Gaza does not need new overlords

Jehad Abusalim | Mondoweiss

The U.S. plan for Gaza is the final stage of Israel’s genocide. Bombs and bulldozers obliterated Gaza’s landscape, and now skyscrapers and data centers aim to dismantle its social fabric and capacity to resist.

Every few decades, a new group of powerful men gathers around a table to decide what to do with Gaza or with Palestinians in general. The language changes. The underlying logic does not.

The latest proposals to “govern” postwar Gaza, from Jared Kushner’s beachfront development fantasies to the so-called “Board of Peace” and various international trusteeship schemes, are presented as bold, forward-looking visions.  In reality, they are just recycling the same colonial framework that has governed Palestinian life for over a century: external actors decide what Palestinians need, what they may have, and what they must become in order to deserve it.

Gaza’s crisis was never a problem of governance or waiting for the right foreign administrator. It was, and remains, the product of a specific political structure: prolonged military occupation, a seventeen-year siege that strangled every dimension of life, and a settler-colonial project that treats Palestinian existence as an obstacle to be managed or removed. These are the roots. Everything else — the poverty, the misery, the desperation — is a symptom.

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Gazans are taking matters into their own hands by launching community reconstruction efforts

Noor Alyacoubi | Mondoweiss

With limited resources, Palestinians in Gaza and in exile are funding community reconstruction efforts amid the absence of international aid. “We have to keep trying to help Gaza rise again,” an organizer with the Sameer Project tells Mondoweiss.

Abu Ahmad, a displaced resident of northern Gaza, thought he would be living with some sort of roof over his head by now. Instead, he and his family remain exposed to the cold and the rain with only a threadbare tent for shelter. He told Mondoweiss:

"When the ceasefire was announced, I believed I would finally be able to rebuild my home, or at least get a caravan to survive the winter. Instead, we only hear about plans and conferences. Nothing has actually changed."

Abu Ahmad's home now lies beyond the so-called Yellow Line, which cuts Gaza in half and has been progressively expanded by the Israeli army to cover larger swathes of land to fall under its control.

Almost two months into the ceasefire, international conferences on Gaza's reconstruction and frequent promises to rebuild have so far amounted to little. According to UN estimates, 25 hospitals are out of service, nearly 70% of housing units have been partially or completely destroyed, 85% of water and sewage facilities have been damaged, and 95% of schools are reduced to rubble.

Amid these conditions, humanitarian aid and reconstruction materials have entered at rates far below the agreed-upon amounts as part of the ceasefire deal. Gazans have characterized the present humanitarian situation as a "new form of genocide."

U.S. President Donald Trump has envisioned turning Gaza into a Middle East "Riviera," while his 20-point "peace" plan would see Gaza run by a foreign "Board of Peace" that amounts to a Mandate-like form of colonial rule over the Strip.

Meanwhile, Egypt plans to host an international conference on Gaza's reconstruction, estimating that $70 billion would be required to rebuild it. Qatar and other countries have also pledged support. On the ground, however, no tangible reconstruction efforts have begun, widening the gap between political statements and lived reality.

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US Navy effectively becomes a tool of modern piracy

Drago Bosnic | Aletho News 

The political West has been conducting an unprovoked aggression against the entire world for at least half a millennium at this point. Whether through direct attacks and occupation or various forms of colonialism (that lasts to this day), the world’s most aggressive power pole has been a threat to every other country on this unfortunate planet. Although certainly not the only one, the primary tool of Western power projection have been navies, which is hardly surprising given the political West’s thalassocratic nature. Through naval supremacy, Western (primarily Anglo) powers have spread their colonial empires to virtually every corner of the world, exterminating the native populations along the way and settling in their lands. 

Entire continents (such as North America and Australia) were secured through brutal genocide of the locals who now live in small, scattered communities (so-called “reservations/reserves”). The genocidal campaign continued throughout the Atlantic and Pacific, where numerous islands and maritime trade routes remain in Western hands to this very day. Controlling these areas is key to maintaining its stranglehold over global trade, as seen during the latest US attacks on inbound and outbound Venezuelan shipping. However, the Pentagon seems to be expanding this aggression to other countries trading with Caracas, including China, which is a major importer of Venezuelan commodities (particularly crude oil). 

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How the world can resist the UN Security Council’s rogue colonial mandate in Gaza

Craig Mokhiber | Mondoweiss.net

The UN Security Council resolution backing the Trump plan for Gaza is clearly illegitimate, but there are several ways that states and individuals worldwide can challenge its illegality.

n a now infamous moment in television history, former US President Richard Nixon, three years after leaving office in scandal, was asked by interviewer David Frost if the US President could commit illegal acts. Nixon replied: “If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

With those twelve words, Nixon dismissed the core idea of republican government and the very essence of the rule of law. For Nixon (and far too many today), some people and some institutions are simply above the law. And not only are they not bound by the law that binds the rest of us, but we must follow their orders. Afterall, this is the divine right of kings. 

Almost a half century later, Nixonian ideology is alive and well. 

In the wake of the Security Council adoption of resolution 2803 last month (a resolution that shocked legal analysts and human rights defenders around the globe for its blatantly colonial content, and about which I have written previously) even critics of the resolution have thrown up their hands to declare “oh well, the Security Council adopted it, so now its law.” In other words, to paraphrase Nixon, “if the Security Council does it, that means it is not illegal.” 

Nonsense. 

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Gaza Cease-fire Agreement Furthers Ongoing Age of Imperialism

Jeremy Kazmurov | Covert Action Magazine 

In October 9, Israel and Hamas announced the adoption of a cease-fire agreement involving the release of all hostages held by Hamas.

Israel, in exchange, agreed to allow for the entry of humanitarian aid, to release Palestinian prisoners, and to withdraw its forces to a so-called “yellow line” from which they will still control all land crossings into Gaza.

The U.S. additionally agreed to send 200 more troops to Israel to monitor and oversee the agreement.

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman gushed that President Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for helping to broker the agreement. However, the World Socialist Web Site reported that the October 9 “peace” deal inscribes a return to the open colonial domination of the Middle East that prevailed in the 19^th century.

Gaza is now to be governed by a “Board of Peace” headed and chaired by Donald Trump and which will include former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) noted that the “peace agreement” was “steeped in colonial rhetoric” and that its “inclusion of an international ‘Board of Peace’…ensures the exclusion of Palestinian voices from the decision-making of Palestinian futures.”

A hidden U.S.-Israeli agenda has long been to control oil and gas fields off the Gaza coast that are estimated to be worth more than $500 billion.

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John Pilger: Assange Arrest A Warning From History

John Pilger
Consortium News

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi-fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

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British propaganda and disinformation, a longtime imperial and colonial tradition

Wayne Madsen
Strategic Culture Foundation

When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American "cousins" and Britain's Commonwealth partners - from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia - in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths. Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another - the latest in a series of similar fabrications - alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.

It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.

For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office - the Information Research Department (IRD) - carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly The Daily Telegraph, The Times, Financial Times, Reuters, The Guardian, and The Economist, ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).

These leaders included Indonesia's President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather of Pyongyang's present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chile's Salvador Allende, British Guiana's Cheddi Jagan, Grenada's Maurice Bishop, Jamaica's Michael Manley, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Guinea's Sekou Toure, Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara, Australia's Gough Whitlam, New Zealand's David Lange, Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, Malta's Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu's Father Walter Lini, and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.

After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State.

Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and a former US ambassador to London. It is not a stretch to believe that similar and even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called British "journalists" reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury, England.

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Modern imperialism goes on trial, and is found guilty

RT
Neil Clark

Imperialism – which today is usually referred to by the euphemism ‘liberal interventionism’ – went on Trial at the Waterside Theatre in Derry, Northern Ireland this week. 

Five passionate and well-informed speakers, who included the former British Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford, detailed the carnage and chaos that has been unleashed around the globe by the aggressive, warmongering policies of the US and its closest allies.

The event could have been called ‘War on Trial.’ It might have been called ‘Regime Change on Trial.’ Or ‘Economic Sanctions on Trial.’ But it was – thanks to organizer Gregory Sharkey – called ‘Imperialism on Trial’ and, as the first speaker, the writer and broadcaster John Wight declared, that in itself was highly significant. 

For the truth is the ‘I’ word is the elephant in the room in contemporary discourse. We’re not supposed to acknowledge its existence. Imperialism, according to the dominant Establishment narrative, ended when the European empires gave their colonies independence in the 1950s and 60s. In fact, the ‘old’ imperialism was only replaced by a new variant which is even more destructive, and certainly more dishonest. At least the British Empire admitted it was an empire.

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Reviewing Mark Curtis' new report: The New Colonialism, Britain's Scramble for Africa

Colin Todhunter
Global Research

Africa is facing a new and devastating colonial invasion driven by a determination to plunder the natural resources of Africa, especially its strategic energy and mineral resources. That's the message from a damning new report from War On Want 'The New Colonialism: Britain's scramble for Africa's energy and mineral resources' that highlights the role of the British government in aiding and abetting the process.

Written and researched by Mark Curtis, the report reveals the degree to which British companies now control Africa's key mineral resources, notably gold, platinum, diamonds, copper, oil, gas and coal. It documents how 101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) - most of them British - have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries and collectively control over $1 trillion worth of Africa's most valuable resources.

The UK government has used its power and influence to ensure that British mining companies have access to Africa's raw materials. The report exposes the long-term involvement of the British government (Labour and Conservative) to influence and control British companies' access to raw materials. Access has been secured through a revolving door between the political establishment and British mining companies, with at least five British government officials taking up seats on the boards of mining companies operating in Africa.

Augmented by WTO rules, Britain's leverage over Africa's political and economic systems has resulted in a company like Glencore being able to to show revenues 10 times that of the gross domestic product (GDP) of Zambia.

Under the guise of the UK helping Africa in its economic development (a continuation of the colonial paternal narrative), $134 billion has flowed into the continent each year in the form of loans, foreign investment and aid, while British government has enabled the extraction of $192 billion from Africa mainly in profits by foreign companies, tax dodging and the cost of adapting to climate change.

The report highlights the roles played by major companies, such as Rio Tinto, Glencore and Vedanta. From the displacement of people and killings to labour rights violations, environmental degradation and tax dodging, Africa appears to have become a free for all. In only a minority of mining operations do African governments have a shareholding in projects. And even if they do, it tends to be small at 5-20%.

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