What a week for the New Troika!
By Habib Siddiqui
Since 9/11, the USA has joined this Entente of Evil to reshape the Muslim world in ways that we haven’t seen in the past. It was no accident that President Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and move the US Embassy there.
This past
week has been a very exciting week globally.
At home, in
the USA, there was the much-anticipated House hearing of Michael Cohen,
President Trump’s one-time personal lawyer, the ‘fixer’. He appeared fully
prepared, genuine, believable and remorseful for his previous support and lying
on behalf of his former boss whom he described as a con-man, liar and cheat.
Trump is also a racist and a bigot. None of these epithets for Mr. Trump is,
however, new. He is worse.
In order to
deflect the public opinion from the domestic scene, Mr. Trump went to Vietnam to
meet his new buddy – President Kim Jung Un of North Korea. Even there, the poor
POTUS did not have a good night sleep. He watched the damning testimony of the
man who previously did not mind ‘taking a bullet’ for him. He was asked to
comment about the House hearing. As expected, he said Cohen had lied except on
one occasion that being his alleged Russian collusion. Cohen did not have a
definitive answer on Trump’s involvement on the matter although he suggested
that it was possible based on what he had heard Don Jr. whispering to Mr. Trump
at the Oval Office.
As expected,
the Republican party members tried to dispute Cohen’s claims alleging him to be
a convicted liar. Republican congressman Mark Meadows (of North Carolina)
invited Lynne Patton – a longtime Trump associate and current Housing
and Urban Development official – to the hearing and referred to her while
disputing Cohen's
allegation that the president is a racist.
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI),
the freshman Democrat from Detroit, was one of the last to question Michael
Cohen on Wednesday. She
said, "Just because someone has a person of color, a black person working
for them, does not mean they aren't racist." She added that the use of Patton as a
political "prop" was "racism in itself."
Meadows
angrily denied the implication of racism and asked for Tlaib's comment's to be
"stricken from the record."
After Rep.
Mark Meadows defended himself against allegations of racism
during a House committee meeting Wednesday, critics resurfaced two 2012
videos of the North Carolina Republican in which he vowed to send
then-President Barack Obama "home to Kenya." "2012 is the
time we're going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya or wherever it is,"
Meadows said at a June 9, 2012 rally. "We're going to do it!" Three
days later, he made a similar remark at a tea party event.
Critics
painted Meadows' remarks as an endorsement of "birtherism" – a
term for the baseless belief that Obama was not born in the U.S. Many have
said the effort to deny the citizenship of the first African-American president
without evidence was rooted in racism.
The official
Twitter account for the anti-Trump Democratic Coalition alleged that
"Meadows promotes the racist birther conspiracy theory."
Mr. Trump
returned home empty-handed without signing any treaty with Mr. Kim Jung Un. He
said that a no deal was better than a bad deal. Apparently, contrary to his
bloated claims, Trump has not mastered the art of deal-making, or so it appears
now.
Remember
Bernie Sanders? The popular U.S. senator from Vermont kicked off his presidential
campaign Saturday (March 2) miles from the rent-controlled apartment where he
grew up in Brooklyn and forcefully made the case that he is nothing like fellow
New Yorker Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the Democrat best prepared to beat
the incumbent in 2020.
"My
experience as a child, living in a family that struggled economically,
powerfully influenced my life and my values. I know where I came from,"
Sanders boomed in his unmistakable Brooklyn accent. "And that is something
I will never forget."
He is right.
With a huge support base from the state of Vermont to California, from the
state of Florida to the Washington state since his failed bid against Senator
Hillary Clinton in 2016, he is currently the front runner within the Democrat
hopefuls.
===-===
When Avichai
Mandelblit was being considered for the post of Israeli attorney general, the
selection committee had a question: If there was enough evidence, would he
prosecute the man who was then his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
After all, Mr. Mandelblit served for three years as Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet
secretary, a position of deep trust.
Mr.
Mandelblit did not hesitate. He said, yes.
Israel's
attorney general (AG) announced Thursday (Feb. 28) that his office plans to
indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges after a two-year
investigation. Mr. Mandelblit outlined the cases against the prime minister in
a 57-page letter sent to Netanyahu’s lawyers. The prime minister faces one
count of bribery and three counts of breach of trust. Police have previously recommended indicting Netanyahu for bribery, fraud and breach
of trust in three different cases.
The decision
marks the first time in Israel’s history that a serving prime minister has been
told he faces criminal charges and casts a heavy shadow over Netanyahu’s
re-election campaign.
In the
parlor game that has captivated Israel in recent weeks, many Israelis had
feared that the soft-spoken AG might not have the guts to take a tough line
against his one-time patron to prove his independence, burnishing his credentials
for what they suspect is his ambition to serve on the Supreme Court. He proved
them wrong despite the attacks on him that have been intense and personal. His
father’s gravestone was desecrated by rightwing vandals.
In a brief
interview with Israeli television, Mr. Mandelblit had said earlier that his
main responsibility was to protect the institution of the attorney general’s
office. “I didn’t invent it, it was here for 70 years before,” he said, “and it
will continue to exist for decades to come.”
The Israeli
justice system has a record of independence, having convicted a former
president, Moshe Katsav, of
rape, and a former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, of bribery.
With
elections just six weeks away, Netanyahu called the prosecution's announcement
"outrageous" and an "unprecedented witch hunt" carried out
by his liberal opponents. He vowed to refute all allegations which he said are
"blood libel." He has said he will not quit even if he is indicted,
and under Israeli law he is not required to do so until he has been convicted
and the appeals process has been exhausted.
But there is
legal precedent for ministers being forced to step down after being charged.
On Thursday,
President Trump said that while he was not familiar with the specifics of the
allegations against Netanyahu, the Israeli leader has done “a great job as
prime minister.” In Netanyahu’s televised address, he thanked “my friend
Trump” for his words and said that as prime minister he had built strong
relationships with Trump that had benefited Israel’s security.
Netanyahu is
also very close to Jared Kushner,
President Trump’s son-in-law and main adviser on the Middle East affairs. [Jared’s
dad Charles was a major donor for pro-Israel causes. Netanyahu once slept at Jared’s
bed when visiting the USA.]
Netanyahu is
a closet fascist. Thus, last week he mentored an agreement for an electoral
alliance between the radical far-right – fascist - group Jewish Power and two
other factions, which is likely to give the party at least one seat in the
Knesset. The Jewish Power party calls for the annexation of the West Bank
and Gaza, complete Israeli control over all land between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea, the cancellation of the Oslo peace accords and for the
imposition of Israeli sovereignty over Al Aqsa and the Temple Mount. It also
advocates the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel who are deemed not loyal
enough to the country and the deportation of what it calls “Arab extremists”.
The
extremist party is believed to be spawned from the Kahanist movement, founded
by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was personally accused of plotting various
terrorist attacks throughout the 1970s against the Palestinian Arabs. Kahane’s
followers continue to face accusations of supporting domestic terrorism and
incitement to racism.
Netanyahu’s
alliance with a fascist group like Jewish Power was so abhorring that even the
American Jewish Committee, a powerful New-York based Jewish advocacy group,
said it felt “compelled to speak out” about the merger which it called
“reprehensible”.
Last Monday
(Feb. 25) around 90 powerful rabbis and scholars, part of Torat Chayim, a
worldwide association of progressive-minded Orthodox rabbis, joined the denunciation
of the Israeli leader’s new deal calling Jewish Power “lamentable”.
Torat Chayim
said Jewish Power was “a racist, violently nationalist party which justifies
terrorist activity by Jews, is anti-democratic, preaches hatred toward other
Jews and Arabs”. Among the signatories were renowned scholars Rabbi Yitz
Greenberg and Rabbi Asher Lopatin.
"The
ends do not justify the means," they wrote in a statement published
online.
History has
taught us that the fascists are known to like or admire each other. Netanyahu’s
gesture with the Jewish Power, and Trump’s admiration for known fascists and
authoritarian leaders of our time, including Netanyahu, Duterte and Kim, once
again give credence to that well-known fact.
----==---
Perhaps the
most important event last week was Pakistan’s magnanimous release of the
captured Indian pilot. Prime Minister Imran Khan announced Thursday to release
captured Indian Air Force pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan on Friday as a
‘gesture of peace’. However, in the same breath he warned India that any
‘miscalculation’ may prove disastrous for the whole region.
The two
nuclear-armed countries came very close to a major conflict when Indian warplanes
used Israeli-made SPICE 2000 precision-guided bombs (weighing 1 metric ton
each) in airstrikes targeting a suspected hideout for the Kashmiri freedom
fighters belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM). The group allegedly had claimed
responsibility for a suicide attack in Indian-Occupied Kashmir earlier in
February that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary troopers. [Note: SPICE
(smart precise impact and cost effective) bombs are the largest conventional
bomb in the Indian Air Force's arsenal.]
I am dismayed
with the international media discussing their biased and faulty opinions and
ideas on the crisis. They sadly ignored the core of the issue. They opined, either
imprudently or purposely, that unless the ‘terrorist’ dens are wiped out such
crisis would never end. In my opinion, addressing the symptoms without the root
causes will never solve the problem, which is all about: Kashmir, the
Kashmiris, their rights and their aspirations for freedom and peace. For more
than seven decades they have been denied a U.N.-mandated plebiscite (per UNSC Resolution
47) to decide their own fate. Instead, they had to settle for what the UN
HCHR chief has rightly noted,
the “total impunity for enforced
disappearances.”
The horrific
case of Asifa Bano, an eight-year-old Muslim girl gang-raped and strangled to
death in a Hindu temple by eight men in Indian-occupied Kashmir, including four
police officers is just one example of what Kashmiris face day in and day out.
These criminals were supported by two ministers from the ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP). That is the sad reality in Modi’s India, which is fueling
anger, frustration and sense of hopelessness amongst the Kashmiri people.
Over the years, Kashmir has become a symbol
of agony, pain, suffering, tragedies
and what not. Here
are some sobering statistics from the last 20 years of India’s
oppression in Kashmir:
·
Kashmiris
Killed by the Indian army: 94,479
·
Custodial
killings by Indian army: 7,048
·
Disappearances
of Kashmiris at the hands of Indian police: 10,125
·
Gang
rapes by Indians in Kashmir: 10,283
·
Kashmiris
blinded by Indian firing: 188
·
Kashmiri
children orphaned: 20,085
·
Kashmiri
women widowed: 20,005
·
Kashmiri
buildings destroyed: 106,071.
While we may
not like see a repeat of the recent bloody episodes between two nuclear-armed
nations, it would be utter folly to say that we don’t understand why a
disgruntled Kashmiri had blown himself up to inflict pain on his persecutors. Modi’s
India has to answer why Kashmiri civilians are agitated today as never before,
why they are tired of false promises, why they despise the Indian occupation
forces in their midst.
Addressing
the symptoms while ignoring the root causes is not only foolish, it is
inexcusable. If the international community is serious about finding genuine
regional peace, it must allow the people of Jammu and Kashmir to decide their own fate (much like what it did
for the people of East Timor and South Sudan): whether they want to remain part
of India or join Pakistan or be an independent nation allowing all its citizens
to live as equals in a dignified way.
As long as
the Kashmiri people are denied their very basic rights to decide their fate,
where truly lies the root cause of the Kashmir problem, hoping for peace is simply
delusional! The sooner the Indian government understands this vital truth and
delivers on its promise to hold a referendum the better for its people and the
entire region.
India with the
second largest population and seventh largest landmass is the world's largest
defense importer and has been investing tens of billions in updating its
military equipment. India is now Israel's biggest
arms market, buying weapons at an average of $1 billion each year.
In 2017, the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries said India would
buy nearly $2 billion worth of weapons technology, making it the military
exporting giant's largest ever defense contract. The apartheid state of Israel
has also been a major arms seller to the other apartheid state of Myanmar that
is guilty of genocide of the Rohingya people.
In recent
years, the Israelis have filmed joint exercises between their own “special
commando” units and those sent by India to be trained in the Negev desert, again
with all the expertise supposedly learned by Israel in Gaza and other
civilian-thronged battlefronts. At least 16 Indian “Garud” commandos – part of
a 45-strong Indian military delegation – were for a time based at
the Nevatim and Palmachim air bases in Israel.
As I noted in my 2005
article - USA-Israel-India:
Semantics of 'Common' Vision - “Gone are those days when India was one
country that had been doggedly anti-Zionist and a powerful voice in the
non-aligned movement.” Just as Israel today considers the Occupied Territories of
West Bank and Gaza as integral parts of Israel, so does India for the disputed
territories of Jammu and Kashmir. Both see the minority Muslims as common foes.
“The BJP is the Likud in saffron, as the
Zionist Movement is the BJP in gaberdine.”
In his first
visit to India last year – preceded by a trip to Israel by Indian prime minister Narendra
Modi, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu recalled the 2008
terrorist attacks on Mumbai in which more than a hundred civilians were killed.
“Indians and Israelis know too well the pain of terrorist attacks,” he told Modi. “We remember the horrific savagery of
Mumbai. We grit our teeth, we fight back, we never give in.” As noted recently
by veteran journalist Robert
Fisk, this was also BJP-speak.
Since 9/11, the USA has joined this Entente of Evil to reshape the Muslim world in ways that we haven’t seen in the past. It was no accident that President Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city and move the US Embassy there.
Nor
is it difficult to understand the toxic foundation stone of the relationship
between these three countries under the leadership of murderous, right-wing
fascist leaders – one of Zionism under Netanyahu, another of Hindutva under
Modi and the other one of New Americanism that is racist and bigoted under
Trump. All these leaders have fascist leanings and share an ugly history of
murder, oppression and persecution of minorities. They can say that they are
not racists or bigots. But their deeds – past and present – speak volumes. That
is enough for us to discern them!
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