mosque and the continued Judaification of Al-Quds (Occupied Jerusalem) by the presence of illegal settlers. This provocative policy reignited the Palestinian’s will to resist the Israeli occupation from all parts of the West Bank, Gaza and increasingly Palestinians from inside. It has become clear that “Israel” is not omnipotent.

It is impotent.

Yes, it can bomb Gaza, getting the region back to the middle ages, but it cannot MAKE IT SUBMIT.

It can occupy the Golan Heights and the Sheba Farms but it will not commit ground troops in Lebanon, Gaza or Syria.

It could only launch proxy wars: To bomb civilians from the sky and assassinate from a distance, to carry out low-level attacks on Iran and destabilize Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, but it has neither the capacity nor the courage for a street fight.

11 days in May showed how an occupied unarmed people could resist the might of one of the largest best-equipped armies in the world.

The Palestinians fight every day with stones and rocks against guns, tanks and fighter planes. They suffer innumerable deaths unreported by the West. They watch their sons and daughters having legs shattered by Zionist snipers of the Israeli “defence” forces for daring to stand up against the illegal, apartheid state that occupies and murders them.

Israel’s strength is undeniable yet it has proven a facade.

As long as it is supported and sponsored by its birth parents America and now the EU, it will continue to aggress the neighbouring countries, like a spoiled child to lash out, at all those around it.

Bad behaviour is seemingly rewarded with more bombs, missiles, aircraft and submarines to further bully the neighbourhood.

No one wants further aggression war or destabilisation in the region. The resistance is a strong force for peace and stability.

“Israel” is facing a huge backlash from civil society all over the world. The question is, will it be enough to force the changes the world needs to see peace in West Asia?

Only time will tell.

One thing is for sure, the resistance will have a say in the outcome.

I stand with those who challenge continued Apartheid Israeli aggression.

Bedouin Leaders on UN Day for the Indigenous Call on President Biden to End Military Aid to Egypt

Under the guise of the war on ISIS, President Sisi and the Egyptian army stand accused of ethnically cleansing the indigenous Bedouin population in the Sinaï.

An area at the north of the Gulf of Suez that borders both “Israel” and Gaza. With a population of 500,000, it is at the epicenter of a war between Egyptian governmental forces, ‘Wilayat Sinaï’ ISIS fighters, anti-governmental tribes and pro-government militias. 

The ongoing conflict has seen destruction, death and war crimes allegedly carried out by all these groups.

Many of those have been forced to leave their homes, farms and villages by the Egyptian army who deprived them of their right of return.

Wilayat Sinaï is governed by a separatist Islamist group trying to turn the Sinai into an Islamic Caliphate.

The people who live there want to stay where their families and ancestors have lived and died.

When the tunnels connecting Rafah to Gaza were destroyed by the Egyptian army, the people were told they would be resettled 800 meters away, in reality; they were transferred over 5 kilometers from their homes.

These Bedouin are now internally displaced within the Sinaï.

It is claimed that ISIS has only around 1000 fighters in the area. The Egyptian army led wars – fighting against terrorism – that resulted in a massive increase in civilian casualties estimated at 90%.

It is claimed that America has gone from [USAID] feeding the people, to arming the dictatorship Abdel Fattah El-Sisi with multi-million dollar armaments.

The war on terrorism has destroyed not only many Bedouin lives and the civilian infrastructure, but also the harmony and peace that were previously characterizing the indigenous people’s life.

They do not want to recall the “Holocaust” perpetrated against the indigenous American peoples and other colonized and occupied lands and countries.

The Egyptian army was largely inactive in the Sinaï for decades but with the overthrow of Egypt’s democratically elected government of Muslim Brotherhood Leader President Mohamed Morsi by the American-backed military coup of General Abdel Fattah El -Sisi on July 3, 2013, everything changed.

A previous peace treaty with “Israel” had limited the number of Egyptian troops allowed into the Sinaï, now appears to have been waived and “Israel” stands accused of assisting the Egyptian army in bombing and killing the Beduoin people as well as ISIS fighters.

“The deal of the century” proposed by the Trump administration in 2020 has been used as an excuse to further occupy the Sinaï.

Through the continued marginalization of the Sinaï tribes, combined with a lack of investment in the area contributed to the conflict; and the fact, the people have no voice in governmental policies that represent them has also exacerbated the situation.

This could all be a result of the Egyptian-Israeli agreement that stipulated a demilitarized Sinaï as part of the de-escalation of the Egyptian-Israeli conflict.

The Bedouin might be the most unfortunate victims of this peace deal, which may limit infrastructure projects and the growth of the economy in Sinaï.

The destruction of the tunnels which once linked Sinaï to Gaza, and provided economic benefits to both areas, combined with the brutal repression from the Egyptian military side against the tribes and ISIS simultaneously, we appear to have two separate belligerents facing the Egyptian security forces.

On one hand, ISIS is fighting to create an Islamic presence, and on the other hand,  the tribes are leading in the area an opposition movement in retaliation for the repression of Egyptian forces and governmental neglect.

All Bedouins appear to be bearing the brunt of Egypt’s military campaign. Non-combatant civilians, as usual, are suffering death, injuries and displacements.

Caught between the army and the ‘insurgents’ the people are paying a heavy price.

The government is being accused of bombing complete villages after being attacked by ISIS insurgents, many of whom do not live in the area.

The army is using young new recruits with only limited basic training as cannon fodder to fight ISIS. Once these young men have been killed in contact with enemy fighters, the army destroys the villages from whence the attack came or the bases from which ISIS launched the attacks.

Many ISIS fighters come from neighboring Arab countries.

Eyewitnesses accuse the Egyptian military of forcing families from their dwellings, to then loot those homes while also stealing sheep and farm animals. They finally explode the properties or set fire to them. Many families are then forced to relocate and live with neighbors and friends.

People want an end to these human rights violations, attacks on journalists and carte blanche support for the regime’s crimes in Sinaï, supported by the European Union, “Israel” and Washington.

With the Sinaï being a ‘restricted area’ very little information is available on the numbers killed and injured.

The war has not distinguished between men, women and children; it has simply destroyed the North of Sinaï. 

Some Bedouin claim they are caught between ISIS on the one hand, and the Egyptian army and the West’s war on terror on the other.

The conflict can only end through peaceful dialogue.

If the Egyptian dictatorship could address the underlying conditions that have alienated the Bedouin from Cairo, then perhaps ISIS could be isolated and peace could return to the region.

Continued war in Sinaï will only further alienate the Bedouin from the dictatorship of El-Sisi and lead to further unwanted death and destruction in the region creating more instability and a rise in attacks on government forces and potential support for ISIS.

Repression breeds resistance and while the conflict continues the dynamics change and the justification for violence becomes self-sustaining.

While America, the EU and “Israel” support the El-Sisi dictatorship, peace is a long way off in the geopolitical machinations of the region.

Has the Close Relationship between the PA and “Israel” Blurred the Lines of Separation ?

The Palestinian Authority was brought into existence as part of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accord, negotiated between the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government led by Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin.

Days before the negotiations began, “Israel” recognized the PLO as ‘representative of the Palestinian people and the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized, ‘the state of Israel’.

With these formalities was concluded the Oslo Accords that envisioned the limited transfer of power, from the illegal Israeli run occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The Palestinian Authority would be established afterward, and power then transferred to it, over the following five years.

Limited self-governance for Palestinians was the proposed outcome of the agreement.

Palestinians believed that a two-state solution would be the eventual result, with a “state of Israel” and a state of Palestine peacefully co-existing side by side.

Many Palestinians and others believed the Palestinian Authority was established to act, as a de facto government in waiting.

The negotiations only ever gave limited autonomy to the Palestinians.

“Israel” would continue to militarily protect its illegal settlements, maintain security on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders and retain full control over the land, sea, and air borders of Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority would be financed by America and the European Union alongside donated monies from other Arab countries.

The hope of peace and justice for the region was short-lived.

The proposals allowed for a Palestinian police force and the civil structures required to govern the local population but remained reliant on external donors.

It had no self financing regulation of taxation, and as such, it is subject to the withdrawal of that international aid at the whim of the American and European administrations.

In order to exist, the PA must firstly satisfy the political agenda, not of the Palestinian people it claims to support, but its international benefactors and donors, who have regional political agendas which fully support “Israel” to the detriment of the indigenous peoples of West Asia.

“Israel” is perceived by many as a white European colonization of parts of West Asia and all of Palestine.

It is similar to the white European colonization of North America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, were the indigenous population were first militarily subdued, then killed, with tens of thousands ethnically cleansed from their indigenous lands, fully colonized and then fully marginalized.

Even now they suffer discrimination, from their white political leaders, those descended from the original colonizers who still govern those countries today.

This template is being followed by the Israeli government with its continued expansionist policies.

The growth of the illegal settlements is a testament to Zionist desires to fully colonize Palestine at the expense of the indigenous population.

“Israel” is being built on the broken bones, broken bodies, and broken dreams of the Palestinian people.

Yet “Israel”, is not alone.

With the continuing normalization policy, were some, pro-western Arab states in the region recognize “Israel”, the Palestinian Authority, is now accused of using brutal methods to repress its own people, for the advancement of “Israel’s” ongoing colonization of Palestine.

Zionism defines its main enemies as those who oppose “Israel” and its expansionist policies, either peacefully or militarily.

Palestinians who aspire to a Palestine free from Israeli occupation are perceived as a threat to continued Zionist domination.

Peaceful protestors, along with kids who throw  stones and men who throw rocks are seen as the enemies of “Israel”.

Increasingly over the years, they have become the enemy for the Palestinian Authority.

The PA initially was set up as a shadow government for a Palestinian state which has de-evolved into an organization, that through its security cooperation with “Israel”, acts as a tool of Israeli repression.

The Zionists have helped to create a Palestinian Authority that polices the Palestinian people on behalf of the occupiers and not the occupied.

They sit in consultation with “Israel” yet spurn national reconciliation talks with Hamas.

They refuse to hold elections, recently won by Hamas in 2006 with 44.45% of the vote, electing 74 representatives of the 132 Palestinian Legislative Council. Fatah the Palestinian faction which controls the PA would not endorse the result as they, in effect, lost control of the council.

The Palestinian Authority acts as a guarantor of “Israel’s” security within the borders of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
 
It protects Israeli soldiers, its illegal occupation, and the illegal Zionist settlements.

The PA exists only to oppress its own people in the interests of foreign powers and their foreign policies.

When illegal Israeli occupation soldiers raid Palestinian refugee camps and homes in order to subdue and arrest its inhabitants, where are the PA police to be found?

These paid mercenaries of the PA are restricted to their barracks.

An armed Palestinian force stands idly by while its community is murdered, beaten and tortured daily, dragged off to interrogation centers, Imprisoned on statements made under torture and duress or written in Hebrew which people then sign, informed they are release by papers but are in fact false confessions which condemn them to years in prison. Many of them are young teenagers.

The dream of a Palestinian Authority to rule a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is not what the PA represents.

The PA has an annual budget in 2021 of 360 million dollars from the United States and 34.4 million euros from the European Union.

The money is desperately needed to sustain jobs and the local economy in the West Bank and Gaza.

These monies are viewed by many as a bribe to Fatah, who runs the PA, to isolate, marginalize and sanction Hamas, as they politically challenge Fatah for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people.

The PA stands accused of corruption.

It stands accused of using its budget to promote Fatah above the needs of the Palestinian people.

It stands accused of abandoning Gaza.

Using its military and finance power as leverage over Gazan’s, to withhold wages from civil servants, like teachers and firemen in order to pressurize Hamas.

Egypt and “Israel” are complicit in the siege on Gaza and so to some extent is the PA.

There are historical parallels to be drawn with the actions of today’s Palestinian Authority.

When white European settlers, militarily colonized North America, some of the indigenous natives helped repress their own people.

They joined the ranks of the military oppressors and helped to eliminate their own communities.

In South Africa, another white European colonization was settled, and the indigenous population witnessed the same phenomenon.

Black Africans joined apartheid white police force to suppress their own people.

The Vichy regime in France in World War II not only acted on behalf of the Nazi occupation, it stood accused of sending its own citizens to death camps.

Now the PA through its police and security apparatus has been accused of torturing and killing Palestinians, this is considered a threat to Fatah, and as a threat to “Israel”.

When the oppressed become the oppressor something has gone fundamentally wrong.

The PA is now working on behalf of “Israel”, and in favor of American and EU foreign policy.

If America or the EU cared about Palestinians, it would withhold funding from “Israel”. In 2021, America planned to give “Israel” 3.8 billion dollars on top of the 3.3 billion it gave them last year. Perhaps would it be better if America and the European Union bring Israeli leaders to the Hague for war crimes in Gaza, instead of funding their wars?

America and the EU are not neutral honest brokers in the conflict and neither is the PA.

In fact, they are all working in tandem to further Zionist expansionist policy in Palestine.

Is it time to puncture the facade of the Palestinian Authority and expose its deceit?

Certainly, many sections of Palestinian civil society are now doing just that

Lebanon the fuel trap

Talks are being conducted between Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan to secure an energy supply line from Egypt and Jordan through Syria, onward to Lebanon, to help alleviate the chronic fuel shortages being experienced by this small country of seven million people on the coastline of the Mediterranean sea which has land borders with Israel and Syria.

Lebanon has suffered disproportionately for decades from the tensions, wars, and destabilization of the region since the creation of “Israel” in 1948.

The huge refugee crisis that engulfed Palestine with the expulsion, at the point of Israeli guns of 750,000 indigenous Palestinians led to refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt with a diaspora of nearly 8 million Palestinians scattered all over the globe.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced out of Beirut in 1982 by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The systematic massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that followed left up to 3500 Palestinian / Lebanese civilians murdered by pro-Zionist Falange forces on September 16,1982. This is only one of many atrocities committed during the Lebanese civil war, a war that was encouraged by “Israel”, the EU, and America in order to weaken Lebanon, a country that has not known peace or stability for generations. 

Over the last several years, since Lebanon liberated itself from Israeli military occupation through the resistance of Hezbollah, Lebanon finally appeared to have weathered the storm through a national government of reconciliation.

This government included all sides involved in the civil war and with input from all sections of society. Finally, Lebanon appeared at peace with itself and was building a united prosperous future for all its citizens.

Lebanon has a pivotal role to play in the region.

Having defeated “Israel”, forcing its retreat in the dead of night from occupied Lebanese land, Hezbollah which is a Lebanese Resistance is perceived as a threat to “Israel” and to EU/ American designs on the region.

Hezbollah plays an integral role in Lebanese society through its social welfare programs and in the government.

“Israel”, France, America, Britain, and many others strive night and day to rekindle the old animosities in Lebanon and to reignite the conditions for civil war, to separate Hezbollah from the government to which they have been democratically elected and from wider Lebanese society.

The desired outcome, for “Israel” and the West, is to condemn Lebanon to perpetual conflict with competing and opposite political ideologies tearing the fabric of society apart.

Some are looking again to the West and some looking to the East.

To this end, the government of Lebanon [and the economy] has been brought crashing down.

The catalyst may well have been the explosion at the Beirut docks which killed hundreds and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses.

The people demanded accountability and an end to the perceived corruption that lay at the heart of some government officials.

With the government in crisis, the economy in free fall, inflation, and profiteering rising, it was only a matter of time before the external protagonists, who may well have encouraged and engineered these crises, took full advantage of the situation.

They have demanded concessions from the elected government of Lebanon. They are trying to implement neo-liberal reforms as preconditions on loans from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and others.

What America and “Israel” cannot achieve through military occupation, they are trying to do through financial occupation. That is to control direct and influence sections and policies of the Lebanese government who are elected by, and acting on behalf of the Lebanese people, and not some external anti-Lebanese financial and military cabal.

While Lebanon suffers from chronic shortages of petroleum, gas, and electricity, the external actors are trying to force concessions from the government and the people before allowing order and supply to be reestablished.

The bakeries have been at times unable to produce bread.

These are the conditions that led to violent street disturbances.

When parents cannot feed their children, revolutions are born.

Hezbollah on behalf of those in need in Lebanon has sourced petroleum supplies from Iran that arrived by sea.

While some in Lebanon see Iran as a regional enemy, this strategic lifeline has been welcomed by many across the sectarian divide to include Christians and Muslims.

America which most likely helped create the conditions that Lebanon now finds itself implicated is concerned that the Lebanese are accepting help from Iran.

They have proposed a pipeline from Egypt and Jordan through Syria to Lebanon in order to supply electricity and gas.

This proposal is in direct response to the proffered Iranian aid. 

It is not a humanitarian pipeline. It is a commercial enterprise with gas and electricity flowing in one direction and profits flowing in the other.

This proposed pipeline could make Lebanon vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of national regional and international political agendas.

Will Lebanon become Gaza mark two?

“Israel” decides how much fuel enters Gaza with Egyptian complicity.

They monitor the calorific food intake of Gazans in order to keep them permanently hungry.

They deny imports of medicine and building materials.

They deny exports of Gazan produce in order to impoverish the people.

The Lebanese people should be wary of any proposals that indebt Lebanon to neighboring unfriendly regimes who may simply be waiting to influence the Lebanese government on behalf of “Israel”, the EU, and America.

Lebanon and Syria should strive to build solar energy reserves so they are not held to ransom by external forces over oil gas or electricity needs. 

Energy Resources of the Lebanese coast in Lebanese waters must be fully accessed and utilized. 

When America proposes to help: be very, very wary.

These proposed pipelines can simply be turned off at the flick of a switch.

Lebanon could find itself with four hours of electricity a day, food shortages, and continued imposed American and EU sanctions.

What they give with the right hand they steal it with the left hand. 

Iran, China, Russia, the Belt and Road Eurasian project is the lifeline Lebanon needs.

Everything else is simply shallow window-dressing: a continuation of the corruption so despised by the Lebanese people, false dawn strewn with traps to further destabilize Lebanese national unity

Israel Beyond Beyond Apartheid

Apartheid (/əˈpɑːrt(h)aɪt/, especially South African English: /əˈpɑːrt(h)eɪt/, Afrikaans: [aˈpartɦɛit]; transl. “separateness”, lit. “aparthood”) was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South-West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 until the early 1990s.

20 years on from the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, in conjunction with the International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People, held in Durban South Africa, where are we now?

The use of the law, in this case, an unjust and immoral law in South Africa by the minority white Dutch Afrikaans and the minority white British colonial invaders, was designed to keep white Europeans, in the ascendancy in South Africa.

Thirteen percent of the population who were white-ruled sixty-eight percent of the population who were black with an Asian community representing the remaining nineteen percent.

First, they ruled through a brutal military occupation, using the gun.

Then they ruled through a brutal racist government using repression and separation laws.

It was the use of apartheid laws that legalized and enforced a system of ‘separateness’. A system of dual apartness which left the races unable to socialize, congregate or work together as brothers and sisters, equal and indivisible under the constitution.

In South Africa, they legalized colonial white supremism through parliamentary statute, police enforcement, and judicial sentencing.

The first apartheid law passed in 1949 was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. This was followed by the Immorality Act of 1950 which made it illegal for many South Africans to marry or have sexual relations across racial lines.

The Pass laws were designed to force black people to live in designated areas, corralled as it were, like animals in a pen, thereby making them available as cheap labor for white farmers.

It was the coming to power of the African National Party in 1948 who created the apartheid laws and system of governing South African society, that reinforced the racial discrimination already self-evident in the country. A series of Land Acts gave more than 80% of the land to whites and banned Black crop sharers from working the land.

A series of discriminatory, racially biased laws, saw the permanent separation of the races, alongside a parallel system of separate transport systems, public lavatories, and housing districts.

In effect, the National Party which won the 1948 parliamentary elections on the slogan of Apartheid meaning ‘separateness’ created a privileged white minority class that used the indigenous black South Africans as a labor pool to work on the farms, clean their homes, as a subjugated underclass, kept in perpetual poverty, in appalling substandard housing units in shantytowns with poor education, poor health, and poor social provision.

Like all colonialists, they strove to keep the people apart by fomenting sectarian tensions between the regional ethnic groups in order to prevent a unified opposition to their racist endeavor. They encouraged black-on-black violence in the townships and in the countryside.

A land of milk and honey for the white supremacist colonial invaders beside a land of despair, oppression, and governmental indifference for the natives.

Apartheid lasted for 50 years in South Africa and only officially ended when the ANC, African National Conference which had historically opposed the apartheid system and fought a legitimate war against the unjust white only parliamentary system, finally came to power in 1993, when the majority of citizens were given the right to vote and they elected Nelson Mandela as the first Black President of the Republic of South Africa,

It can be claimed that not much has changed for the indigenous peoples of South Africa, While it is true they have a majority black representative government, the whites still own the land. White farmers still get rich while employing cheap black labor.

The captains of industry are still white although a new elite cadre of black politicians and civil servants may now live in gated (separate) communities, much of the pain of being poor, disenfranchised, and black has changed very little for so many.

A new black capitalist class also rides high above the black dispossessed workers and those who go to bed hungry.

Many observers and organizations make parallels between the apartheid segregated Society of South Africa, the Jim Crow racial segregation laws of North America, and “Israel”. The use of Israeli-only roads and Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank are prime examples of Israeli separation laws.

The discrimination against black African Americans is again reflective of the white European racism that underpins white American society. It is mirrored in the majority of the white legislator, judiciary, police, and army aficionados in power in American civil society and in the corporate, business, and banking sectors.

White Americans control the levers of power and influence, in the media as well as on Capitol Hill.

The continued destruction of black Afro American society through the widespread use of drugs, criminal gangs, poverty, underinvestment, governmental neglect, police brutality, judicial repression, are continued proof if it were needed, that a white European colonial mindset underpins discrimination and racial prejudice in societies where white Europeans want to maintain an internal hegemonic position of superiority which is then reflected in their foreign policies of exploitation and subjugation, in order to maintain white economic privilege in the countries of the EU, North America, Canada, and Australia.

All the countries I have mentioned above are guilty of genocide, racial intolerance, oppression, military adventurism, and ethnic cleansing.

Is “Israel” any different?

“Israel” is a white European colonial settler state.

It has followed all the steps taken by previous white European settler-colonial states such as South Africa, North America, Canada, and Australia,

It has colonized, subjugated, ethnically cleansed, and marginalized the indigenous populations of the country they have militarily conquered and supplanted.

“Israel” has its Nations state Law which many international observers see as a template for a Jewish only Israeli state that separates non-Jews and others from playing an active role in the state.

“Israel” now has usurped 85% of historic Palestine.

To me, apartheid is an abhorrent manifestation of a supremacist ideology that seeks to separate one from the other, to create disharmony, bitterness, hatred, and a divided dysfunctional broken society based on racial or religious purity.

“Israel” fulfills all these roles but it does so much more.

An apartheid state might use the law to discriminate. It may use the law to repress and isolate those it seeks to subdue but it doesn’t bomb kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and bakeries, does it?

It may have separate roads and separate housing areas but it doesn’t shoot countless children in the legs for throwing stones or bringing water to the kids resisting an illegal occupation, creating crippled boys, does it?

It does not shoot paramedics and leave the wounded to bleed out on the street to die, does it?

It does not murder physicists in another jurisdiction, indiscriminately bomb bridges and civil infrastructure in neighboring countries, does it?

It does not count the calorific intake of those it is legally responsible for, to break their will to resist, to withhold food, medicine, vaccines, fuel in order to impoverish and emasculate an entire population of 1.8 million people, does it?

It does not bomb neighboring countries that are not at war with it, deny building permits to the indigenous population while simultaneously dismantling their homes in a land you are illegally occupying, and forcing homes owners to destroy their properties. To detain citizens under Administrative detention, internment without trial. To murder, maim, imprison, torture, and kill at will with impunity, is this Apartheid? I think not. Yet these are the everyday actions of a rogue unaccountable state immune to international law and international sanctions, actively supported protected, and facilitated by the other white European ethnic colonies that Israel aspires to be.

“Israel” is Beyond Apartheid.

We must find a new way to describe “Israel” based on its everyday practices of Ethnic cleansing, murder, colonization, dispossession, and expansion.

We must call “Israel”, not an Apartheid State which it is, but an Ethno cleansing pariah genocidal rogue state, because that it was, it does? That is what it is. That is what we must call it.

Hillary Clinton Installed as New Chancellor of Queens University Belfast

A protest of 50 people organized by Lasair Dhearg, an Irish republican socialist and anti-imperialist party gathered on University road at 11 am as Hilary Clinton posed for journalists and television crews covering her inauguration as the first female Chancellor of Queens University Belfast.

People chanting ‘shame on Queens’, and ‘Hillary you should be at The Hague’, were to be heard at the entrance to Queens University Belfast on the morning of September 24, 2021.

As Clinton walked the short distance from the Queens University entrance to the nearby Whitla Hall for her inauguration chants of “Killiary Killiary Killiary out out out” echoed on the morning breeze.

Several speakers addressed the assembled protestors calling into question her record as a former American Secretary of State and her support for the war on Libya, illegal drone attacks over west Asia and Africa, alongside her continued support for her husband former American President Bill Clinton who has been accused of being a womanizing philanderer and her continuing unequivocal pro-Zionist support for “Israel”.

Speakers included Academics against Apartheid, Lasair Dhearg, People Before Profit, as well as current and past Queens University students.

The event itself seems to have gone under the radar.

The promotion of a warmonger like Clinton to a seat of learning must surely be, at the very least, controversial, and at the very most a shameful act of denial of power abuse that she, her husband, and the corporate imperialist American political system represent. They have so much blood on their hands, from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan to Libya, Yemen to Palestine, Syria to Nicaragua, Venezuela to Cuba, and Chile to Haiti. The invasions and regime-change operations list is endless.

In a televised interview Clinton once joked about the brutal murder of Col. Muammar Gadhafi, the leader of Libya. She is quoted as saying, ‘We came, we saw, he died’ and then she laughed. Oh, how she laughed.

This type of heartless disregard for human life lays at the very heart of capitalist contempt for human values in its pursuit of money, profit, and power.

As a native of Belfast, as an activist, as a person with a social conscience, I do not want a warmongering, cheerleader of Zionist apartheid “Israel”, brainwashing our youth, our young students, with keen analytic minds, that war is good, that capitalism is good, that regime change is good, that the values of white European and American establishments are also the world values that all other nations must bow to and accept.

I believe we need a multi-polar world where mutual cooperation, for mutual benefit, is the moral and economic model of choice, not the imposed capitalist values, delivered through military occupation and financial domination.

So why did Queens University offer Clinton such a prestigious post as Chancellor of one of Ireland’s leading universities established in 1845?

In recent years Queens University invited Mark Regev, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom to address the university on October 16, 2018

There was a huge protest with 100’s in attendance.

This was followed by a visit from Hilary Clinton when the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award in Peace and Reconciliation studies bursary at Queens University was established.

This appears to be a forerunner to her eventual installment as Chancellor.

Modern universities in many first world countries are not so much seats of learning for our children as the next generation of doctors, philosophers, and teachers, will be very much a business run for profit, with huge salaries for those running the organization and significant grants from many technological and pharmaceutical companies.

It is my belief that in order to benefit from research and development grants and encourage greater ties between American companies and the Belfast University, Queens has sold its soul, sold itself and sold its name for the almighty Yankee dollar, while simultaneously whitewashing Clinton’s war crimes and Clinton’s wars are committed.

Hillary Rodham Clinton does have a history in Ireland. Her husband former President Bill Clinton, visited Belfast and was seen to be a central figure in the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which brought an end to the war of national liberation being waged by Irish republicans in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the socialist Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) against Britain’s continued military occupation of the North of Ireland. Remodeling Clinton with a makeover as some kind of beneficial mentor who has something to offer the youth of Ireland is an illusion.

She has nothing to offer except the blood on her hands. The hate in her heart and her unhealthy disregard for democracy, human rights, and the sanctity of life itself.

I can only echo the words of the protestors who challenged this shameful episode in Irish education, and Irish public life, when Queens University Belfast, gave the ‘Butcher of Tripoli’, a get out of jail card.

‘Shame on Queens’!

Killiary’ Killiary’ Killiary’ out, out, out!

My own particular favorite chant which I expressed on several occasions as she posed in front of cameras was ‘Hillary you should be in The Hague for war crime against humanity’!

While educational campuses across the western hemisphere increasingly call for Justice for Palestine, even as the Israeli lobby works ever harder to censor and have dismissed academics who call “Israel” an apartheid state, Queens University Belfast appears to be on the wrong of history, the wrong side of justice, and the wrong side of humanity by appointing an arch war criminal who in the eyes of many should be in jail, not in our university!

Full Statement from Lasair Dhearg

Lasair Dhearg’s Pól Torbóid, who helped organize and also spoke at the event, said, “Queen’s University’s complicity in the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton and her war crimes further epitomizes the university’s role in an international framework of imperialism that sees it not only glorify warmongers like Clinton but have an immense financial investment in military contracts and companies guilty of immense environmental destruction.”

“Queen’s has facilitated the visitation of many war criminals and parasites over the years, but arguably none as big as the visit of Hillary Clinton as its chancellor. A proud Zionist and imperialist; with a war record as long as your arm, Clinton has helped oversee US bombing campaigns in over 9 countries.”

“As US secretary for war, she authorized over 400 drone strikes across multiple nations, which overwhelmingly killed civilians and even children at a proportion of almost 90%.”

“She labeled black men ‘super-predators’ when she helped lobby for the 1994 US Clinton Crime Bill, which was immensely important in creating the mass incarceration levels that exist today in the US to benefit the prison-industrial complex – which is a system of slavery by new means.”

“A Zionist, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be an enemy of Palestinian liberation, siding with the oppressor every time it mattered, like during the 2014 Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza. She increased annual US funding to Israel from 2.5 billion to 3.1 billion US dollars whilst she was US Secretary of State, and she stated that countering the BDS movement globally should be a priority for Israel’s defense.”

“All this – and Queen’s award her chancellor for her Peace and Reconciliation efforts. For all the books that Queens University has at its disposal, I don’t think their management has ever read one! PEACE IS SOMETHING HILLARY CLINTON CAN’T EVEN SPELL, NEVER MIND DISPENSE!”

Divide and Conquer it’s the Imperialist Way

Iraq

When America, Britain, and the coalition of the greedy decided to crush Iraq under a barrage of bombs, cruise missiles, and multiple munitions, in its campaign of Shock and Awe to destroy Iraq, it was only the beginning.

With claims that Iraqi Generals had been corrupted in advance and the much-celebrated Republican guard would collapse, the western imperialist destruction of another sovereign state was only in its embryonic stage.

Crushing the Iraqi military was not a complicated matter. The overwhelming superiority of western military technology and firepower left the outcome of the war in little doubt, but like all wars winning was only beginning, it was the following occupation that would lead to brutal repression coupled with a hearts and minds propaganda blitz on the Iraqi people.
 
The real threat to western financial gain in Iraq through its programs of resource theft would be a united Iraqi resistant axis, utilizing all of the Iraqi territories, all of its resistance networks, and all those willing to play a part in a national war of liberation against the illegal occupying forces mainly British and American.

In order to prevent the Iraqi resistance from resisting the invaders, a way was to be found to weaken the resistance and have the Iraqi people fight each other and not the anglo -American invaders.
 
Sectarian murder was not a feature of daily life in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.
 
Then one Friday afternoon as people knelt in prayer in a Mosque probably praying for peace and an end to the violence and death brought to them at the hands of the invaders, a bomb shattered those prayers for peace along with the bodies of those saying those prayers and a new horror was visited upon the Iraqi people.
 
An attack on the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf on 29 August 2003 left 95 Shia worshippers dead including Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim the spiritual leader of the Islamic revolution in Iraq.
 
This monstrous event occurred just five months after the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003.
 
Who was behind this hideous heinous act may never really be known. Al-Qaeda militants later claimed responsibility but that was in 2007.
 
Many wonder was this a deliberate attempt to provoke a civil war in Iraq? 
 
Was it American or British special forces?
 
Was it others acting on behalf of, or directed by, western imperialists or Zionists interested in further destabilizing Iraq?
 
The result was a protracted campaign targeting Mosques, targeting the most vulnerable in society, people at prayer, and the resistance against the foreign occupation crumbled as the country fell into ethnic pseudo-religious sectarian strife. A Shia- Sunni civil war was instigated. 
 
The losers were all those who died, all those who were injured, all those who grieved at the loss of loved ones, and a society that lost security as it became a victim of a senseless indiscriminate campaign of random civilian murders.
 
The winners were the west and its illegal occupation of Iraq, who were then given a freer hand to rob and plunder at will with little coordinated opposition.
 
In September 2005 in Basra, two undercover British soldiers disguised as Iraqi civilians shot and killed two Iraqi police officers who had tried to question them. The two SAS officers, Special Air Service soldiers were later detained and their car was found to contain explosives.
 
They were subsequently freed when the British army using tanks and a SAS assault team stormed the place where they were legally detained and illegally snatched them from lawful custody.
 
You can make up your own mind on why they were disguised as Iraqi nationals, why they murdered two friendly Iraqi police officers and why they had explosives in their car?
 
They divided the Iraqi people and the Iraqi resistance and they conquered Iraq for two decades.
 

Afghanistan

America has made a tactical withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Many claim it is a humiliating defeat for America which it is, but America left voluntarily.
 
There was no Taliban army at the gates of Kabul. The reality is the Taliban controlled the countryside and the invaders, Britain and America, had the cities.
 
That was the trade-off, that was the stand-off.
 
Biden, corporate America, and their hangers-on in the United Kingdom establishment along with the military-industrial complex have robbed Afghanistan as much as they can.
 
They have used British and American taxpayers’ monies to destroy Afghanistan and pay for its continued occupation with trillions of dollars being paid out to private contractors and weapons manufacturers.
 
America, Britain and now bizarrely Australia are looking to project their power into the South China Sea in an attempt to retain their first world dominance of global commerce, finance, and technology.
 
A battle they have already lost.
 
In leaving Afghanistan they appear determined to destabilize the incoming victorious Taliban Afghan government.
 
They want to keep Afghanistan impoverished at war and away from the influence of China, Russia, and Iran.
 
To that end, we have now witnessed bombs exploding outside Shia mosques in Afghanistan, killing many, just like we saw in Iraq.
 
The seeds of civil war and war by proxies of the Afghan ISIS-K who are being reinforced by ISIS elements brought in from Iraq and Syria, armed and financed by the usual suspects from Turkey, EU America, and the Gulf states will only exacerbate the situation.
 
As relative peace was finally dawning on Afghanistan after another two decades of foreign interference in the internal politics of Afghanistan by western imperialist military and financial adventurism, we now witness the bombs of hate deployed once again.
 
If they can divide Afghan society through another western-inspired Shia-Sunny civil war, then politically for a time at least they will reconquer Afghanistan.

 
Lebanon

The tragic events surrounding the Port of Beirut explosion that killed and maimed so many, which left total destruction to hundreds of private homes, apartments blocks, and businesses, the cause of which is being investigated by a Lebanese judicial inquiry.
 
The inquiry is meant to portion blame on those who are directly or indirectly responsible for the storage of dangerous nitrates in huge concentrations in the heart of a busy Mediterranean port.

The judge is being accused by many of playing a part on behalf of the enemies of Lebanon in trying to scapegoat Hezbollah for being complicit in the explosion.
 
As victims and survivors of the bomb blast joined Hezbollah and Amal supporters in a peaceful demonstration at the judiciary offices in downtown Beirut, calling for the judge, Tarek Bitar to be removed, accusing him of being an American stooge trying to divide the Lebanese people, gunmen from the Christian Lebanese Forces opened fire on these unarmed protestors killing 8 and wounding nearly 35 others, some of whom are in critical condition and the death total may very much rise.
 
For decades, Lebanon -a confessional state- has been at war with itself on behalf of foreign powers like its former colonial occupier France, and more recently “Israel.”
 
From the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982, where as many as 3000 Palestinian and Lebanese unarmed civilians, old men, women, and children were systematically and brutally murdered, after the Palestine Liberation Organisation left Beirut, to the events on October 14, 2021, in order to impoverish and enslave Lebanon, the west and “Israel” use the right-wing Christian Phalange, their political representatives and now the Lebanese Forces to do their killing.
 
Collectively they are all working against the sovereign interests of Lebanon and are in the pay of foreign nations alien to Lebanon. as Victoria Nuland, American Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who it is claimed by many, was instrumental in the events leading up to the Maidan square massacre of February 20, 2014, in Kiev, Ukraine, resulting in the following coup, suddenly appeared in Beirut on the same day fundamentalist right-wing Christians murdered the victims and survivors of the Beirut port blast alongside peaceful unarmed Hezbollah and Amal supporters.
 
What is Victoria Nuland doing in Beirut?
 
Well, she was defending the judge Tarek Bitar whom many Lebanese want to see step down, while simultaneously meeting the generals of the Lebanese army confirming America will give the Lebanese army a further 67 million dollars in military aid.
 
What has America, Britain, and “Israel” got planned for Lebanon?
 
It looks like America is buying Lebanese army loyalty with 67 million dollars while Britain already stands accused of running spy networks from inside the military intelligence corps of the Lebanese army through a British company. 
 
Is another debilitating bloody civil war the desired outcome of western and Israeli imperialist adventures in Lebanon?
 
Dividing Lebanon, so the imperialists and colonial “Israel” can conquer the country. 
 
Divide and conquer? Well after all it’s the imperialist way.

Partition 100 Years of Sectarianism in Ireland

In 1921 under threat of immediate and terrible war, Ireland was partitioned against the wishes of the majority of the people on the island.

Britain might have been forced out of 26 counties but they were keeping a foothold on Irish soil by proxy, through their colonial settlers in the six counties in the North East of Ireland.

When Irish men and women won the war for independence and Britain sued for peace, the price of limited autonomous self-rule for Southern Ireland within the British Empire was at the expense of their Northern brothers and sisters who were to be condemned to at least a century of separation and division, to include 50 years of Unionist pro-British misrule, at the hands of a settler-colonial Parliament, whose clarion call was a Unionist Parliament for a Unionist people.

A sectarian one-party state was created where pro-British unionists, many of whom were Protestant by their religion, continued the settler-colonial project, as an alien ascendancy, while the indigenous natives, the Irish nationalists mainly Catholic by their religion continued to be treated as second class citizens and potential dissidents to the new arrangements of partition on the island of Ireland.

Ireland was England’s and Britain’s first colonial conquest. Between the 12th century and the 20th century, England and Britain ruled Ireland through a brutal colonial military occupation.

From land theft to famine, they stole, murdered, and starved the Irish people into submission.

A victory they never fully enjoyed.

The indigenous Irish, in nearly every generation, rose up in defiance, in rebellion, and in arms against a usurping foreign invader.

In the years including and following the Irish famine, 1845-1850, two million Irish citizens died or emigrated. Fleeing a man-made catastrophe, Ireland’s very own “Holocaust”, and Nakba, created by the British, who removed food, grain, cattle, butter, and many more consumable items, by the ton under military escort to be consumed in Britain and exported to Europe. 

They filed past the dying and the dead on the roads, while they bled Ireland dry of its food resources, to simply create exceptional profits for the absentee English landlords, the robber barons, and the crown.

Modern Irish history has simply been one of subjugation, repression, and tyranny at the hands of the invaders.

Helped by France and Spain at different epochs in our history, Ireland finally freed herself in the national war of Independence through her own revolution, by her own efforts, by the strength of her sons and her daughters.

No colonial imperialist power be it Britain in Ireland, France in Algiers, America in Mexico, Spain in Latin America and the Caribbean, has ever withdrawn peacefully and unilaterally from those colonial occupations.

In all struggles for freedom from imperialism, occupation wars of national liberation have been fought. Some achieve full success like Algiers or Bolivia while others like Korea, India, and Ireland have all suffered the sin of Partition just like Palestine.

The Irish could not attain full freedom in 1921 and two Parliaments and two countries were brought into being. The Irish Free State and the state of Northern Ireland were both created under the sights of British guns.

While Irish men turned guns on each other in the Irish civil war which was the immediate result of partition and the creation of the Irish Free State, British and Unionists’ guns were brought to bear on the Irish nationalists and republicans now kidnapped into the new bastardized illegitimate state of Northern Ireland.

When the guns fell silent in the Irish Free State those who had agreed to partition had won and those who had fought against partition had lost.

The Catholic Irish population in the north of Ireland had been signed sealed and delivered into a sectarian, one-party state, whose discriminatory laws, police, judiciary, and ruling class held them in abeyance, at arm’s length, a subjugated, second class citizenry, held in the economic bonds of poverty and trapped in the political wilderness.

After 50 years the cries of enough, the cries of equality, and the cries of injustice rang out, as yet another generation of Irish nationalists and Republicans forswore ending discrimination, and the one-party state.

The peaceful calls for reform were met with brutal repression. The state attacked the peaceful protests. Whole streets in Belfast were ethnically cleansed of their Irish Catholic inhabitants. Families were forced to flee as the Unionist Protestant police alongside sure their Unionist Protestant followers, assaulted, attacked, and in some cases murdered their catholic Irish neighbors.

Violence from the state resulted in resistance from the people, and a new war on the island of Ireland was born.

Internment without trial, administrative detention ensued, a national war of liberation unfolded, and between 1969 and 1998 violence was again a feature in Irish politics. The batons had been drawn; the gun was back in play.

I mention this solely in the context of the recent interchurch service to mark 100 years, the centenary of the establishment of the state of Northern Ireland, which took place on October 21,  2021, in Armagh pro-Cathedral.

Attended by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, representatives of the government of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the four main Christian religions, some minor celebrities, and Pro-Union mainstream media types, who by celebrating 100 years of partition are celebrating the continued foreign occupation of Ireland by a sectarian alien cabal of politicos, corporations and the ruling class.

I look forward to the end of Northern Ireland as a distinct political unit, on the island of Ireland, when the indigenous people are given the opportunity to reunite the country hopefully by referendum within the next decade.

Irish are seeking a final end to British interference in the internal affairs of Ireland; a chance for the colonial settlers to finally embrace their Irish neighbors as equals and a chance for a lasting peace with justice for all of us on Erin’s green shamrock shore.

When I think or speak of the history of Ireland, I always see the parallels with Palestine, another land militarily occupied by the British. Partitioned, beaten, colonized, oppressed, and to this day suffering under an alien military occupation. The British did the same in India, with partition and separation of Pakistan and Kashmir.

Imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and corporatism are the ideologies that continue to destroy our world, enslave its peoples, and terrorize our children

Afghanistan What Next?

Afghanistan What Next?

by Fra Hughes Belfast

So where do we go from here,  Better still where do we even begin to unravel the pain sorrow and hardships Afghans have endured for decades? 

Do we start with the American invasion twenty years ago? Its objective was to end terrorism as part of the ‘War on Terror’ after the 9-11 attacks the anniversary of which occurs shortly? 
Can we usefully employ this timescale of  American and Nato interference in the internal affairs of the Afghan people? A  prelude to war on Iraq? Should we start a timeline from 2001? If we cannot ignore the transgressions of the Taliban while in power surely we cannot ignore how they came to power in the first place? 

Should the timeline begin with the Taliban gaining control in Kabul or must we delve back even further to the government that ruled Afghanistan prior to the rise of the Taliban?
Now I am not a historian and the situation has been complex for a very long time but let’s just simplify things a little bit. 

After three Anglo-Afghan wars, a monarchy continued to rule Afghanistan until a bloodless coup was led by General and former Prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan on July 17, 1973.
Born into the royal family he deposed the King and inaugurated a one-party-style political system installing himself a supreme leader as President of the Republic of Afghanistan.

Economic reforms were promised but failed to materialise as events on the ground became unstable. As President, he led a purge of the soviet aligned Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan. One of its leaders was assassinated and several of its officials; arrested. Many went into hiding and led a military coup on April 28, 1978, deposing Daoud Khan. He and his family were killed and a secular communist government was then established.
With Afghanistan now led by a secular, pro soviet government at the height of the cold war between American capitalism and Soviet communist ideologies, the stage was being set for a proxy war financed by America to destabilise the country and trap Soviet troops in a Vietnam type quagmire of military entanglement.

Many analysts and historians have claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency set out to recruit arm finance and train Islamic fundamentalists?  People who through their religious outlook and practices similar to the type of Islam practiced by Saudi Arabia could be radicalised in order to incentivise an armed opposition to the government of Afghanistan. While opposition to the communist government was already established it was about to be fully financed by America, Saudi Arabia, and others. Pakistan was already a haven for the Afghan opposition.
.Under Operation Cyclone the Central Intelligence Agency of America financed and armed the Afghan opposition between 1979 and 1989

A civil war erupted between  ‘the Mujahideen’ who were led by amoung others, Ahmad Shah Massoud joined later by Saudi Arabian, Osama Bin Laden, and the secular government of Afghanistan who had invited the Soviet Army into Afghanistan to help store order.
The protagonists were ready. The stage was set the actors employed armed and financed and the war began in earnest.

The Mujahideen trained and financed by the American government and others succeeded in destroying the secular government
The Taliban took control of Kabul.
Human rights were repressed and women especially were forced to conform to Islamic law.
America won the proxy war. Their surrogate army which repressed women and arguably de-evolved human rights by 100 years seized power and the American administration was full of self-congratulatory smugness.

Then began the systemic misrule of Afghanistan by the reactionary forces of Islam, the Taliban

The Mujahideen, a collection of opposition forces then began an internal struggle between the Northern Alliance forces and the Taliban in 1996. This struggle ended with the American-led invasion of 2001.

Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency ISI played a major role on behalf of America during the Mujahideen revolt and harbored its leaders. 

Many of those who fought on the side of the Afghan Mujahideen were not even Afghans but Islamic extremists from many other Arab countries.

With claims of Al Qaeda Islamic militants now training in Afghanistan, and the country a hotbed for fundamental Islamists, America blamed Bin Laden and others for the 9-11 attacks on the twin towers. Although nearly all those accused of perpetrating this atrocity were Saudi Arabian and the only planes allowed to leave America in the immediate aftermath of the attacks were Osama bin Laden’s family, America duly attacked Afghanistan. This was despite claims the Taliban had offered to help America hold those responsible to account? 
The Taliban had been part of the Mujahideen front which took control of Afghanistan. The Taliban now controlled 90% of the country while various warlords and drugs gangs involved in the Northern Alliance controlled the countries northeast corner.

The puppets of American imperialism the Mujahideen, now the Taliban, went from Washington’s brave fighters for freedom to the terrorists who needed to be rooted out and destroyed when America and its allies bombed parts of Afghanistan back to the stone age.
A twenty-year invasion and occupation costing an estimated 2 trillion dollars alongside countless allied and Afghan deaths have finally ended.

American troops withdrew in a negotiated humiliating retreat on August 31 2021.

I asked at the beginning of this piece, What next for Afghanistan? 

Well, I fear more violence destabilisation death, and destruction?

With the Taliban are now back in charge of affairs in Afghanistan amid claims, they want to pursue national reconciliation with the Northern Alliance who would benefit from the disruption of this initiative?  

The new Sino -Soviet cooperation in rebuilding an economic supply line into a revitalised economic Eurasia will be a focal point of American and European sanctions and destruction.
American troops may well have left Afghanistan. No more NATO boots on the ground but the economic cooperation policies pursued by China and Russia to include vast investment in infrastructure projects throughout Eurasia to include Afghanistan may yet see a new proxy war aimed at the Taliban government but in reality, it will be yet another war against Russian and now Chinese economic cooperation in the region.

While Nato and America pursue a military dominance in a hegemonic new unipolar world order, Russia,  China, and increasingly many others from Iran to Venezuela pursue a cooperative multipolar mutually benefitting economic strategy. America will use every vestige of influence along with the EU to destroy destabilise and attack the new Belt and Road initiative led by China and supported by most Eurasian and African countries.

The war on terror is nothing more than a capitalist-imperialist attack on democracy and the freedom of sovereign nations led by those who claim to cherish democracy and freedom yet they continually bomb invade sanction murder displace and maim millions all in the name of humanitarian intervention.

I fear Afghanistan will not see peace and stability. I fully expect the Northern Alliance and now Al Qaeda in Afghanistan ISIS-K to give its American name to be used and directed by America to disrupt the Belt and Road initiative and have continued war in the region.