Robert Fisk Independent/UK November 15, 2015
Brian Keenan was held by Shia Muslims loyal to Hezbollah in Lebanon for four and a half years With atrocities in Sinai, Beirut and Paris (and let’s keep the order in sequence here, since all those lost innocents, Russian, Lebanese and French, are equal as our brothers and sisters), I was beginning to think that our emotions were becoming as insane as the perpetrators of these crimes. An “act of war”, a response “without mercy” – the French response was straight out of the Isis vocabulary.
So immediately after the Paris massacres, I sought for reason, clarity and wisdom from a man who spent four and a half years in the hands of Muslim kidnappers – 54 months wearing a blindfold, always waiting for death. Had he been taken by Isis in Syria or Iraq, we would by now have been able to watch his beheading on video – yet he kept his sanity to write the only literary work to emerge from a Western kidnap victim of Beirut in the 1980s, An Evil Cradling, a book that will live for a hundred years as a monument to humanity amid suffering.
Keenan sipped his coffee in Westport in the far west of Ireland – he was born in Belfast – and spoke slowly, almost philosophically. He rarely gives interviews. The Paris slaughter had happened only 16 hours earlier. “The contagion has broken out of its confinement,” he said. “Someone has planned all this for a long time. There is a lot of organisation – but it doesn’t take much of a commitment to kill people. What happened doesn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that what happened in Beirut [24 hours earlier] spun to Paris. It’s as if the culture of victimhood which is rife in the Middle East … has risen to new levels, legitimising the worst horrors.”
It’s not difficult to see that Keenan’s own experience slides imperceptibly into his arguments, giving them an elliptical quality as well as a frightening immediacy. He talks as if he is still confined in a Beirut cellar. “What do we need to do about this? In a global dimension, we all have to take some responsibility for this. My own thoughts – after four and a half years in captivity – is that the dispossession and the anger has to be acknowledged. These people have to be offered something more than revenge or Holy War or even this perverse Islamic apocalypse. I’ve seen too often the map of the Middle East changing – many borders are irrelevant now.
“What worries me is that as these old borders and ‘international zones’ disappear, ‘security barriers’ become the new borders. We’ve seen this in the Middle East and they are rapidly being erected across Europe. These worry me more than the term ‘terrorism’. They create these kinds of conceptual contours – it’s not just a wall, it’s a wall that defines a lot of cultural beliefs and misbeliefs. We are damaging ourselves with these walls.”
Keenan is a hard man. He has returned four times to Lebanon – on his own – since he was released by his hooded kidnappers, to discover what he calls “the stories lying about on the streets of Beirut if you just pick them up”. It’s a phrase used by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who insisted that there was more than just one narrative – the Israeli story – about the Middle East, and it led Keenan to return to those who were behind his kidnapping. To understand all this, he thought, “was the debt Lebanon owed me”.
So he feels extraordinary sympathy with those who lost their loved ones in Paris. “I acknowledge their right to be angry,” he said. “But my own feeling is that anger can be healing if you use it in a meaningful way. Elie Wiesel has written of how he came back from the concentration camps full of anger – but he turned that into something creative. “It’s not easy. He talked about the panacea for anger and violence – he said that a country that does not build on a foundation of love will ultimately wither away with the poison it feeds off.”
“Part of the problem with the Middle East,” he said, “is that war is diplomacy. That’s at the root of how you ‘justify’ and ‘meaningfully’ deal with the problem. “The other thing to ask is: who are the war criminals? There’s a kind of skewed vision of what a war criminal or a war crime is. We need to honestly think about this if we are going to talk about justice – so that everybody feels that justice is being done. If the Nakba [the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land by Israel in 1948] has now gone global, we need a different set of principles. I don’t know that people are ready to make that profound self-examination. Until we can un-blindly question how power is dispensed, then we’re all wearing blindfolds.”
The Hollandes and Camerons and Obamas of the world will not read these words, of course. Emotion, not reason, is the policy option. “Without mercy” is now our dogma as well as that of Isis. Which is why Isis is winning. But I guess you need four and a half years in a blindfold to understand that. [Abridged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/robert-fisk-we-remain-blindfolded-about-isis-says-the-man-who-should-know-a6735426.html#gallery
Wednesday, 18 November 2015
Monday, 16 November 2015
War Now Displaces 60 Million. Time for World to 'Reaffirm Its Humanity'
In rare joint call, head of both UN and International Red Cross say human conflict is reaching unprecedented proportions
In a rare joint call, the head of the UN and International Red Cross stressed the importance of respect for international humanitarian law in order to stem the chaos and prevent further instability.
Citing nearly unprecedented levels of conflict and instability across the world, the heads of both the United Nations and the International Red Cross on Saturday issued a rare joint call warning that nations and global leaders must dramatically step up efforts to scale back wars and military actions that are causing massive human suffering while ripping apart families, communities, entire nations, and regions.
"Rarely before have we witnessed so many people on the move, so much instability, so much suffering," said Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). "In armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, combatants are defying humanity’s most fundamental norms. Every day, we hear of civilians being killed and wounded in violation of the basic rules of international humanitarian law, and with total impunity. Instability is spreading. Suffering is growing. No country can remain untouched."
Citing figures that are the highest they've been since the Second World War, the two agencies said that sixty million people around the world have now been displaced from their homes because of conflict and violence. What's more, they say, today's conflicts have become more protracted, meaning that many displaced people face years away from their homes, communities and livelihoods.
Both Mr. Maurer and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon stressed that the institutions they lead are in a unique position to bear witness to the consequences of these numerous conflicts around the world as they condemned the heads of nation states for doing far too little.
"In the face of blatant inhumanity, the world has responded with disturbing paralysis," said Ban. "This flouts the very raison d’être of the United Nations. The world must reaffirm its humanity and uphold its commitments under international humanitarian law. Today we speak with one voice to urge all States to take immediate, concrete steps to ease the plight of civilians."
Offering at least a partial set of solutions to the global crisis of war and conflict, the UN and ICRC leaders called on leaders of world governments to the following urgent actions:
Redouble efforts to find sustainable solutions to conflicts and take concrete steps to that effect.
- Individually and collectively, use every means to wield influence over parties to armed conflict to respect the law, including carrying out effective investigations into breaches of international humanitarian law, holding perpetrators accountable, and developing concrete mechanisms to improve compliance.
- Condemn those who commit serious violations of international humanitarian law, such as deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
- Ensure unhindered access to medical and humanitarian missions and protect medical and humanitarian workers and facilities.
- Protect and assist internally displaced people and refugees while they are fleeing insecurity, and help them to find long-term solutions, while supporting host countries and communities.
- Stop the use of heavy explosive weapons in populated areas.
Personal Reflection
Arthurspeaceblogspot has rarely contained frank comments on the articles that have been featured here. For the most part I have left these writers to speak their minds, believing that they have something important to say, something that we should take seriously even when we have doubts about parts thereof. But I expect it has been clear that I am not in the business of encouraging a warlike response to any of the crises that have been reported on our media in the last six years or so while this blog has been running. In that time there has been a steady backward drift, with violence regularly meeting counter-violence, and the odds heavily weighted on the side of traditional power blocs and big money.
Now we have reached a new low in Paris. Surely some new thinking is called for, and a new voice that speaks of a creative way ahead, at some cost no doubt, but not in more sophisticated military hardware, proxy wars, and fear of terrorists. At this moment I see little sign of that new voice that speaks to our need. But the two articles that follow this will emphasize how much we are in want of it.
Your comments are welcome.
Arthur
Now we have reached a new low in Paris. Surely some new thinking is called for, and a new voice that speaks of a creative way ahead, at some cost no doubt, but not in more sophisticated military hardware, proxy wars, and fear of terrorists. At this moment I see little sign of that new voice that speaks to our need. But the two articles that follow this will emphasize how much we are in want of it.
Your comments are welcome.
Arthur
Saturday, 14 November 2015
Yellow Ribbons and Endless War
By R.C. Koehler Common Dreams Nov. 12, 2015
“By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” This was Bush 41, a quarter of a century ago, celebrating the terrific poll numbers his kwik-win war on Iraq was war — still has a shadow presence in America, but it no longer matters.
Our official policy is endless bombing, endless war. No matter how much suffering it causes — over a million dead, maybe as many as two million, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — and no matter how poorly it serves any rational objectives, our official response to geopolitical trouble of every sort is to bomb it into compliance.
Greg Grandin, writing recently at Tom Dispatch about Henry Kissinger’s extraordinary contribution over four decades to Washington’s war-no-matter-what consensus, pinpoints a moment at the onset of Gulf War I that gave me deep pause. In that moment, war had lost its controversy, its raw demand for public sacrifice. Suddenly war was little more than . . . entertainment, as cozily unifying to the American public as professional sports.
Back in 1969, shortly after Richard Nixon was inaugurated (on a platform that included ending the war in Vietnam), Kissinger and Nixon launched — in deep, dark secrecy — their bombing campaign against Cambodia. This campaign was a war crime of the highest order, devastating and utterly destabilizing Cambodia and creating the preconditions for genocide, as it allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power.
Fast-forward a few decades. Kissinger was no longer in government, but as a high-profile pundit, he was still a major player in American politics, and he pushed the war button at every opportunity. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Kissinger was an early proponent of a military response. Eventually, of course, George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm.
And Kissinger, wrote Grandin, “was once again a man of the moment. But how expectations had shifted since 1970! When President Bush launched his bombers on January 17, 1991, it was in the full glare of the public eye, recorded for all to see. There was no veil of secrecy and no secret furnaces, burned documents, or counterfeited flight reports. After a four-month-long on-air debate among politicians and pundits, ‘smart bombs’ lit up the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City as the TV cameras rolled.”
“It would be a techno-display of such apparent omnipotence that President Bush got the kind of mass approval Kissinger and Nixon never dreamed possible. With instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public’s backing. On January 18, only a day into the assault, CBS announced that a new poll ‘indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush’s Gulf offensive.’”
There were yellow ribbons around every light pole as Bush proclaimed that “Vietnam syndrome” was dead. All it took was a permanent shift of responsibility away from the public at large — via elimination of the draft — combined with an ultra-sophisticated public relations effort that successfully turned our former ally, Saddam Hussein, into The Face of Evil. The slaughter of 100,000 Iraqis during the month-and-a-half-long Desert Storm was, apparently, a small price to pay for the good we had accomplished.
And a different kind of syndrome — Gulf War Syndrome, a.k.a., Gulf War Illness — the name for the serious health consequences suffered by American soldiers due to an array of war-related toxic exposures, including ultra-fine depleted uranium dust, was well off in the future at that point, with bureaucratic denial and media indifference destined to minimize its impact on public awareness.
A decade later, another Bush in office, the Towers go down. George W. proclaims that America will take on Evil itself. And even though his successor, Barack Obama, is swept into office on the global hope for peace, war remains the default setting. Fourteen years in, war does, indeed, look endless. Obama recently announced, for instance, that he won’t be the one to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. War is now, as I say, impervious to democracy, despite the incredible harm — the millions killed directly and indirectly because of the war on terror, 60 million refugees worldwide, numerous countries in chaos — it continues to cause.
Maybe, as scattered individuals, we long for peace, but for now, the interests of war are safely fortified from this longing. As we stand against these interests anyway, let’s declare, as a starting place, our belief that war is never the path to peace.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/12/yellow-ribbons-and-endless-war [Abridged] Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist
“By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” This was Bush 41, a quarter of a century ago, celebrating the terrific poll numbers his kwik-win war on Iraq was war — still has a shadow presence in America, but it no longer matters.
Our official policy is endless bombing, endless war. No matter how much suffering it causes — over a million dead, maybe as many as two million, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — and no matter how poorly it serves any rational objectives, our official response to geopolitical trouble of every sort is to bomb it into compliance.
Greg Grandin, writing recently at Tom Dispatch about Henry Kissinger’s extraordinary contribution over four decades to Washington’s war-no-matter-what consensus, pinpoints a moment at the onset of Gulf War I that gave me deep pause. In that moment, war had lost its controversy, its raw demand for public sacrifice. Suddenly war was little more than . . . entertainment, as cozily unifying to the American public as professional sports.
Back in 1969, shortly after Richard Nixon was inaugurated (on a platform that included ending the war in Vietnam), Kissinger and Nixon launched — in deep, dark secrecy — their bombing campaign against Cambodia. This campaign was a war crime of the highest order, devastating and utterly destabilizing Cambodia and creating the preconditions for genocide, as it allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power.
Fast-forward a few decades. Kissinger was no longer in government, but as a high-profile pundit, he was still a major player in American politics, and he pushed the war button at every opportunity. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Kissinger was an early proponent of a military response. Eventually, of course, George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm.
And Kissinger, wrote Grandin, “was once again a man of the moment. But how expectations had shifted since 1970! When President Bush launched his bombers on January 17, 1991, it was in the full glare of the public eye, recorded for all to see. There was no veil of secrecy and no secret furnaces, burned documents, or counterfeited flight reports. After a four-month-long on-air debate among politicians and pundits, ‘smart bombs’ lit up the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City as the TV cameras rolled.”
“It would be a techno-display of such apparent omnipotence that President Bush got the kind of mass approval Kissinger and Nixon never dreamed possible. With instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public’s backing. On January 18, only a day into the assault, CBS announced that a new poll ‘indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush’s Gulf offensive.’”
There were yellow ribbons around every light pole as Bush proclaimed that “Vietnam syndrome” was dead. All it took was a permanent shift of responsibility away from the public at large — via elimination of the draft — combined with an ultra-sophisticated public relations effort that successfully turned our former ally, Saddam Hussein, into The Face of Evil. The slaughter of 100,000 Iraqis during the month-and-a-half-long Desert Storm was, apparently, a small price to pay for the good we had accomplished.
And a different kind of syndrome — Gulf War Syndrome, a.k.a., Gulf War Illness — the name for the serious health consequences suffered by American soldiers due to an array of war-related toxic exposures, including ultra-fine depleted uranium dust, was well off in the future at that point, with bureaucratic denial and media indifference destined to minimize its impact on public awareness.
A decade later, another Bush in office, the Towers go down. George W. proclaims that America will take on Evil itself. And even though his successor, Barack Obama, is swept into office on the global hope for peace, war remains the default setting. Fourteen years in, war does, indeed, look endless. Obama recently announced, for instance, that he won’t be the one to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. War is now, as I say, impervious to democracy, despite the incredible harm — the millions killed directly and indirectly because of the war on terror, 60 million refugees worldwide, numerous countries in chaos — it continues to cause.
Maybe, as scattered individuals, we long for peace, but for now, the interests of war are safely fortified from this longing. As we stand against these interests anyway, let’s declare, as a starting place, our belief that war is never the path to peace.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/12/yellow-ribbons-and-endless-war [Abridged] Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist
Sunday, 1 November 2015
New book reveals details of life under Isis
It details all of Isis’s cruelty, but places it in the context of a very bloody history
By Robert Fisk Independent/UK 30 October 2015
Before Obama’s few dozen brave Spartans put their little bootees on the soil of the tiny bit of Syria that the Kurds hold, they should learn a bit about Isis from the work of a Syrian historian. He is Sami Moubayed, a historian and former scholar at the Carnegie Center in Beirut and he lives in Damascus. He is a brave man, and knows it.
“This book is very dangerous for me,” he told me. “It could take my life. It’s very different from the kind of history I’ve written about before – it’s about a very different Syria with very different characteristics and it was very painful for me to write... You need to fight the radicals, yes, but bombing these people is not the answer.”
As Moubayed also says in his book, “The pre-Baathist Syria of the 1950s will never return – nor will the Baathist one of 1963-2011... I have no sympathy with Islamists and power-hungry soldiers. What is happening today is a completely new chapter in the history of my country. It is an ugly chapter but one that will last much longer than any of us desire.” A pessimist? Certainly no Baathist. Moubayed should indeed take care.
He’s been to Raqqa, talked to Isis officials, he’s even met their slick media guys, one of whom, Abu al-Nada al-Faraj, a 25-year-old English graduate from Aleppo University who treats Isis as “just another well-paying employer”, translates for Isis’s gruesome magazine, Dabiq. All its staff are European Muslims, Google addicts with a list of critical publications to read. The Independent is among them. But so is the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and the Syrian government news agency SANA.
Raqqa has an efficient tax system and schools have reopened – segregated, with a heavy emphasis on religion – although it’s ironic to learn that exam papers are forwarded across the front lines to the Syrian government ministry of education in Damascus. All-powerful Isis, it seems, is not as all-powerful as it seems.
In his scandalously under-reviewed but deeply revealing new book, Moubayed details all of Isis’s cruel and inhuman punishments and executions – war crimes indeed – but is intent on placing them in the context of a very bloody history. There are, for example, painful historical precedents for the frightening “Islamic state” which now exists, from the edge of Baghdad almost to the Mediterranean. Sunni Muslims believe that a caliph must trace his origins back to the Quraysh clan of Mecca, to which the Prophet himself belonged. Thus al-Baghdadi insists on using two additional names, “al-Qurashi”, and “al-Hassani” (descendant of the Prophet’s grandson, al-Hassan ibn Ali). Isis always refer to him with these names.
In the 14th century, Ibn Taymiyyah, a Muslim theologian, sought a return to the purity of Islam from moral corruption, calling for a holy jihad to create an Islamic state. In the 18th century, Mohamed Abdul-Wahab and Muhammad ibn Saud – whose family now rules Saudi Arabia – went on head-chopping expeditions to extend their purest rule over Arab lands. Al-Saud’s historian, Uthman bin Bashir al-Najadi, wrote after 5,000 Shia Muslims were butchered in 1801: “We took Karbala and we slaughtered… With the permission of Allah, we will not apologise for what we have done and we tell all kafir [unbelievers] ‘You will receive similar treatment’.”
Sound familiar? It could be Jihadi John himself. Nor is it surprising that al-Baghdadi chose Raqqa as his capital. He studied three histories of the Syrian city, because at the height of the Abbasid dynasty, a Muslim empire stretching from north Africa to central Asia was controlled from the very same cityQuite a dissection of Isis for US Special Forces to ponder before they tip-toe over the Syrian border. But they might also remember that the Prophet ordered the execution of prisoners captured in the battle of Badr in 624, a precedent followed by later Muslim leaders; the Ottomans beheaded King Ladislaus of Hungary and King Stephen of Bosnia and his sons after they surrendered.
And those most obedient of Muslims, the Saudis, beheaded more than 50 people in one year alone. Yup folks, it’s those Saudis again – one of America’s most loyal allies... [Abridged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-new-book-reveals-the-horrifying-and-fascinating-details-of-daily-life-under-isis-a6717056.html
By Robert Fisk Independent/UK 30 October 2015
Before Obama’s few dozen brave Spartans put their little bootees on the soil of the tiny bit of Syria that the Kurds hold, they should learn a bit about Isis from the work of a Syrian historian. He is Sami Moubayed, a historian and former scholar at the Carnegie Center in Beirut and he lives in Damascus. He is a brave man, and knows it.
“This book is very dangerous for me,” he told me. “It could take my life. It’s very different from the kind of history I’ve written about before – it’s about a very different Syria with very different characteristics and it was very painful for me to write... You need to fight the radicals, yes, but bombing these people is not the answer.”
As Moubayed also says in his book, “The pre-Baathist Syria of the 1950s will never return – nor will the Baathist one of 1963-2011... I have no sympathy with Islamists and power-hungry soldiers. What is happening today is a completely new chapter in the history of my country. It is an ugly chapter but one that will last much longer than any of us desire.” A pessimist? Certainly no Baathist. Moubayed should indeed take care.
He’s been to Raqqa, talked to Isis officials, he’s even met their slick media guys, one of whom, Abu al-Nada al-Faraj, a 25-year-old English graduate from Aleppo University who treats Isis as “just another well-paying employer”, translates for Isis’s gruesome magazine, Dabiq. All its staff are European Muslims, Google addicts with a list of critical publications to read. The Independent is among them. But so is the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and the Syrian government news agency SANA.
Raqqa has an efficient tax system and schools have reopened – segregated, with a heavy emphasis on religion – although it’s ironic to learn that exam papers are forwarded across the front lines to the Syrian government ministry of education in Damascus. All-powerful Isis, it seems, is not as all-powerful as it seems.
In his scandalously under-reviewed but deeply revealing new book, Moubayed details all of Isis’s cruel and inhuman punishments and executions – war crimes indeed – but is intent on placing them in the context of a very bloody history. There are, for example, painful historical precedents for the frightening “Islamic state” which now exists, from the edge of Baghdad almost to the Mediterranean. Sunni Muslims believe that a caliph must trace his origins back to the Quraysh clan of Mecca, to which the Prophet himself belonged. Thus al-Baghdadi insists on using two additional names, “al-Qurashi”, and “al-Hassani” (descendant of the Prophet’s grandson, al-Hassan ibn Ali). Isis always refer to him with these names.
In the 14th century, Ibn Taymiyyah, a Muslim theologian, sought a return to the purity of Islam from moral corruption, calling for a holy jihad to create an Islamic state. In the 18th century, Mohamed Abdul-Wahab and Muhammad ibn Saud – whose family now rules Saudi Arabia – went on head-chopping expeditions to extend their purest rule over Arab lands. Al-Saud’s historian, Uthman bin Bashir al-Najadi, wrote after 5,000 Shia Muslims were butchered in 1801: “We took Karbala and we slaughtered… With the permission of Allah, we will not apologise for what we have done and we tell all kafir [unbelievers] ‘You will receive similar treatment’.”
Sound familiar? It could be Jihadi John himself. Nor is it surprising that al-Baghdadi chose Raqqa as his capital. He studied three histories of the Syrian city, because at the height of the Abbasid dynasty, a Muslim empire stretching from north Africa to central Asia was controlled from the very same cityQuite a dissection of Isis for US Special Forces to ponder before they tip-toe over the Syrian border. But they might also remember that the Prophet ordered the execution of prisoners captured in the battle of Badr in 624, a precedent followed by later Muslim leaders; the Ottomans beheaded King Ladislaus of Hungary and King Stephen of Bosnia and his sons after they surrendered.
And those most obedient of Muslims, the Saudis, beheaded more than 50 people in one year alone. Yup folks, it’s those Saudis again – one of America’s most loyal allies... [Abridged]
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-new-book-reveals-the-horrifying-and-fascinating-details-of-daily-life-under-isis-a6717056.html
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