Who are the “Wrong Hands” in Yemen?

by CHARLES PIERSON

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Some of them want to kill us.

Take Abu Abbas (as Henny Youngman used to say: “Please.”). Abu Abbas (a nom de guerre for one Adil Abduh Fari al-Dabhani) is the founder and leader of the Abu Abbas brigade, a militia fighting on the government side in Yemen.

Abbas and his eponymous militia are unintended beneficiaries of Pentagon largesse. According to CNN, the Abu Abbas brigade possesses armored tactical military vehicles manufactured by US company Oshkosh Defense. We know this because the Abu Abbas brigade openly paraded the American-made vehicles through the streets of the Yemeni city of Taiz in 2015. Apparently, President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who loves a military parade.

There are two things you should know about Abu Abbas. First, the Abu Abbas brigade isn’t supposed to have the vehicles. The US sold the vehicles to the UAE which violated the sales agreement by transferring them to a third party, the Abu Abbas brigade, without the authorization of the US.

Second, Abu Abbas is affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The Trump Administration placed sanctions on Abu Abbas in 2017, calling him a fundraiser for Al-Qaeda who, in addition, “served with” ISIS. The Washington Post calls Abbas “a powerful Yemeni warlord.”

To recap, the UAE, a nominal US ally, illegally transferred military hardware to a militia affiliated with a major US enemy. Al-Qaeda, you’ll recall, kills Americans. And still does. Ahmed Mohammed Alshamrani, the Saudi pilot trainee who murdered three US sailors at a US naval base in Florida in December 2019, was in contact with Al-Qaeda’s Yemeni franchise, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The FBI learned this from examining Alshamrani’s phone records. AQAP has taken credit for the Florida attack.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which have been making war on Yemen since 2015, routinely transfer US arms to extremist militias involved in the fighting. To its shame, the US has been supporting the Saudi-led coalition with arms sales, intelligence sharing, and targeting assistance since 2015. Nobel Peace Prize (Sorry, Mr. Trump. I mean Noble Peace Prize) laureate Barack Obama took the US into the war in 2015. The war in Yemen is now the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in which at least 100,000 people have died.

CNN told the Department of Defense that US weapons were winding up in the hands of extremist militias. DoD said the matter was already being looked into. Great news! The DoD has cleared the UAE of wrongdoing, according to sources in the executive branch and on both sides of the aisle in Congress. So I guess we have nothing to worry about.

Either that, or the US doesn’t care that American weapons are winding up in the hands of US enemies just so long as the US gets to sell more and more arms. The Trump Administration doesn’t care how. If selling arms requires circumventing Congress, Trump is cool with that. So is Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

In May 2019, Secretary Pompeo concocted a phony emergency with Iran in order to push through $8 billion in arms sales without having to consult Congress. State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was investigating the legality of the sale when President Trump fired him at Secretary Pompeo’s behest on May 15 of this year.

CNN learned from four sources that Pompeo had apparently already decided to push the sale through when he asked subordinates to dream up reasons to justify the sale’s legality. According to Politico, “high-level officials of the State Department, Pentagon and within the intelligence community” advised Pompeo against invoking an emergency in order to make the arms sale.^[1]

Going further back, on September 12, 2018, Secretary Pompeo falsely certified that the Saudis and the UAE were “undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure” in Yemen. Hogwash. The month before, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that “There is little evidence of any attempt by parties to the conflict to minimize civilian casualties.” Had Pompeo told the truth, the US would have been required under the National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 to terminate military assistance to the Saudis and the UAE. That would have jeopardized arms sales.

Even if US arms were not being transferred to extremist militias, arming the Saudis and UAE is bad enough. The Saudi-led coalition uses US arms in indiscriminate attacks on civilians, in contravention of international law. Fragments of a bomb manufactured by US defense contractor Lockheed Martin were found at the scene of a 2019 bombing which killed 40 Yemeni children aboard a school bus. CNN and other media outlets engage in much hand-wringing about US weapons winding up in the “wrong hands,” by which they mean militias. Why aren’t the Saudis and UAE considered the “wrong hands,” too? Oh, I know. Because they buy US arms.

Notes.

1) On June 24, 2019, Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) introduced a bill, the Saudi Arabia False Emergencies (“SAFE”) Act. The bill restricts the president’s ability to invoke an emergency in order to evade Congressional review of arms sales to a handful of countries: members of NATO, Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Israel. The list conspicuously omits Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. ↑

Charles Pierson is a lawyer and a member of the Pittsburgh Anti-Drone Warfare Coalition. 

White Supremacy is the Virus; Police are the Vector

by NICK PEMBERTON

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Tensions are high as Minneapolis police murdered a black man named George Floyd, not by gunshot, but by an agonizingly long kneel on his neck; which was not released for seven minutes, several of which the man was not breathing. Protest is a place to emerge into the collective and become unoriginal, to humble yourself in silence as others more aware with said experience lead the charge. However, writing should be the place for originality. A place where we solve the problems of theory that informs action.

It is here where I would like to address a kind of Othering. This is not the Othering of making the minority docile and holy and martyred, but more so the Othering of whiteness and its discontents. I am of the opinion that all people, but especially white people, must begin to live a life that fully embraces shame.

The more racist shit happens the more white guilt rears its ugly head. I will maintain that the primary division within society is between the ruling class and the working class. Working people don’t manage crises; working people are the crisis that must be solved by the pharmaceutical industry, the military-industrial complex, the police, and even the social worker, doctor and teacher, sorry to say. Do these groups intersect? Of course. And are cops generally the most racist people in society? Of course.

But it isn’t this simple. The police are protecting something here. We may not like when it goes viral, when the true nature of the ruling class is broadcast on screen. And yet I maintain two controversial assertions that aren’t so much pro-police as they are anti-racism, as strange as that sentence may sound.

It is very tempting to engage in groupthink. And one of the challenges I have faced is disengaging with the groupthink of even the left and seeing where it takes me. I hear this statement all the time: “you think there are good cops? All cops are bad.”

This may be true, I don’t really care if it is. The reality is that I’m in serious trouble I’m calling 911, but if I see a cop I’m generally assuming the worst, I don’t really think it matters if cops are good or bad. It makes us feel good to call them bad, and maybe it’s true. But I worry about the finality of any ideology.

If the cops are the problem, we are absolved. This horrifies me. Perhaps yes it is a privileged horror but a horror nonetheless. I very much fear the death of white guilt. As toxic as it is, it’s the best we got.

Forgive me but just as I see the prisoner as fully human, I also see the policeman in the same light. Who would I trust more? Like you, dear leftist, it’s the prisoner. Who is more likely to be guilty, like you, dear leftist, I know it’s the police.

However, aren’t we all just playing the roles? Yes we can and should judge each other on the roles we choose to play. How we benefit from the evil we do onto others, and what not. And yet I see the police officer doing his job when he kills the black man. To me this is far more horrifying than him being evil, which he may well be.

This is the same thing as the Trump phenomenon or the COVID phenomenon. We feel better when we externalize evil. But we are the system, are we not? The question is how do we change the incentives? We all know that Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, known for good reason as Gentri-Fry, would not have fired the four police officers without years of the Black Lives Matter movement effectively rearranging desires.

This is the type of progress we must hope for. Not to extradite the problem by washing our hands but to admit that maybe if I was raised in the same way this cop was raised, or if I had the same job he had or if I had the same mental illness he had or what have you, well that could have been me. This is the type of horror White America must embrace. Just as black folks may shake in their boots when they go to the supermarket we must shake in our boots with the possibility that we may be in this situation where we have to make this choice between opportunism and love.

Climate change is no joke. Who can clean their hands of the millions dying already because of it. Xenophobia and the prison-industrial complex solves these natural problems for us. The cops may operate without hypocrisy. We may not.

I do see the police as working class. They operate on the front lines for the capitalists and the white supremacists while we attempt to socially distance ourselves from the days they accidentally fulfill our own ideology and hatred. I say this not as a conspiracy but as a believer in the subconscious racism. I know that most ruling class white people would shoot a black person quite quickly if they went through the police academy.

I speak to as a communist, as someone who hates austerity and as someone who believes that while it’s easy to blame the state for its sins it is far harder to recognize the power we have collectively when we give up the individual freedom and instead embrace accountable government. I know a lot of white Minnesotans will have a lot of government to whine about after this murder but amidst the coronavirus pandemic who saved the most vulnerable, the minorities and poor people most likely to die in the pandemic? The government did. The government that is one of the few state and local governments without a lot of corruption. People are just hypocrites. This do it yourself mentality of not needing to be protected is the most privileged position.

Who needs a strong government, including a strong community-controlled police force more than people of color? Who is more ravaged by crime than these communities? And the crime I mean isn’t just street crime, such as the McMichael dad and son duo, but also crimes such as Flint water. We can’t have it both ways here and say all government is bad when it is the most white and privileged who can survive without it.

This is why more than ever we need to hold the police accountable, this is the point. To say we don’t need police, they’re all bad, well that’s easy for some people to say. Without the police who is to say that MAGA killers wouldn’t be lynching people in the streets? There is the obvious intersection we have to address that the people most likely to be lynching are the corporate mob and the cops themselves. But this is the power of capital and the individual and profit. Seriously powerful. We can’t fight that with this coronavirus paradise where we’re all vigilantes and fighting for ourselves. We need community power.

The police are piling up bodies. They are the vectors. To beat the virus of white supremacy we must control the vectors. We must hold them accountable. But the virus is white supremacy. We can’t solve this plague by socially distancing ourselves from the problem. We are the virus. So instead of just blaming the most sick, let’s be responsible for the future of society. No feeling is more empowering. We shouldn’t just be scared of the cops. We should be scared of becoming them.

Slavoj’s insight that Trump is hated because he is the last thing left-liberals see before they see the class struggle also applies here. The cold-blooded murder of this person, much like the coronavirus, invites outrage but never a conclusion, exactly. Trump comes and we hear “Democrats have failed us”, coronavirus comes and we hear “capitalism has failed us” and then yet another murder of a black man comes and we hear “white privilege has failed us”. None of these are solutions. All of them are catered to be popular and cool and hip but none will solve the problem.

The threat to the social order was displayed by thousands taking to the streets. I think we have to stop externalizing everything. Let’s take control over our own fates here. No one is here to say that any of the standard evils of the day whether that be fake Democrats, angry whites, profiteering capitalists or killer cops should be redeemed in their current form. But just as a strong government can regulate laws, and must be embraced, a strong citizenship can regulate the government, and must be embraced.

Change will come. It will not be because anyone is a good person or a bad person. This I think is the genius ideology of Black Lives Matter. It does not aim at any of the altruisms or platitudes of the liberal left about how capitalism is so heartless or how we all care so much or whatever. It simply says: our lives matter.

The genius is this: this is already is what is being said. United States has greatest human rights, we hate racism, etc., etc. It really is actually taking a step back from all the rosy sayings and asserting something further back in the process that hasn’t been met therefore exposing the whole series of lies rather than just our present failure.

Criticism is for chumps. The time is now to change the world. But here I am a bit more of a pessimist. If we did change the world what would left-liberals be able to stand on their soapbox about? The good thing though is that even the most power-hungry people can get bored. A new project will be found for the ruling class and new resistance to their colonization will have to be met. One by one, we can eliminate the necessity for these projects.

It is important to resist the most explicit forms of domination such as Trump, the police or the virus. If we don’t do that, we risk this form of crisis becoming the only form of engagement we know. It is an equal danger to only oppose a crisis without addressing its cause because then we resist continual return to the site of crisis.

We must ask the crucial question about why authoritarianism emerges. It expresses itself when the traditional order can no longer be legitimized in subtle terms. This may be in part because of pressure put on the ruling class by the poor but sadly it is even more so a part of the poor being unable to cope with the pressures from the ruling class.

While it is tempting to say things keep getting worse or things keep getting better I think it is most accurate to say it’s just the same shit on a different day with different tools and resources and desires for all sides that remain in a struggle. We must fully embrace our side in this historical battle and accept its lifelong challenge. Imagining history to be fixed in a state of hopeless fascism, capitalism or any other ideological prism limits our chance to surprise the world. While murders of blacks and whines of whites may be as predictable as the sun and the moon coming to pass, we can look to that nasty bug by the name of COVID-19 to say that nothing is really set in stone. A new day is here, for those of us still standing. Let’s not waste another moment of it.

Nick Pemberton writes and works from Saint Paul, Minnesota. 

Protest, Uprisings, and Race War

by TIM WISE

The moralizing has begun.

Those who have rarely been the target of organized police gangsterism are once again lecturing those who have about how best to respond to it.

Be peaceful, they implore, as protesters rise up in Minneapolis and across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd. This, coming from the same people who melted down when Colin Kaepernick took a knee — a decidedly peaceful type of protest. Because apparently, when white folks say, “protest peacefully,” we mean “stop protesting.”

Everything is fine, nothing to see here.

It is telling that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the evils of violence, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we claim possession solely as a result of the same. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others. We are here because of our insatiable desire to take by force the land and labor of others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Instead, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it, we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

Even in the modern era, the notion that we believe in non-violence or have some well-nurtured opposition to rioting is belied by the evidence. Indeed, white folks riot for far less legitimate reasons than those for which African Americans might decide to hoist a brick, a rock, or a bottle.

We have done so in the wake of Final Four games, or because of something called Pumpkin Festival in Keene, New Hampshire. We did it because of $10 veggie burritos at Woodstock ’99, and because there weren’t enough Porta-Potties after the Limp Bizkit set.

We did it when we couldn’t get enough beer at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, and because Penn State fired Joe Paterno.

We did it because what else do a bunch of Huntington Beach surfers have to do? We did it because a “kegs and eggs” riot sounds like a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Albany.

Far from amateur hooliganism, our riots are violent affairs that have been known to endanger the safety and lives of police, as with the infamous 1998 riot at Washington State University. According to a report at the time:

The crowd then attacked the officers from all sides for two hours with rocks, beer bottles, signposts, chairs, and pieces of concrete, allegedly cheering whenever an officer was struck and injured. Twenty-three officers were injured, some suffering concussions and broken bones.

Twenty-two years later, we wait for academics to ruminate about the pathologies of these whites in Pullman, whose culture of dysfunction was taught to them by their rural families and symbolized by the recognizable gang attire of Carhartt work coats and backward baseball caps.

Back to the present: To speak of violence done by black people without uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black communities against which those who live there are now rebelling.

Let us remember, those places to which we refer as “ghettos” were created, and not by the people who live in them. They were designed as holding pens — concentration camps were we to insist upon plain language — within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. Generations of housing discrimination created them, as did decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. They were created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. Zoning laws, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all are violence, however much we fail to understand that.

As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works,” especially when it does. We are, after all, here, which serves as rather convincing proof that violence works quite well. What is worse is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have caused the current crisis and that we need not even know about those conditions. It brings to mind something James Baldwin tried to explain many years ago:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

White America has a long and storied tradition of not knowing, and I don’t mean this in the sense of genuinely blameless ignorance. This ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness honestly, but in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. It’s not as if the truth hasn’t been out there all along.

It was there in 1965 when most white Californians responded to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles by insisting it was the fault of a “lack of respect for law and order” or the work of “outside agitators.”

The truth was there, but invisible to most whites when we told pollsters in the mid-1960s — within mere months of the time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault. Only one in four thought white racism, past or present, or some combination of the two, might be the culprit.

Even before the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, whites thought there was nothing wrong. In 1962, 85 percent of whites told Gallup that black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education. By 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good-paying job. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better opportunity for a good education than whites did.

Even in the 1850s, during a period when black bodies were enslaved on forced labor camps known as plantations by the moral equivalent of kidnappers, respected white voices saw no issue worth addressing.

According to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th century, enslavement was such a benign institution that any black person who tried to escape its loving embrace must be suffering from mental illness. In this case, Cartwright called it “Drapetomania,” a malady that could be cured by keeping the enslaved in a “child-like state,” and by regularly employing “mild whipping.”

In short, most white Americans are like that friend you have, who never went to medical school, but went to Google this morning and now feels confident he or she is qualified to diagnose your every pain. As with your friend and the med school to which they never gained entry, most white folks never took classes on the history of racial domination and subordination, but are sure we know more about it than those who did. Indeed, we suspect we know more about the subject than those who, more than merely taking the class, actually lived the subject matter.

When white folks ask, “Why are they so angry, and why do some among them loot?” we betray no real interest in knowing the answers to those questions. Instead, we reveal our intellectual nakedness, our disdain for truth, our utterly ahistorical understanding of our society. We query as if history did not happen because, for us, it did not. We needn’t know anything about the forces that have destroyed so many black lives, and long before anyone in Minneapolis decided to attack a liquor store or a police precinct.

For instance, University of Alabama History Professor Raymond Mohl has noted that by the early 1960s, nearly 40,000 housing units per year were being demolished in urban communities (mostly of color) to make way for interstate highways. Another 40,000 were being knocked down annually as part of so-called urban “renewal,” which facilitated the creation of parking lots, office parks, and shopping centers in working-class and low-income residential spaces. By the late 1960s, the annual toll would rise to nearly 70,000 houses or apartments destroyed every year for the interstate effort alone.

Three-fourths of persons displaced from their homes were black, and a disproportionate share of the rest were Latino. Less than ten percent of persons displaced by urban renewal and interstate construction had new single-resident or family housing to go to afterward, as cities rarely built new housing to take the place of that which had been destroyed. Instead, displaced families had to rely on crowded apartments, double up with relatives, or move into run-down public housing projects. In all, about one-fifth of African American housing in the nation was destroyed by the forces of so-called economic development.

And then, at the same time that black and brown housing was being destroyed, millions of white families were procuring government-guaranteed loans (through the FHA and VA loan programs) that were almost entirely off-limits to people of color, and which allowed us to hustle it out to the suburbs where only we were allowed to go. But we can know nothing about any of that and still be called educated. We can live in the very houses obtained with those government-backed loans, denied to others based solely on race, or inherit the proceeds from their sale, and still believe ourselves unsullied and unimplicated in the pain of the nation’s black and brown communities.

As much of the country burns, literally or metaphorically, it is time to face our history. Time to stop asking others to fight for their lives on our terms, and remember that it is their collective jugular vein being compressed. It is their windpipe being crushed. It is their sons and daughters being choked out and shot and beaten and profiled and harassed.

It is their liberty and freedom at stake.

But by all means, white people, please tell us all the one again about how having to wear the mask at Costco is tyranny.

Tim Wise is the author of: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White and “Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.” His latest book is Dispatches From the Race War (City Lights).

America ‘a Failed Social Experiment’

Harvard University Professor

WASHINGTON (Common Dreams) -- Harvard University philosophy professor Dr. Cornell West appeared on CNN Friday night amid nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota and offered a searing indictment not just of white supremacy, the neo-fascism of President Donald Trump, and a criminal justice system that repeatedly brutalizes the poor and people of color—but also of a deep depravity that exists within the neoliberal capitalist system of the 21st Century in the United States that dominates both major political parties.
As protests raged in Minneapolis, outside Trump’s White House, and U.S. cities nationwide—including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Oakland—West told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview, "I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment.”
"What I mean by that,” explained West, "is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure. Its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way that people could live lives of decency. The nation-state, it’s criminal justice system, it’s legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties. And now our culture, of course is so market-driven—everything for sale, everybody for sale—it can’t  deliver the kind of nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose.”
West explained the current anger over Floyd’s murder by police—one of whom, officer Derek Chauvin, was arrested Friday and charged with 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter—adds to a "perfect storm” of multiple failures and inequities that pre-exist under an American imperial system that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have been warning about since the middle of last century.
"When I saw those pictures there of Atlanta,” West said, "you could see Brother Martin right there in Atlanta, saying: ‘I told you about militarism. I told you about poverty. I told you about materialism. I told you about racism in all of its forms. I told you about xenophobia.’ And what you’re seeing in America is those chickens coming home to roost. You are reaping what you sow. And in this instant, you have Brother George—it is so clear—it was a lynching at the highest level. Nobody can deny it.”
While solidarity protests erupted far beyond Minneapolis Friday night in outrage over Floyd’s murder—and the killing by police of other black, brown, and other marginalized victims—West said, "I thank God people are in the streets. Can you imagine this kind of lynching taking place and people are indifferent? People don’t care? People are callous?”
West denounced President Donald Trump as the "neo-fascist gangster in the White House,” but said the failure of the nation—one that allows for endemic inequality and a culture of greed and consumerism that tramples on the rights and dignity of poor people and minorities decade after decade—goes much beyond the current president.
"The system cannot reform itself,” West argued and pointed to a dynamic in which identitarian representation is asked to be a stand in for class equality, shared prosperity, and a functional democracy that actually expresses the will of the people and satisfies the material needs of the working people and the poor.
"We’ve tried black faces in high places,” he said. "Too often our black politicians, professional class, middle class become too accommodated to the capitalist economy, too accommodated to a militarized nation-state, too accommodated to the market-driven culture of celebrities, status, power, fame, all that superficial stuff that means so much to so many fellow citizens.”
"You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party that is now in the driver’s seat with the collapse of brother Bernie [Sanders] and they really don’t know what to do,” West added, "because all they want to do is show more black faces—show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy, too—because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security, and they couldn’t deliver. So when you talk about the masses of black people—the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color—they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless—then you get rebellion.”
According  to West, the nation faces a choice now between "nonviolent revolution” and continuing the status quo failures. "And by revolution what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth and respect,” he explained. "If we don’t get that kind of sharing, you’re going to get more violent explosions.”
While reiterating the inherent dangers of Trump, West said one benefit of the president is that he tells the world exactly who he is. On the hand, the broader failures of the system under the neoliberal capitalist economy is rarely called out or revealed for what it is.
"White supremacy is going to be around for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time, don’t be surprised when this happens again,” West said.
"But the question is we must fight,” he concluded. "Even in the moment where we have a failed social experiment, we must fight. We must have an antifascist coalition against what’s going on in the White House and the Republican Party.”

Baqi, A Blot on Muslim Conscience

By: Kayhan Int’l 

Reports are rife these days of the betrayal of the Palestinian cause and gifting of Islam’s first qibla, the al-Aqsa Mosque, to its Zionist occupiers by oil-rich Arab reactionary regimes, led by Saudi Arabia.
This is not a matter of surprise for Muslims familiar with the recent history of the region and how the Land of Revelation, Hijaz, was occupied with bloodshed and its Islamic sites desecrated by heretical hordes from Najd who were rewarded by their masters in London in 1932 with a spurious kingdom called Saudi Arabia.
Today, the 8th of Shawwal is the tragic day on which 97 lunar years ago in 1344 AH (21 April 1926), Wahhabi terrorists sacrileged the sanctity of the sacred cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi in the holy city of Medina. They demolished the tombs of the elders of Islam, especially the blessed shrine where reposed in peace, Four of the Twelve Infallible Heirs of Prophet Muhammad (SAWA) – Imam Hasan al-Mujtaba (AS), Imam Zain al-Abedin (AS), Imam Muhammad al-Baqer (AS), and Imam Ja’far as-Sadeq (AS).
According to eyewitness accounts, a strange spectacle unfolded. To the shock and horror of pilgrims thronging the holy site, an unruly and uncouth mob with unkempt beards burst upon the scene with shovels, pickaxes and truncheons and started demolishing the domes and canopies that shaded the tombs including the resting places of two of the Prophet’s aunts, an uncle, several cousins, and the Prophet’s infant son, Ibrahim.
In frenzied mood, the heretics then struck with savage vengeance at the grand mausoleum that towered over all other edifices and hammered down its dome on the heads of pilgrims. This was the most blessed spot in Baqi. It housed the holy graves of the 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th Imams of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt.
It is a tragedy of story that these desecrators of Islamic sanctity are called ‘puritanical’ Muslims by the pro Zionist western media. A great misnomer indeed, since the seditious Saudi clan that leads the Wahhabis and their vandalism, funds terrorist outfits throughout the Muslim world!
Literally "Jannat al-Baqi” means a tree garden. It is a sanctified place, since in it are buried many of our Prophet’s relatives and companions, the first of whom was Othman bin Maz’oun who died in the 3rd year of Hijra.
It was the habit of the Prophet to greet those buried in Baqi with the words: "Peace upon you, O abode of the faithful! God willing, we should soon join you. O Allah, forgive the fellows of al-Baqi".
Baqi also had the "Bayt al-Hozn” or House of Grief, built by Imam Ali Ibn Abi Taleb (AS) for his bereaved wife, the Noblest Lady of all times, Hazrat Fatema Zahra (SA), to lament in solitude for her departed father, Prophet Muhammad (SAWA). At this place, following the heartrending tragedy of Karbala, ladies of the Prophet’s household, including his granddaughters, Hazrat Zainab (SA) and Hazrat Omm Kolthoum (SA), used to assemble to lament for Imam Husain (AS), joined by the latter’s wife, Rabab, the mother of the infant martyr, Hazrat Ali Asghar (AS). They would be joined by the womenfolk of Medina in wailings.
Thus, for over a millennium and two centuries, the Jannat al-Baqi Cemetery remained a sacred site with renovations being carried out as and when needed till the Wahhabis rose to power in the early 19th century. They desecrated the tombs and showed disrespect to the martyrs and the companions of the Prophet. Muslims who disagreed with them were branded "infidels” and were killed.
In 1802, they violated the sanctity of Mecca and destroyed all sacred places and domes there, including the canopy over the well of Zamzam. In 1804, the Wahhabis entered Medina to desecrate Jannat al-Baqi as well as every mosque and religious site they came across. An abortive attempt was made to demolish the Prophet’s tomb as well, but because of uproar by world Muslims, they backed off.
Muslims all over the world denounced this blasphemy and savagery of the Wahhabis and exhorted the Ottoman Sultan to save the sacred shrines from total destruction. The Sultan ordered his governor of Egypt, Mohammad Ali Pasha, to punish the Wahhabis. Mohammad Ali Pasha landed at Jeddah and with the support of local tribes, restored law and order in Medina and Mecca by driving out the Wahhabis. The entire Muslim world celebrated this victory. In Cairo, the celebrations continued for five days. He then sent his son, Ibrahim Pasha, in hot pursuit of the fleeing Wahhabis, who were totally defeated and their stronghold Diriyah in Najd near modern Riyadh, was razed to the ground.
In 1818 AD, the Ottomans carried out reconstruction and restored the Islamic heritage. Between 1848 and 1860 AD, further renovations were made, adding to the splendour of Medina and Mecca. World War 1, however, saw the defeat of the Ottomans by the British and their exit from all Arab lands.
In 1925, with British help, the Wahhabis, led by the desert brigand Abdel-Aziz entered Hijaz and carried out merciless massacre, even killing Muslims in the sacred precincts of the Holy Ka’ba.
In 1926 Medina fell to the Wahhabi onslaught. The Islamic heritage including Baqi was destroyed. The only shrine that remained intact was that of the Prophet and that too not because of any respect for him but because of fear of reaction from the whole Muslim world.
In Ohad, outside Medina, tombs of the martyrs of the famous Battle of Ohad, including the Prophet’s uncle Hamza were desecrated and demolished, while in Mecca, the Wahhabis destroyed the house where the Prophet and the tombs of the Bani Hashem in the equally sacred Jannat al-Mu’alla Cemetery, such as those of the Prophet’s grandfather Hazrat Abdul-Muttaleb, uncle and guardian Hazrat Abu Taleb, and the Prophet’s loyal wife of over 25-long years Umm al-Momineen (Mother of Believers), Hazrat Khadija (SA).
The Wahhabis also destroyed the tomb of the Prophet’s father Abdullah near Medina, the tomb in Abwa of the Prophet’s mother, Amina bint Wahb, and the tomb in the port city of Jeddah of the Mother of Mankind, Hazrat Hawwa (Eve).
As a reward for his massacre of Muslims and blasphemy against Islam, Britain created for Abdel-Aziz a kingdom called Saudi Arabia in the name of his tribe.
The ruins of Baqi continue to remain a blot on Muslim conscience. As long as this open wound that lies opposite the Prophet’s shrine is not healed, Islamic solidarity and the goal of world Muslims to liberate al-Aqsa and the Palestinians, will remain nothing more than a dream – a dream, which the enemies of Islam are trying to turn into a nightmare through the sedition of the Saudis.

Graveyards Visit – National Reconciliation or Resentment at the US!

By: Kayhan Int’l 

Was it a genuine gesture of national reconciliation, or a barely concealed mockery of US meddling in Afghanistan?

Whatever way one were to interpret it, the recent visit by the Afghan National Security Adviser to the graves of two diametrically opposed political figures in two different cities of the country was an open slap on the face of the Americans who are scheming to hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban militants.
Hamidullah Mohib, who recently conveyed President Ashraf Ghani’s protest to the Donald Trump administration for its cutting out the Afghan government from the direct US-Taliban negotiations in Doha, Qatar, took time during the Eid ul-Fitr holidays to visit the grave in Gardez of Mohammed Najibullah, the country’s Soviet-backed president from 1987-to-1992, and then the grave in Panjshir Valley of the "Lion of Panjshir” Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Defence Minister in the post-communist government of President Burhan od-Din Rabbani.
It was the first formal visit to the grave of a resented relic of the dark communist past of Soviet era Afghanistan by a senior Afghan government official.
It should be recalled that in 1996 following the fall of the Rabbani government and the withdrawal of Shah Massoud from the capital, the Taliban, supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, had violated the diplomatic immunity of the UN office in Kabul, where Najibullah and his brother had taken asylum since 1992.
To the horror of the civilized world the two ethnic Pashtun brothers who had refused the offer by influential Tajiks of safe passage to asylum in India and erred in expecting some sort of ‘Islamic’ clemency from fellow Pashtun Taliban, were brutally beaten, dragged behind a jeep, castrated, shot, and then strung up from a traffic light pole outside the presidential palace.
Five years later in September 2001, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who as Leader of the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance was leading the liberation struggle against the Taliban, was killed in Panjshir in a cowardly manner by terrorists of the CIA-backed al-Qa’eda outfit disguised as journalists.
It was clear from Hamidullah Mohib’s tweet and the photographs he released on the social media that he wanted the Afghan people and the world to know the purpose of his visit to the graveyards in Gardez and Panjshir.
The Afghan National Security Adviser, whose meetings are boycotted by US officials following his recent criticism of Washington for "delegitimizing” the Afghan government by excluding it from the negotiations in Qatar, and who has charged Zalmay Khalilzad, the US special envoy to Afghanistan, of seeking to become a "viceroy”, tweeted:
"During Eid, I visited the tombs of two historical figures in our country, with whom my family had differing views in the past. However, bringing real peace depends on tolerance, and overcoming predetermined classifications.”
Mohib, an ethnic Pashtun himself who until 2018 had served as the Afghan ambassador to the US, said in a second tweet: "Today’s Afghanistan is made up of different beliefs that used to be antagonistic to each other, but today all work under one system, one flag and one Afghanistan.”
This indicates that national reconciliation is the need of the hour in Afghanistan as was recently demonstrated by the agreement to share cabinet posts in the new government by President Ghani and his rival Dr. Abdullah Abdullah – a closed associate of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud.
It also indicated the deep distrust of both the US and the Taliban by the majority of Afghan people, whatever their ethnicity, political affiliations, and religious denominations.
Mohib’s visit to the graves of the two diametrically opposed figures, thus carries a message for multiple audiences — for the Taliban, whose agreement with the US has thrown the country into another cycle of violent uncertainty; for the Tajiks who fear a fresh Pashtun takeover; for the Hazaras and other Shi’a Muslims who are the frequent victims of terrorist attacks by takfiri elements; and for the turncoat ethnic Pashtun Khalilzad, who motivated by his slavish attitude to the US unsuccessfully ran for the Afghan presidency in both the 2009 and 2014 elections.
Najibullah’s daughter, Muska, who lives in exile in India, captured some of the irony in her own tweet, titled "The Khalilzad Strategy” on the American way to distract the world from a failed peace deal in Afghanistan by trying to create a regional mess.

The final scenes of the mission impossible on the Caribbean coast

EXCLUSIVE BY NOURNEWS

Despite extensive US efforts to challenge the Venezuelan fuel transfer operation, the heroic personnel of five Iranian oil tankers are in the final stages of the seemingly impossible mission in the US backyard.

NOURNEWS - Following the large-scale operation to transport the fuel cargo of the Iranian oil tanker fleet to Venezuela, the Faxon is unloading at the port of Puerto de Guaragoao. According to the information received by NOURNEWS; The ship is expected to be unloaded at around 15:00 local time tomorrow, May 31. Meanwhile, the operation of the ship "Forrest" in the port of "Punta Cardin" ended at 12:30 local time yesterday, May 29, and the tanker left the pier at 18:18 local time and is fueling in the anchorage in order to return. According to the plan, the fueling of this tanker will end at about 6:00 local time today. It should be noted that the unloading operation of the "Fortune" tanker in the port of "El Palito" ended at 23:36 yesterday, May 29, local time, and this ship will leave the wharf and be taken to the place of refueling after performing the necessary formalities.

Accordingly, Despite extensive US efforts to challenge the Venezuelan fuel transfer operation, the heroic personnel of five Iranian oil tankers are in the final stages of the seemingly impossible mission in the US backyard.

Lenses on Riots, Murder, and Racism in the US and Hong Kong

BY KIM PETERSEN

The despicable police murder of a person, another Black person, who allegedly used a counterfeit $20 bill has caused widespread revulsion among Americans. This time, however, authorities acted relatively quickly calling in the FBI and firing all four police officers at the scene — Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J Alexander Kueng.

George Floyd, who did not resist, was forcibly extricated from his vehicle by police, handcuffed, whereupon officer Derek Chauvin knelt for 8 minutes on Floyd;s neck while he pleaded that he was unable to breathe. Floyd’s death was the result.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has called for the arrest of Chauvin, although not by the officer’s name. Said Frey, “If you had done it or I had done it we would be behind bars right now and I cannot come up with an answer to that question.”

In contradistinction protestors have been hastily arrested while protesting Floyd’s murder.

Even the media were not safe from being arrested for covering the story of another police murder of a Black man. The Save Journalism Project responded in a press release:

The arrest of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew on live television this morning simply for reporting on the protests of police violence in Minneapolis violates the most basic tenet of press freedom: the necessity of reporting what are at times uncomfortable truths for government authorities. The government possesses enormous coercive power, that as this episode clearly shows, can be all too easily applied to limit or prevent the press from reporting on their actions. The First Amendment exists precisely for this reason.

The arrest of Jimenez even underscores the reasons for the protests he was covering. No one has been arrested in the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But Jimenez, who like Floyd is black, has been arrested. There was even another CNN crew near Jimenez at the time of his arrest, but Josh Campbell and his producers were, according to Campbell, “treated much differently,” and were obviously not arrested.The arrest of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew on live television this morning simply for reporting on the protests of police violence in Minneapolis violates the most basic tenet of press freedom: the necessity of reporting what are at times uncomfortable truths for government authorities. The government possesses enormous coercive power, that as this episode clearly shows, can be all too easily applied to limit or prevent the press from reporting on their actions. The First Amendment exists precisely for this reason.

In the US, American journalists, especially if Black, can be arrested … for what? Reporting a live story? To curtail racism and prejudice from wider exposure? To protect the crimes of the US gendarmerie from becoming public knowledge?

Prejudice in US and China

Why did the police murder another black citizen. NBA star Lebron James had no doubt.

Despite rampant racism and racism-inspired violence in the US, the US continues to inveigh against the alleged Chinese maltreatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans in Tibet. It has been refuted by others, such as journalist Caleb Maupin, as propaganda that seeks to demonize the Chinese government.

Arresting versus expelling journalists

In mid-March, the Chinese government announced the expulsion of journalists from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

The US mass media struck back: “[N]ewsroom leaders criticized China’s move, which comes in the midst of a global public health crisis over COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.”

Trump said, “I’m not happy to see it. I have my own disputes with all three of those media groups — I think you know that very well — but I don’t like seeing that at all.”

The Chinese action comes after Washington imposed limitations on staff at Chinese state media outlets in the US.

Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said,

The United States cannot proceed from ideological prejudice, use its own standards and likes and dislikes to judge the media of other countries, let alone suppress the Chinese media unreasonably…. We urge the US to take off its ideological prejudice, abandon cold war mentality…. China is not one to start trouble, but it will not blink if trouble comes. We urge the US side to immediately stop suppressing Chinese media, otherwise the US side will lose even more.

Notably, Americans have also been prohibited from working as journalists in Macau or Hong Kong.

A Comparison to China’s Response to the Riots in Hong Kong

What about the protests/riots that have resumed in Hong Kong? What triggered those protests? Some citizens were opposed to extradition of alleged criminals? How has China responded to rioting, sabotage, terrorism, separatism, and even murders by the so-called protestors? Hong Kong is a territory having been a under British colonial administration from 1841 to 1997 when it reverted to mainland China as a special autonomous region; it must be noted that once the original demands for rescinding the extradition bill were met, the goal posts of the NED-supported protestors transformed into a purported democracy movement.

Has china responded with military force? No. With arrests of law-abiding journalists? No. With police brutality? Most observers will acknowledge that police have been incredibly restrained, some would say too restrained in the face of protestor violence.

The protestors, largely disaffected youth, as is apparent in all or most video footage, by and large employ random violence as a tactic, which they do not condemn. This was made clear by Hong Kong protest leader Joey Siu, during an interview with Deutsche Welle, who said she “will not do any kind of public condemnation” for the use of unjustified violence by protesters against residents who do not share their political views.

How has Beijing responded? Legislatively, by seeking to uphold the Basic Law, whose Article 23 mandated Hong Kong to enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government. It is the normal case that nations everywhere protect their national security. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post ran an opinion piece titled “If Hong Kong had enacted national security laws on its own, Beijing wouldn’t be stepping in” which pointed out:

Beijing trusted Hong Kong to implement Article 23, but its trust was misplaced. The Basic Law is a two-way street – it isn’t fair to accuse the central government of failing to comply with the mini-constitution when Hong Kong itself has not fulfilled its obligations.

Extradition for crimes committed versus extradition for exposing war crimes

The Hong Kong imbroglio stems from the attempt to enact a bill to permit extradition between Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. This was given impetus when Hong Kong resident Chan Tong-kai, 20, murdered his girlfriend, Poon Hiu-wing, 20, while they were on vacation in Taiwan. To be convicted of murder, he’d have to return to the jurisdiction in which it occurred for trial. But there is no extradition treaty between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Chan did agree to return to Taiwan to face the charges, but Taiwan blocked his entry.

The absurdity of this extradition conundrum is laid bare by the fact that Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with Britain and the US and not with its motherland, China. Thus, the lack of an extradition arrangement prevents justice for criminal acts such as murder among certain regions of China.

Meanwhile another bombastic evidence of western infidelity to justice is the extradition that is sought for a man whose “crime” was to reveal to the world the war crimes of the US war machine. For this Julian Assange, a man who should be protected by all humanity, has seen his human rights obliterated and any shred of western adherence to the concept of justice obliterated.

UPDATE:

In the course of writing this article, Derek Chauvin was taken into custody. The other three officers who were aware of officer Chauvin’s brutal and lethal act are in essence accomplices and ought to be held culpable under the law for their roles.

 The Killing of George Floyd

KIM PETERSEN

Kim Petersen likes scuba diving, Anton Berg marzipan, working out, and advancing the struggle for a world based on principles of peaceful, fair, and equitable sharing of wealth along with a respect for the environment and life. His essays are published in many books, magazines, and ezines. He was also a longtime editor at the Dissident Voice newsletter and Original Peoples editor at the Dominion grassroots newspaper.