How Middle East Dictators Bring Their Western Allies Down! YET ANOTHER LEADING WRITER SOUNDS THE ALARM ....

by Selvam Canagaratna

"Tyrants never perish from tyranny, but always from folly –when their fantasies have built up a palace for which the earth has no foundation."

– Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, 1824.

Robert Fisk, author of the 2005 blockbuster classic The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East, and now a regular contributor to the Independent, London, noted in his piece on December 4: "Trump, like his dangerous Middle Eastern allies, doesn’t want to live in heaven. He craves the pleasures of leadership. He enjoys risk. He believes not in history or morality. He believes in himself. That is why a lot of Arab despots rather like Trump. They have much in common."

The problem, as Fisk saw it, was that Arab dictators, "delusional though they may be, have got us taped. They see through our lies and our arms sales and our lust for oil and our fraudulent desire that Jeffersonian democracy embrace the Muslim world. But we simply do not comprehend the Middle East. We do not spot even the most obvious clues to the behaviour of these Arab gauleiters. We roar with laughter at their sword dances and fake elections and talk of equality and liberalism, when we should be terrified.

"Let me give you a particularly grizzly example of this: Take what appeared to us to be the weird behaviour of the Saudi consul in Istanbul in the days following the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. We all watched the extraordinary footage of Mohammad al-Otaibi as he took Reuters on a tour of his six-storey building. During this apparently bizarre performance, the consul opened up cupboards, filing cabinets and panels covering air-conditioning units to show Jamal was not there. But how on earth, we asked ourselves, could they have conceivably hidden the journalist in a cupboard, as the consul seemed to suggest? What a nincompoop the poor chap must be! What a charade.

"But I don’t think it was a charade at all. We allowed our natural racism towards the Arabs to overcome any serious line of enquiry. By wrongly assuming that the consular official was a fool, we missed the significance of his actions – which is exactly what we do when we frame our foreign policy in the Middle East."

The Arabs comprehend our world rather well, stressed Fisk. "They are not stupid. They watch CNN and Fox with the same irreverence, ironically, as a western liberal or leftist, and they know that the simplest Hollywood themes will appeal to the Americans: fear of Islamist ʽterrorʼ, political stability and low oil prices, and fortunes in cash that may be bestowed upon western nations in return for political support and military power.

"It is we who do not understand them but we who choose to paint the backcloth to their politics. They may lock up and torture the innocent but they are also ʽmoderatesʼ fighting ʽIslamist extremismʼ – this of the Saudis, who gave us 15 of the 19 killers involved in 9/11, for heaven’s sake!

Writing in the same sarcastic vein, Fisk asked: ʽWho is responsible for the Syrian civil war?ʼ and answered ʽIranʼ; ʽWho is responsible for sectarianism in the Middle East?ʼ ʽIranʼ; ʽWho is responsible for the Yemen war?ʼ ʽIranʼ; ʽWho threatens Israel?ʼ ʽIranʼ.

"Only three and a half years ago, the Saudis launched their bombing campaign and military adventure against the Houthis – ʽIranian-backedʼ, as we like to say – in Yemen. This was the creation of Mohammad bin Salman, who was then Saudi defence minister. It had two codenames: Operation Decisive Storm and Operation Restoring Hope. It proved neither decisive not did it give hope to anyone. It merely killed tens of thousands – let’s not get involved in the wretched statistics scorecard yet once more – yet the western powers which gave its military and logistics support to the Saudis in this awful conflict shrugged their shoulders: Iran was to blame.

Fisk noted that even when Mohammad bin Salman jailed many of his fellow princes and business colleagues in a luxury Riyadh hotel and kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minister, we smiled. Good chap, our MbS. Opening up the Saudi oil market, letting women drive. Our kind of guy. "Then came the demise of Jamal Khashoggi – of whom more has been written than of all the dead of Yemen – but even then, we’re still behind the Saudis in their Sunni war. We couldn’t blame Iran for this murder, so the world itself must be to blame. Isn’t that what Trump said? The world might be "accountable" for the chopping up of Jamal, he said, because "it is a very vicious place".

Added Fisk: "Vain are our leaders in their failure to remember the entanglement of their fates with Middle Eastern history. Suez destroyed Anthony Eden. The Iranian hostage crisis destroyed President Jimmy Carter. Irangate almost did for Ronald Reagan. George Bush Sr’s ʽnew orderʼ in the Middle East may have doomed his subsequent election. George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq has besmirched his political reputation forever.

"The same goes for Tony Blair – although it is instructive to remember that it was Lebanon and Israel which caused Blair’s downfall. His refusal to accept an early ceasefire during Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon after more than 1,000 civilians had been killed – in support of George W’s plan to give the Israelis more time to destroy Hezbollah (Iran again, of course!) – finally destroyed the Blair premiership.

"The Syrian war provoked the ocean of Muslim immigrants who fled to Europe and probably – and very sadly – ultimately finished off the political career of Angela Merkel. And how much did her version of the murder of the US Ambassador in Libya lead to Hilary Clinton’s downfall?

"So I have a prediction: If the Trump regime collapses – for regime it is – I suspect it will not be his frolics with the Russians which destroy it. Nor his corruption, nor his domestic lies. Nor his misogyny. Nor his anti-immigrant racism. Nor his obvious mental instability, though this clearly connects him to his friends in the Arab world.

"The Middle East has already got its coils into the White House. Trump is a friend of a highly dangerous state called Saudi Arabia. He has adopted Israeli foreign policy as his own, including the ownership of Jerusalem and wholehearted support for Israel’s illegal colonisation of Palestinian Arab land. He has torn up a solemn treaty with Iran. He has joined the Sunni side in its sectarian war with the Shias of the Middle East, in Iran, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Bahrain and, of course, in Saudi Arabia itself.

"Many countries have gone to war on behalf of other nations. Britain drew the sword for Poland in 1939, albeit a little late in the day. But to actively seek participation in someone else’s sectarian war for no other reason than to continue to sell weapons to a wealthy and unstable autocracy, to amalgamate your own country’s foreign policy with that of the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East – to the point of depriving an entire people of a share in its capital city – and to wilfully ignore the long and lucrative support that our Gulf "allies" have given to the most frightful of our cult enemies – those who have indeed struck in the streets of London and New York – is beyond the usual lexicon. It is beyond shameful. Beyond wicked. Were it not for the insanity of the man responsible, the word "depravity" comes to mind.

"Crystal balls are dangerous objects in the Middle East. Mine have been broken several times. But there’s no reason why Donald Trump should be immune from the fate of so many of his predecessors. It’s no longer good enough to say merely: "Watch out." We all do that by nature these days. But the Arabs and Muslims who live in territory which many of the American supporters call the holy land may well decide his future; after all, he thinks he can decide theirs.

"The world is indeed a vicious place – but the Middle East is its most treacherous."

Saudi Arabia And Israel Are Best Buddies

by Dr Ludwig Watzal saudi-israel

That the Zionist and the Saudi regime are cooperating very closely and intensively is all over town. They have a common enemy: Iran. So, Israel doesn’t mind supporting the most radical, anti-democratic, fundamentalist, and repressive Islamic regime on the face of the earth. Besides that, both regimes are not that different. In the last decade under the Netanyahu reign, Israel has become so fundamentalist that one can hardly differentiate this government from the Iranian one, not to speak of the Saudi regime. Radical Jewish right-wing extremists infiltrating all ranks of the state, especially the military, and have hijacked the Netanyahu government through the Bennett’s Jewish Home party. Compared to Saudi Arabia, Iran is a fully fledged Muslim democracy with regular elections on all levels of society. The Saudis have no votes whatsoever and oppress not only its Sunni but especially its Shiite population. Western media do not report on the daily attacks against Saudi installations. The Saudi regime is going to execute 13 Shiites again in the coming days. Western protests: Nil. Israel, which is the self-proclaimed “only democracy in the Middle East,” can only fool their Western supports with this slogan. Israel has become a significant liability not only to the US but Western interests across the Middle East. The country is heavily involved in causing havoc in their neighborhood such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Kurdistan. The latest indication of this close cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia is Israel’s intent to shut down Al-Jazeera, the Qatari news network that has been a nuisance to the ruling dictators in the Middle East. To silence this network has long been on the list of the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the other Arab dictatorships. At the height of the US attack and its atrocities in Iraq, George W. Bush contemplated openly on bombing Al-Jazeera. But in the case of Israel, it’s different. By closing down the Iraqi network, the Zionist Netanyahu-regime wants to do the Saudis a big favor because both countries still want to push the US into war with Iran. The way to this disastrous road would be the canceling of the Iranian nuclear deal that Obama and the other nations signed with Iran. Israel and the Saudis are strongly opposed to this agreement. Al-Jazeera’s political analyst Marwan Bishara stated recently: “Israel is taking its cues from Saudi dictators.” Perhaps US President Donald Trump is that stupid to walk into this Israeli-Saudi trap. The US has already paid a high price for its illegal attacks across the Middle East. Why should the American people take the bullet for these two rogue regimes? When Saudi Arabia and Israel want to attack Iran, the tens of thousands of their decadent princes should fight together with the Israeli army. So far, Saudi Arabia was unable to defeat a bunch of Houthi tribesmen in Yemen. To shut down Al-Jazeera in Israel is not that easy as in the Arab dictatorial regimes. In Israel, at least, a due process is still required. What a strange coincidence, the office of Al-Jazeera is in the same building that houses the Israeli government press office. To shut down Al-Jazeera in Israel would also close a window to the Muslim population that only the Qatari network can provide. Or does Netanyahu wants to detract from his legal and political difficulties that he is facing, and Al-Jazeera serve as the useful bogeyman? Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn , Germany . He runs the bilingual blog between the lines.http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de/

THOUGHTS ON MUBARAK , MORSI AND THE ARAB SPRING

Mubarak is free now and has been released from the hospital where he was detained for three years on the ground of corruption, while he was absolved from the crime of giving orders to shoot at the demonstrators during the Arab spring. Mubarak has thus served his term and has returned to his home in Masr al Jadida to start a new life which he will begin by performing Hajj as he expressed. This is to say that the Arab Spring did not bring a new life to Egypt , there was no rebirth even if Mubarak was removed . The World Order had already chosen the successor of` Mubarak after a period of` transition made possible by the presidency of Morsi who was but the bridge over which the real successor of`Mubarak was to cross. The truth is that it would not be befitting to have a military take over after Mubarak . The so called Revolution would not have looked good to replace a despot by a military, so, there was need for a transitional period that president Morsi had to fill . Neither Morsi , nor the Muslim Brothers understood what the World Order was up to . They thought hey had been chosen for candidacy because they were suitable , they did not think they were being drawn to a trap and were being set up in order to finish them because they represented a possibility of independence and autonomy for Egypt that the other parties did not represent . There is no need to say that Morsi was not allowed to rule because this is the truth . Because, from the beginning, he was prevented from taking decisions and carrying them on , so he had to take draconian measures like expand his prerogatives and powers which caused the Egyptians to rally against him accusing him of all sort of` transgressions and violations . The truth is that he was just trying to be the president of Egypt which is why he was elected. But the World Order had decided otherwise . And like what happened in Algeria and Somalia before, where the Muslim Brothers or the Islamic parties were just brought to power in order to be removed , the same goes for the Egyptian rule whereby the`Muslim Brothers were brought to power in order to be removed in their turn. The decision had been taken long ago that Egypt will go through change in name only , and that Mubarak will be toppled only because the country could not afford his decision to install his son - Jamal - after him, and that this installing was liable to cause a real uprising that the world powers wanted to avoid at any price . This is why the Egyptian Spring was created; a false flag revolution in every respect, that ended up in a military coup arranged by the predators in favor of which they had succeeded in rallying millions of Egyptians . A strange thing to have millions of people call for a military rule which is not usually so appealing . But this has been carefully engineered by the masterminds of the foreign embassies and the NGOs ; and the Egyptian society is one of the most exposed and infiltrated societies world wide, and we have seen millions signing petitions and protesting and calling for change, ending up in bringing to rule a third rate officer who was chief of Intelligence during Mubarak's rule! This much for the Egyptian Spring. Nothing has changed really, and now, Egypt would have to wait for more than ten years to witness anything that is close to a Revolution. The Arab Spring is nothing but Operation Abortion which is the real description of what happened. This is to say that Morsi had tried his best to please the World Order by taking position against the Syrian rule and against Iran thinking that this will work in his favor , but it did not. He even corresponded with the israeli officials thinking that this will speak in his favor. He thought that he will be treated like Erdogan and promoted like him by the world powers, forgetting that Erdogan is not only a fake Muslim Brother but a real NATO asset , and forgetting that the Muslim Brothers of Egypt are strongly linked to HAMAS, and that the World Order hoped that by removing the first, he will be able to remove the second , and that the goal was to expose the Muslim Brothers and finish them in Egypt and Palestine. Now, Mubarak is not only free but he is still ruling, if not through his son Jamal like he wished and desired , he is ruling through field Marshall Abdel Fattah al Sisi, his Chief of Intelligence , a military affiliate to israel and to the World Order, brought to power by millions of Egyptians according to the World Order scheme . Mubarak is free , and has been released after 3 years of detention he spent at the hospital. But Morsi has been sentenced to life term . The World Order will never forgive a close association with an armed Resistance that is threatening to israel. - Daniel Mabsout

Sri Lankan Muslims in the racist paradigm

By Izeth Hussain

It is questionable whether there are today any purely internal problems, serious internal problems, without any external dimension to them at all. It is true that governments frequently try to explain away internal problems, for which they alone are responsible, by alleging foreign interference. It is true also that there is the human propensity to indulge in conspiracy theories. In certain situations of stress people can become paranoid and imagine that sinister foreign forces are at work behind practically every serious problem. While all that is true, it is also true that in today’s highly interdependent world foreign interference takes place on a scale never before known in human history. A very convincing illustration of the case stated above is provided by the Arab Spring. When it began in Libya a couple of years ago, we tended to think of it mainly or even exclusively in terms of the problem of democracy. It seemed that at long last the sole surviving bastion against democracy – the Arab world – was being breached, and that democracy would come to hold sway over the entire Arab world, though with many hiccups along the way. At the same time we were uneasily aware that American imperialism would welcome democracy only to the extent that the democratic regimes were favorable to the US. Since then several other factors have come into play. Saudi Arabia will not accept democracy in certain parts of the Arab world, and can be expected to abort democracy wherever possible by encouraging fundamentalists. Above all, the Sunni-Shia schism has become a major factor in the Arab world. Instead of going into excessive detail I will merely cite the example of Syria to show the importance of the external dimension in what ought to be a purely internal problem. A fairly smooth transition to democracy in Syria could have been arranged by ensuring that the formerly privileged Alawite minority would not be subjected to genocidal massacre after a democratic regime is established. That would have been conceivable if the Syrian problem were approached as a purely internal one. But several powerful countries believe that they have legitimate stakes in what goes on in Syria: on one side there are Iran, Russia, China, and on the other there are the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Europe. The Syrian people have to bear the consequences. It is not always easy to establish foreign interference, but it is not difficult at all to establish the external dimension in what might appear to be purely internal problems. I will now make some observations with this perspective in mind on our halal problem and the anti-Muslim hate campaign,The external dimension of the halal problem is constituted by the meetings of the UN Human Rights Council that are taking place in Geneva right now. The halal problem does not figure on the UNHRC agenda. We Sri Lankan Muslims are not so stupid as to want to internationalize our problem – though that may become inevitable at a later stage. But we can be certain, all the same, that anti-Muslim action in Sri Lanka is there, very much there, in the minds of the Ambassadors who are gathered in Geneva, and that it will be a determinant, perhaps an important determinant, in shaping the votes on the anti-Sri Lanka Resolution that is being moved by the US. We tend to think in Sri Lanka about international developments that are unfavorable to us as resulting from the diabolical machinations of the diabolical LTTE. In doing that we are assuming that the Western powers are so stupid that they are easily taken in by the LTTE. But does that ring true? It seems to me that if they are that stupid they would not be where they are today – at the top of the world. One cannot help wondering whether, perchance, it is we and not they who are stupid. Anyway, I am certain on one point: the major determinant behind the policy of Western Governments on Sri Lanka is not the LTTE but the Western Ambassadors who are presently working in Sri Lanka. We can safely presume that none of them owe their exalted positions to political patronage, that all of them have behind them many years of proven capacity particularly in the field of political analysis, and that every one of them has reported in detail and analysed responsibly the halal problem and the anti-Muslim hate campaign. It is not difficult to guess the trend of their analyses and their recommendations. It would be more or less along the following lines. The SL Tamils and the SL Muslims are both minorities but they are fundamentally distinct because the former can claim a homeland while the latter can’t. That is a fundamental distinction because the claim to a homeland can serve as the basis for a separatist claim. Any claim to separatism by the SL Muslims cannot therefore be taken seriously at all, and understandably they have never made that claim. Furthermore, whenever there has been controversy between the Sinhalese and the Tamils the Muslims have always taken the Sinhalese side against the Tamils, and they have done so instantly, unconditionally, and wholeheartedly. It is worth mentioning that during the July ’83 holocaust against the Tamils a top Muslim politician organized thugs in a part of Colombo to make a grand Muslim contribution to the holocaust. It is worth mentioning also that at this time last year some members of the All Ceylon Jamiath-ul Ulema were in Geneva canvassing Muslim votes for the Sri Lankan side. This year the ACJU is in the dock. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is difficult to imagine a more loyal minority than the Muslims. They have in fact been servile to the Sinhalese power elite. And yet there has been a protracted hate campaign against the Muslims, with nineteen websites going at it, and without the Government taking the slightest notice of it. There have been attacks on mosques and Muslim business establishments, with the police playing the role of passive spectators or taking not much more than perfunctory action. There have been videos showing monks breaking the law and the police placidly looking on, but the Government has refused to take any action in such cases. It is true that around the time of the National Day on February 4 there were Governmental statements – including one by the President himself – acknowledging and deploring racism among the Sinhalese. That certainly was a significant step forward, but the requisite counter-action did not follow. Instead the halal problem was allowed to become critical. The present writer believes that in the annals of race relations there is nothing to parallel the halal problem in Sri Lanka: it is almost certainly unique in its sheer quasi-insane irrationality. Some food items are forbidden to Muslims in the Koran. For thousand four hundred years there were no problems among Muslims about eschewing forbidden food items. But now there is a problem because there is a vast array of synthetic food items which could use forbidden components, and hence there is a need for halal certification. The ACJU started issuing such certificates to Muslims. Non-Muslims who mainly wanted to tap the huge halal market abroad also wanted halal certificates, and the ACJU obliged. It appears that the ACJU had no legal warrant for issuing halal certificates, and for charging money for them. The most important point that has to be borne in mind is that the ACJU did not, and could not have compelled non-Muslims to buy halal certificates. There was nothing in all that that could not have been sorted out by the Government without any difficulty. The fact that halal certification became so huge a problem shows that racist idiocy has been allowed to go too far in Sri Lanka. We can be certain that foreign Ambassadors in Colombo have been reporting to their Foreign Offices more or less along the lines indicated above, and we can be certain also that the reports will impact on the thinking on how to vote on the US Resolution in Geneva. The notion will be formed – or will be strengthened having been already formed – that the Sinhalese include in their ranks some of the worst racists in the world, and that the Government allows them much latitude. There does not seem to be much of a hiatus in Sri Lanka between the centre occupied by the Government and what is sometimes called the lunatic fringe. Two conclusions can follow. One is that the notion that our troops deliberately killed Tamil civilians on a massive scale becomes more credible, strengthening the case for a strong anti-SL Resolution. The other possible conclusion is this: if the friendly and innocuous Muslim minority can be treated in this way, it becomes almost impossible to believe that the potentially militant Tamil minority will ever get fair and equal treatment, and the case becomes much stronger for a solution based on a very wide measure of devolution. One question cannot be avoided. Were the Bodu Bala Sena and the JHU unaware of what was going on in Geneva, and that the anti-halal campaign could have very adverse consequences there? Common sense should have dictated that the campaign be postponed until the conclusion of the UNHRC meeting. Some who are over-fond of conspiracy theories would say that they are secretly serving the purposes of the US and of India. Others may say that they have been manipulated by the CIA and RAW without being aware of it. I cannot subscribe to such notions. I have the strong conviction that the valid explanation for the horrendous mistiming of the anti-halal campaign is to be found in the irrationality that goes with racism. The usual paradigm of racism does not include a recognition of the fact that racism and irrationality go together.

Izethhussain@gmail.com