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Monday, July 3, 2017

Alexis Luthor notes and archives in regards to Talia al Ghul....

The Bizarre Case of Bashar al-Assad





by Uri Avnery 
Posted on
July 01, 2017

Conan Doyle, the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, would have titled his story about this incident "The Bizarre Case of Bashar al-Assad".
And bizarre it is.
It concerns the evil deeds of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, who bombed his own people with Sarin, a nerve gas, causing gruesome deaths of the victims.
Like everybody else around the world, I heard about the foul deed a few hours after it happened. Like everybody else, I was shocked. And yet…
And yet, I am a professional investigative journalist. For 40 years of my life I was the editor-in-chief of an investigative weekly magazine, which exposed nearly all of Israel’s major scandals during those years. I have never lost a major libel suit, indeed I have rarely been sued at all. I am mentioning this not to boast, but to lend some authority to what I am going to say.
In my time I have decided to publish thousands of investigative articles, including some which concerned the most important people in Israel. Less well known is that I have also decided not to publish many hundreds of others, which I found lacked the necessary credibility.
How did I decide? Well, first of all I asked for proof. Where is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? Is there written documentation?
But there was always something which cannot be defined. Beyond witnesses and documents there is something inside the mind of an editor which tells him or her: wait, something wrong here. Something missing. Something that doesn’t rhyme.
It is a feeling. Call it an inner voice. A kind of intuition. A warning that tells you, the minute you hear about the case for the first time: Beware. Check it again and again.
This is what happened to me when I first heard that, on April 4, Bashar al-Assad had bombed Khan Sheikhoun with nerve gas.
My inner voice whispered: wait. Something wrong. Something smells fishy.
First of all, it was too quick. Just a few hours after the event, everybody knew it was Bashar who did it.
Of course, it was Bashar! No need for proof. No need to waste time checking. Who else but Bashar?
Well, there are plenty of other candidates. The war in Syria is not two-sided. Not even three- or four-sided. It is almost impossible to count the sides.
There is Bashar, the dictator, and his close allies: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Party of God (Hizb-Allah) in Lebanon, both Shiite. There is Russia, closely supporting. There is the US, the faraway enemy, which supports half a dozen (who is counting?) local militias. There are the Kurdish militias, And there is, of course, Daesh (or ISIS, or ISIL or IS), the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Al-Sham is the Arabic name for Greater Syria.)
This is not a neat war of one coalition against another. Everybody is fighting with everybody else against everybody else. Americans and Russians with Bashar against Daesh. Americans and Kurds against Bashar and the Russians. The "rebel" militias against each other and against Bashar and Iran. And so on. (Somewhere there is Israel, too, but hush.)
So in this bizarre battlefield, how could anyone tell within minutes of the gas attack that it was Bashar who did it?
Political logic did not point that way. Lately, Bashar has been winning. He had no reason at all to do something that would embarrass his allies, especially the Russians.
The first question Sherlock Holmes would ask is: What is the motive? Who has something to gain?
Bashar had no motive at all. He could only lose by gas-bombing his citizens.
Unless, of course, he is crazy. And nothing indicates that he is. On the contrary, he seems to be in full control of his senses. Even more normal than Donald Trump.
I don’t like dictators. I don’t like Bashar al-Assad, a dictator and the son of a dictator. (Assad, by the way, means lion.) But I understand why he is there.
Until long after World War I, Lebanon was a part of the Syrian state. Both countries are a hotchpotch of sects and peoples. In Lebanon there are Christian Maronites, Melkite Greeks, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Druze, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and diverse others. The Jews have mostly left.
All these exist in Syria, too, with the addition of the Kurds and the Alawites, the followers of Ali, who may be Muslims or not (depends who is talking). Syria is also divided by the towns which hate each other: Damascus, the political and religious capital and Aleppo, the economic capital, with several cities – Homs, Hama, Latakia – in between. Most of the country is desert.
After many civil wars, the two countries found two different solutions. In Lebanon, they agreed a national covenant, according to which the president is always a Maronite, the prime minister always a Sunni Muslim, the commander of the army always a Druze and the speaker of the Parliament, a powerless job, always a Shiite. (Until Hizballah, the Shiites were on the lowest rung of the ladder.)
In Syria, a much more violent place, they found a different solution: a kind of agreed-on dictatorship. The dictator was chosen from among one of the least powerful sects: the Alawis. (Bible-lovers will be reminded that when the Israelites chose their first King, they took Saul, a member of the smallest tribe.)
That’s why Bashar continues to rule. The different sects and localities are afraid of each other. They need the dictator.
What does Donald Trump know about these intricacies? Well, nothing.
He was deeply shocked by the pictures of the victims of the gas attack. Women! Children! Beautiful Babies! So he decided on the spot to punish Bashar by bombing one of his airfields.
After making the decision, he called in his generals. They feebly objected. They knew that Bashar was not involved. In spite of being enemies, the American and Russian air forces work in Syria in close cooperation (another bizarre detail) in order to avoid incidents and start World War III. So they know about every mission. The Syrian air-force is part of this arrangement.
The generals seem to be the only halfway normal people around Trump, but Trump refused to listen. So they launched their missiles to destroy a Syrian airfield.
America was enthusiastic. All the important anti-Trump newspapers, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, hastened to express their admiration for his genius.
In comes Seymour Hersh, a world-renowned investigative reporter, the man who exposed the American massacres in Vietnam and the American torture chambers in Iraq. He investigated the incident in depth and found that there is absolutely no evidence and almost no possibility that Bashar used nerve gas in Khan Sheikhoun.
What happened next? Something incredible: all the renowned US newspapers, including the New York Times and The New Yorker, refused to publish. So did the prestigious London Review of Books. In the end, he found a refuge in the German Welt am Sonntag.
For me, that is the real story. One would like to believe that the world – and especially the "Western World" – is full of honest newspapers, which investigate thoroughly and publish the truth. That is not so. Sure, they probably do not consciously lie. But they are unconscious prisoners of lies.
Some weeks after the incident an Israeli radio station interviewed me on the phone. The interviewer, a right-wing journalist, asked me about Bashar’s dastardly use of gas against his own citizens. I answered that I had seen no evidence of his responsibility.
The interviewer was audibly shocked. He speedily changed the subject. But his tone of voice betrayed his thoughts: "I always knew that Avnery was a bit crazy, but now he is completely off his rocker."
Unlike the good old Sherlock, I don’t know who did it. Perhaps Bashar, after all. I only know that there is absolutely no evidence for that.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli Knesset. Read other articles by Uri, or visit Uri’s website.

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Whither the Palestinian Authority?





by Uri Avnery 
Posted on
June 08, 2017

Last week, a not so well-known Palestinian woman received an unusual honor. An article of hers was published on top of the first page of the most respected newspaper on earth: New York Times.
The editors defined the writer, Diana Buttu, as: "a lawyer and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization".
I knew Diana Buttu when she first appeared on the Palestinian scene, in 2000, at the beginning of the second intifada. She was born in Canada, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who tried hard to assimilate in their new homeland, and received a good Canadian education.
When the struggle in the occupied territories intensified, she returned to her parents’ homeland. The Palestinian participants of the negotiations with Israel, which started after the Oslo agreement, were impressed by the young lawyer who spoke excellent English – something rare – and asked her to join the national endeavor.
When the negotiations died clinically, Diana Buttu disappeared from my eyes. Until her dramatic reappearance last week.
The location and the headline of the article demonstrate the importance which the American editors saw in her argument. The headline was "Do we need a Palestinian Authority?" and further on, in another headline, "Shutter the Palestinian Authority".
The argument of Diana Buttu seduces by its simplicity: the usefulness of the Palestinian Authority has passed. It should be liquidated. Now.
The Palestinian Authority, she says, was set up for a specific purpose: to negotiate with Israel for the end of the occupation and the creation of the hoped-for Palestinian state. By its very nature, that was a task limited in time.
According to the Oslo agreement, the negotiations for ending the occupation should have reached their goal in 1999. Since then, 18 years have passed without any movement towards a solution. The only thing that has moved was the settlement movement, which has reached by now monstrous dimensions.
In these circumstances, says Buttu, the Palestinian Authority has become a "subcontractor" of the occupation. The Authority helps Israel to oppress the Palestinians. True, it employs a large number of educational and medical personnel, but more than a third of its budget – some 4 billion dollars – go the "security". The Palestinian security forces maintain a close cooperation with their Israeli colleagues. Meaning, they cooperate in upholding the occupation.
Also, Buttu complains about the lack of democracy. For 12 years now, no elections have taken place. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) rules in contravention of the Palestinian Basic Law.
Her solution is simple: "it’s time for the authority to go." To abolish the authority, to return the responsibility for the occupied Palestinian population to the Israeli occupier and adopt a "new Palestinian strategy".
What strategy, exactly?
Up to this point, Buttu’s arguments were lucid an logical. But from here on they become unclear and nebulous.
Before going on, I have to make some personal remarks.
I am an Israeli. I define myself as an Israeli patriot. As a son of the occupying nation I don’t think that I have the right to give advice to the occupied nation.
True, I have devoted the last 79 years of my life to the achievement of peace between the two nations – a peace that, I believe, is an existential necessity for both. Since the end of the 1948 war I preach the establishment of an independent State of Palestinian side by side with the State of Israel. Some of my enemies in the extreme Israeli Right even accuse me of having invented the "Two-State Solution" (thus deserving the title of "traitor".)
In spite of all this, I have always abstained from giving the Palestinians advice. Even when Yasser Arafat declared several times publicly that I am his "friend", I did not see myself as an adviser. I have expressed my views and voiced them many times in the presence of Palestinians, but from that point to giving advice, the distance is great.
Now, too, I am not ready to give advice to the Palestinians in general, and to Diana Buttu in particular. But I take the liberty to to make some remarks about her revolutionary proposal.
Reading her article for the second and third time, I gain the impression that it contains a disproportion between the diagnosis and the medicine.
What does she propose that the Palestinians do?
The first step is clear: break up the Palestinian Authority and return all the organs of Palestinian self-government to the Israeli military governor.
That is simple. But what next?
Diana Buttu voices several general proposals. "Non-violent mass protests", "boycott, divestment and sanctions", "addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees" (from the 1948 war) and the "Palestinian citizens of Israel". She mentions approvingly that already more than a third of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories support a single-state solution – meaning a bi-national state.
With due respect, will these remedies – all together and each one separately – liberate the Palestinian people?
There is no proof that it will.
Experience shows the it is easy for the occupation authorities to turn a "nonviolent mass protest" into a very violent one. That happened in both intifadas, and especially in the second. It started with nonviolent actions, and then the occupation authorities called in snipers. Within a few days the intifada became violent.
The use of boycotts? There is now in the world a large movement of BDS against Israel. The Israeli government is afraid of it and fights against it with all means, including ridiculous ones. But this fear does not spring from the economic damages this movement can cause, but from the damage it may cause to Israel’s image. Such image may hurt, but it does not kill.
Like many others, Buttu uses here the example of South Africa. This is an imagined example. The worldwide boycott was indeed impressive, but it did not kill the apartheid regime. This is a western illusion, which reflects contempt for the "natives".
The racist regime in South Africa was not brought down by foreigner, nice as they were, but by those despised "natives". The blacks started campaigns of armed struggle (yes, the great Nelson Mandela was a "terrorist") and mass strikes, which brought down the economy. The international boycott played a welcome supporting role.
Buttu has high hopes for "Palestinian boycotts". Can they really hurt the Israeli economy? One can always bring in a million Chinese workers.
Buttu also mentions the international court in the Hague. The trouble is that Jewish psychology is hardened against "goyish justice". Aren’t they all anti-Semites? Israel spits on them, as it spit on the UNO resolution at its time.
What is left? There is only one alternative, the one Buttu wisely refrains from mentioning: terrorism.
Many peoples throughout history started wars of liberation, violent struggles against their oppressors. In Israeli jargon that is called "terror’.
Let’s ignore for a moment the ideological aspect and concentrate on the practical aspect only: does one believe that a "terrorist" campaign by the occupied people against the occupying people can, under existing circumstances, succeed?
I doubt it. I doubt it very much. The Israeli security services have shown, until now, considerable ability in fighting against armed resistance.
If so, what remains for the Palestinians to do? In two words: Hold on.
And here there lies the special talent of Mahmous Abbas. He is a great one for holding on. For leading a people that is passing a terrible ordeal, an ordeal of suffering and humiliation, without giving in. Abbas does not give in. If someone will take his place, somewhere in the future, he will not give in either. Not Marwan Barghouti, for example.
As a young man I was a member of the Irgun, the underground military organization. During World War II, my company organized a "trial" for Marshal Phillip Petain, who became head the French government after the French collapse. This "government" was located in Vichy and took orders from the German occupation.
Much against my will, I was appointed counsel for the defense. I took the job seriously, and, to my surprise, discovered that Petain had logic on his side. He saved Paris from destruction and made it possible for most of the French people to survive the occupation. When the Nazi empire broke down, France, under Charles de Gaulle, joined the victors.
Of course, Diana Buttu does not refer to this emotion-laden historic example. But one should remember.
A few days before the publication of Buttu’s article, a leader of the Israeli fascist right, Betsalel Smotrich, a deputy chairman of the Knesset, published an ultimatum to the Palestinians.
Smotrich proposed to put the Palestinian before a choice between three possibilities: to leave the country, to live in the country without citizenship rights or to rise up in arms – and then the Israeli army "would know how to deal with them".
In simple words: the choice is between (a) the mass expulsion of seven million Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Israel proper and the Gaza Strip, which would amount to Genocide, (b) life as a people of slaves under an Apartheid regime and (c) simple genocide.
The unclear proposal of Buttu constitutes, in practice, the second choice. She mentions that many Palestinians approve of the "one-state solution". She shies away from a clear-cut statement and hides behind a formula that is becoming fashionable these days: "two-states or one state". Rather like: "swimming or drowning".
This is suicide. Dramatic suicide. Glorious suicide. Suicide none the less.
Both Buttu and Smotrich lead to disaster.
After all these years, the only practical solution remains as it was at the beginning: two states for two peoples. Two states that will live side by side in peace, perhaps even in friendship.
There is no other solution.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli Knesset. Read other articles by Uri, or visit Uri’s website.

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Palestine’s Nelson Mandela





by Uri Avnery 
Posted on
April 22, 2017

I have a confession to make: I like Marwan Barghouti.
I have visited him at his modest Ramallah home several times. During our conversations, we discussed Israeli-Palestinian peace. Our ideas were the same: to create the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and to establish peace between the two states, based on the 1967 lines (with minor adjustments), with open borders and cooperation.
This was not a secret agreement: Barghouti has repeated this proposal many times, both in prison and outside.
I also like his wife, Fadwa, who was educated as a lawyer but devotes her time to fight for the release of her husband. At the crowded funeral of Yasser Arafat, I happened to stand next to her and saw her tear-streaked face.
This week, Barghouti, together with about a thousand other Palestinian prisoners in Israel, started an unlimited hunger strike. I have just signed a petition for his release.
Marwan Barghouti is a born leader. In spite of his small physical stature, he stands out in any gathering. Within the Fatah movement he became the leader of the youth division. (The word "Fatah" is the initials of "Palestinian Liberation Movement, in reverse),
The Barghoutis are a widespread clan, dominating several villages near Ramallah. Marwan himself was born in 1959 in Kobar village. An ancestor, Abd-al-Jabir al-Barghouti, led an Arab revolt in 1834. I have met Mustafa Barghouti, an activist for democracy, in many demonstrations and shared the tear gas with him. Omar Barghouti is a leader of the international anti-Israel boycott movement.
Perhaps my sympathy for Marwan is influenced by some similarities in our youth. He joined the Palestinian resistance movement at the age of 15, the same age as I was when I joined the Hebrew underground some 35 years earlier. My friends and I considered ourselves freedom fighters, but were branded by the British authorities as "terrorists". The same has now happened to Marwan – a freedom fighter in his own eyes and in the eyes of the vast majority of the Palestinian people, a "terrorist" in the eyes of the Israeli authorities.
When he was put on trial in the Tel Aviv District Court, my friends and I, members of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), tried to demonstrate our solidarity with him in the courtroom. We were expelled by armed guards. One of my friends lost a toenail in this glorious fight.
Years ago I called Barghouti the "Palestinian Mandela". Despite their difference in height and skin color, there was a basic similarity between the two: both were men of peace, but justified the use of violence against their oppressors. However, while the Apartheid regime was satisfied with one life term, Barghouti was sentenced to a ridiculous five life terms and another 40 years – for acts of violence executed by his Tanzim organization.
(Gush Shalom published a statement this week suggesting that by the same logic, Menachem Begin should have been sentenced by the British to 91 life terms for the bombing of the King David hotel, in which 91 people – many of them Jews – lost their lives.)
There is another similarity between Mandela and Barghouti: when the apartheid regime was destroyed by a combination of "terrorism", violent strikes and a worldwide boycott, Mandela emerged as the natural leader of the new South Africa. Many people expect that when a Palestinian state is set up, Barghouti will become its president, after Mahmoud Abbas.
There is something in his personality that inspires confidence, turning him into the natural arbiter of internal conflicts. Hamas people, who are the opponents of Fatah, are inclined to listen to Marwan. He is the ideal conciliator between the two movements.
Some years ago, under the leadership of Marwan, a large number of prisoners belonging to the two organizations signed a joint appeal for national unity, setting out concrete terms. Nothing came of this.
That, by the way, may be an additional reason for the Israeli government’s rejection of any suggestion of freeing Barghouti, even when a prisoner exchange provided a convenient opportunity. A free Barghouti could become a powerful agent for Palestinian unity, the last thing the Israeli overlords want.
Divide et impera – "divide and rule" – since Roman times this has been a guiding principle of every regime that suppresses another people. In this the Israeli authorities have been incredibly successful. Political geography provided an ideal setting: The West Bank (of the Jordan river) is cut off from the Gaza Strip by some 50 km of Israeli territory.
Hamas got hold of the Gaza Strip by elections and violence, and refuses to accept the leadership of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), a union of the more secular organizations which rules the West Bank.
This is not an unusual situation in national liberation organizations. They often split into more and less extreme wings, to the great delight of the oppressor. The last thing the Israeli authorities are willing to do is release Barghouti and allow him to restore Palestinian national unity. God forbid.
The hunger strikers do not demand their own release, but demand better prison conditions. They demand, inter alia, more frequent and longer visits by wives and family, an end to torture, decent food, and such. They also remind us that under international law an "occupying power" is forbidden to move prisoners from an occupied territory to the home country of the occupier. Exactly this happens to almost all Palestinian "security prisoners".
Last week Barghouti set out these demands in an op-ed article published by the New York Times, an act that shows the newspaper’s better side. The editorial note described the author as a Palestinian politician and Member of Parliament. It was a courageous act by the paper (which somewhat restored its standing in my eyes after it condemned Bashar al-Assad for using poison gas, without a sliver of evidence.)
But courage has its limits. The very next day the NYT published an editor’s note stating that Barghouti was convicted for murder. It was an abject surrender to Zionist pressure.
The man who claimed this victory was an individual I find particularly obnoxious. He calls himself Michael Oren and is now a deputy minister in Israel, but he was born in the USA and belongs to the subgroup of American Jews who are super-super-patriots of Israel. He adopted Israeli citizenship and an Israeli name in order to serve as Israel’s ambassador to the USA. In this capacity he attracted attention by using particularly virulent anti-Arab rhetoric, so extreme as to make even Binyamin Netanyahu look moderate.
I doubt that this person has ever sacrificed anything for his patriotism, indeed, he has made quite a career of it. Yet he speaks with contempt about Barghouti, who has spent much of his life in prison and exile. He describes Barghouti’s article in the New York Times as a "journalistic terror act". Look who’s talking.
A hunger strike is a very courageous act. It is the last weapon of the least protected people on earth – the prisoners. The abominable Margaret Thatcher let the Irish hunger strikers starve to death.
The Israeli authorities wanted to force-feed Palestinian hunger strikers. The Israeli Physicians Association, much to its credit, refused to cooperate, since such acts have led in the past to the deaths of the victims. That put an end to this kind of torture.
Barghouti demands that Palestinian political prisoners be treated as prisoners-of-war. No chance of that.
However, one should demand that prisoners of any kind be treated humanely. This means that deprivation of liberty is the only punishment imposed, and that within the prisons the maximum of decent conditions should be accorded.
In some Israeli prisons, a kind of modus vivendi between the prison authorities and the Palestinian prisoners seems to have been established. Not so in others. One gets the impression that the prison service is the enemy of the prisoners, making their life as miserable as possible. This has worsened now, in response to the strike.
This policy is cruel, illegal and counterproductive. There is no way to win against a hunger-strike. The prisoners are bound to win, especially when decent people all over the world are watching. Perhaps even the NYT.
I am waiting for the day when I can visit Marwan again as a free man in his home in Ramallah. Even more so if Ramallah is, by that time, a town in the free State of Palestine.
Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, writer, and former member of the Israeli Knesset. Read other articles by Uri, or visit Uri’s website.

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