Biden’s Israel Policy Has Led Us to the Brink of War on Iran

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 2nd, 2024

Photo credit: CODEPINK

On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah, and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition.

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”FacebookTwitterReddit

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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

 

Inconvenient Truths: The Shia Salah al-Din and 10/7

by Eric Walberg / October 3rd, 2024

Salah El Din – Salah El Din El Ayoubi – Saladin and Richard the Lionheart

Jerusalem’s hard-fought liberation, now in process, is a recapitulation of the Christian Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries, this time, not by the knight on a white horse of legend, but through the long march of guerilla warfare by the much maligned Shia. This follows on the liberation of Iran from its Judeo-Christian yoke in 1979 and Iraq 25 years later, ironically by the US, forming the second Shia majority state. But it is the Shia minority of Lebanon that holds the keys to Jerusalem. Their 40% of the Lebanese population punches well above their weight in a fractious country split among Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Hezbollah was forged in the heat of Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. The then-rag-tag militia killed over 600 Israeli soldiers, forcing Israel to retreat in humiliation, its first such defeat ever, and by a nonstate actor, a very bad omen, which Israel’s almost daily murder of Palestinians every since cannot erase, and which culminated in 10/7, Israel’s own private 9/11, bringing us to Israel’s carpeting bombing of Lebanon.

It is the Shia of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen we have to thank for preventing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians from proceeding smoothly. Sunnis will have to wake up if they don’t want to be left behind by their Shia brothers, their self-satisfied Sunni hegemony cracked open, exposed as the ‘sick man’ of the Middle East, i.e., undermined by imperialism, the same compromised role that destroyed the Ottomans, created post-Ottoman puppet Sunni states, and planted in Palestine a cursed tree, the Quran’s poisonous zaqqum, rooted in the center of Hell, aka the Jewish state.

The Saudis long ago were compromised through a voluntary pact with first British then US imperialism but, until the rise of Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS), were at least keeping up the trappings of Islamic ritual, jealously guarding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The quietist Saudis effectively blackmailed the Palestinians into accepting an interminable Israeli murderous occupation and creeping (now galloping) theft of their lands, financing Palestinian refugees, but with no promise of liberation, effectively working with not against the enemy.

Now MBS has let the westernizers loose in his kingdom, discarding the hijab, promoting concerts of trashy western rock music, buying British football teams (Newcastle United in 2021). Trump’s Abraham Accords were supposed to lead to a new Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia as the kingpins. With October 7 (10/7), the bottom fell out of MBS’s fantasy of a Saudi-Isreali hegemony over the Middle East, leaving the Palestinians in permanent limbo or exile. It didn’t seem to matter to the Saudis and Gulf sheikhs, who long ago lost interest in Palestine. In thie face of this complete betrayal of the Palestinians, of Islam itself, the Shia are the only Muslims to resist the sacrilege of permanent Jewish rule over Palestine and the destruction Islam’s holy sites to build a Third Temple.

Orthodox Sunni Muslims have always feared the moral purity which Shiism was founded on, in opposition to the more worldly, pragmatic Sunni majority. This very productive, though at times deadly, stand-off between the two strands of Islam began with Muhammad’s young cousin Ali being the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife Hadija, Ali’s heroic military career defending the religion during the early, perilous battles immortalized in the Quran, through to the murder of him and his family by power-hungry rivals. The draw of idealism and justice has kept Shiism alive, and from what we see today, it is the saving grace of Islam, pushing back today against deadly secularism. Ultimately, the Sunni will have to admit that the Shia are not just an inconvenient footnote (like MBS et al would have liked to make of the Palestinians).

20th century ummah challenges

All Muslims will agree that the unity of the ummah is the first, most urgent, priority. The Shia, though outliers, strive for this even more, as they face hardline Sunnis who consider them apostates and would be happy to cut them loose or wipe them out. The official Sunni position has wavered over the centuries, but generally grudgingly accepts them. The imperialists of course were happy to use ‘divide and rule’, and they quickly turned a peaceful ummah into quarreling sectarians in India, Pakistan, Iraq, wherever they had the chance.¹ This only really worked for post-Ottoman Iraq and Lebanon, both with large Shia communities mixed (peacefully) with Sunni. But the 20th century was one of increasing division, chaos, everywhere in the ummah. It is still on life support, held together now by the Shia thread, the ‘Shia crescent’, the only link the ummah has to Jerusalem and the Palestinians as they face annihilation, their Sunni brothers helpless or unwilling to save them.

The British official who fashioned the new Iraq in the 1920s, Gertrude Bell, had no time for Shia, who were the majority then as now, but Gertrude had no time for democracy for the dark-skinned. I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil. She knew how the ulama in Iran had defeated the Shah on his westernizing mission, the famous tobacco fatwa of 1890 that forced the shah to cancel the British concession, and supported the constitution movement for democracy in 1905. The British had no interest in creating a radical Shia majority state and put in place a Sunni puppet king.

Iraq’s long and violent history since then finally undid Gertrude’s machiavellian scheming in 2003, bringing to an end a truly disgusting Sunni dictatorship, and the advent of the first Shia-majority state, the positive effects of which are still being discovered. We can thank the US imperialists (even a broken clock is right twice a day) for stumbling on a winning formula for Islam (and for themselves, for the world). By genuinely promoting electoral democracy (along with opening Iraq to foreign exploitation of Iraq’s oil), it started the ball rolling on Sunni-Shia relations everywhere, including US client number one, the Saudi dictator-king, with his truly downtrodden Shia, who sit on Saudi oil and get only repression, disenfranchisement and lots of beheadings as thanks.

The 20th century path that brought us to our present apocalyptic scenario was long and tragic. The Ottoman ‘sick man of Europe’ collapse at the end of WWI, invaded by the British and French (their Russian allies had already collapsed leaving more spoils for the victors). The end of the caliphate? For atheist Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal that would have been fine. The Muslim ummah, both Sunni and Shia, anticipated this and had already rallied in its defense with the Khilafa Movement in 1919-1920, supported by other anti-imperialists, including Gandhi and India’s Hindus, who saw the British divide-and-rule as the poison that kept Indians subjugated.

Kemal got his way in 1924, accusing Indian Muslim leaders, who came all the way to Ankara to beg the Turkish strongman to maintain the caliphate, of foreign election interference. As if the caliphate was a Turkish plaything The shock wave reverberated around the world culminating in the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931 at the behest of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, bringing together Muslim leaders from around the world. A truly historic moment in the history of the ummah. But the caliphate was already a pipe dream, with growing Jewish immigration to British Palestine, the intent being to create a Jewish state, an imperial outpost to control the Middle East.

Everywhere, the Muslim world was occupied now by nominally Christian world empires, British, American, French, Dutch, the House of War (vs the ummah, the House of Peace), the the financial strings predominantly in Jewish hands, accounting for the plum Palestine being selected as a future Jewish state, purchased by the elite Jews who financed the British empire. Except for Shia Iran, which was never fully occupied and given an imperial make-over. But Iran also had its atheist modernizer, Reza Shah, who, having tricked the ulama into giving him their blessing initially, left them alone though marginalized. Though he weakened the religious establishment, outlawed the veil, and built industry and infrastructure, he was not so fanatically anti-Muslim He was anti-imperialist, and when WWII broke out, he was deposed by the British to prevent the shah from sending oil to the Germans. That occupation wrankled, and all the foreign devils, British, Russia, American were given the boot when the war ended.

It was the Shia ulama of Iran who were the only ulama to resist imperialism,² supporting the first genuinely independent prime minister, Mossadeq, in 1951 in his effort to kick the British out and take control of the economy. The normally quietist, conservative religious elite had been radicalized despite themselves. When the US moved in to foment a coup in 1953, the invaders were able to get a few religious leaders to bless their scheming, but this blatant imperialist act galvanized all Iranians, and eventually led to the overthrow of the second and last Pahlavi shah in 1979. Newly religious Iran was joined by newly religious Turkey with the coming to power of Recep Erdogan in 2000, who refers to his followers as ‘grandchildren of the Ottomans’. Traditional Sunni-Shia rivals, Turkey and Iran are far from bosom buddies, but the current crisis of the ummah means that differences are put aside.

The second stumbling block for Muslims was the secular reaction to imperialism, Arab nationalism, now competing with Turkish and Persian nationalisms, fashioned as secular identities, undermining a united Islamic identity, central to the ummah. Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are the two most notorious nationalist leaders, who led their countries in a death spiral of violent repression of Islam, corruption and failed military ventures.

Nationalism was foreign to Muslims, never the defining ideology, and these nationalist movements failed, with chauvinistic Sunni radicals morphing into violent pseudo-Islamic movements – al-Qaeda, ISIS and Islamic State–Khorasan Province.

With the current US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the ummah is coming together again, realizing this is the make-or-break moment for Islam, and that these nationalisms are evaporating in the heat of crisis. Even the perfidious MBS casually announced that there would be no Israeli-Saudi new order until the Palestinians have a real state. The ice is cracking, moving, as Palestine’s spring takes shape out of the Israelis’ ashes and rubble.

Turkey and Iran had secular capitalism imposed from the top to keep the imperialists at bay. Egypt had a brutal British occupation until the 1950s, creating the same secular capitalism as Turkey and Iran, but then came socialistic dictator Nasser in 1951, injecting a new political element. Sadly, he too refused to acknowledge Islam as the bedrock of society, a more genuinely socialistic way of life, his secular vision collapsing with Israeli invasion, leaving Egypt, the largest Middle East country, far weaker now than either of its two Middle East rivals. The Arab states have all remained puppets of imperialism and remain cool to, even resentful of the new Shia vitality and presence. But the Arab masses support the Shia defiance of US-Israel, despising their Quisling leaders.

Puppets and fledging actors

Iran’s revolution in 1979 was bad news for the Saudis, leading to even greater repression of its Shia. Saudi suspicions and fear of Shia have been a terrible ordeal for the 10% of Saudis who are Shia, and a powerful Shia state would naturally push for justice. So instead of making peace with their Shia (and thus, with the new Iran), in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait) spent $25b (i.e., gave US weapons producers $25b) in support of the brutal, mad thug, Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). When Saddam invaded Kuwait, cashing his US-Saudi IOU for sacrificing half million Iraqi Sunnis-Shia to kill a half million Shia Iranians, Saudi Arabia was unhappy. Not only had Saddam failed to crush Shia Iran, his defeat would mean an angry Shia state next door, which could easily invade and overthrow him.

So King Fahd invited the US forces into the kingdom to invade Iraq and keep the Saudi kingdom as head honcho of the Muslim world. I repeat: King Fahd allowed American and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian forces were involved both in bombing raids on Iraq and in the land invasion that helped to ‘liberate’ Kuwait, the so-called Gulf War (1990-1991). The ummah, the House of Peace, invaded and occupied by the House of War. MBS’s current free and easy secularism makes sense after all, but not for the ummah.

Why would the US have gone to all the trouble to invade Iraq as part of ‘liberating’ Kuwait, and then leave the (truly odious) dictator Saddam in power? Ask weakling King Fahd, whose fear of a Shia-majority Iraq next door was even greater than his fear of a cowed, murderous Saddam. Pan-Arab nationalism – RIP.

This enduring Sunni-Shia stand-off is the imperialists’ trump card. All the Arab countries are in varying degrees still US puppets, and persecute their Shia because they, the so-called rulers, are weak and fear the implicit critique of their weakness that the morally uncompromised Shia represent. Nigeria, Bahrain, Indonesia, Malaysia have all driven wedges between Sunnis and Shias when it was politically useful. The Sunni masses, looking for a way out of the imperialist straitjacket but educated to despise Shia, looked not to solidarity with all Muslims to fight the looming imperial enemy, but inward to past Sunni experience, the early four Rightly Guided Caliphs, for their inspiration. They downplay the fact that the finally one was Ali, the inspiration of the Shia as sole legitimate caliph of the whole lot. In the 1980s-1990s, frustrated Sunnis coalesced around radical Saudi Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, various ISIS caliphate dreamers in central Asia, the Caucasus, Africa, internationally, with an unIslamic jihad condoning mass civilian deaths as a key tactic.

This element continues to plague the Sunni world, the whole world. It has undermined the efforts to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The Ba’thists were outlawed, leaving the minority Sunni with nothing, so they preferred chaos and road bombs, but Shia long-suffering patience grudgingly brought together ‘good’ Sunni and all the Shia to fight the latest (Sunni) terrorists, ISIS et al.

10/7 was an earthquake, not just for Israel but for Islam, the Sunni-Shia tremors finally syncing on that explosive day, pushing the Sunni establishment into Shia arms. All people of goodwill now rout for the Shia Hezbollah in their battle with Israel to protect the heart and soul of Islam. Paradoxically, this challenge was anticipated by the renewal of relations between the Saudis and Iran in March 2023, anticipating 10/7, an admission that Shia power could not be ignored in the new world order taking shape under China and Russia, quite apart from the central role Iran was now playing in protecting the Palestinians from total annihilation, with the Saudis watching with alarm from the sidelines as their position at the head of the Muslim world was being usurped by events on the ground, including from its own despised 10% Shia, now demanding the same rights as citizens that the Sunnis have.

Democracy really is the answer

It’s finally clear: Arab nationalism has been a flop, as has been Pakistan nationalism, where the 20% Shia must constantly fight Sunni chauvinists. Indian nationalism is worse, following the path of Israel, a racist Zionized Hindutva ideology that exclused all Muslims, Sunni or Shia. Sunni chauvinism under imperialism, taking refuge in nationalism, always undermines the ummah, unless the Shia are a sizable minority or majority, and the government is sufficiently representative. I.e., democratic.

In hindsight, I would argue the road to the liberation of Jerusalem began with Iran’s revoluton in 1979, which put Palestine liberation at the top of its international agenda. The war launched by Iraq was supposed to steamroll through a weakened Iran, as ordered by Saddam’s backers Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, the US and Europe. (What a cynical, bizarre coalition!) Ayatollah Khomeini was brilliant and charismatic, but a poor politician, refusing to end the war when Saddam offered, hoping to liberate Iraq, leading to 100,000s more deaths and seriously weakening and tarnishing the revolution. His hubris was immortalized in telling anecdotes. My favorite: Pakistani dictator Zia had urged the shah in 1977 to crack down even harder on the rebels. When Zia met Khomeini as the shah’s successor a few years later, Khomeini merely asked politely for Zulfikar Bhutto’s life (Zia was Bhutto’s successor) to be spared. No dice. On the contrary, Zia advised Khomeini not to tangle with a superpower. Khomeini retorted he would never do such a thing and in fact always relied in the superpower. Ouch! That only made Zia persecute his Shia even more.

Arab secular states can’t unite when they are headed by dictators like Assad, Nasser, the Jordanian and Saudi king-dictators. Corrupt dictatorships don’t make good allies. The need for democracy is obvious. Iraq hopefully can be the model for Sunni and Shia learning to work together again under a robust electoral democracy. Sunni and Shia lived more or less till Saddam and sons really began their madness.³

The end of Saddam moved the Shia-Sunni ‘battle lines’ 200 miles west, now running through Baghdad, which was precisely what Gertrude Bell, Saddam and the imperialists had all tried to prevent. History takes its revenge. The chauvinistic Sunni hegemony of the Muslim world is finished. The Sunni hegemons tried to overthrow Khomeini and failed. The same battle took place 12 years later in Iraq and failed again due to Shia patience in the face of Sunni-inspired terror. Thousands of Saudi and Jordanian youth went to Iraq after 2003 to fight the occupation (and looming Shia hegemony) and die, just like they did in their misguided jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their violent self-sacrifice only digging the Sunni world deeper into a state of humiliation. 85% of ISIS in Syria working alongside the US imperialists are Saudi. They are there solely to fight the ‘sons of al-Alqami’, referring to the Shia vizier when the Mongols razed Baghdad in 1258.

Now the Sunni are exposed as helpless in the face of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, are actually helping ‘protect’ US-Israel from Iranian bombs intended for Israel. The Sunni world is humiliated, betraying Islam, kowtowing to not just the US but US-Israel. To defeat (Sunni-inspired) ISIS, the ‘good’ Iraqi Sunnis even had to welcome help from not just Iraq Shias (the army) but also Iran. It is high time to bury the hatchet of envy and suspicion, and join the Shia, if only because they hold the fate of the ummah in their hands.

The ‘bad’ Sunnis (regime elites) are still supporting the US-led war on terror. Their goal is still to wreck the new, Shia-led Iraqi state and keeping the lid on their own pressure-cookers, looking over their shoulders at the (failed) Arab Spring of 2011. The Sunni elites do US-Israel’s work for it. At the same time, they are angry with the US for complicity in Shia revival, undermining House of Saud, contributing to the decline in its religious legitimacy. MBS’s secular turn is more a parody of soft power, which only undermines (Sunni) Islam. The Saudi treatment of its own Shia mirrors Israeli treatment of Palestinians.⁴ Sadly, it is only because Palestinians have some shred of legal independence as part of the post-WWII internationally agreed policy of decolonization that this instance of apartheid is being fought openly. Anti-Muslim apartheid is actually alive and well but hidden behind national borders (China, Myanmar).

What remains of the insurgency in Iraq today is an alliance of Jordanians, Saudis and Iraqi Ba’thists. Syria and Saudi are both ripe for change, with Iraq and Iran as their models, but especially Iraq, with its more open, competitive elections and its large Shia population. The main legacy of the Iraq invasion was to make the Shia case, which means fighting Sunni extremism and terrorism, exposing the US Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a fraud (produced more (Sunni) terror), cementing Shiism as the adult in the room, holding the Islamic faith secure by a string, open to democracy.

21st century the Shia century?

This is already happening. Islamic Iran from the start allied with all anti-imperialist countries. Its revolution echoes the idealism of the Russia revolution of 1917, both of which were met by invasions by western powers and/or proxies, and both succeeding against all odds, based very much on ideological zeal for the good of mankind. Both also became authoritarian states, with elections but with limited choice. Iran’s elections are much more credible, and the election of reformers like Khatami and now Pezeshkian show there is room for real public debate. As with all countries victim to US ire, survival trumps all finer nuances, which are put on hold. Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. Iran’s allies are the anti-imperialist good guys.

In contrast to the Arab states, with their muddled Islamo-nationalisms, which have failed to fashion a Sunni identity independent of imperialism, and which still exclude Shia. A shame that Shia find better allies on the secular left, with largely common political, economic and cultural goals, above all peace. Like the Jews at the heart of Bolshevism, Iraq’s Communist Party was full of Shia intellectuals (e.g., poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab). The Iraqi town Shatra in the Shia south was nicknamed Little Moscow. The Shia have a natural affinity for the secular left, supporting the underdog. The Iraqi Communist Party was reorganized after the Iraq war and its leader Hamid Majid Musa was part of the governing body the US set up. The communists wanted peace as do all communists, Islamic Iran and Iraq want peace (salam) more than anything. Neither the communists nor the ummah were/are aggressive, expansionist. Both offer(ed) a way of life that doesn’t have war built in as its engine. The communist alternative was social/state ownership and planning. The Islamic alternative is a mix of state direction/ownership and limited capitalism. There are no billionaires who aren’t emigres already. That kind of money lust is alien to a devout society or a communist one.

Iran and Hezbollah are suffering Israel’s truly Satanic war crimes alongside their Palestinian brothers. Meanwhile the Gulf and Saudi sheikh-dictators, the Egyptian no-pretense-dictator, the Jordanian British-installed-king sit on the sidelines cursing the Palestinians for disturbing their sleep. They actually come to Israel’s aid – Egypt and Jordan are official allies of Israel – when Iran tries to hurt poor little Israel, as they already did in April 2024. The US is well aware that the Jordanian and Egyptian masses are very unhappy, but it relies on its local puppet dictators to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker, and is very cautious about exporting one-man-one-vote after its painful and expensive experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former once again Taliban, the latter in league with Iran against the Great Satan, which just happens to include itself, US-Israel. So don’t hold your breath for US pressure to make its dictators relinquish power. 2011 was a close call, not to be repeated.

As for the Palestinians, they were completely left out of the negotiations about their future following the 1973 Egypt-Israel war. Sold out by (atheist, Sunni) Sadat with an empty promise. The past half century has been unremitting hell for the Palestinians, who were kicked out of Jordan in the 1970s, many ending up in southern Lebanon, living with the Shia there. This is the origins of Musa al-Sadr’s Amal and after his assassination, Hezbollah. This happened during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, forging of a new force to confront Israel, which was given a huge boost with the Islamic revolution in Iran. Suddenly there was a ‘Shia crescent’, a genuine quasi-state opposition to Israel that functioned outside the imperial constraints.

Musa al-Sadr represented the best of the Shia tradition, an activist cleric engaged in the life of his community, unafraid to speak truth to power. He earned a law degree from (shah-era) Tehran university. His Amal militia ran social services and acted as a political organization, a challenge to the fiction of pan-Arab unity and the unyielding reality of Sunni hegemony. Iran’s IRGC was organized by veterans of Amal training camps. Amal represented a political threat to the Arab and Palestinian establishment, and his assassination by Gaddafi was clearly a Sunni move to quash a Shia upstart.⁵ But he (and Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s) inspired the formation Hezbollah, which killed 654 Israeli soldiers in a few years and pushed a humiliated Israel out of Lebanon in 1985.

‘Good’ Sunnism is reviving but more in the emigre communities, largely in the US/Canada, Europe, Australia/ New Zealand, where there are now communities of mainstream Sunni and Shia as well as sects (Ismaili, Yazidi, Ahmadiya, Bahai’s). This young, well educated, assertive diaspora radically challenges the Sunnia world, as a new generation of Muslims takes electoral democracy for granted, and were able to gain equal rights as citizens in the ‘House of War’, which meant fight for Palestine against Israel. Effectively the need for young, educated workers to fuel its capitalist machine ended up importing the ‘enemy’ to the heart of imperialism. As these mostly Sunni Muslims spread their message of ‘goodwill to all men’, colonized, persecuted Palestine has gradually gained the edge over colonizer, persecutor Israel. They are joined by a growing community of converts, as people find out about Islam from friendly, law-abiding neighbors. Islam is the fastest growing religion everywhere.

The Shia are Islam’s ‘wandering Jews’ but without the usury, so they have a presence on all continents, mostly persecuted (or just ignored) by Sunni majorities (but not everywhere). The Sunni too are like the Jews with their world network, a persecuted minority (but not everywhere). In fact, Sunni emigres are free to criticize Israel and their own native Muslim-majority countries in the West, where, say, in Egypt or Pakistan that could land them in jail or worse. As with the Jews, the spread of both Sunni and Shia presence virtually everywhere creates a powerful network for mutual support, to ensure both Shia and Sunni, emigre and domestic, are vital parts of the ummah, all devoted to defending Palestine and liberating Jerusalem. A kind of benign Judaism.⁶ Democracy brings power to Shia majorities and give voice to minorities, resisting Sunni terrorists. The goal remains the liberation of Jerusalem, but the center of gravity has shifted from Saudi Arabia, Egypt to Iran and Iraq, now stretching from Lebanon and Syria along the Shia axis of resistance.

The US allies with the pragmatic Sunni dictators, hates, targets Shia, but they are the best defense against real terrorists (Saudi/ Jordanian ‘jihadists’, ISIS, US-Israel). Standing up to tyranny is never popular with tyrants. By overthrowing Saddam, the US unwittingly paved the way for the Shia revival. Ayatollah Sistani brilliantly used the opening to guarantee democratic Shia hegemony in Iraq as a model for a renewed Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, in short, the Muslim ummah. The Iraqi Shia proved that it is possible to work with the US and not compromise. Sistani refused to meet with US officials: Mr Bremer, you are American I am Iranian. Leave it up to the Iraqis to devise their constitution. He challenged US plans to hand power to Allawi, Chalabi. Insisted on one-person, one-vote. When the US refused, he called for large demos over five consecutive days until the US relented.⁷

Iraqi Shia abandoned the Iraqi nationalism of Saddam. The renewed nationalism is firmly nonsectarian, uniting the ummah. This is a powerful message to the other Arab states. It is fitting that Palestine has brought the Sunni to the Shia-led defense of Jerusalem. Israel can be defeated only by a united ummah which acts wisely, with restraint, indefatigable. It is also a message to Israel and the Palestinians about inventing a new nationalism based on peace and reconciliation.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  To give the US occupiers of Afghanistan 2001–2022, they made sure Afghan Shia, the Hazars, were given full rights in the new constitution, where the state was carefully dubbed Islamic, reflecting the new identity-politics imperialism.
• 2
  Sunni Sufis resisted imperialism (Algeria, Caucasus) but never the Sunni establishment. Grand Mufti of Egypt Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was a westernizing reformer. His legendary friend (Shia) Jamal al-Afghani was anti-imperialist but didn’t manage to do much.
• 3
  Democracies are not immune from this as Biden’s pathetic defense of his son shows how family concerns can seriously undermine any legacy of good the leader accomplishes.
• 4
  They have no public voice, all 300 Shia girls’ schools have Sunni headmistresses, they sit on the oil wealth and get only low paid jobs, scholars get their heads chopped off, etc.
• 5
  Probably out of jealousy, as he saw himself as the savior of Palestine. See Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival, 2006, p 113.
• 6
  This could be why Israel so detests Iran. Initially, Israel was admired by Iranian intellectuals. Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad visited Israel in 1962 and recorded his experiences in The Israeli republic (1962). But when he observed the treatment of Palestinians, he soured and Iranians broadly criticized ‘westoxification’, anticipating the revolution’s clear anti-imperialism. Only Iran really ‘gets’ imperialism.
• 7
  Vali Nasr, op.cit., p175.RedditEmail

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

 

Unrealisable Justice: Julian Assange in Strasbourg

by Binoy Kampmark / October 2nd, 2024

It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.

The hearing in Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), arose from concerns raised in a report by Iceland’s Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, in which she expressed the view that Assange’s case was “a classic example of ‘shooting the messenger’.” She found it “appalling that Mr Assange’s prosecution was portrayed as if it was supposed to bring justice to some unnamed victims the existence of whom has never been proven, whereas perpetrators of torture or arbitrary detention enjoy absolute impunity.”

His prosecution, Ævarsdóttir went onto explain, had been designed to obscure and deflect the revelations found in WikiLeaks’ disclosures, among them abundant evidence of war crimes committed by US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, instances of torture and arbitrary detention in the infamous Guantánamo Bay camp facility, illegal rendition programs implicating member states of the Council of Europe and unlawful mass surveillance, among others.

A draft resolution was accordingly formulated, expressing, among other things, alarm at Assange’s treatment and disproportionate punishment “for engaging in activities that journalists perform on a daily basis” which made him, effectively, a political prisoner; the importance of holding state security and intelligence services accountable; the need to “urgently reform the 1917 Espionage Act” to include conditional maliciousness to cause harm to the security of the US or aid a foreign power and exclude its application to publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

Assange’s full testimony began with reflection and foreboding: the stripping away of his self in incarceration, the search, as yet, for words to convey that experience, and the fate of various prisoners who died through hanging, murder and medical neglect. While filled with gratitude by the efforts made by PACE and the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, not to mention innumerable parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, even the Pope, none of their interventions “should have been necessary.” But they proved invaluable, as “the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.”

The legal system facing Assange was described as encouraging an “unrealisable justice”. Choosing freedom instead of purgatorial process, he could not seek it, the plea deal with the US government effectively barring his filing of a case at the European Court of Human Rights or a freedom of information request. “I am not free today because the system worked,” he insisted. “I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

When founded, WikiLeaks was intended to enlighten people about the workings of the world. “Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.” Power can be held to account by those informed, justice sought where there is none. The organisation did not just expose assassinations, torture, rendition and mass surveillance, but “the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them.”

Since leaving Belmarsh prison, Assange rued the abstracting of truth. It seemed “less discernible”. Much ground had been “lost” in the interim; truth had been battered, “undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship.”

Much of the critique offered by Assange focused on the source of power behind any legal actions. Laws, in themselves, “are just pieces of paper and they can be reinterpreted for political expedience”. The ruling class dictates them and reinterprets or changes them depending on circumstances.

In his case, the security state “was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of the US constitution,” thereby denuding the expansive, “black and white” effect of the First Amendment. Mike Pompeo, when director of the Central Intelligence Agency, simply lent on Attorney General William Barr, himself a former CIA officer, to seek the publisher’s extradition and re-arrest of Chelsea Manning. Along the way, Pompeo directed the agency to draw up plans of abduction and assassination while targeting Assange’s European colleagues and his family.

The US Department of Justice, Assange could only reflect, cared little for moderating tonic of legalities – that was something to be postponed to a later date. “In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect.” A “dangerous new global legal position” had been established as a result: “Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights.”

PACE had, before it, an opportunity to set norms, that “the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all”. “The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.”

A spectator, reader or listener might leave such an address deflated. But it is fitting that a man subjected to the labyrinthine, life-draining nature of several legal systems should be the one to exhort to a commitment: that all do their part to keep the light bright, “that the pursuit of truth will live on, and the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.”

Handmaiden to the Establishment

Peter Greste’s Register of Journalists

by Binoy Kampmark / October 4th, 2024

When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.

The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.

During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.

Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.

With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.

It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.

In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”

It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.

Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.

Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.

A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.

Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.

Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”

This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 SOUTH AFRICA

A Declaration of War on the Poor

by Abahlali baseMjondolo / October 4th, 2024

On 16 September we marched in our thousands in Ballito to oppose evictions and racism. However, the attacks on the poor are escalating and the Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association have made a public declaration of war against one of our branches.

Since the formation of the Government of National Unity there has been a huge increase in state attacks on shack settlements around Durban and elsewhere. This includes settlements in Belair and the Bluff, both formerly white suburbs, and the Lindokuhle Mnguni Occupation in Johannesburg, which is near to a middle-class area. In all these cases settlements in middle class areas are being targeted. There have also been evictions in KwaDebeka in Durban.

We have also been resisting evictions along the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal where the super-rich lived in mansions in gated communities. They employ violent and militarized security companies to police the poor. The police follow the lead of these security companies. The Hlanganani occupation in Salt rock, the Sihlalangenkani occupation in Umhlali and the Ekuphumleni occupation in Ballito are all resisting evictions. The Phola and Magebhula settlements, also on the North Coast, under the KwaDukuza Municipality, have also suffered violent evictions.

It seems clear that two things are driving this general attack on the poor. One is that the DA, which has been viciously evicting in the Western Cape, has pressured the ANC to step up its attacks on the poor. Another is that the state is cynically responding to the public outcry about the frightening levels of violence in the country, including kidnapping and extortion, with violent attacks on the poor and on migrants in the name of ‘fighting crime’. They are criminalising and abusing vulnerable people instead of dealing with the real crisis of violence.

In the case of the evictions from land near the gated communities on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal the power of property, of wealth, is being mobilised to crush grassroots urban planning and decommodification of land organised via popular democratic power.

The ANC gives special preference to the super-rich in these gated communities. They were even given an exception for loadshedding. They have told us that we are living on ‘prime land’ and must be moved away to desolate human dumping grounds far from work and schools.

In our statement issued before the march in Ballito on 16 September we said that:

“The KwaDukuza Municipality is openly working with the rich to remove poor black people in Ballito and Umhlali. The ratepayers’ association and the ANC led municipality are working together to evict poor black people, to destroy our homes and communities.

They say that our presence reduces the value of the land, as if value is just a question of the price of the land and has nothing to do with the value of land for the human beings who live on it. They say that we must be removed because we are a health hazard as we must use the bush to relieve ourselves whereas the obvious solution to the lack of sanitation is to provide sanitation. They say that we are ‘chasing tourists away’. The strong element of racism driving all this is often openly displayed on the social media used by the white residents of the gated communities. The black elites who live in the gated communities are silent about this racism.”

Now the residents of the gated communities, the super-rich, have made their racism and contempt for the poor clear. The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association have released a viciously anti-poor and racist video in which we are said to be criminal, dangerous, unhygienic and polluting. These are old colonial stereotypes about impoverished black people, stereotypes that have long been used by governments and elites to justify state violence and the destruction of homes, communities and livelihoods.

The video aggressively criminalises impoverishment declaring that we are engaged in illegal occupation, illegal trading and illegal water electricity connections and demanding that the state ‘take action’ and that ‘the law be enforced’.

When it demands the enforcement of the law it is not demanding that the limited but important rights given to the poor in the Constitution are guaranteed. This is an open demand for violence against us by private security and the state, for the destruction of our homes, our community infrastructure and our livelihoods. It is a declaration of war against the poor by the rich, a declaration of war against the black poor by the white dominated elite in the area.

It is true that we are denied access to land, water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal. The solution to this is to provide land and services, not to incite state violence against us when we make our own arrangements to build viable lives and communities.

We would like to note that not all the wealthy residents of the area are taking this hostile, anti-poor and racist position. One resident has publicly stood up to make the important point that our living conditions are due to state failure and that this is the problem that needs to be fixed. No doubt he is not alone and there are other decent people who also recognise our humanity.

The racist and anti-poor video put out by The Dolphin Coast Residents & Ratepayers’ Association must be condemned in the strongest terms. It should be investigated by the Human Rights Commission.

It is also important for us to note that according to the KwaDukuza Speaker’s office the Mayor has refused to respond to the People’s Memorandum submitted on the 16 September march. She has long been failing to engage people with respect, to take the dignity of the poor seriously and to run an efficient administration. This anti-democratic refusal to respond to the Memorandum is provoking the anger of the people.

We will continue to defend our right to live on the North Coast and to demand that our occupations be recognised and provided with all the services required for a decent and dignified life.

Our humanity is not negotiable. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, including the poor. There can be no compromise with racism. We will hold the land.FacebooTwitterRedditEmail

Abahlali baseMjondolo, or AbM, is a shack-dwellers' movement in South Africa. It campaigns to improve the living conditions of poor people and to democratize society from below. The movement refuses party politics and boycotts elections. It's key demand is that the social value of urban land should take priority over its commercial value and it campaigns for the public expropriation of large privately owned landholdings. Read other articles by Abahlali baseMjondolo, or visit Abahlali baseMjondolo's website.

 

Facilitators of Imperialist Terror, Enemies of Socialism

“Human Rights Watch”

by Trotskyist Platform / October 5th, 2024

Photo Above, Yemen, January 2024: U.S and British forces, backed by the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand imperialists, hit Yemeni people and Yemen’s Houthi forces with deadly air and missile strikes. Human Rights Watch facilitated the attacks by producing a report accusing Yemen’s Houthis of “war crimes” for their laudable efforts to defend the people of Gaza through blocking Israel-linked shipping traversing through the Red Sea. By helping to attack actions in support of the Palestinian people of Gaza, Human Rights Watch is complicit in Israel’s ongoing Gaza genocide.7 April 2024: Today, in the course of giving his Israeli ally the gentlest of slaps on its wrists for murdering aid workers, Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, referred to Israel as “a proud and successful democracy.” This compliment was given while Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza! And while the Israeli regime is forcing the Palestinian people in the West Bank to live under brutal Apartheid conditions! As for the capitalist ruling class of Britain itself and that of the U.S., Australia, Germany, France and other “Western democracies”, their self-description as “liberal-democracies” supposedly gave them the license to invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of her people on the basis of a false pretext; and today to arm, support and help direct Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It is in the name of “standing up for democracy” that these Western ruling classes are threatening China in the waters of the South China Sea off her own coast and massively arming the anti-China, Western-puppet Taiwanese regime. And it is supposedly a quest to “defend our democratic values” that is driving the Western regimes to engage in a massive military build-up towards war against socialistic China and her North Korean socialistic ally. Here in Australia, the capitalist rulers believe that their status as a supposed “Western democracy” allows their state institutions to continue to strip Aboriginal children from their families and culture in the name of “child protection” and their governments to impose curfews and compulsory “income management” schemes discriminatorily targeting Aboriginal people. Australia’s capitalist government thinks that its self-proclaimed status as a “democracy” allows it to maintain housing policies that enable the capitalist bigwigs that they serve – and other wealthy individuals – to rip off huge fortunes from speculative property investments and exorbitant rents, while shoving millions of low-income renters into poverty and sometimes even homelessness. All of this is supposedly acceptable, because the people are said to have “freely” decided themselves through “democracy”.

However, the truth is that in these “Western-style democracies” the masses are not truly deciding. To be sure, the “democratic” form of capitalist tyranny is preferable to other, still more repressive, forms of capitalist rule. For it allows the working class masses to more easily organise resistance against their own exploitation. However, in truth, the democracy that exists in capitalist “liberal democracies” is only a “democracy” for the capitalist class. Just like other forms of capitalist rule – like fascism, military dictatorship, absolute monarchy and theocratic dictatorship – the “democratic” form of capitalism is still in essence the dictatorship of the capitalist class over working class people. For in the “democratic” form of capitalist state as in the fascist form, the enforcement arms of the state – the police, army, courts, prisons and bureaucracy – are themselves tied to the financially dominant capitalist class and inevitably serve the exclusive interests of this class. This remains the case no matter who wins elections. Moreover, although “parliamentary democracy” under capitalism allows “one person one vote”, the means to shape public opinion – and in the end that means how people vote too – overwhelmingly resides with the super-rich capitalists. It is this class that owns the media. It is they who, in great disproportion to their numbers, have the financial resources to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, hire lobbyists and establish “independent” think tanks. Whereas in the fascist and military dictatorship form of capitalist rule, capitalist interests are enforced mostly through naked force, in the “democratic” form of capitalist rule, capitalist power is, in the first instance, mostly enforced through deception (and when this doesn’t work, they can of course revert to brutal repression and, if necessary, will even seek to overthrow their own “democracy” and replace it with the fascist form of capitalist rule).

Of all the different means of deception that the capitalists have at their disposal, their most effective tools are their supposedly “independent”, “human rights organisations”. These are especially crucial for the capitalists of the richer, imperialist ruling classes to make their “own” masses support their predatory interests abroad. Among such “human rights organisations”, there is one that stands out for its level of influence, Human Rights Watch (HRW). When the mainstream Western media or a Western ruling class politician wants to attack an overseas enemy of the capitalist ruling class that they serve, the “credible source” that they will most often quote is HRW. This in turn boosts the authority of HRW.

HRW’s number one aim is to vilify the socialistic states: the Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK – “North Korea”), Vietnam and Laos. HRW also targets any other state that happens to be in the gun sights of the U.S.-led Western imperialists. In 2011, HRW played a key role in facilitating the NATO operation in Libya to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi, who the Western imperialists had decided was not bowing down enough before their demands to be allowed to continue to rule such an oil-rich country. In the lead up to the NATO intervention in Libya that began on 19 March 2011, HRW unleashed a torrent of hyped-up “reports” of alleged human rights atrocities by the Libyan government that provided the “human rights cover” for NATO’s intervention.  There was, for example, this “report” that HRW released just six days before NATO’s terror bombing was unleashed. Then as NATO continued to rain death upon the people of Libya, HRW produced more “reports” of supposed atrocities by Libyan government forces (for example) that served to justify the continuation of the blood-soaked Western imperialist, “regime-change” operation.

Tripoli, Libya, 19 June 2011: Doctors stand near the bodies of a man and a child killed when NATO destroyed yet another residential building in the Libyan capital during their neo-colonial 2011 military intervention in Libya. Through greatly hyped-up and one-sided “human rights reports” in the days leading up to the NATO attack, Human Rights Watch’s propaganda provided the “human rights” “justification” for the brutal NATO onslaught.
Photo: Ivan Sekretarev/AP

The Devious Nature of Human Rights Watch’s “Even Handedness”

To give themselves credibility, HRW will occasionally also report on human rights violations by the U.S. and other Western ruling classes. But they will mostly only report problems that everyone already knows about and which have been substantiated many times over. That way their “exposés” of human rights atrocities of Western capitalist regimes do minimal damage. In contrast, when HRW launches an attack on China, Cuba or another socialistic state, or on a capitalist state that is being too independent of the Western imperialist rulers, they will produce either entirely new claims or spread, as fact, highly disputed claims made by others – most of which are usually completely unsubstantiated or simply plain lies. Moreover, whenever attacking supposed human rights violations in a workers state or other country in the firing sights of Western imperialism, HRW will not only use the most extreme language as possible but will always make their shrill statements in the context of accusing the targeted state of having an “abysmal human rights record”. By contrast, whenever HRW feels compelled to acknowledge human rights problems in Western capitalist countries they use moderate language and emphasise that the issues occur in the context of the state having an otherwise “strong record of protecting civil and political rights”. Having a “strong record of protecting civil and political rights” is precisely how the Human Rights Watch (HRW) World Report 2022 described the human rights record of Australia’s capitalist regime. The very regime whose special forces murdered dozens of Afghan civilians in cold-blooded, racist executions during their war-crime-ridden participation in the two decade-long U.S./NATO occupation, whose racist police and prison guards have killed, or otherwise caused, the deaths of hundreds of Aboriginal people in custody over the last three decades and which brutally imprisons asylum seekers in offshore hell-holes.

The full range of HRW’s methods of deception were unleashed during their propaganda campaign buttressing the 2011 NATO operation in Libya. For example, HRW acknowledged that NATO killed civilians during their Libya operation but greatly downplayed the numbers. HRW stated that NATO killed “at least 72 civilians”, when even other pro-Western sources acknowledge that the NATO airstrikes killed at least several hundred civilians – and other sources report the number of civilians killed by NATO in the thousands. In contrast, HRW greatly exaggerated the number of civilians killed by the Gaddafi government enemies of NATO.

As well as greatly downplaying the numbers of civilians killed by NATO, HRW despicably praised NATO for supposedly making genuine efforts to protect civilians during its 2011 Libya intervention! Check out this disgusting HRW apology for NATO war crimes in Libya disguised as a “criticism”:

“NATO says it took extensive measures to minimize civilian harm, and those measures seem to have had a positive effect: the number of civilian deaths in Libya from NATO strikes was low given the extent of the bombing and duration of the campaign. Nevertheless, NATO air strikes killed at least 72 civilians, one-third of them children under age 18. To date, NATO has failed to acknowledge these casualties or to examine how and why they occurred.”

“Unacknowledged Deaths”, 12 May 2012, HRW website

The truth is that the 2011 NATO regime-change operation that HRW deviously facilitated with its “human rights” reports not only directly killed thousands of civilians in air strikes but produced a horrific, new imperialist-created “order” in Libya. That “order” immediately resulted in murderous racist violence against black African residents of Libya. In the following years, it produced multi-sided sectarian violence and clashes between rival warlords that killed tens of thousands of Libyan people. Human Rights Watch has a lot of blood on its hands!

HRW followed its Libya playbook when “reporting” on the upheaval in Syria that erupted in 2011. Initially the anti-government protests in Syria had a multi-directional quality. But by early 2012, the U.S.-led imperial powers had taken effective political hegemony of the movement and turned it into an armed proxy war aimed at toppling Syria’s Bashar al-Assad government and replacing it with one more subservient to the Western imperialists. As they poured arms, intelligence and training into their armed proxies, HRW filled the information space with one-sided, hyped-up and often false reports accusing Syrian government forces of horrific crimes. Without ever openly stating their intentions, HRW were key propagandists who justified the imperial powers’ proxy war to subordinate Syria. This proxy war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian people and the forced displacement of millions more. HRW has much complicity in this carnage!

Today, HRW are at it again! This time they are facilitating the attacks of the U.S., British, Australian and other Western imperialists against the most effective international solidarity actions with the embattled Palestinian people over these last six months – the Yemeni Houthi actions to stop Israeli related shipping from traversing the Red Sea. As the U.S.-led imperialist powers took political steps to justify their impending air strikes against the Yemeni supporters of the Palestinian people, HRW provided the “human rights” justification for the attacks by despicably accusing the Yemeni Houthis of “war crimes” for the Houthis’ laudable actions to resist the Gaza genocide by targeting Israeli-linked shipping. To be sure, with Israel’s ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza obvious to most of the world, HRW also has to make stern criticisms of Israel. If they did not do so, they would lose all credibility and thus all ability to serve Western imperialism. However, by equating resistance actions in support of Israel’s victims with Israel’s genocidal terror, HRW is obscuring the one-sided genocide that is taking place. To facilitate attacks on pro-Palestinian resistance actions when a horrific slaughter of Palestinian people is taking place is to be complicit in the mass murder of the Palestinian people. Therefore, HRW shares responsibility for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

18 April 2024: Palestinian people survey the damage in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip following yet another murdering Israel strike.
Photo: Xinhua

Funded and Led By Wealthy Western Capitalists and Serving Their Class Interests

Although HRW would like to portray itself as a “grassroots” organisation standing up for “human rights”, it is the very opposite of that. Headquartered in the U.S., HRW is a multi-hundred million dollar operation funded by super wealthy American and other Western donors and corporations. It is indeed run like a corporation. The outfit’s CEO, Kenneth Roth, is paid an annual salary package in excess of $A1.05 million per year (!!) … hardly the practice of an organisation that claims to be devoted to “bringing greater justice and security to the oppressed around the world”! For the last two years, HRW’s annual revenue averaged over $A163 million per year – overwhelmingly from contributions from rich donors and millions more from fundraising events.

HRW goes to great lengths to hide exactly who the wealthy donors and corporations backing it are. Despite its frequent criticism of various adversaries of Western imperialism for “lack of transparency”, HRW is itself a very shadowy organisation. One massive donor to HRW that the organisation has had to confirm is anti-communist billionaire, George Soros. In September 2010, HRW announced that Soros would be donating a massive $US100 million to the group over ten years. That means that this leaching hedge fund manager, known for his extreme criticisms of socialistic China and his earlier funding for the political forces that destroyed the East European and Soviet workers states through capitalist counterrevolution, has been providing a large proportion of HRW’s funding. Indeed, such corporate bigwigs also make up a big and leading part of HRW’s Board of Directors. Like Soros, many of them extracted their wealth from the especially parasitic finance sector. Thus, one of the two Co-Chairs of HRW’s Board is co-founder and General Partner of venture capitalist group Index Ventures, Neil Rimer. The other Co-Chair, Amy Rao, is a former CEO of a Silicon Valley company. Many of the Board’s Vice Chairs are also bigwigs of investment firms, including the chairman of Japanese financial services company, Monex Group, Oki Matsumoto. This HRW Vice Chair owns $A180 million of shares in his company. Another Vice Chair is Principal at financial services firm KME Consulting, Kimberly Marteau Emerson. Emerson had earlier worked in Bill Clinton’s administration as a senior political appointee and as a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department; which exemplifies the close links between the HRW and the U.S. regime. Indeed, one of the only officers in HRW’s Board who has not been a corporate bigwig is the former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria and the Republic of Congo, Robin Sanders. Meanwhile, the Australian in the HRW Board and indeed a Vice Chair of the Board, is one of the two owners and co-chairs of Australian private equity firm, CHAMP Private Equity, Joseph Skrzynski. Skrzynski, who was once also the chairman of SBS, is known for his ownership of extravagant beach-side mansions in Palm Beach and Elizabeth Bay.

Given that it is both funded by capitalist tycoons and other wealthy Western donors and led by corporate bigwigs it is little surprise that HRW takes a political line of strident opposition to the workers states created through the overthrow of capitalism. Indeed, anti-communist opposition to socialistic states goes to the very roots of HRW. HRW began in 1978 with Helsinki Watch – an organisation formed to support anti-communist forces seeking to overthrow the workers states then ruling the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This fundamental purpose of HRW, to provide the “human rights” cover to forces seeking the counterrevolutionary overthrow of socialistic states, has not changed to this very day.

With HRW, together with the rest of the imperialist ruling classes, having succeeded in destroying the former Soviet and East European workers states, their focus has now turned to the goal of destroying the remaining workers states. That HRW has gained much greater prominence in recent years is a reflection of the increasing desperation of the imperialist rulers to achieve this goal. With socialistic China’s spectacular successes in lifting her people out of poverty and improving the economic and cultural lives of her population such a stark contrast to the periodic economic crises, stagnant real wages, growing homelessness, divided societies, social malaise and decay of the capitalist world, the imperialist rulers know that they must destroy socialistic rule in China in order to ensure their own tyrannies at home. They are looking to the likes of HRW to rise to the occasion and spearhead the “human rights propaganda” front of their all-sided Cold War against Red China and the other socialistic states. And unfortunately, HRW is indeed rising to the task! HRW has played a lead role in selling the lie that Red China is persecuting her Uyghur minority and blares anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda over Tibet, Hong Kong, COVID and a whole lot of other matters.

It is notable that HRW lists the Ford Foundation as one of their key partners. Established in 1936 by the big-time capitalist Ford family that owned the Ford Motor company, the Ford Foundation has always been devoted to buttressing capitalist rule and opposing communism. It worked closely with the CIA to both spread anti-communist propaganda and to assist CIA covert interference operations around the world. In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation trained elite students in Indonesia in both pro-capitalist political and economic ideology and anti-communist military operations. These students would play an important role in the CIA-backed, 1965 far-right coup in Indonesia that saw the Indonesian military and anti-communist mobs slaughter between one million to two million Indonesian communists, trade unionists, women’s rights activists and members of the Chinese and other minority communities. That HRW and the Ford Foundation should today be working closely together is thus completely natural. It is a bond between organisations that serve the same masters – the U.S. and other Western capitalist classes – share the same anti-communist ideology and have similar blood-soaked histories of providing the “human rights” and “pro-democracy” cover for hideous imperialist-orchestrated terror.

Separately and Independently Serving Western Imperialist Interests

It is worth noting that the biggest single backer of HRW, liberal billionaire George Soros, happens to be a favourite hostile target of the reactionary far-right sections of the Western ruling classes. The far right of the capitalist establishment and its liberal wing, exemplified by the likes of Soros and HRW, truly hate each other on many issues. However, when it comes to China and other socialistic states, these feuding wings of the imperialist ruling classes – and the mainstream conservatives in between – unite as one to oppose these workers states. And they also unite as one to oppose most other states that refuse to submit to the “rules-based world order” – which, in practice, is really a “might is right” tyranny – created and dominated by the U.S. and its junior imperialist partners.

In Australia, too, we see such collaboration between the organisations and representatives of the different ruling class-supporting factions in order to advance the interests of the capitalist class – especially when it comes to attacking the socialistic states. Thus, the ALP, the Teal “independents”, the Liberals and the Far-Right parties will openly cooperate to advance the Australian capitalist regime’s aggressive, U.S.-allied, military buildup targeting socialistic China. They also come together to push through legislation and other measures that allow the regime to forcefully repress and intimidate any people from Australia’s Chinese community and beyond who dare to make statements positive about the PRC. Often such collaboration extends to the Greens – such as in making lying attacks on China and North Korea over “human rights violations” or in preventing the PRC-sponsored, language-teaching Confucius Institutes from teaching Chinese language in Australian schools (the latter McCarthyist campaign was actually driven by Greens politician, David Shoebridge).

As well as open collaboration between the squabbling wings of Western ruling classes (and the social democratic organisations supporting them), they coordinate behind the scenes. You can bet that senior U.S. ruling class politicians and CIA and State Department officials are making clear to leaders of HRW what they would like the “independent human rights organisation” to emphasise. Often this may be done in an informal manner such as when they run into each other at social functions or at events promoting one of the political forces that they both support. However, for the most part, HRW does not take direct orders from the U.S. regime. There is no overall conspiracy as such. For HRW doesn’t need to receive direct orders! What makes HRW, other prominent Western “human rights” NGOs, all the arms of the U.S. and allied regimes, the different factions of the U.S., British, Australian and other U.S.-allied ruling classes, all the mainstream Western media and all well-funded think tanks in Western countries (like Australia’s ASPI and Lowy Institute) all sing basically the same tune is that they are all institutions ultimately controlled by, often directly funded by and always serving the interests of the very same people – that is, the closely-allied, Western imperialist exploiting classes. In other words, all these institutions and organisations are designed to serve either the U.S. capitalist class or allied capitalist ruling classes – like the Australian one. The fact that they are all not, for the most part, acting together in a giant conspiracy but rather act independently for the same cause, each with their own separate emphasis and nuances and sometimes even openly bickering with each other on the details, actually makes them all the more effective in advancing the predatory interests of the U.S., British and Australian imperialist ruling classes and their allies. For this makes it easier for the likes of HRW to claim that they are “independent”, “non-partisan” organisations.

HRW likes to present itself as a grass-roots organisation supporting the under-dog that is driven by nice, compassionate people who truly care about “human rights”. But the truth is that Human Rights Watch is an incredibly rich organisation directly funded by American and other Western capitalists and by wealthy, upper-middle class Western individuals. It is led by corporate bigwigs and dedicated to serving the predatory interests of the mass murdering, genocide-in-Gaza-supporting, U.S, British, Australian and allied imperialist ruling classes. We must push back against and discredit the extremely harmful, pro-imperialist propaganda that is being spouted out by Human Rights Watch! This includes through exposé’s of HRW’s deeds facilitating war-criminal-ridden, Western interventions in Libya and Syria; and now through providing the “human rights” cover for U.S./British/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand attacks aimed at crushing Yemeni support for the embattled Palestinian people of Gaza. We must also encourage any current, or former, volunteers and staff working for HRW, who mistakenly thought that they were joining a genuine human rights organisation and who are now disgruntled, to blow the whistle on the highly secretive organisation, expose all its funding sources and make the public aware of all of HRW’s connections to Western regime officials and unsavoury, imperialist-backed “rebel” groups in socialistic countries and other Western-targeted states. We in Trotskyist Platform also call on all genuine opponents of capitalism and imperialism to build street protests and pickets against Human Rights Watch. Let us work hard to obliterate blood-soaked Human Rights Watch through all political means available!Email

Trotskyist Platform stands against the capitalist system. We struggle towards a socialist society where exploitation of labour, racism, oppression of women and colonial subjugation of “Third World” countries will become things of the past. Read other articles by Trotskyist Platform, or visit Trotskyist Platform's website.