Tag: qatar

Christmas 2017 & The Dishonest Broker

In the last few months we have seen the Trump administration reeling from one extraordinarily stupid move in foreign policy, to another.

Firstly  we have the tragedy and farce of the declaration that the US will ‘accept’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; somewhere that all Western nations have been loathe to go (officially) whilst fully accepting and unconditionally supporting the reality of the triumphalism of the apartheid racist Israeli entity.  A two state solution has, since 1948, been known to  all  parties  as a totally non-viable option, and will never happen.

It is of course possible that the Israelis finally realise that the nation of Israel has no future in the long term , unless it grants full right of return to all Palestinian and full compensation for lands stolen since 1948 and lives destroyed… The alternative for Israel does not bear thinking about.

It is not that Trump’s declaration changes anything;  what is upsetting for the West and for China and Russia, is that it makes plain that there never was a two state option- and that the United States has always been the Dishonest Broker in the ‘peace process’ .

Now we can start to face reality in Palestine- and it is not a pretty picture for the Israelis.

The ludicrous aspect of this, is that for those modern day Israelis whose ancestors came from the Levant; they are of exactly the same ethnic Semitic lineage as the ‘dirty Arabs’ they despise . We have seen more than 60 years of completely farcical “peace’ negotiations; the Israelis have never had any intention of returning any of the lands stolen by war or genocide, and both the ‘disinterested” broker and the Palestinian negotiators have always known that.

Then  we have the  ongoing playground bully tactics to North Korea by  the United States president and his policy  advisors and chiefs of staff.  A country that knows full well the epic scale of barbarity the American nation is capable of;  having endured American genocide in the Korean War and the continuous threats from various U.S. presidents and US generals since that time to blast them back into the stone-age. With its back against the wall, North Korea has only one option- to continue to develop enough nuclear ICBMs to substantially debilitate the American economy ( Given that of course from the American side, there will be no negotiations with North Korea until they ‘behave’ )

And then we have dear Nikki Haley the United States ambassador to the United Nations displaying bits of what are supposedly Iranian made missiles launched by the Yemenese Houthis against their Saudi aggressors ,who are currently killing thousands of Yemen citizens with cholera and millions through starvation…

But hey Nikki!- what ‘s more important? -the lives of a few million Yemenese? Or the need to destroy Iran to serve the interests of the Israeli supporters and Saudis who pay Congress and the Washington ‘think-tanks’ ? One hopes that karma is not for real:- Nikki’s future lives are not going to be exactly pretty…nor will it be in this life should true international justice be finally served.

It is not that Trump has really changed anything;- the brutality, cynicism, duplicitiousness and lack of humanity of United States foreign policy has remained largely unchanged since the Second World War. Trump has simply made it very clear what it  has always been about for the United States:- money!

The facade has been removed…We have  seen  a dramatic transition from  a President able to so  plausibly lie through his teeth  (and win  a Nobel peace prize for it), to  one who  seems  to  say  (or tweet) whatever  fleeting thought is on  his mind at  the time ,  but whose sole  immediate directive for decision-making is money  and power, rather than  a longer term strategy of deceit  to reach  the desired same end.

It is disturbing to think that these great leaders of the ‘Free World’ are supposedly the best of humankind- a sad indictment on us all

Links

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/world-will-not-mourn-decline-u-s-hegemony/ 

Brothers in Arms – Saudis and Israelis

On July 10th  2017  the U.K. High  Court rejected a bid by  the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) that ‘Britain’s multi-billion-pound arms sales to Saudi Arabia should be halted because they were being used in Yemen in violation of international humanitarian law. ‘

The British  High  Court judges claimed that the Saudis had “sought positively to address concerns about International Humanitarian Law”…..”Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no ‘real risk’ that there might be ‘serious violations’ of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or cancelled,” the court said. “

One wonders whether judges can be indicted for perjury? Those judges would have known  full  well  that  their legal  judgement  was a total  and outright lie. The Saudis have in  fact  done everything possible to  exacerbate the suffering  of the Yemen population over the past two years,  with  massive starvation and typhoid outbreaks the consequence of  Saudi bombing of civilian  infrastructure and a blockade of aid and food to Yemen (using British  and U.S. aircraft  ordinance, guidance and coordination) .

One might put this ruling alongside the  eagerness of the U.K. to   continue to  pour millions into  the Israeli  military, which  has for the past 60  years engaged in  a war of not-so- slow motion genocide of the Palestinian  people, for whom  it has  legal  responsibilty as the occupying entity . One has only to  read John Pilger’s account  of the horrendous ordeal  of the Palestinian  people, to be shamed  by  our complicity in  Israeli  war crimes. What  do  these two  delightful  pariah  states have in  common?-  firstly an overweaning desire for  expansion and power; secondly the destruction of the Iranian state,  and thirdly the use of religion to  justify  their  expansionist  goals; with  the Saudis using  their  Wahhabist dogma  to  promote sectarian violence against those who  do  not subscribe to  their bizarre version of  the muslim faith,  while the Zionists use the Jewish  religion as a weapon  against  all  those who  defy  their expansionist  policies and  appropriation of other people’s lands.   As the Boycott,  Divestment Sanctions  (BDS) movement gathers steam  against  the  Israeli  entity, having at least some friends  Israel  can  rely on, may prove rather useful…

It is no  wonder then that  the long-standing secret  alliance between the Saudis and Israel  is now becoming visible, as  political  and moral  pressure  continues to  escalate against  both of them. The Saudi ‘princes’ have continued to  publicly preach  their opposition to  Israeli  occupation of Palestinian  lands , whilst  clandestinely supporting Israel. As the article in Investigaction notes: With some exceptions, support for the Palestinian cause in the Arab world is overwhelming. And regimes like Saudi Arabia have happily betrayed the Palestinian cause over and over again because they are aware that key to their survival is subservience to the United States, and that an alliance with Israel may boost their regional hegemony prospects. But because their legitimacy to rule is incredibly thin to say the least, royals and officials need to keep pretending in public that they are defending and fighting for the Palestinians.

As the economic and military  power of Iran continues to grow,  (despite the best efforts of most of the Western world; with sanctions and  attempted coups and assassinations and wars), the  anti-Iran hysteria within  the ruling classes in these two  regimes continues to  escalate. For the Saudis,  Iran , a largely Shi-ite theocracy ( i.e.  decidely more democratic than  the Saudis,  but  with brutal  political  oversight by  its religious governing bodies) is  a complete anathema to  Saudi Wahhabist  Sunni  ideology,  which holds that all  non-Sunni  muslims are in  fact not muslim  at  all.  In addition  Iran’s rapid development of an internal  arms industry (particularly in  missile development) totally unreliant on  Western imports, along with an economic  structure largely  independent  from  the West ( largely as a result of Western  sanctions based on  fraudulent claims of its  development of nuclear weapons) has allowed it to pursue a totally independent foreign policy line-  unlike the Saudis who  remain completely reliant on  U.K.  and U.S.  weaponry  and therefore required to  be  largely compliant  to U.S.  and U.K military   and political  objectives in  the Middle East.

For the Israelis,  Iran  remains the one  major threat   to its goals of a larger and all-powerful  Israel;  the Middle East  country with the largest  military (courtesy  of the United States)  and  a nuclear arsenal . Iran continues to  support fund and train  Hezbollah  in Lebanon,  and to some degree Hamas  in  the Occupied Territories of Palestine itself. Both Hezbollah,  with its devastating victory over the Israeli  Army in  Lebanon in 2006, and to  a smaller degree Hamas, with its ongoing resistance to  Israel’s brutal military incursions into  the West  Bank, have been  a thorn in  the side of Israeli  expansionism, and hence have been deemed ‘terrorist  organisations’  by the West.  Hezbollah  has again  played a significant role  against  Al Qaeda (Al Nusra) and ISIS ( funded and armed by  the Saudis and to  some degree by  Turkey, Qatar   and Israel in  the Syrian  war, with coordination and logistics provided by  British and United States intelligence agencies).  And while Israel  knows that  Iran is not going to  acquire nuclear weapons,  it is fearful  of the increasingly advanced home-grown missile technology  that Iran  posseses which now poses a significant deterrant to Israeli  expansion.

Thus  Israel  and  the Saudi  regimes; both rapidly becoming pariah states,  have  increasingly cosied up to each other, (just  as Israel  did with  apartheid South  Africa in  the 1960s) with Israel  providing overt  support to  the Saudi  war  in Yemen,  along with the British and Americans,  on the premise that somehow/somewhere  the Iranians must  be supporting the Yemenese Houthi forces there.  This most un-holy of alliances will  inevitably be the undoing of both  regimes…

Links

https://www.caat.org.uk/campaigns/stop-arming-saudi/judicial-review

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-saudi-arms-idUKKBN19V0YR

http://johnpilger.com/articles/palestine-is-still-the-issue

http://wolvestuc.org.uk/index.php/local-campaigns/wolves-palestine-solidarity/256-wolverhampton-link-to-arms-exports-to-israel

Yemen: The War That Isn’t Happening Even as It’s Happening

http://www.investigaction.net/en/israel-and-saudi-arabia-a-match-made-in-heaven-or-in-washington/

 

 

Yemen: The War That Isn’t Happening Even as It’s Happening

Qatari questions…

As Donald Trump  has announced: ‘Qatar has  been funding terrorism  at a very high level”. Trump is of course correct;  Qatar has been funding training and arming  jihadists across the Middle East  and the Western world for many years. However, funding  terrorists is not Qatar’s sin  for the Saudis ,  the Americans and the British.  Qatar’s crime is that they not only support Hamas to    respond to Israeli  terror against  the  Palestinians ,  but they also have a  distant alliance with  Iran promarily via  their shared Pars field gas resource; and,  to cap  it all  off, are  now agreeing to sell some gas  in non-US dollars!

The reality is that   a few  deaths on  London  Bridge  or somewhere else in  Europe are simply collateral  damage;  worth it,  in  the bigger interest of huge kickbacks  from  the Saudis,  and Israel’s backers in  the States  and the U.K. .. This is purely and simply about money. The  festering cesspool  of  British/American  mainstream  politics and their respective ‘intelligence’  units , is all  about money- what’s a few blown-up  innocent citizens compared to  the billions that  can be made through arms deals,   oil  deals and kickbacks?-with  the added benefit of  de-stabilising the one final   disruptor  to  Israel’s’ plans  to  once and for good  ‘solve’  the Palestinian question-  by removing Iran  and their allies Hezbollah and to some degree Hamas.

As Angry Arab notes:  If Western media want to really serve their readers in their (lousy) coverage of the Gulf crisis, they would adhere to those two basic standards of professional journalism:
1) they would tell their readers while interviewing academics, journalists, or “citizens” in UAE or Saudi Arabia or Qatar that opposition the government or disagreeing with the government in tweets or in retweets would land you in jail for up to 15 years with a hefty fine. They would tell them people in those countries are not free to express views different form the government.
2) they would tell readers when they cite “experts” at DC think thanks that those think tanks are all funded by UAE and/or Saudi Arabia (except Brookings which is funded by Qatar).  These are basics.’

 

Links

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/qatar-linked-terror-list-issued-saudi-arabia-allies/

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13960320000109

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/391853-qatar-riyadh-plan-backfires/

https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/buying-silence

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/iraq-reinforces-border-saudi-arabia-amid-deepening-qatari-saudi-rift-video/

http://angryarab.blogspot.co.nz/

 

Dance of the Macabre

We are now treated to the spectacle of President Trump  dancing a sword dance with  Saudi  princes after signing  a multi  billion dollar arms deal  with  the Saudi  regime..
We  have indisputable evidence that  the Saudis and Qataris are not only funding training and even  providing  jihadist manpower to  terrorists in  the Middle East  ( including both  Al Qaeda and ISIS), but that  the Saudi  regime is also  the sole source of the Wahhabist  ideology  that drives foolish young men to commit terrorist crimes,  both in the West  and as  jihadist  mercenaries in  the Middle East.
We know also  that  Britain  (remember Lawrence of Arabia) and now the United States, have continued to  prop  up  this brutal  sectarian and misogynist regime on the Arabian  peninsula for the past 100  years,  because it serves their interest  to do  so. Interests that include  oil of course and the sale of superfluous  armaments , but also  the capacity to combat  those states in  the Middle East  who  do  not bow down  to  Western interests;  eg Iraq, Libya, Syria,  and the ultimate prize,  Iran.
Thus, as academic Christopher Davidson  meticulously records in  his 2016 book, “The Shadow Wars”; ongoing U.K.  and U.S.  support for the Saudi regime and its terrorist activities is very  much in  their interests.
For how much longer will  this macabre dance continue?