John Pilger

The life and death of an Australian hero, whose skin was the wrong colour

Arthur Murray died the other day. I turned to Google Australia for tributes, and there was a 1991 obituary of an American ballroom instructor of the same name. There was nothing in the Australian media. The Australian newspaper published a large, rictal image of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, handing out awards to his employees. Arthur would have understood the silence.

I first met Arthur a generation ago and knew he was the best kind of trouble. He objected to the cruelty and hypocrisy of white society in a country where his people had lived longer than human beings had lived anywhere. In 1969, he and Leila had brought their family to the town of Wee Waa in outback New South Wales and camped beside the Namoi River. Arthur worked in the cotton fields for a flat rate of A$1.12 an hour. Only "itinerant blackfellas" were recruited for such a pittance; only whites had unions in the land of "fair go". Having not long been granted the vote, the First Australians were still not counted in the national census - unlike the sheep.

Working conditions in the cotton fields were primitive and dangerous. "The crop-sprayers used to fly so low," Arthur told me, "we had to lie face down in the mud or our heads would've been chopped off. The insecticide was dumped on us, and for days we'd be coughing and chucking it up." In 1973, a Sydney University study reported its "astounded" finding of fish floating dead on the surface of the Namoi River, poisoned by the "utterly mad, uncontrolled" level of spraying, which continued.

Arthur and the cotton-chippers made history. They went on strike, and more than 500 of them marched through Wee Waa. The Wee Waa Echo called them "radicals and professional troublemakers", adding that "it is not fanciful to see the Aboriginal problem as the powder keg for Communist aggression in Australia". Abused as "boongs" and "niggers", the Murrays' riverside camp was attacked and the workers' tents smashed or burned down.

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Philip Giraldi

Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv’s demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.

Well, I don’t feel that way. I don’t like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn’t alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.

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Patrick Martin

Perhaps the closest the debate came to a moment of truth was when Romney observed, “High-income people are doing just fine in this economy. They’ll do fine whether you’re president or I am.” Obama smiled in response.

The first debate of the US presidential election campaign laid bare the unbridgeable gulf between the corporate-controlled political system and the concerns of the overwhelming majority of the American people.

The United States is in the grip of the worst social crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, with record levels of long-term unemployment, record levels of hunger and homelessness, mass layoffs of workers in the public schools and other essential services, deteriorating public infrastructure and deepening poverty and social misery.

Aside from two sentences from Romney—in the course of proposing measures that would make the crisis even worse for working people—there was no reference to this social reality in 90 minutes of debate. The words “poverty” and “unemployment” never crossed Obama’s lips. Neither candidate offered any proposals to alleviate mass suffering, put the unemployed to work or rebuild public services devastated by budget cuts.

On the contrary, more than four years into an economic crisis brought on by the greatest financial collapse of the profit system since the 1930s, both candidates pledged their loyalty to Wall Street and hailed capitalism as the greatest boon to mankind.

Obama declared in his two-minute summation, clearly prepared in advance, “The genius of America is the free enterprise system.” Romney, himself the possessor of a huge personal fortune based on stripping the assets of companies and speculating in the financial markets, repeatedly argued that the “private sector” had to be given free rein in every sphere of life, from job-creation to education to health care.

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Ron Holland

"A people should know when they are conquered." Maximus responds, "Would you, would I?" – From the movie, "Gladiator"

One hundred years ago the American republic was overthrown and captured by financial elites and money power during the Taft and Wilson administrations, the first Republican and the second Democrat. Both the Federal Reserve and federal income tax were born and you know the rest of the story consisting of two world wars, the Great Depression and stock market crash, the rise of communism and fascism and the Cold War. Since that time directed current events, history and financial markets have ruled at the expense of free markets and free people.

The minor policy differences with one agenda shared by two different parties and their presidents back during the Taft and Wilson presidencies are somewhat similar to Obama and Romney today, should the GOP win this election. The only real difference is in the political rhetoric preceding the election. The America and republic established by our founding fathers effectively died 100 years ago and real, productive Americans have been a conquered people since that time.

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David Michael Green

Last week America engaged in one of its perennial paroxysms of constitutional cogitation – this time over the Obama health care bill – with (mostly) predictable results.

Four of the great legal priests on our High Temple’s Council of Scriptural Interpretation said that, yes, the Affordable Care Act was within the boundaries of what a small collection of men riding horseback to a meeting in Philadelphia one summer two-and-a-quarter centuries ago allow us to do today as a continent-wide superpower society of 300 million people in the age of atom bombs, space travel, heart transplants and genetic engineering. George and John and Thomas say it’s okay, we can have health care. Whew. That’s a relief.

But then four other priests insisted, “Oh, no, this is fundamentally not allowed. Not at all.”

And one apparently went both ways, voting against it before he was for it.

Such, in “the greatest country in the world” – as regressives, doing their national equivalent of Allahu Akbar, seek to assuage their insecurities and reassure themselves by constantly shouting at the rest of us – is the way we determine whether tens of millions of children will or will not receive pediatric care. This – by pondering what would John Hancock do? – is how we figure out whether one-sixth of our population deserves to have their lives lengthened by early cancer detection and intervention, or must instead resort to ‘treatment’ of their already metastasized masses in hospital emergency rooms.

The very fact of this debate and the questions on which it turns tells you far more than you’d care to know about just how great your greatest country is, the one which spends vastly more on health care than any other, but delivers the least to its citizens. But that is the subject of an essay (or six) for another day.

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William Blum

Syrian Rebels/Free Syrian Army/CIA Death Squad
hold up their rifles as they "secure" a street in Saqba,
in Damascus suburbs. (Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah)

"Today, many Americans are asking — indeed I ask myself," Hillary Clinton said, "how can this happen? How can this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated, and at times, how confounding the world can be." [1]

The Secretary of State was referring to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya September 11 that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans. US intelligence agencies have now stated that the attackers had ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.[2]

Yes, the world can indeed be complicated and confounding. But we have learned a few things. The United States began blasting Libya with missiles with the full knowledge that they were fighting on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. Benghazi was and is the headquarters for Muslim fundamentalists of various stripes in North Africa. However, it's incorrect to claim that the United States (aka NATO) saved the city from destruction. The story of the "imminent" invasion of Benghazi by Moammar Gaddafi's forces last year was only propaganda to justify Western intervention. And now the United States is intervening — at present without actual gunfire, as far as is known — against the government of Syria, with the full knowledge that they're again on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. A rash of suicide bombings against Syrian government targets is sufficient by itself to dispel any doubts about that. And once again, the United States is participating in the overthrow of a secular Mideast government.

At the same time, the Muslim fundamentalists in Syria, as in Libya, can have no illusions that America loves them. A half century of US assaults on Mideast countries, the establishment of American military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia, and US support for dictatorships and for Israel's genocide against the Palestinians have relieved them of such fanciful thoughts. So why is the United States looking to forcefully intervene once again? A tale told many times — world domination, oil, Israel, ideology, etc. Assad of Syria, like Gaddafi of Libya, has shown little promise as a reliable client state so vital to the American Empire.

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Adnan Al-Daini

One of the most powerful sustaining characteristics that make us unique among the animal kingdom is hope. It is what sustains us in times of hardship, tragedy and despair. Austerity mania, for the 99%ers, that is currently sweeping Europe, is getting close to killing hope.

The evidence that austerity measures are not working is all around us, however politicians insist that the good times are not far away and we should hold our nerve and persevere; there is no alternative, they say.

Research conducted by the Institute for Employment Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, commissioned by the Resolution Foundation, paints a frightening picture of the economic well-being of those on the bottom half of income distribution in the UK up to the year 2020 (benefit reliant and those in the lower to middle income, LMI, groups). This is what researchers predict:

“Living standards for working-age households in 2020 are likely to be substantially lower for those in the bottom half of income distribution (the benefit-reliant and LMI groups) than they were for households in the same position a decade earlier. Over the 2008 to 2020 period as a whole, the modelling suggests a decline in real terms income of around 5 percent for low to middle income households and around 19 percent for households reliant on benefits. Only higher income households—those above middle income—see income growth, of around two per cent over the period.”

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William Blum

In Afghanistan, the US military has tried training sessions, embedded cultural advisers, recommended reading lists, and even a video game designed to school American troops in local custom. But 11 years into the war, NATO troops and Afghan soldiers are still beset by a dangerous lack of cultural awareness, officials say, contributing to a string of attacks by Afghan police and soldiers against their military partners. Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

So the Afghan army is trying something new, most likely with American input: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it's likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge. The pamphlet they've produced includes the following advice:

■ "Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you."
■ "When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind. They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you've done. Once again, they don't mean to offend you."
■ "When someone feels comfortable in your presence, they may even put their feet on their own desk while speaking with you. They are by no means trying to offend you. They simply don't know or have forgotten the Afghan custom." (Pointing the soles of one's shoes at someone is considered a grievous insult in Afghanistan.)
■ The guide also warns Afghan soldiers that Western troops might wink at them or inquire about their female relatives or expose their private parts while showering — all inappropriate actions by Afghan standards.[1]

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Eric Peters

Cops are the enemy. A harsh – and global – statement, certainly. But: Is it true?

Consider the nature of the job. It is to enforce the law. By definition. It is not to protect any specific individual – you or me – from harm. It is certainly not to serve – other than as automata who . . . enforce the law. Whatever the law is, it must be enforced. The cop will tell you so himself. He is merely doing his job – and his job is . . . to enforce the law. Period. “The law is the law.” We have all heard it. It does not matter whether the law is itself outrageous, or simply stupid. He may even freely confess it. But he will nonetheless enforce it. He is required to enforce it.

Consider that for a moment. - In a doctrinal way, the cop is exactly like the people who were – rightly – strung up at Nuremburg after WWII, who stated – truthfully – that they were just following the orders issued by the lawfully constituted authority. They were not merely thugs. They were duly appointed thugs. They did not do the awful things they did at random, on their own nickle – so to speak. They were told to do it – agreed to do it – and went ahead and did it. Any questions they may personally have had about the rightness or wrongness of what they were doing were put aside. Orders are orders.

And it is no great leap to go from abusing your fellow man in a small way to doing it in a big way. The principle of the thing is what matters. And the principle is now very well-established indeed. The rest is merely follow-up. A cop who will pull a gun on you for refusing to wear a seatbelt will do much worse when the time comes. When he is ordered to. When the law demands it. - So, what sort of man volunteers for such work?

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Stephen Lendman

Photo: Palestinians run to avoid the effects of tear gas, thrown by Israeli soldiers during a protest against Israel excavations near the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied Jerusalem, in the West Bank town of Hebron (AP/Nasser Shiyoukhi)

How do Palestinians manage every day? How do they deal with state-sponsored denial of their rights? How do they survive under suffocating conditions?

Where will they live once Israel steals all parts of Judea and Samaria it wants? It's grabbing it durum by dunum. What Palestinians lived on peacefully for centuries is fast disappearing.

On September 21, 30 organizations urged Quartet action to keep Palestinian villages from disappearing. They include:

ActionAid; Amnesty International; Broederlijk Delen; Care International; Caritas Jerusalem; Comet- ME; Danish Church Aid (DCA); Diakonia; Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI); World Council of Churches; EWASH; GVC (Gruppo di Volontariato Civile); HelpAge International; Human Rights Watch (HRW); Japan International Volunteer Center (JVC); Islamic Relief; Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation; MAP UK; medico international; Norwegian Church Aid (NCA); Norwegian People's Aid (NPA); Oxfam; Polish Humanitarian Action (PAH); Prèmiere Urgence-Aide Médicale Internationale; SEBA; The Swedish Cooperative Centre (SCC); Terre des Hommes Italia (TdH); The Carter Center; The Overseas NGO; War Child; and World Vision Jerusalem-West Bank-Gaza.

In Hebron Hills alone, 13 Palestinian villages are targeted for demolition. Their residents face eviction. Its ongoing. Demolition and displacement rates hit a three-year high.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) said Israel destroyed 467 structures and 140 houses in 2012. Over 700 Palestinians were displaced. Since 1967, Israel destroyed around 27,000 Palestinian structures. Information comes from the Israeli Interior Ministry, Jerusalem Municipality, Civil Administration, UN bodies and agencies, Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights groups, ICAHD's field monitoring, and other sources.

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Stephen Lendman

America betrayed them and all Native Peoples. Throughout US history and earlier, genocide was policy.

Historian Ward Churchill explained four centuries of systematic slaughter. It went on from 1492 - 1892. It continues today against Native culture. Churchill estimated around 100 million Native People throughout the Americas "hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases."

Destruction of their culture continues in new forms. "The American holocaust was and remains unparalleled, in terms of its scope, ferocity, and continuance over time." Silence and denial suppress what happened and goes on today. Try finding coverage anywhere by America's major media. Virtually nothing is said, let alone explained. Survivors represent a tiny fraction of original numbers. They also symbolize a longstanding US tradition of butchery and viciousness. After centuries of systematic slaughter, Census Bureau data estimated around a quarter-million US survivors. Those living struggle to get by.

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Philip Giraldi

The view into Syria from Turkey's Ulu mosque

Regional powers aren't immune to blowback and other consequences of intervention either.

Over the past eleven years we have become so accustomed to the United States intervening in the affairs of other countries, to include regime change and military invasion, it is sometimes possible to forget that some other nations have also found themselves mired in situations that they cannot extricate themselves from when they pursued similar policies. America’s closest and most important ally in the Middle East Turkey now finds itself in a largely lose-lose situation in its dealings with its neighbor Syria.

Turkey certainly has many detractors who point to the increasing authoritarianism of the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government, its increasing drift from secularism to a mild Islamism, and the de facto limits on civil liberties and rule of law demonstrated in its arrests and prosecutions of journalists and political opponents. But both visitors and longtime foreign residents would also note the country’s dynamic society and vibrant economy at a time when much of the Western world appears to be mired in self-doubt and historical revisionism. Turkey’s economy has been growing, currently at an 8% annual rate, and its centrality as a militarily powerful moderate Muslim regime has led to speculation that they are a possible role model for other developing Islamic states in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, was a passionate secularist, believing as he did that it was the Medievalism of Islam that retarded the nation’s development. He was also a nationalist. During and immediately after the First World War Turkey was a polyglot nation with large Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, Jewish, and Arab minorities. Turkish ethnics were a majority, but nearly half of the nation was non-Turkish. Pogroms against the Armenians and the war of liberation against an invasion by Greece produced major population shifts, sharply reducing the numbers of Christians in the country. But the other major ethnic groups remained. Ataturk’s solution to the country’s ethnic diversity consisted of declaring that henceforth all citizens of the Republic of Turkey would be Turks, whether they liked it or not and without regard to what language they spoke at home and how they chose to worship. This was referred to as “Turkification” and some languages, including Kurdish, were actually made illegal. Ethnic riots in the 1950s further reduced the number of Greeks, primarily in Istanbul, but the fundamental instability of the Turkish state based on its large, predominantly Kurdish minority remained.

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Wayne Madsen

The old Boston Consulting Group team of Republican US presidential nominee Mitt Willard Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who was briefly known in Boston as Benjamin Bin Nitai, is telling enough.

Romney’s sycophantic support for Netanyahu and his reliance on neo-conservative retreads from the Bush-Cheney administration has all but erased any standing the Republican nominee has in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Romney’s hitching of his Middle East foreign policy wagon to Netanyahu received a severe blow when Netanyahu delivered a school teacher-like lecture to the UN General Assembly on setting a “red line” representing 90 percent uranium enrichment for Iran’s nuclear program.

Netanyahu displayed a cartoon image of a sizzling bomb that evoked memories of American cartoons that used similar bombs in scenes of the “Road Runner” outwitting his nemesis, “Wile E. Coyote” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” in which Russian agents Boris Badenov and Natasha tried to kill Rocky the Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose.

Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, an adviser to Romney and a stalwart supporter of Netanyahu, said, “Bibi’s use of that chart was one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I’ve ever seen.” Fleischer probably thought that “Rocky and Bullwinkle” was a documentary on US-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

Netanyahu’s and Romney’s supporters said it was wise for the Israeli Prime Minister to keep his message “simple” for the “uneducated.” In fact, the only “simple” and “uneducated” ones appear to be those like Romney and his neocons who believe Netanyahu is intelligent.

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