We bomb them. They bomb us.
Chris Hedges, journalist and senior fellow at The Nation Institute, discusses the Brussels Attacks for The Real News.
Terrorism
NPA Statement After Paris Attacks
The New Anti-Capitalist Party, one of the leading organizations on the Left in France, issued a statement today, after the attacks in Paris of the evening of 13 November.
The only response to wars and terrorism is the unity of the workers and people, over and above their origins, their skin colour, their religions, across the borders, to fight together against those who want to silence them, to dominate them, to do away with this capitalist system which generates cruelty.
Read the Full Statement: The cruelty of imperialist wars results in the cruelty of terrorism | International Viewpoint
Today, we remember Paris. We also remember Beirut and Gaza and Kunduz, and all of the innocent victims of violence created by a system which has outlived its usefulness.
A Conversation With Chomsky
Isabelle Kumar of Euronews interviews Noam Chomsky on a range of topics. On the subject of Greece’s debt (and that of Portugal and Spain and others) this is what he said.
Who incurred this debt? And who is the debt owed to? In part, the debt was incurred by dictators. So in Greece it was the fascist dictatorship, which the US supported, that incurred a large part of the debt. The debt I think was more brutal than the dictatorship, and that’s what’s called in international law, “odious debt” which need not be paid, and that’s a principal introduced into international law by the United States, when it was in their interest to do so. Much of the rest of the debt, what is called payments to Greece are in fact payments to banks, German and French banks, which had decided to make extremely risky loans with not very high interest and are now being faced with the fact that they can’t be paid back.
Read the Transcript: Chomsky says US is world’s biggest terrorist | euronews, the global conversation
Here’s the video.
Conflating Bigotry and Blasphemy
In an email interview to Vidya Venkat of The Hindu, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, explained the difference between critiquing a religion and ridiculing it, and why it is one thing to oppose censorship and quite another thing to reprint Charlie Hebdo cartoons in solidarity.
“The problem with the ongoing discussion of Charlie Hebdo is that it tends to confuse bigotry with blasphemy. I am personally more favorable to blasphemy, but have no time for bigots or bigotry.”
Read the interview: ‘Charlie Hebdo cartoons are bigoted’ – The Hindu.
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie
Perhaps the best thing I have read on the murders in Paris (and their aftermath) – from Scott Long:
Nothing is quick, nothing is easy. No solidarity is secure. I support free speech. I oppose all censors. I abhor the killings. I mourn the dead. I am not Charlie.
Read the full essay: Why I am not Charlie | a paper bird.
What’s Really Going On In Iraq?
The mainstream media would have us believe that it’s a war between a terrorist group called ISIS, and the U.S. installed government of Iraq, led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki – but is it really just a sectarian battle between the Sunni terrorists and the Shiite-dominated government, with the people of Iraq caught in the middle?
Not according to Michael Schwartz.
For the last couple of years, local folks in the Sunni areas of Iraq–many of whom are now involved in this insurgency–have been organizing protests, nonviolent and violent, against the government, based on numerous justified grievances.
As the government has escalated its repression of these protests, what is essentially a guerrilla war has developed (or rather a large number of uncoordinated local guerrilla-type insurgencies) in the various cities and towns in Anbar, Nineveh and other northwest provinces. ISIS–with a multi-local presence in many, but not all, of the local areas–is an (often vicious) element in the mix. It sometimes takes leadership, but most often, it is not the dominant force in any locality.
Read On: Understanding the crisis in Iraq | SocialistWorker.org.
Benghazi: The Real Scandal
Last week, I posted an update on Facebook noting that Congressional critics and the news media are fundamentally asking the wrong questions about Benghazi. Though it is obvious that the GOP’s focus on the “scandal” represents the worst sort of partisan opportunism – there is, I believe, another story here. It’s not a story about security at the compound, or the military response to the attacks, or what may have been said on television afterward. It’s a story about our government’s complicity to (and culpability for) the attacks themselves.
There is an excellent essay out today from Bill Van Auken that unpacks the situation in great detail.
In its intervention in Libya, Washington utilized Al Qaeda-linked fighters as a proxy ground force in the war to topple the secular regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, arming and advising them and using them to follow up the massive US-NATO bombing campaign. Christopher Stevens was very much the point man in this relationship, having carefully studied the Islamist opponents of Gaddafi before the launching of the war for regime-change. He was deployed in April 2011 to Benghazi, where he coordinated the arming, funding and training of the so-called rebels, elements previously denounced by the US as terrorists and, in some cases, abducted, imprisoned and tortured by the CIA.
So all of the reported “confusion” within the State Department and the Intelligence Community in the wake of the attacks is complete and utter nonsense, as is the portrayal of their interactions as simple bureaucratic interagency bickering. They knew from the very beginning what had happened – that their own assets were involved. The purpose of all the frantic scrambling and deception after the fact was to conceal our government’s relationships with their supposed Al-Qaeda terrorist enemies. There is simply no other way it all makes sense.
The circus sideshow being orchestrated by the GOP is not merely cynical political maneuvering. It misses the point. It helps to conceal from public view the true nature of the events at Benghazi, and ensures that there will be no discussion of the more serious and important issues involved.
READ MORE: Benghazi and the deepening crisis of the Obama administration – WSWS.
