Students of the United States, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, are bringing back the anti-war movement that was ignited during the American war on Vietnam in the 1960s.
Universities across the United States have been witnessing an expanding movement on campuses by students protesting for Palestine against the war waged by “Israel” and supported by the US. This movement is not new – this movement is reborn with a cause brushed under the history books only to be unearthed by those living it.
Students have forever been the face of the young revolution, only now being louder, fearless, and more audacious
Students of the United States, of all ethnicities and backgrounds, are bringing back human rights activism, which dates back to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which influenced the anti-war movement that was ignited during the American War on Vietnam.
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, which instigated the domino effect of pro-Palestine protests in universities across America, is more than just a wave of uproar against the US government’s military and financial support for “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza. It represents the call to action, mirroring the voice of power, which, in turn, gives voice to resistance against injustice.
Complex yet simply put, student activism is making a comeback, through civil disobedience and peaceful protests, to challenge the imperialist system that uses the academic institution as a tool of social control to enforce its ideologies and conceal the failures of its own history and present.
And being “woke” is sort of the boogeyman of the government, because the term itself challenges the government and looks it dead in the eye.
‘By all means necessary’ and peacefully
Student demonstrations, regardless of how peaceful they are, have always been a bone for the government to pick with ever since the 1968 protests at Columbia against the war in Vietnam. Other universities like the University of Michigan and NYU followed suit, and thus the anti-war movement gained traction and the attention of the American youth.
As of last week, the Morningside campus of Columbia has been the stage of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment where tents have been set up by students, housing posters calling for the end of the siege and genocide in Gaza encouraged by Western allies. The on-site encampment was the venue of multiple forms of protests such as teach-ins (which began in the 1960s Vietnam protests), dances, and poetry readings, while other students were seen completing assignments and painting.
Then comes the crackdown at the hands of New York’s finest, the NYPD. Picture this: America has a problem, instead of resorting to ways to solve the problem, who are they going to call? The police.
Columbia students, during their peaceful protests, have been calling for the complete divestment of the university from ties with “Israel” and the occupation’s business entities.
However, in a shocking turn of events, NYPD Chief John Chell revealed that it was the University’s President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik (of Egyptian descent, by the way) who called the police after calling the demonstration a “clear and present danger.”
“To put this in perspective, the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,” he said.
Let’s go back 235 years, to the formation of the US Constitution, specifically the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
So, rather than meeting the demands of their students, university administrations have been obeying the demands of their donors and political affiliates. To get down to the law side of things, universities could be sued for violating the First Amendment, which gives the students the natural right to express and advocate against policies by the US government freely.
Shafik, Columbia University’s President, is facing calls by students, faculty members, and even lawmakers to resign or face censure over her decision to call NYPD and arrest over 150 students for exercising their right to free speech.
Here’s the funny part of this whole shebang: The authorities, be they police or academics, have been weaponizing anti-semitism, claiming “intimidating” behavior from the students. After all, waving the anti-semitism card is a game the US is a professional at playing.
Do you want to speak up against the rape of women in Gaza by Israeli forces? You’re anti-semitic. What, you’re against the blocking of aid by “Israel” into Gaza? You’re anti-semitic. Did you say you’re an anti-Zionist human rights advocate? I guess this also makes you anti-semitic, by US standards that is…
Capitalist combat
In an interview for Al Mayadeen English, Maryam Iqbal, a student at Columbia’s Barnard College and an organizer of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group, stated, “I believe that as students at an American institution, we have an inherent complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people because our tuition and tax dollars are paying for it. And we have to fight with everything in us against our complicity. “
She reveals that not only was she arrested, but she was “suspended and evicted” from her housing by Columbia University.
She tells other students, “We want you to learn from our tactics and occupy buildings, occupy spaces and say I’m all eyes on that right now. I don’t want people to center on Columbia because this should not only be about Columbia. It’s not about us. It’s about Palestine.”
In the latest news, just today, Shafik imposed an ultimatum on students peacefully protesting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza: either reach an agreement with the administration to end the encampment or the school would resort to a different approach to dismantle it – by Monday midnight. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan recently announced, in light of the events, that it would permit free expression and peaceful protest during graduation in May but would stop “substantial disruption”.
Basically, it’s kind of set like this: you can speak on our own terms, and the “disruption” stops when we say so.
When has intimidation and threat ever instilled fear into the minds of those who fear neither the book nor its author, neither the pen nor its holder, and neither the weapon nor its maker?
The privilege of being a student is having a voice and being the voice of those who are silenced by political agendas for cash and clout. The privilege of being a student is holding the pen as a weapon of resistance against imperialist ideologies and systemic injustice.
The university or college campus represents the space for learning freedom, advocating for it, and therefore, using that space to educate society on it.
Students across the US are rewriting history, just like those before them decades ago. These students are rewriting history to break free of colonial rhetoric and fight the war on Gaza through their pens and their voices. Instead of battlegrounds, they’re fighting for the liberation of Gaza on their campuses.
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On December 1, 2018, the Yellow Vests announced themselves in France and the world, registering their name in history books with their revolutionary graffiti tagging of the Arc de Triomphe, one of the country’s most iconic monuments.
“The Yellow Vests will win” was a slogan that reverberated across the world, as the movement became the biggest, most organic, most devoted and truly revolutionary threat any Western country had faced for over half a century.
It was their third week of protest, and there was no going back now.
The world never expected a genuine resistance movement to sprout in France, a Western imperialist hub. The French were – many insisted – too self-righteous, too spoiled, too indoctrinated, and yet for the next six months every Saturday turned into a war zone across the country.
France was wholly gripped by the revolutionary frenzy at the time, and it was because the French way of life isn’t as extravagant as people may think.
The Yellow Vests didn’t bravely endure all this – at least 11,000 arrests, 1,000 political prisoners, 5,000 protesters seriously hurt, 1,000 critically injured, scores maimed for life and 11 deaths – because they have a luxurious lifestyle.
It is hard to say what was worse – the repression by the French regime, or the way Western media and NGOs slandered and ignored the weekly bloodletting, tear gas shelling and mass arrests.
The Yellow Vests are an immediate, permanent rejoinder to Westerners who claim that their governments are more protective of democracy and less brutal than those in non-Western countries. That’s one of the three great legacies of the Yellow Vests.
The key to understanding the Yellow Vests is this, and it’s implicitly understood by the average European, totally not understood in places like the United States, and has been intellectually mastered by the vanguard Yellow Vests.
Ever since the pan-European project was activated in 2009, it has failed to do anything. Prosperity, stability and democracy – none of these have been implemented. France is not really France anymore – not unless Brussels says so – and it’s becoming less like France with each passing day under a political system that is still new.
So the Yellow Vests were truly 10 years in the making. They even arrived after a decade full of major social movements, because the first war of the European Union wasn’t a proxy war against Russia but the social war it waged against its own citizens.
The problem was not just the Great Recession of 2008 but the fact that the European Union/Eurozone was the only macroeconomic bloc that implemented absolutely no major recovery plan.
Even worse, its response was to undemocratically ram through far-right austerity policies. The Yellow Vests were the “working-poor class” cemented by the changes in Brussels, and their opponents were the highly-unequal “bourgeois bloc” that only saw the pan-European project in a rainbow glow of total success.
The Yellow Vests disproved the insistence of the Anglosphere – whose cultures are politically conservative – that all populist groups in the West are necessarily on the far-right.
As soon as December 2018, it was clear in France that the Yellow Vests were steeped in left-wing economics, anti-imperialism and a non-Islamophobic, modern conception of healthy patriotism.
This explains the nearly 80 percent approval rate for the movement, and staggering popularity, especially in France which had grown extremely cynical due to undemocratic failures of the pan-European project.
If one word had to be given to describe the Yellow Vests, it would be “civic-minded”. Concern for fellow citizens and the downward spiral of non-elite masses is what basically propels such popular revolutions.
These simple, obvious and pro-community concepts are forbidden in the Western mainstream media. There is no “working-poor class” in France. There are only racist, backward, lazy, always-complaining Frenchmen. There is no “bourgeois bloc” but only an elite group of enlightened and deserving technocrats who decide for us what constitutes the “reality”.
These are truly the two classes of the 21st century West – forget “middle class”, because the pan-European project has dealt the final blow to what Reaganomics/Thatcherism began.
Fully understanding and opposing the West’s current social class reality is the second great achievement of the Yellow Vests, but of course, one cannot find class discussed in the English-speaking media.
However, there is another achievement that is even greater but less discussed, probably because it requires a complete overview of modern Western politics, which began in 1789 with the anti-monarchy/anti-aristocrat/anti-privilege French Revolution.
The arrival and the repression of the Yellow Vests remind us all of the undeniable failures of “liberalism”. The Yellow Vests aren’t actually new but are integral to French revolutionary history transported from 1848-71.
The struggle today is the same as it was back then. It’s a struggle against elitist liberalism and its attendants: oligarchical and anti-democratic parliamentarianism, free-market chaos, anti-government ideology encapsulated by austerity cuts to social services, and encouragement of a rat race to “become bourgeois”.
The Yellow Vests took France and Europe back to 1848 when the “Second Republic” re-ended the French monarchy and claimed the mantle of the French Revolutionary “First Republic”. Liberalism was installed for the first time and immediately proved that it was plagued by all the problems described above.
Liberalism has proved a failure since 1848, and the liberalist principles (“neoliberal” is more commonly used today to differentiate it from the discredited, original “liberalism”) that underpin the pan-European project have failed today. They always fail.
The arrival, desperate passion and durability of the Yellow Vests are proof of this, and showing the hypocrisy, brutality and ineffectiveness of always-unequal liberalism is the third and greatest and historical achievement of the Yellow Vests.
Liberalism, infamously, does not promise anyone the right to a decent existence. Back in 1848, Karl Marx and other socialists demonstrated these facts about Western liberal democracies. The Yellow Vests have brought us back to these inescapable political and social truths.
Why did the Yellow Vests “fail”? Quite simply because the French government scared people away from it through heavy-handed tactics such as violence, heavy fines, arrests and imprisonment. That’s why their protests slowly dwindled in scale and magnitude – owing to fear of state repression.
The fear has had dramatic, lasting consequences: the French have been reduced from the most politically-active nation in the West to being apathetic and uninvolved – typical of Western liberal democracies.
The apathy surrounding this year’s re-election of French President Emmanuel Macron was completely atypical for the country but it showed there was no stopping the will of the 1 percent and their fanatical “bourgeois bloc” toadies.
The Yellow Vests recently marched to commemorate their fourth anniversary, but you probably didn’t hear about it. You also likely haven’t heard that they’ve been marching every Saturday since “Season 2” began in October 2021, following a year-and-a-half coronavirus pause – which no world leader embraced with more joy and relief than Macron. However, the media blackout on them actually began way back in June 2020.
France is no longer gripped in revolutionary fervor, but the Yellow Vests haven’t gone anywhere. The average person has put their reflective yellow vest back where it belongs by law – in the car – but the network, relationships and experiences created by this extraordinary movement ensure that they will be back one day.
And they will be back. The history of Western liberalism has proven over and over again that the average person’s right to live decently will never be guaranteed.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009.
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
Press TV correspondent in Ukraine Johnny Miller says he has been placed on a “kill list” by Ukrainian ultranationalists following his revelations about Ukrainian atrocities against pro-Russian children and other civilians in the Donbas region.
Reporting from the war-torn country on Friday, Miller said that the neo-Nazi group wants him dead following his repeated reports about Ukrainian forces’ violence in the east of the country.
In an interview with Press TV, Miller said that he was placed on the kill list after he sent a journalistic inquiry to the website that had published a kill list of hundreds of people.
“Actually I contacted the website for a statement, which is normal in journalistic standards, but they didn’t reply to my statement… rather, they put me on the list,” the correspondent said.
“It’s clear that some parts of Ukrainian society [are] witnessing some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, when a journalist does a legitimate story about a kill list and they put him on the same list,” he added.
He warned that most of the people on the list, including a 13-year-old teenager who was interviewed by Miller, “have already been receiving threats of physical violence.”
“There is no doubt that this list does promote violence, and the killing of anybody on that list,” he noted, adding that there are “over 300 children” on that kill list right now.
Miller called on international organizations such as the UN to take down this list and said that it’s so shocking that there is no pressure from such organizations.
“There should be more pressure from western countries to take down this list, [which is] promoting violence against children and journalists through an extremist behavior and ideology.”
“The Ukrainian government has the power to take down this list; NATO countries have a huge influence over Ukraine, but it doesn’t seem to be any pressure to take down this list at the moment,” Miller said.
He said that in spite of Western media’s supposition, there is a considerable degree of “extremism” in Ukraine, which he has been trying to highlight through the years.
In 2017 two out of three French voters were on the side of the nation’s Muslim citizens – for two weeks.
In between the first and second round presidential vote the incredible repression which Marine Le Pen was going to wage on Muslims was constantly cited as a reason to vote for Emmanuel Macron, who was presented as a “centrist”.
As the largest Muslim country in Europe the Muslim vote matters: In 2012 French Muslims decided the election. More than 2 million Muslim voters voted for Francois Hollande to the tune of 93% against Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande prevailed by just 1.1 million votes, or a 51.6% to 48.4% margin.
Hollande immediately sold out the Muslim vote by refusing to take a zero-tolerance approach to Sarkozy’s inauguration of France’s normalisation of Islamophobia.
The start of open attacks on Islam with Sarkozy has only backfired in every way, because since his election polls show that French Muslims have only gotten more devout in their practices. The reason is obvious: the constant accusations that Islam is bad pushes French Muslims to look more closely at their religion – they do, and they realise how wonderful Islam is, thus they become more devout.
For France’s non-Muslims it has tragically backfired as well. Many in France don’t realise that the insulting Islamophobia, which results in humiliating domestic oppression, comes on top of two centuries of colonial and neo-colonial domination, plus foreign wars in places like Mali, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. Seemingly every Muslim attacker in France since 2008 who wasn’t clearly insane cited France’s wars in Mali and Syria, specifically, as justification for their attacks.
Hollande manipulated the attacks to gain approval for state-sponsored Islamophobia, which became his trusty “Islamo-diversion” tactic to deflect from his unpopular enforcing of far-right economic austerity. In his tenure some 4,000 warrantless raids on Muslim homes, mosques and properties only led to six suspicions of terrorism. The handful of the court cases were won, and I cannot unearth even one conviction from Hollande-era raids.
France’s fake-left assumed they have the Muslim constituency in their back pocket in 2012. In 2017 the threat of the National Front forced them into Macron’s camp. 2022 is a changed place.
Many French Muslims have told me they will do what was unthinkable to them previously – vote for the National Front (now rebranded as the “National Rally) in the second round.
Why the change? The insidious deception that Macron is a “centrist” and not a willing manipulator of Islamophobia has been totally disproven – the lower class and the Muslim class have paid the price for five years.
Sarkozy brought French Islamophobia into the mainstream, Hollande got it approved, but Macron institutionalised it. Macron took Hollande’s multiyear state of emergency and legalised it, with Muslims the clear targets and practically the only victims. Only the Yellow Vests and a small number of leftist and environmental activists have ever been impacted.
From not apologising for various massacres and atrocities against Algerians, to keeping Europe’s oldest political prisoner and the “Arab Nelson Mandela” Georges Ibrahim Abdallah in prison, to falsely and shamefully enacting legislation which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, to a “cyber-hate bill” which targets pro-Palestinians and Yellow Vests – Macron did very little in the past five years which did anything but hurt Muslims.
Have Islamophobic acts increased during the Macron era? We don’t know – Macron forced the closure of the French Collective Against Islamophobia, seemingly the only and certainly the best Muslim NGO committed to tracking this problem.
His so-called “anti-separatist law” of 2021 was the definite legalisation of Islamophobia, and was so heavy-handed even the United Nations and English-media widely criticised it. It tried to ban the hijab for minors and clearly violated constitutional protections for the freedom of association, worship and politics. In recent months nearly 100 mosques have recently been raided by the government, with at least two dozen shut down so far. (Who says Macron doesn’t care about far-right voters?)
Just this week a new report from Reuters came out: The mosque closures were based merely on “secretive evidence” which violate the right to fair trial and equality before the law. “Secretive” is simply another word for “false”, of course.
As his record clearly now proves, Macron is on the far-right economically (austerity and neoliberalism), politically (with his repression of the Yellow Vests), in his governance style (it’s a completely top-down style befitting a monarch and not an elected public servant who must listen to others and compromise) but also culturally – he’s Islamophobic.
The error is exactly as I wrote in 2017 – in agreeing with the Mainstream Media’s insistence that Macron was a “centrist”. The past five years proves he is authoritarian, pro-economic inequality, and Islamophobic.
Much like with the absolutely brutal repression of the Yellow Vests – Marine Le Pen would have never gotten away with half of the Islamophobia Macron did. People would have been on guard from the day she took office – similar to the response to Donald Trump’s election in the United States. A Le Pen victory would have sparked organised progressive resistance groups – something like a George Floyd response or #MeToo but à la française.
The handful of French media oligarchs who decided to give a political neophyte (he was previously a Rothschild banker) like Macron such glowing press coverage in the run-up to the 2017 election also decided to hand the 2022 election campaign agenda to convicted racist Eric Zemmour. The reason? Primarily this was done to spit the far-right vote for Sunday’s first round vote, but Zemmour also aids Macron by making Macron look more falsely “centrist”. Look at his record – Macron needs that assistance.
Making Islamophobia the 2022 election’s primary campaign issue will backfire – record abstention is widely predicted. It’s actually good news in this way: Islamophobia may still propel French politicians but the French people are bored by it – they wanted to go back to discussing real issues.
A very recent poll actually has Marine Le Pen beating Macron 50.5% to 49.5%. Other recent polls have her just 3 points down from Macron – that’s within the margin of error, and thus it’s a dead-heat. Her Hungarian “right-nationalist” counterpart just won a huge victory even though polls predicted a much tighter contest. French polling agencies are not just staffed by politicians – the biggest one is owned by a politician. Thus the odds of a 2nd round win by Le Pen seem much, much higher than many claimed in the previous months.
A Le Pen victory will be no picnic for France’s Muslims but at least everyone will be on guard against her. Macron, foolishly, was given a huge leash, and he went so far against Muslims that he broke the chain.
But mostly, France’s Muslims will do what a record number of French people will likely do: tune out the mainstream media hate factory and not vote. Abstention will hurt France’s left wing candidate – Jean-Luc Melenchon, who opposed the anti-separatism bill – but in France even the left wing is often as Islamophobic as the right wing.
One thing is certain: the alleged “centrist” Macron was no solution for France’s anti-Muslim problems.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. His new book is ‘France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values’. He is also the author of ‘ Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
There has been massive and widespread publicity about Ukraine. It is a simple Hollywood script: Ukraine is the angel, Russia is the devil, Zelensky is the hero and all good people will wear blue and yellow ribbons.
Fabricating Putin Quotes and Banning Paraplegic Athletes to Undermine Russia: How Low Can the West Go?
Mobilizing a population to vilify and hate a targeted enemy is a tactic that leaders have used since before the dawn of human history, and it is being used to demonize Russia and Vladimir Putin in the current conflict. If we want to join the march to war, we can join the hate fest. But if we want a more objective and honest assessment of events, we must rely upon facts that our government and its cheer-leading mainstream media are not anxious for us to view.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all things Russian are being punished. Russian athletes, including paraplegics, are barred from international sports competitions. Century-old Russian writers and musicians such as Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky are being removed from bookshelves and concerts. Even Russian bred cats are not exempt.
If such actions are justified, why was there no such banning of US athletes, musicians, or writers after the US invasion of Iraq? Moreover, why are so few people outraged by the bombing and killing of 370,000 Yemeni people? Why are so few people outraged as thousands of Afghans starve because the United States is seizing Afghanistan’s national assets which were in western banks?
Why Ukraine?
There has been massive and widespread publicity about Ukraine. It is a simple Hollywood script: Ukraine is the angel, Russia is the devil, Zelensky is the hero and all good people will wear blue and yellow ribbons.
Maintaining this image requires propaganda to promote it, and censorship to prevent challengers from debunking it.
This has required trashing some long-held western traditions. By banning all Russian athletes from international competition, the International Olympic Committee and different athletic federations have violated the Olympic Charter which prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Censorship
The West prides itself on free speech yet censorship of alternative viewpoints is now widespread in Europe and North America. Russia Today and other Russian media outlets are being blocked on the internet as well as cable TV. Ironically, numerous programs on RT were hosted by Americans, for example, journalist Chris Hedges and comedian Lee Camp. The US is silencing its own citizens.
Censorship or shadow banning is widespread on social media. On April 6, one of the best informed military analysts, Scott Ritter @realScottRitter, was suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he suggested that the victims of Bucha may have been murdered not by Russians, but rather by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and the US and UK may also be culpable.
The 2015 Netflix documentary titled “Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” deals with the Maidan (Kiev central square) uprising of 2013-2014. It ignores the most essential elements of the events: the management provided by the US and the muscle provided by ultra-nationalists of the Right Sector and Azov Battalion. The attacks and killing of Ukrainian police are whitewashed away.
By contrast, the 2016 documentary “Ukraine on Fire” provides the background and essential elements of the conflict. It is not available on Netflix and was banned from distribution on YouTube for some time.
Backed by US and UK intelligence agencies, Ukraine knows the importance of the information war. They make sensational accusations that receive uncritical media coverage. When the truth eventually comes out, it is ignored or buried on the back pages. Here are a few examples:
– In 2014, eleven civilians were killed in eastern Ukraine when an apartment was hit in rebel-held territory. Ukraine tried to blame Russia even though no bombs were coming from Russia and the population is ethnically Russian.
– At the beginning of the current conflict, Ukrainian President Zelensky claimed that soldiers on Snake Island died heroically rather than surrender. Actually, all the soldiers surrendered.
– Ukraine and western media claim a maternity hospital in Mariupol was bombed by Russia. Evidence shows the hospital was taken over by Ukrainian military forces on March 7, two days before the bombing on March 9.
– The latest sensational accusations are regarding dead civilians in Bucha, north of Kiev. Again, there is much contrary evidence. The Russian soldiers left Bucha on March 31, the mayor of Bucha announced the town liberated with no mention of atrocities on March 31, the Azov battalion entered Bucha on April 1, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry published a video of “Russian” atrocities on April 3.
In most cases, western media does not probe the accusations or use simple logic to ask if they make sense. However in the case of Bucha story, the NY Times had to acknowledge they were “unable to independently verify the assertions by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.”
Self Censorship
In addition to actual censorship, there is widespread self-censorship. Instead of reading what the Russians are saying, western political “analysts” engage in outlandish amateur psychology and speculation. With no factual basis, they speculate about what Putin wants and his mental state.
This is convenient if one does not want to deal with real issues and arguments.
Most western analysts and journalists are afraid or unwilling to read or listen to what the Russian leaders say. That is unfortunate because those speeches are more clear and direct than those from western politicians who rely on public relations, spin, and platitudes.
Fabricating quotes
Ignorance of Russian foreign policy is such that Truthout online magazine recently published an article that contains a sensational but completely invented quote from Putin. It says,
Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”
Putin said no such thing and any moderately knowledgeable person would recognize this to be fake.
When I emailed the co-author, Carl Davidson, asking where the quotation came from, he admitted inventing it. This is significant because the statement goes to the core of what the conflict is about. Is Russia trying to absorb all of Ukraine? Do they intend to occupy Ukraine? Anyone who reads the speeches of Putin and Lavrov, such as here and here and here, knows they do not. Davidson’s fabricated quote suggests he has not read the speeches himself.
Ukraine in the Global Context
The article with the made-up quote contends that “Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movement that seeks to ‘overthrow’ the 20th Century.” This analysis is close to that of the US Democratic Party, which sees the major global division being between “authoritarianism” vs “democracy”.
It is highly US-centered and partisan, with Putin somehow lumped with Trump. It is also self-serving, with US Democrats as the embodiment of “democracy”. It is completely contrary to a class analysis.
This faulty analysis has major contradictions. It is well known that Biden is unpopular. Biden’s latest approval rating is under 42%. It is less well known in the West that Putin is popular in Russia. Since the intervention in Ukraine his approval rating has increased to over 80%.
Also largely unknown in the West, most of the world does NOT support the Western analysis of the Ukraine conflict. Countries representing 59% of the global population abstained or voted against the condemnation of Russia at the UN General Assembly. These countries tend to see US exceptionalism and economic-military domination as a key problem. They do not think it helpful to demonize Russia and they urge negotiations and a quick resolution to the Ukraine war.
Cuba said, “History will hold the United States accountable for the consequences of an increasingly offensive military doctrine beyond NATO’s borders which threatens international peace, security and stability…. Russia has the right to defend itself.”
South African President Ramaphosa blamed NATO saying, “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.”
The Chinese representative said, “The final settlement of the Ukraine crisis requires abandoning the Cold War mentality, abandoning the logic of ensuring one’s own security at the expense of others’ security, and abandoning the approach of seeking regional security by expanding military blocs.”
Many western anti-war movements are critical of Russia’s invasion. Others, such as the US Peace Council, see the US and NATO as largely responsible. However they all see the necessity of pressing to stop the war before it gets worse.
In contrast, the western military-industrial-media complex is fueling the war with propaganda, censorship, banning, demonization and more weapons. It appears they do not want a resolution to the conflict. Just as they supported NATO pushing up against Russia, knowing that it risked provoking Russia to the point of retaliation, they seem to be pushing for a protracted bloody conflict in Ukraine, knowing that it risks global conflagration. Yet they persist, while crying crocodile tears.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
France has thrown a hypocritical hissy fit over a satirical cartoon, ”L’Europe en 2022.” So exceptionally exquisite are the decent sensibilities of the French Foreign Ministry, that the Office summoned Russia’s ambassador to France, to whine that the tweeted caricature was “unacceptable,” in its reputed mockery of Europe.
Per Reuters, France’s European Affairs Minister Clement Beaune described the cartoon as a “disgrace,” apparently particularly painful once given that “We [France] are trying to maintain a demanding channel of dialogue with Russia and these actions are completely inappropriate,” according to the Reuters report.
France’s Macron had a much more liberal view of free speech during his second trip in less than one month, to soothe “traumatized Lebanon” after the massive and deadly explosion which destroyed the Beirut Harbor.
France’s Macron took a different stance on “free speech” when in Lebanon.
France’s Macron took a different stance on “free speech” when in Lebanon.
In a speech during his 1 September 2020 visit — related to Charlie Hebdo, and to a Muslim-majority audience — he stated: “It’s never the place of a president of the Republic to pass judgment on the editorial choice of a journalist or newsroom, never. Because we have freedom of the press…[T]here is in France a freedom to blaspheme which is attached to the freedom of conscience. I am here to protect all these freedoms. In France, one can criticize a president, governors, blaspheme.”
He did not explain how he was in Lebanon to protect Lebanese freedoms (though there remains a sulfuric stench Sykes-Picot residual).
Perhaps an entitled, imperialist mindset is required to consider a series of humorless, baseless, and vile caricatures which seem to have the intention of inciting anger decent and proper free speech, while one based in accuracy demands universal condemnation.
According to Macron in Lebanon, politicians can be criticized, and the rudest blasphemy is doubleplusgood.
Also according to Macron in NATO Brussels, an honest cartoon is ‘false propaganda,’ and completely “unacceptable.”
Reuters did not include the ‘mocking’ caricature of NATO and the US destroying Europe in its report, maybe fearing it would be sanctioned by the regime that selectively promotes freedom of speech.
France’s hypocritical hissy fit over Russia’s concise polemic is a call to political cartoonists to up the ante.
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In a wide-ranging interview with Palestine Deep Dive (PDD), Mark Seddon discusses with distinguished Palestinian journalist and author, Dr. Ramzy Baroud, the unfolding crisis in Ukraine through the eyes of the Palestinian people.
While examining what seems to be emerging on the global geopolitical stage, Baroud also highlighted the hypocrisy of the international community, as well as the mainstream media in their response to Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in comparison to their response, or lack of it, to Israel’s ongoing 74-year occupation of Palestine.
“People have the right to defend themselves against military occupation, period. Under any circumstance, regardless of the geopolitical nature of that conflict, and regardless of who’s involved in that conflict,” Baroud said.
“We are still buried in this massive dichotomy in which we Palestinians can’t even protest without being accused of being anti-Israel or anti-America or anti this or that, compared to what is happening in the Ukraine within the matter of hours. In fact, even before the invasion took place. When the Russian forces were amassing at the Russia-Ukraine border, the condemnations were coming from all over Europe, all over North America. Of course, we have to face the reality that the international community does not have fair and just standards in its view of international conflicts.”
Commenting on the United Nations General Assembly vote, which saw 35 member states, including South Africa, India and China, abstaining from condemning Russia’s actions, Baroud said:
“I think geopolitics has a lot to do with it. (…) To give you an example, I was in Africa quite recently, and I visited several countries and became somewhat familiar with the political tussle that is happening in Africa itself.(…) African countries are very, very wary of the nature of the fight that is underway in Africa. South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, and other countries do not want to see this happening. They want a more balanced bipolar world.”
When asked about the possibility of a new Cold War situation in Europe, with a revival of the Non-Aligned Movement, Baroud said:
“I think it’s very possible. Of course, we understand that there are so many moving pieces here, but if indeed, even if a stalemate is achieved, in other words, if NATO does not get its way in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe, and some kind of a compromise is made, will definitely embolden other countries to start negotiating (for themselves) a new political contract.”
Regarding the double standards currently displayed by Western politicians and media, Baroud said:
“I think we need to revisit the term double standards or hypocrisy. It just does not even begin to tell half of the story regarding what’s happening in Palestine. What the West, what the Americans are condemning right now regarding Russia’s military action is exactly what Israel has been doing as a matter of course, in Palestine every single day. What’s happening in Yemen. These millions of poor people are starving, fighting cholera, fighting bombs falling on top of them.”
Baroud went on criticizing social media censorship of pro-Palestinian content, and describing the double-standards by international institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, FIFA or the International Olympic Committee.
In highlighting the inherent racism in Western media coverage on Ukraine, Baroud said:
“That’s really the mindset of the racist. I know that this is a term that people are very careful using, but if this is not outright racism, I don’t know what is. The thing about a racist mentality is that you never see your own fault, and you always project that on someone else.”
Pro-Palestinian activists marched across the city of London on Saturday urging people to boycott Israeli apartheid, UK-based NGO Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA) said in a press release.
“Starting at PUMA on Carnaby Street and stopping at Coca-Cola’s Head Office and other locations before reaching Parliament, FOA supporters engaged Londoners with street action emphasizing the power of boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning the individuals, companies and culture complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine,” the press release read.
The protest follows Amnesty International’s recent report labeling Israel as an apartheid state and coincides with the Global Day of Action on PUMA.
“Today’s march demonstrated the strength of opposition to the (British) government’s proposed anti-BDS Bill as well as support for sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law,” FOA declared.
Last December, British Conservative politician Robert Jenrick announced that the UK government was “working to outlaw BDS in the UK”. Moreover, UK Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi recently came under fire when he said that pro-Palestine activists who use the slogan “From the river to the sea” should be referred to police, saying that the chant is an example of antisemitism.
These political moves have been perceived as an attack on democracy and a limitation to the right of free speech.
Free speech has long been a cornerstone of Western society. However, within the past few years the situation has completely changed. Recently, one of the Western`s oldest public figures – the legendary leader of the Western Civil Liberties Union Ira Glasser, who for many years fought against racism, violation of the rights of workers and employees, and government corruption, spoke about a discussion that took place at one of the leading Western universities following a lecture he had delivered there. Young people, from student to professor, argued that freedom of speech is incompatible with social justice because it cannot fully guarantee the rights of LGBT people, migrants and non-white minorities. Glasser, who had fought for the equal rights in Western society for many years, was frightened to see Western democracy dying right before his eyes.
In a modern society freedom of speech cannot be absolute. Defamation, personal, racial, gender and other insults are inadmissible. There are courts that are supposed to protect the rights of those offended, but no one can deprive a person of the right to express his or her opinion on such issues as illegal migration, the destruction of the education system, the tax system or when heterosexuals serve in the army alongside representatives of sexual minorities. Or maybe already can? In the midst of the pandemic, freedom of speech has become lopsided – the “cancellation culture” has led to calls for violence against members of the successful middle class, who in turn are no longer able to raise their voice in defense of their rights. What is even more outrageous is that this was done to please the old political elites … mostly white and very wealthy.
However, while previously high-profile cases such as Watergate, the Bill Clinton sex scandal and others got in the media spotlight leading to the conviction and often impeachment of politicians, in the course of the past five years the situation has changed. Facts are no longer needed. Investigative journalism has been replaced by fakes and unfounded statements. Certain political forces clearly benefit from this new reality. Democrats support BLM, LGBT people and migrants. Therefore, any accusation against them is a lie, a manifestation of racism and intolerance. Any evidence presented was fabricated in Moscow and Beijing and handed over to Trump. All media outlets that do not support Democrats are lying.
As a result, Joe Biden’s supporters got a powerful trump card – almost complete impunity. Supporting corporations such as Amazon can exploit their employees any way they like, but any complaints about their inhuman work schedule is a provocation by the Trumpists, because Amazon is a company where gender equality is respected and they have diversity directors. The situation at the largest startups in Silicon Valley, the main sponsors of the Democratic Party, is the same.
Accordingly, any accusations against the party of the current President cannot be considered objectively – after all, these are all lies told by the enemies of minorities. Consider, for example, the 2016 scandal with $84 million, which, thanks to Hillary Clinton, replenished the Democrats’ election coffers, in violation of the law on maximum party funding. Trump has long tried to initiate an official investigation of all this, but without success. The same with the scandal surrounding Biden Jr., for whom his father secured a cushy job on the board of Ukraine’s Burisma Company with a monthly salary of a hefty $50,000. When the Ukrainian opposition tried to initiate an investigation into this, Joe Biden simply replaced the country’s disloyal Prosecutor General. Moreover, he brags about it in his public speeches. And brag he certainly can, because changing the prosecutor in a semi-colony is a truly democratic way to go. Attempts by Trump supporters to prove that the Bidens’ activities were illegal have failed despite all the evidence corroborating the charge. The “Democrats” simply said it was a fake.
The same about the Clintons, whose lobbying structures worked hard defending the Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus accused of corruption. Hillary Clinton personally threatened the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. The news about this appeared in the media, but there were no investigations either. Biden, just like the Clintons and other leading Democrats are all hereditary politicians representing the top tier of American society. Most of the Democratic party leaders came to power from Ivy League universities, not from street protests or black neighborhoods. However, it was they who initiated and spearheaded the LGBT and BLM protests, launched the “cancellation culture” and are now enjoying the fruits of their labors. Getting into their closed club is no easy matter. It is easier to leave it, as did Bernie Sanders, a popular politician but a bit too independent for the taste of the Democratic Party bosses. As a result, he was forced to pull out of the presidential race.
At first glance it may seem that Western’s Big Business has nothing to gain from protests and new cultural codes, which theoretically make it possible to declare a boycott of any company. However, while stores in many cities were being burglarized and calls were being made to abolish the “white privileges,” Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Postmates and other corporations spent more than $200 million to push new and tighter labor legislation through the courts, thus dealing another blow to the middle class, which now pays for everything. By the way, this whole process was set in motion by Tony West, the son-in-law of the new Vice-President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color in this post, who comes out as a champion of minority rights.
So, let the protests and all the noise being made about the “oppressed minorities” not fool you. This only makes the “Democratic Party” inviolable, so welcome to the beautiful new West – a one-party system with “right” freedom of speech. If you want more evidence and examples to arrive to the same conclusions as did the author of this article, spend a few minutes watching a good video that is going viral every day:
Batko Milacic is an independent analyst who lives in Podgorica (capital of Montenegro), he is 30 years old. He graduated history at University of Montenegro and his graduate thesis was: “Foreign Policy of Russia from 1905 to 1917”. He has been doing analytics for years, writing in English and Serbian about the situation in the Balkans and Europe. He participated in several seminars for young journalists, organized in the Balkans.
We are at a critical historical juncture in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to criticize Israel without being branded an anti-Semite. You are an anti-Semite if you support the International Criminal Court’s recent ruling that it has jurisdiction to open a war crimes investigation against Israel. But you are also likely to be called an anti-Semite if you reject the logic informing the court’s decision.
Target List
The ICC is on Israel’s target list. This becomes clear when searching for the terms “ICC ruling” and “Israel” together; instantaneously, an ad pops up at the very top of Google’s list of 1,390,000 results: “ICC & Israel: No Standing. No Jurisdiction. No Case.” Clicking the ad, will take you to a slick blue and white website (i.e., the colour of Israel’s flag) called “ICC Jurisdiction” with the large “No Standing….” slogan at the centre of the page.
Under the slogan one reads that “The International Criminal Court (ICC) was established as a court of last resort to try the perpetrators of some of the world’s worst crimes. It has been widely recognized that the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel. Any other conclusion is the outcome of a politicized process which upholds a wrong interpretation of international law.”
Israel’s official view, then, is that the ICC has no standing to investigate alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories that Israel had occupied in 1967. Israel, so the claim goes, is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the ICC; moreover, the Palestinian Authority is not sovereign and therefore cannot delegate jurisdiction and request that the ICC intervene on its behalf as required by the Statute. This is why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily rejected the ICC’s recent ruling that paves the way for a war crimes probe, averring that “The decision of the international court to open an investigation against Israel today for war crimes is absurd. It’s undiluted antisemitism and the height of hypocrisy.”
Several Israeli allies, including the US, Germany, and Hungary, appear to agree with Israel’s analysis. Although US Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not invoke the anti-Semitism charge, he did parrot Israel’s Prime Minister when he declared that “the Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore, are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC.”
Avoiding Hypocrisy
Yet, if one insists that the Palestinians have no standing before the ICC since they lack sovereignty, then the only way to avoid Netanyahu’s accusation of hypocrisy would be to infer that the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River as well as the people living in it are controlled by Israel.
This, however, would mean agreeing with Israel’s foremost human rights organization B’tselem, which has claimed that the Palestinian territories are ruled by one regime—namely, Israel. B’tselem goes on to explain that this regime is “organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians.” The human rights organisation concludes that “a regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime.”
But the claim that one regime controls the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is also considered anti-Semitic. After the publication of B’tselem’s report, professor Eugene Kontorovich, head of the Kohelet Policy Forum’s International Law Department, said that the rights organization’s charge of apartheid was akin to an anti-Semitic “blood libel.” In a similar vein, NGO Monitor claimed that B’Tselem’s report is informed by anti-Semitic tropes, while specifically flagging the phrase from the “River to the Sea” as extremely disturbing.
Of course Palestinians who have dared to talk about “Israeli apartheid” or students who have organized an “Israel Apartheid Week” on campuses have frequently been subjected to similar accusations.
Parallel Universe
There is, of course, one way to speak about Israel without being cast as an anti-Semite. But to do so one would have to have a very creative imagination or live in some kind of parallel universe, where Israel does not have a colonial project, where Palestinian rights are not continuously violated, and where, in fact, Palestinians do not even exist.
U.S.-and-allied governments, and their billionaires’-controlled press, are unrelenting in their fraudulent portrayal of what was actually the U.S. regime’s conquest and destruction of Ukraine in 2014, by means of a brutal coup, which caused a civil war and the break-up of that country.
The hidden truths about Ukraine, after 2009, will be documented and proven here. These facts have been kept secret from Western publics. (Articles like this are censored-out by the regime’s operatives.)
The first documentation concerns the coup itself, which occurred in February 2014, though the narrator in that video mistakenly says (at 0:27) that the coup started “on February 20th of 2013,” instead of on February 20th of 2014, which is the only slip-up in this entire otherwise-superb presentation. The video is here, and it demonstrates — it even displays — that the U.S. Government, under President Barack Obama, lied through their teeth about that coup, as having been instead a “revolution,” instead of a coup. The key “leaked [phone] call” that’s excerpted in this video can be heard in full here; and its full transcript, including explanations of the persons who are being referred-to in it, is available here. The broader historical significance of that phone-call is reported and explained here. To sum it all up: There is no way that this phone-conversation (which is between two Obama-Administration officials who are discussing whom to appoint to lead Ukraine when the coup will have been completed) can reasonably be interpreted in any other way than that the Obama Administration had carefully planned and executed this coup d’etat, which replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected Government by one that would be controlled by the U.S. regime. This truth is the exact opposite of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-reporting about that coup, as its having been, instead, ‘the Maidan revolution’. This is how America (and each of its ‘allies’ or vassal nations) deceives its people, just as much (and just as viciously) as any other dictatorship does.
So: how did that ‘revolution’ come about? Here is how it happened — and also the Western lies hiding this reality:
Unwilling to launch economic reforms, cut spending or tame the appetites of his cronies, Mr Yanukovych [Ukraine’s democratically elected and — for the Ukrainian people — remarkably successful, President, as will subsequently be documented here] proceeded to trade the country’s most valuable asset: Ukraine’s geopolitical position. “The talks with the EU were an auction. It was a position of a pimp who is offering Ukraine up for sale,” says Mr Poroshenko [a political enemy of Yanukovych, who became Ukraine’s President after the coup]. Mr Yanukovych let it be known that, if Europe wanted a modern, democratic Ukraine, it needed to pay. His price was $160 billion by 2017.
European politicians were aghast at such blatant blackmail; Mr Putin seemed happy to haggle. It is not clear what he and Mr Yanukovych agreed during their secret meeting in early November — the deal is said to include cheaper gas, credits and lucrative business contracts — but not, it is rumoured in Kiev, a requirement that Ukraine join a proposed new customs union with Russia. Whatever the understanding, it has persuaded Mr Yanukovych to distance himself from the EU. Though nothing is ever final in Ukraine, Mr Yanukovych’s favoured option seems to be to preserve the status quo and refrain from joining either camp while continuing to milk both — hence his new proposal of three-way talks.
A face-saving memorandum may yet be signed with the EU, but the collapse of the association agreement could be a blessing in disguise for the Europeans. Teaming up with Mr Yanukovych, who would never have implemented it, would have only led to disappointment and recriminations, while helping Mr Yanukovych get re-elected. Instead, the collapse brought pressure on Mr Yanukovych from educated middle-class Ukrainians who feel that their future has been hijacked and their dream stolen. Haunted by the memories of 2004, Mr Yanukovych may try to crack down, but time is against him.
On November 24th tens of thousands of Ukrainians went to the streets in support of Ukraine’s European course.
The coup happened in February 2014, and the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine happened in March 2014, and the civil war that erupted in Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbass region (which had voted 90%+ for Yanukovych) started on 9 May 2014. Then, on 24 November 2014, Germany’s Spiegel magazine headlined “How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine”, and reported that, back on 19 November 2013, in the Presidential mansion in Kiev, Yanukovych informed the EU’s representatives of his predicament:
“But there are the costs that our experts have calculated,” Yanukovych replied. “What experts?” Füle demanded to know. The Ukrainian president described to his bewildered guest the size of the losses allegedly threatening Ukraine should it sign the agreement with the EU.
Later, the number $160 billion found its way into the press, more than 50 times greater than the $3 billion calculated by the German advisory group. The total came from a study conducted by the Institute for Economics and Forecasting at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and it was a number that Yanukovych would refer to from then on.
“Stefan, if we sign, will you help us?” Yanukovych asked. Füle was speechless. “Sorry, we aren’t the IMF. Where do these numbers come from?” he finally demanded. “I am hearing them for the first time.” They are secret numbers, Yanukovych replied. “Can you imagine what would happen if our people were to learn of these numbers, were they to find out what convergence with the EU would cost our country?”
Obviously, those are two very different accounts of Yanukovych, in Economist and in Spiegel — not the same person. However, both of them agree that his reason for rejecting the EU’s offer is that it amounted to a $160 billion loss to Ukraine, which was money that Ukraine didn’t have. So, regardless of which of those two reports about Yanukovych was true, and which was false, they both reported that Ukraine could not afford the $160 billion price which joining the EU would entail. This fact, alone, means that joining the EU would be a disastrously losing proposition for Ukraine.
Did it turn out to be that — a disastrously losing proposition for Ukraine? It wrecked Ukraine’s economy and destroyed that country, as will now be shown in, first, the subsequent figures on the Ukrainian economy: Ukraine’s GDP, which had risen steadily each and every year throughout Yanukovych’s four years in office, from 136.01 in 2010 up to 183.31 in 2013, plunged 27% in 2014 down to 133.5, and then plunged yet another 32% down to 91.03 in 2015. Then in 2016, it crept up 2.6% to 93.36 in 2017. From there, it rose steadily up to 156.78 in 2019, and then it is currently estimated to be around 132 this year, 2020, which is a 14% decline down from that post-coup peak of 156.78. In other words, even now (nearly 7 years after the coup), Ukraine’s economy hasn’t yet recovered from what U.S. President Barack Obama did to Ukraine by his conquest of (coup to grab) Ukraine. Instead of having been rising every year as it had done under Yanukovych — rising a total of 35% during his Presidency — it has declined 41% from then till now, and has averaged, for every year since 2013, 121, which is 34% (one third) lower GDP than it had been in Yanukovych’s last year (183.31), and 11% lower than it had been even in Yanukovych’s first year as President (136.01).
Regarding the second question (“destroyed the country”), this is what Obama’s Ukrainian coup did to Ukraine’s people: On 23 March 2017, Gallup headlined “South Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine Lead World in Suffering”. What more needs to be said about that?
Whether or not the economic losses did amount to $160 billion (as Ukraine’s own experts had estimated) — or more, or less, than that — those losses did turn out to be enormous; and, Obama, clearly, raped Ukrainians. He destroyed Ukraine (and Trump did nothing to reverse that). Here is how this happened:
On 23 June 2011, two emissaries of the Obama Administration — the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, and his aide, and former subordinate to Hillary Clinton in the U.S. State Department, Jared Cohen — visited Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, pretending to be on his side, while deceiving him to reveal to them ways to reach out online to members of Ukraine’s pro-nazi organizations in order to generate mobs for the demonstrations which were to be organized on Kiev’s Maidan Square to overthrow Ukraine’s President.
On 1 March 2013, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev held its first “Tech Camp” to teach Ukraine’s leading pro-nazis how to reach out to their followers so as to get as many people as possible trained and prepared to follow their instructions on what to do when those demonstrations would be held.
In June 2013, the Obama Administration quietly put out for bid to American contractors their planned project to renovate a school in Sevastopol, in Crimea, in Ukraine, in the location where Russia since 1783 had (and still has) its largest naval base:
Federal Contract Opportunity for Renovation of Sevastopol School #5, Ukraine N33191-13-R-1240. The NAICS Category is 236220 – Commercial and Institutional Building Construction. Posted Aug 20, 2013. Posted by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (DOD – Navy). The work will be performed at Sevastopol 99000.
This was before the coup, and there were 28 years still remaining on Russia’s lease there. That part of their plan — to terminate that contract and replace Russia’s largest naval base, by yet another U.S. naval base — got foiled by Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, protecting Crimeans when they (as soon as the coup occurred) demanded to have a referendum on becoming restored again to being a part of Russia, as they had been between 1783 and 1954 (when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea, from the Russian part, to the Ukrainian part, of the Soviet Government).
Then, during the interim between the Korsun massacre and the 16 March 2014 Crimean referendum on rejoining the Russian Federation, a Ukrainian federal prosecutor from Crimea, who opposed the coup and managed safely to flee back home by her own private means, became interviewed on local Crimean television and recounted how terrified she had been by the nazis. She was asked whether Crimeans had the right to vote in a referendum to return to being Russians, and she said, “Citizens of Crimea, you have every right in the world” to do that.
The Obama regime (including the International Republican Institute, since foreign conquests are a bipartisan obsession of both Democratic and Republican Party billionaires) had, as part of its planning to take control over Ukraine, hired the Gallup polling firm to survey throughout Ukraine, and especially within Crimea (because of their intention to grab Russia’s naval base), regarding favorability-unfavorability toward NATO, EU, and Russia, both during 16-30 May 2013, prior to the coup (which polling was done ONLY in Crimea, since seizure of Russia’s naval base was the coup’s main goal) and during April 2014 shortly after Crimea broke away from Ukraine in March of 2014. Here are some of the pre-coup findings:
International Republican Institute Baltic Surveys Ltd./The Gallup Organization … with funding from the United States Agency for International Development
p.8: “Regardless of your passport, what do you consider yourself?”
“Common oblast of Ukraine [ruled under Ukraine’s 1991 Constitution]” 2%
“Crimea should be separated and given to Russia” 23%.
——
Regarding the second poll, which was taken throughout Ukraine plus Crimea and only a month after the Crimeans had voted to be Russians again, I headlined on 2 July 2014 “Gallup Poll Finds Ukraine Cannot Be One Country” and reported that, “Views of Foreign Parties’ Role in the Crisis – Ukrainian Residents Exclusive of Crimea” were mostly anti-Russia, whereas “Views of Foreign Parties’ Role in the Crisis – Crimea” were overwhelmingly pro-Russia, by 71.3% to 8.8%, which is 89% pro-Russia. Only 2.8% were pro-America, while 76.2% were anti-America, which is 96.5% anti-America.
As I reported, at that time:
An April poll of Ukrainians, published in June by Gallup’s Broadcasting Board of Governors [CORRECTION HERE: That was actually by Gallup, for the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which group Wikipedia describes as “an independent agency of the United States government which operates various state-run media outlets,” and, so, that propaganda-agency had sponsored this poll, perhaps hoping to find that the Crimean referendum’s reported 96.77% favoring to rejoin Russia would be inconsistent with this Gallup poll — which didn’t turn out to have been the case], found two shockingly opposite countries: one, in the northwest, where the view of the U.S. is favorable among more than 50% of the population; and the other, in the southeast, where the view of the U.S. is unfavorable among more than 70% of the population. Additionally, in the Crimean region — Ukraine’s farthest southeast area, which our President, Barack Obama, says that Russia forcibly seized when the people there voted overwhelmingly on 16 March 2014 to become part of Russia again (as they had been until 1954) — only 2.8% of the public there view the U.S. favorably; more than 97% of Crimeans do not.
And the situation is even more extreme when the issue is the public’s views of Russia — which, overall, are far less favorable than the U.S. is viewed in Ukraine. Less than 2% of residents in Ukraine’s northwest have a favorable view of Russia, but 71.3% of Crimeans do. In Ukraine’s far east, 35.7% do. In Ukraine’s far south except for Crimea, 28.4% do.
Support for joining the European Union is 59.8% in the far north, and 84.2% in the far west. It is 19% in the far east, and 26.8% in the far south. Crimeans were not asked this question, because they had already voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia.
Support for joining NATO is 37.7% in the North, 53.2% in the west, 13.1% in the east, and 10.3% in the south. (Again, Crimea wasn’t polled on this.)
The 500 people that were sampled in Crimea were asked “Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status [whether to rejoin Russia] reflect the views of most people here.” 82.8% said “Agree.” 6.7% said “Disagree.”
That 82.8% who said “Agree” constituted 92.5% of the Crimeans who expressed an opinion on this.
On 10 October 2014, I headlined “What Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did” and reported on the effort by his stooges there to ethnically cleanse or eliminate the residents in the portion of Ukraine’s far eastern Donbass region so as to eliminate enough of the voters in that area, which had voted 90%+ for Yanukovych, so as to then enable Ukraine to reabsorb that region without thereby causing another President such as Yanukovych to become elected in Ukraine. His effort failed, largely because Russia has assisted the people there to defeat even such attacks as these by Ukraine.
Then, on 15 February 2015, I headlined “Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed in Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’”, but Obama’s people finally gave up their ambitious objective. So, it’s a stalemate there, somewhat like the stalemate in Israel’s ambitious objective to ethically cleanse away most of the Palestinians. But, of course, that is a different situation, with a different history, though with a not too different ethnically eliminative intent.
During the cold war the West called dissenters those Russians in the USSR who voiced their complaints against the system. A definition – ‘dissenter’ – which, processed through the lexical grinding machine of the CIA and associates, was actually stripped of its original meaning to become a weapon of trivial instrumental imperialist propaganda. Said it another way, it was the dissenters who gave the pigs of the animal farm the tools for the pigs’ full spectrum propaganda.
But none can halt the inaudible and noiseless foot of time. And with the fall of the Berlin Wall it has come to pass that Western propaganda itself has created the dissenters. Meaning people who have been persecuted or even tortured, as is the case of Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning. Plus a hefty list of others – uncomfortable men, daring an escape from the Twilight Zone, thus dangerous by definition, and therefore marginalized or branded as traitors, maladapted or plainly mad, for to define true madness what is it but to be nothing else but mad.
However, increasingly, such criminalizing or demonizing measures appear inadequate – notably in the current phase of the ‘great reset’, meaning a global theft of freedom in exchange of a pseudo-security or pseudo-salvation from system-fostered terrors, dangers and apocalyptic ills.
And yet it is not enough. Unlike with dictatorships, Western pseudo-democracies have established a soft and practically invisible censorship consisting of the concentration in a few power groups of all main sources of communication and information, so as to drown any dissenting voice into the bottomless ocean of silence.
It may help that our Zionist “elder brothers in the Abrahamic faith” (that’s how the current Vatican calls them, reversing 1000 years of Catholic theology and practice), own and control 90% or thereabouts of all communication media, printed, Hollywood, academia, radio-TV and Internet.
Still, he who does not submit is jailed, or simply marginalized, rendered irrelevant in the Google archipelago, a wondering atom among the million molecules of deplorables.
Yet the strategy is increasingly proving inadequate, while freedom is hijacked in exchange for a pseudo-security that is fake, proclaimed and accompanied by threats. Nevertheless it is a pseudo-security made inevitable, following the train of provoked and questionable epidemic threats, possibly set up by the very security-providing system. 9/11 may serve as the master key or copy.
Therefore sundry ‘free’ countries have passed or are passing legislation involving punishment for the crime of opinion. This is inevitable for the greater the enforcement of the official ministerial truth, the more likely are desertions of the ministry by the unbelievers. So far, desertions are limited and rendered noiseless by a thousand-eyed censorship. And yet they risk to garnish attention and rip the curtain cloth that shelters fiction from fact.
For example, Germany has pending laws to prevent the questioning of vaccine(s), a remarkable instance of a new medical theology. And with the spirit of rebellion growing at large, so grows the violence of repression, even though the ‘elder-brothers’ owned media waters down the reports to dampen or hide their impact.
Much as, in another continent and settings, the same media all but ignored Trump’s mass rallies, while extolling Biden’s, often attended by eight people and a dog.
Massive censorship is justified on the ground that social media companies are private, therefore entitled to establish what is and isn’t true. What more evidence is needed to demonstrate the ethical and intellectual rotting decline of the West.
Clearly the escalation of threats and repressions is a sign of weakness among the globalist masters. For to establish their own truth they need to cast off the mask of liberty. Though given the flow and development of pandemic-related events even that mask may be redundant.
The legitimation of what is but an influenza wave, branded as a bubonic plague, falsified in the numbers and yet lethal for the cure of other illnesses. The imposed obedience clearly inconsistent, contradictory, ridicule in scope and medieval in appearance, should open the eyes of those who like to use them.
That may not be the case. Hence the path is open for the cashiering of constitutions and the introduction of freedom-killing legislation.
It is questionable whether generations educated to passiveness and in love with the ephemeral, may attempt a defense. They have but a rudimental notion of liberty, mainly associated with the liberty to purchase and consume. It is equally questionable whether their defense may trespass the borders of disillusionment. And even disillusionment is uncertain, as for many belonging to the herd can overcome the fear of being led to slaughter.
Therefore it is not with a large mass of inert followers of the mainstream media from hell that the West can defend its position of some kind of leadership.
In my archive, there is a video snippet where the ‘spokesman’ for a band of Pakistani migrant hooligans in the North of England says, “In 20 years we will take over f—ing England.”
I know I am but one of many living in the Google archipelago, where the godfathers of globalism reign supreme.
It seems we cannot bring light to darkness or call forth the mutinous winds of rebellion. As rhetorical as it may sound, we may as well dispel the illusion of redemption, bury it in the earth and, deeper than did ever plummet sound, drown the book that extols the values and worth of European civilization.
PS. For this article I relied on material provided by an anonymous European writer whom I would gladly cite if only I knew his name.
In mid October 2020 a French schoolteacher, 47-year-old Samuel Paty, decided to show his Freedom of Speech class cartoons demeaning Islam’s founding prophet, Mohammed. The cartoons were the same ones originally published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) in 2014-2015. At that time, the magazine’s actions resulted in the murder of twelve of its staff, including the editor, Stephane Charbonnier. The murders were committed by Muslim extremists associated with al-Qaeda. Samuel Paty’s fate turned out to be similar. Shortly after having shown the caricatures of the founder of Islam, the teacher was murdered by an 18-year-old Muslim immigrant. Other attacks have followed.
In all of these cases, the killings were provoked as well as indefensible. The cartoons in question are all too easy to interpret as gratuitous insults against Islam and therefore against the almost 9% of the French population that are Muslim. Nonetheless, murder is incompatible with stable society. The latter being prima facie true, the next question is, What alternatives were available to those who were/are disgusted by the Charlie Hebdo caricatures? Lawsuits for defamation have been repeatedly filed. Some are still ongoing. However, to date, none have stopped the magazine’s demeaning ways. Well-organized public protests combined with steady political pressure might work in the long run. It was perhaps because such an effort was not forthcoming, at least not consistently, that action defaulted to emotionally driven individual fanatics.
By the way, Charlie Hebdo, with its own brand of fanaticism, is what you might call an equal opportunity defamer. Topics ranging from the Catholic Church to Italians killed in earthquakes have been depicted in distasteful, sometimes semi-pornographic fashion. As it stands, the right to publish gratuitously insulting cartoons is not only legal in France but, because of all the related violence, also now defended as an important expression of French national culture. To make this point clear, French officials have announced the publication of a booklet to include the Charlie Hebdo images. This will be “handed out to high school students as a commitment to defend the values of the Republic.”
Part II—A Trap
The value referred to in the booklet is freedom of expression. As Charbonnier said in a 2012 interview, “We can’t live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than to live like a rat.” Of course, it is now obvious that Charbonnier’s ardent determination to avoid a rodent’s fate, and his nation’s embrace of the man’s grossness as a symbol of free speech, has led France into a trap. Here is how the Sorbonne Professor Pierre-Henri Tavoillot puts it: “what is at stake now is France’s laicite—the secularism that underlies its culture. If the nation compromises on laicite in this instance, this cultural principle may well unravel.” Refusal to consider a balanced way out of the situation paints the French into a corner while explicitly tying the culture to often semi-pornographic cartoons.
The trap has many other dimensions. French enthusiasm for Charlie Hebdohas fueled Islamophobia and led others to use the situation to argue for the restriction of civil rights. France’s interior minister believes that the country is “at war against an enemy who is both inside and outside.” While it is true that the country’s 5.7 million Muslims (the highest number in any Western country) are increasingly alienated and fearful, the vast majority are peaceful. Yet they all have now been placed under suspicion of being terrorists. Now, the mayor of Nice is calling for a “modification of the Constitution” so that the nation can “properly wage war against Islamic extremists.” President Macron has announced a widespread crackdown on “Islamist individuals and organizations.” This includes closing French Muslim civil rights organizations and Arabic language schools.
The whole affair has also brought France into conflict with Muslim populations and governments around the world. Presently, the French and Turkish governments are now trading insults. In Bangladesh, 40,000 people took part in an anti-French demonstration and called for the boycott of French goods. French goods were removed from shelves in shops in Qatar and Kuwait.
Part III—Rationalizations
The French will tell you that their take on free expression was born in violence: in “eradicating the power of the monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church” during the French Revolution. Later, a 1905 French law made faith a strictly private matter and secularism the rule for the public sphere. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement. However, over the years the French have generally lost common sense relative to the subject and failed to be consistent in their approach to religion. On the one hand, laicite has caused some French men and women to see religion as a belief system that need not be taken seriously. Criticism of religion is seen as a “dear right.” On the other hand, recent history has led French governments to be very sensitive to even the slightest suggestion of anti-Semitism (which is illegal in France). Except in this case, the stipulation that one should not be critical of someone simply because he is observant is often forgotten.
Against this backdrop, French Muslims, the most religious of French residents, have been held at arm’s length. Those who retain their traditional dress and ways stand out as outsiders and assimilation has not been made easy even for those Muslims who desire it.
The French will also tell you that the art of caricature “is an old tradition that is part of our democracy.” French Muslims make the argument that “there should be limits to offensive satire [in the form of demeaning caricature] when it comes to religious beliefs.” They say that this is so because such satire “fuels extremism.” For millions of French Muslims, this suggests that “cartoons putting a prophet who is fundamental to millions of believers in suggestive and degrading postures” should not fall within the right to be satirical.
One can, of course, argue the issue of censorship. Free speech/expression rights are explicitly meant to protect speech we may not approve of. On the other hand, all societies impose some limits on speech—you can’t cry fire in a crowded theater. Who decides when, or if, there should be a legitimate restriction to free speech/expression? How about when there is a present atmosphere that leads to multiple murder and the breakdown of otherwise friendly foreign relations? Under such circumstances, can such competing issues be finessed by the application of common sense? The flamboyant display of such “art” as practiced by Charlie Hebdo, much less its presentation as a cornerstone of French culture, might be such a case.*
Part IV—Conclusion
How many cultures make rudeness a symbol of cultural excellence? It doesn’t seem to be a common practice. Yet, the French have done so in this case. It has gotten them nothing but trouble at home and abroad.
The problem with the present French position is that it gives wide latitude to people who care little or nothing for cultural awareness. Stephane Charbonnier, the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, seemed uninterested in the real cultural consequences of his personal practice of freedom. In truth, he was an extremist who persisted on insulting a religion of 1.8 billion adherents, the vast majority of whom are peaceful folks. As he knew no bounds to his freedom to be brutally insulting, so his behavior activated a small number of Muslim extremists willing to be even more brutal than Charbonnier. This led to his violent death. In death he has become a French cultural icon—in total disregard of the extremist nature of his behavior and the counter-extremism it triggered.
Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General Sayed Hassan Nasrallah on October 30, 2020, on the occasion of Islamic Unity Week, commemorating the birth of the Prophet of Islam, Mohammad b. Abdallah (born on the 12th day of the month of Rabi ’al-Awal according to the Sunnis, and the 17th according to the Shiites).
See also Ramzan Kadyrov’s full reply to Macron below
[…] This great Prophet is regarded by the unanimity of Muslims throughout history, until this day and until Judgment Day —it will always be like this—, as worthy of all their love, passion, respect, consideration and sanctification, more than anything they can feel for any other human being in terms of love, respect and sanctification. No other Prophet, Messenger, Close Friend of God, Imam, Righteous or Chosen one throughout history (has such a lofty status). All Muslims have an exceptional esteem, a special faith, a very unique love for this person, this man, this personality.
Muslims can differ on many things, and this has happened (many times) throughout history: they have differed on all kinds of issues, whether disputes of thought and intellect, of dogma, of jurisprudence, about what is lawful and what is forbidden, about the evaluation of events in the history of the Muslim world and the status of some personalities, etc. Today, in our time, important and major political questions can separate and oppose Muslims, even struggles and (inter-Muslim) wars, etc. But there are points and questions on which there is unanimity, on which Muslims have never been divided throughout history, and which will remain unchanged until Judgment Day. One of the most important points of convergence, which unanimously unites Muslims, is their faith in Muhammad son of Abdallah, peace and blessings of God upon him and his family, their faith in his quality as Messenger and Prophet, in his unique character, in his (supreme) status and in his (unparalleled) rank. Muslims consider him as the Seal of the Prophets —there will be no Prophet after him—, the Master of Messengers, the best of creatures, the most perfect creation, the most perfect and noblest man (of all), the creature closest to God the Most High and the Exalted, the one whom God loves and cherishes the most. This is how Muslims regard this Messenger and this Prophet.
This faith is so great, the love of Muslims for the Prophet is such that they are ready to sacrifice their blood, their flesh, their whole being to him, they are ready to sacrifice their life, their soul, their mind, their heart for him. This is not a theoretical, philosophical, cultural or intellectual faith, no. There is an emotional and sentimental relationship, an (exceptional) attachment of soul and spirit (of every Muslim) with the Messenger of God, peace and blessings of God upon him and his family, (which manifests itself) when required, and it will always be required. (All Muslims) have the greatest respect for him here on earth, and know his status and his preeminent rank in the Hereafter (alongside God). All of this should be kept in mind in the points I will now address. Because the consequence of all this is that it is impossible for Muslims to tolerate the slightest insult, the smallest offense against this greatest Prophet. Because (all) Muslims consider that defending the dignity of their Prophet is the highest priority, which takes precedence over all other calculations, over all other interests –whether political, economic, concerning means of subsistence, etc. Absolutely no concern can come before this issue. This is the highest priority for Muslims, (under all circumstances). Muslims can not (ever) tolerate or forgive attacks on the dignity of their Prophet, nor never be silent in the face of such attacks, and that is why they react (with great virulence) to any action or behavior that involves an insult, outrage or offense against the greatest of God’s Messengers, peace and blessings of God upon him and his family.
The situation in France: condemnation of the Nice attack
I now come to the first point of my speech this evening, namely the current problem… This is not a problem limited to one country, or to Muslims in a specific country, but it concerns all Muslims throughout the world. I am talking about the current problem that the highest French authorities have with Islam and with Muslims. And I will express myself in a calm, precise and rational manner, in order to dissect this problem and seek ways of resolving it. My goal is to find a solution, not to reinforce enmities or hostilities, nor to seek new enemies.
I will start by (evoking) the last event, so that the false does not mix with the truth, nor the truth with the false, which would annihilate all truth and justice. I begin with the event in the city of Nice, in France, where a Muslim man killed three people and injured others. This attack —I start from the end to go back to the beginning—, we condemn it (very) strongly, and the Muslims (clearly) condemned it, each from his position: whether they are scholars, religious dignitaries or politicians, the entire Muslim world and the Muslim authorities in France and in Europe and everywhere else (have clearly condemned it). This attack is rejected and condemned by Islam itself, and no one should attribute it to Islam. Islam and the Muslim religion reject it, because Islam (formally) prohibits killing the innocent, attacking them or inflicting any harm on them, whatever their beliefs or convictions. And any similar attack that has taken place in the past, or that will happen in the future, will always be in our eyes, Muslims, and primarily from the point of view of Islam, (strongly) rejected and condemned, wherever it occurs, whatever the target, whether in France or anywhere else in the world. This point must be clearly established, as a principle and as a basis, so that our position is quite clear thereafter.
Terrorism and Islam: the unacceptable confusion of the French authorities
My second point concerning this question is that the French authorities, and all the other authorities, do not have the right to pin the responsibility for a crime perpetrated by a single person on his religion, nor on the followers of the religion to which he belongs. To put it more clearly, if a crime is perpetrated by a Muslim, no one has the right to blame Islam for that crime, and no one has the right to blame it on Muslims in France or around the world. Because it is an incorrect, unfair, illegitimate, illegal and immoral attitude. When a person commits a crime, it is he who must be held responsible for that crime, whatever his motivations, even if that person considers himself driven by religious considerations. If, for example, and these are things that are happening in France and in Europe, and elsewhere in the world —I am going to speak only of Muslims and Christians, I will not speak of Jews—, if a Christian man commits such a crime, which has already happened in France —and in France, most crimes are not committed by Muslims, even if the media insist on Muslim crimes and hide others, but those who follow this closely and check the statistics know it—, would it be right for anyone to pin the responsibility of this crime on our Master (Jesus Christ) the Messiah, peace be upon him, God forbid? Would it be right to blame it on the Christian religion, or on Christians around the world? Or on the Christians in the country in which the crime was committed? No one would accept such a confusion. But unfortunately, this is how the French authorities behave (towards Muslims). When President Macron and other French officials speak of “Islamist terrorism”, which someone translated as “Islamic terrorism”, which is the same thing, when they speak of “Islamist terrorism” or “Islamist fascism”… There is no such thing! “Islamist terrorism”, no more than “Islamist fascism”, do not exist. If someone commits a terrorist act, he is the terrorist. If anyone commits a crime, he is the criminal. But to speak of “Islamist terrorism” or “Islamist fascism” (is misleading & unacceptable).
Today, the United States are carrying out massacres all over the world. Since 2000 alone, since September 11, 2001, the wars they have waged in Afghanistan, Iraq and the entire Middle East, not to mention the world wars, Hiroshima, etc. Let’s only talk about what the current generations have gone through. Millions of people have been killed in these wars, and Americans admit killing hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes claiming it was by mistake, like the bombing of wedding ceremonies in Afghanistan, or as a deliberate act. Does anyone claim, because the American President and his administration are of the Christian religion [and claim waging a “crusade” against “evil” in the name of God], as are the majority of American soldiers [at least culturally], is anyone claiming that American terrorism is Christian terrorism [or Christianist terrorism]? Does anyone claim that the responsible for these massacres is our Master the Messiah, God forbid, or the Christian religion, whose values and teachings (clearly) oppose these terrorist acts? Not to mention what the European armies, including the French army, did when they invaded Algeria and perpetrated atrocious crimes there, and what others have done in Libya and elsewhere in our region. No Muslim has denounced “Christian terrorism” or blamed the Christian religion [or so-called Republican, Democratic & Civilizational ideals] for these crimes, never. And if anyone made such a claim, he would be sorely mistaken. But there is no such tendency (to accuse Christianity) in the Muslim world.
Therefore, it is unacceptable, when a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew or a follower of any religion or thought, commits a crime, to attach the responsibility for it on his religion, or on the Prophet of his religion, or on the community that believes in this religion. To impute responsibility & liability to a whole group or religion is a (serious) mistake. And it must stop. But unfortunately, France and its officials make this confusion every day. After that, they claim that they respect the Muslim religion, but if this is really the case, they must renounce the expression “Islamist terrorism” or “Islamist fascism”, and stop following Trump, who has made his specialty of this type of expression.https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x6e7jhb
ISIS and Charlie Hebdo are both despicable
Third, in the last few days, we have heard a lot of criticism that instead of being concerned about some people who insult the Prophet and Islam, Muslims had better deal first with the Muslims who smear Islam and the Prophet (by their behavior). I would like to say on this subject that it is obvious that some Muslims smear Islam, that some Muslims smear the Prophet of Islam, peace and blessings of God be upon him and his family, and that some commit very, very, very, very, very dangerous (and serious) offenses (against Islam). What we have seen in recent years in terms of terrorist acts, crimes, destruction of mosques, churches, historical remains, murders, beheadings, butchered chests, assassinations of innocent people from various peoples and various beliefs, slaughtered like sheep, so many atrocious images that the western media have also spread to the world, this is undoubtedly a very great insult that was done (by ISIS) to our religion and to our Prophet. We strongly opposed this, and clearly condemned it (in addition to having fought and defeated ISIS in Syria, Iraq, etc.).
But even in the hypothesis —and this is not a mere hypothesis, it is a reality— where some Muslims smear our Prophet, that is no reason for you to smear our Prophet too. If some of you blaspheme what you consider holy, does that give us the right to do the same? It is completely absurd. Prophets, Messengers, religions, religious symbols and all that is holy must be respected, even if some followers of these religions sully and desecrate them.
Terrorists are the West’s creatures, not Islam’s
Fourth, and I continue to address French officials and the public opinion, instead of blaming Islam and Muslims for these terrorist acts that occur in France, Europe and elsewhere, let us rather seek together your responsibility, your own responsibility for these acts and the (existence of) these (terrorist) groups. Let’s go back (in time) a bit. Again, no need to go back 50 years, just go back ten years, to 2011. There is a takfiri and terrorist thought that supports the murder of anyone who has a difference of opinion, of thought, of dogma, of religious school, of politics or on the smallest other detail. And the followers of this thought perpetrate monstrous crimes. You are the ones who protected this thought, you Americans, the American administration, the French government, the European governments. You protected them. You gave them all the help in the world. For those who are followers of other thoughts, it is very difficult to obtain visas to come and work in your countries. But as for the followers of takfiri thought, all the doors were opened to them, and they were protected. These groups which have been formed and which are followers of this takfiri thought, it is you who facilitated their access to Syria and Iraq. You have contributed to their support, their funding and their armament, to the point that they have acquired experience, expertise, a fighting spirit, etc. And I ask you the question: after all this, are you surprised that there are slaughterings, beheadings? But where did it start? It started in our region, in our countries. Who committed these acts? The very terrorist groups that you have supported politically, financially, in the media, in terms of communication… You have granted them international protection, you have organized international conferences to support them. You opened up all the borders to them, you provided them with passports, and you made it easier for them to come to the region. So start by looking for your own responsibility. Ask yourself how responsible you are for all of this.
I invite you to consult the archives for the years 2011-2012, whether in my statements or those of other people. We have urged you many times, especially the Europeans, not to participate in this world war against Syria, against Iraq and against our region —they failed to extend it to Lebanon (thanks to Hezbollah). We have told you many times not to embrace these terrorist groups, not to support them, not to facilitate their coming (from all over the world) and their strengthening. Because you will lose this battle, and these terrorists will turn against you. This (takfiri) thought will turn against you. These groups and these fighters will return to your countries and sow terror and chaos there. And whatever they’ve done in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere, they’re going to come back to you.
And that day, we told you clearly that the United States was very far, and that Europe was the area closest to our region (and would therefore be the preferred destination of these terrorists), and that the greatest threat therefore hung over Europe. We have warned you and urged you to be cautious. But you got carried away by your arrogance and your malice, and did not accept our exhortations. You thought you were going to win this war, and we know the outcome you were hoping for.
Today, you also need to question your own responsibility, and stop blaming those who have no responsibility. What is the relation between the Prophet of Islam, Mohammad b. Abdillah, peace and blessings be upon him, and these crimes? What is the relation between his religion, his Islam and his Quran with these crimes? What is the relation between the Muslim Community of 2 billion Muslims and these crimes? Those who are responsible for these crimes are people you embraced, protected, raised, to whom you have granted all the help in the world, whom you have brought (to Syria & Irak from everywhere). And it is this policy that must be reconsidered, because until now, you persist in this direction, you still carry out the same policies.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius praises Al-Nosra’s “good job” in Syria (authentic), while Al-Baghdadi praises their good job in France
Otherwise… I repeat with the same words I used then (in 2012), when we chose our side: I said we would never be on the side of the head-cutters, the chest-rippers, the (human) liver-eaters, the cut-throats. These people were your allies, the groups that you supported, that you protected. Therefore, it is you, the French, the Europeans, the Americans and their allies in the region who must reconsider your actions and behavior, and renounce the use of these terrorist groups as instruments in the service of (your) political projects and (your) war projects. And you never learn (from your mistakes). In Afghanistan, that is what you did (against the USSR), and you paid the price on September 11 (2001). You made those mistakes, and you make them again, always the same mistakes, the same mistakes, the same mistakes. The use of these kinds of (terrorist) groups as instruments must stop, otherwise you will also pay the price for these mistakes.
When the West was praising Ben Laden
Sidebar: See also Putin’s comments on the issue: “Instead of settling conflicts, [the Western interventions] lead to their escalation, instead of sovereign and stable States we see the growing spread of chaos, and instead of democracy there is support for a very dubious public ranging from open neo-fascists to Islamic radicals. Why do they support such people? They do this because they decide to use them as instruments along the way in achieving their goals but then burn their fingers and recoil. I never cease to be amazed by the way that our partners just keep stepping on the same rake, as we say here in Russia, that is to say, make the same mistake over and over. They once sponsored Islamic extremist movements to fight the Soviet Union. Those groups got their battle experience in Afghanistan and later gave birth to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The West if not supported, at least closed its eyes, and, I would say, gave information, political and financial support to international terrorists’ invasion of Russia (we have not forgotten this) and the Central Asian region’s countries. Only after horrific terrorist attacks were committed on US soil itself did the United States wake up to the common threat of terrorism. Let me remind you that we were the first country to support the American people back then, the first to react as friends and partners to the terrible tragedy of September 11. During my conversations with American and European leaders, I always spoke of the need to fight terrorism together, as a challenge on a global scale. We cannot resign ourselves to and accept this threat, cannot cut it into separate pieces using double standards. Our partners expressed agreement, but a little time passed and we ended up back where we started. First there was the military operation in Iraq, then in Libya, which got pushed to the brink of falling apart. Why was Libya pushed into this situation? Today it is a country in danger of breaking apart and has become a training ground for terrorists.
In Syria, as in the past, the United States and its allies started directly financing and arming rebels and allowing them to fill their ranks with mercenaries from various countries. Let me ask where do these rebels get their money, arms and military specialists? Where does all this come from? How did the notorious ISIL manage to become such a powerful group, essentially a real armed force? We sometimes get the impression that our colleagues and friends are constantly fighting the consequences of their own policies, throw all their effort into addressing the risks they themselves have created, and pay an ever-greater price.”
France embarks on an insane crusade against Islam
Fifth, the French authorities have launched a battle against Islam and Muslims for illusory, and sometimes incomprehensible reasons. They dragged France as a whole in this battle, and they are trying to drag all of Europe behind them. I speak with caution, and I’m not here to score points. What is the cause of the recent problem, the recent developments that we have seen in the last few weeks? So much so that it became clear that France, its President, its government, its ministers, Parliament, the media, the street, etc., are very clearly engaged in an open war (against Islam and Muslims). What’s the cause? Who started this problem? Who assaulted the other? Who insulted the other?
The problem started when this hypocritical and infamous French newspaper (Charlie Hebdo) started piblishing cartoons insulting the Prophet of Islam, peace and blessings of God upon him and his family. And now Muslims are denouncing it in many parts of the world. Then it developed into several events, up to the History Professor who was killed and beheaded. Instead of trying to solve this problem, get it under control and take a fair and measured stance, consisting in preventing the confusion of the true and the false and to mix everything, as they say in Lebanon, (by spreading confusion between Islam and terrorism, free speech and hate speech…), because there is an essential cause which led to all these developments…
In 2015, a French teenager who merely reposted the cartoon on the right was indiceted for apology of terror
Instead of acting on the causes (I will come back to this at the end of my speech), the French authorities have acted on the consequences. Unfortunately, what happened is that the French authorities, instead of solving this problem, declared war on Islam and Muslims, and stubbornly and obstinately stuck (to their error), claiming that it was all about freedom of speech, and that France would persist in exercising this freedom of speech, in protecting & publishing those outrageous cartoons, which is absolutely insane (it is a capital mistake). France wants to persist in protecting & publishing those outrageous cartoons. So what is your message to 2 billion Muslims around the world? Because we are not talking about politics, money, economy, security struggle, etc., no! We are talking about the Prophet, the Messenger, the Master of Muslims, and I explained very well at the beginning of my speech what he represents for them. So what is the thing that would deserve these sacrifices on your part (state of maximum alert, loss of human life, etc.), O French authorities? What is it that justifies you endorsing it all, justifying it and defending it, protecting it by starting such a battle, embracing it? You claim that it is in the name of your values, including freedom of speech, and that you do not want to give up those values. All right, let’s debate that then. I said from the start that I wanted to speak in a calm and rational manner.
Freedom of speech has no limits only when speaking about Muslims
The first debate is about the way (this principle) is exercised, and the confrontation of your statements (in favor of freedom of speech) with reality. If things were really as you say, if things were really that way in France or in Europe (that is to say if freedom of speech was total there), perhaps we could say that indeed, the problem should be solved differently (than by banning these cartoons). But this is not the case. You must first convince Muslims that your claims are true and sincere, which is by no means a given, because Muslims do not accept your claims as a reality. Your claim is neither true nor sincere. We have a large amount of evidence and examples in France and in Europe where official actions have prevented freedom of speech, and even suppressed freedom of speech, for things that are much less sensitive than an issue that touches a Prophet in whom 2 billion people in the world believe.
In order not to waste too much time, I will be satisfied with a single example, well known, and which does not need much explanation, namely the French philosopher Roger Garaudy. One can easily find (the details of this case) in archives, televisions, official documents, videos, statements, etc. It all exists. All this man did was write a book, a study, on the founding myths of the Israeli genocide, namely the Holocaust. He proposed a rational debate, putting forward figures and discussing them, proposing a scientific and academic reflection on this subject, and speaking of the political instrumentalisation of this event. And let us recall that to this day, Europe and in particular Germany are still victims of a racketeering of international Zionism because of this issue. This man (Garaudy) neither insulted, offended, denigrated nor caricatured anyone, nor did he mention the Jewish religion. He only discussed an important event that happened in Europe.
What did the French authorities do in the face of this French philosopher? Judicial proceedings were launched against him, he was tried, and sentenced to prison. It was perhaps his advanced age that prevented him from serving his prison sentence. This man was (severely) repressed. Is this freedom of expression? Is this the value that you (claim) to defend? Because in reality, what we can say (to accurately describe the reality) is that when a certain community is affected (the Jews), when it comes to Israel or the Zionists, there are clear limits imposed to the freedom of speech. But when it comes to another community, an entire Ummah, 2 billion people, when it comes to their holiest things, then there is total freedom of speech.
The example of Roger Garaudy, and many other examples that may be compiled on another occasion, confirms that freedom of speech in France and in Europe is not absolute, but hampered by legal, political, security limits, etc. [let us remind that in France, anything that can disturb public order, even without being illegal, can be prohibited]. This claim that freedom of speech is total (in France), and that anyone can say and do whatever they want, that any newspaper can disparagingly caricature the Prophet of Islam, or that someone could make a movie in which they make fun of the Prophet of Islam, this would not pose any problem, because freedom (of speech) is absolute, this claim is false. And if you want, some another time, we can present you with countless examples (of repression of freedom of speech in France). That is why this argument is inadmissible, and the whole battle you are waging today (against Islam) is based on non-existent and unreal foundations. The situation in France is not one of unlimited freedom of speech. We can make a whole list of your censorship of TV channels, newspapers, magazines, etc., on the pretext that they support a particular thought, or have broadcast particular programs and series (see for example the ban on the Al-Manar channel on the pretext of anti-Semitism). All of this can easily be found in the archives. So much for the first point.https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7x99lo
On September 18, 2012, following the broadcast of excerpts from a blasphemous film about the Prophet produced in the United States, entitled Innocence of Muslims, Hezbollah called its supporters to a huge demonstration to denounce this attack on Islam and Muslims. Over a hundred thousand people took to the streets of Beirut to proclaim their attachment to the Prophet and their rejection of any attack on his dignity. To everyone’s surprise, Nasrallah participated in person (remember that the Israeli, Western and Gulf secret services have made his elimination a priority), and delivered the above speech, one of the most vocal to date. Without the ravages of the coronavirus, it is likely that Hezbollah & Iran would have expressed outrage against Charlie Hebdo and Macron in a similar fashion.
The Rational and Moral Limits of Freedom of Speech
The second aspect (of this argument), which is equally important, is that even if this value of free speech was (really) fundamental and absolute to you, can it be considered as such when it is exercised in this form? Coming back to fundamental humanitarian and ethical values, can we claim that there should be absolute freedom of speech? Should it not refrain from crossing certain limits? Why must freedom of speech stop in the face of anti-Semitism? Does freedom of speech make it possible to insult others, to humiliate them, to undermine their dignity, to defame them, to slander them, to falsely blame them for crimes for example [cf. the Charlie Hebdo cartoons representing the Prophet, and therefore all Muslims, as a terrorist, and his religion as sh***]? And would it be fair to tolerate it? [Let us remember that Charlie Hebdo has been condemned 9 times by French Courts for libel].
If a person, in the name of freedom of speech, disseminates State secrets and facts that undermine national security, how will you react? How do the United States and the West behave in these situations [cf. the martyrdom of Julian Assange, a real case of freedom of expression completely censored by the media; France rejected both Assange’s and Snowden’s application for political asylum]? If anyone is doing, declaring or announcing things, or writing about matters which can create internal strife, a civil war, a danger to national security, how will you behave in the face of it? The freedom of speech does not stop then in front of the honor of anybody [in 1970, Charlie Hebdo’s ancestor, Hara-Kiri, was forbidden by the Interior Minister after a cartoon offensive to Charles de Gaulle who had just died]? (If this is really the case), we hope and call for you to reconsider things because it is not a human value, it is against human values. It is not an ethical value, it is contrary to all ethics and to all moral values. Therefore, we have to reconsider.
A call to reason
In conclusion, I would like to address the French authorities and tell them this: you see, today, in the Muslim world, nobody is looking for new enemies, nor new battles. I do not think that the state of mind of 2 billion Muslims is belligerent, on the contrary: Muslims are working to reduce hostilities in this world, and to remove from them the specter of wars and confrontations for which they always (are the first to) pay the price. You have to think about how to correct the mistake, the huge mistake you made. I heard the French leaders say: “We will not give in to terrorism”. No one is asking you to give in to terrorism. What you are being asked to do is correct your mistake. Righting one’s faults does not mean submitting to terrorism. On the contrary, persisting in your mistakes and engaging in confrontations that are not in the interest of anyone, this is submitting to terrorism, this is playing into the hands of terrorism and terrorists who want to blow up the whole world. You have to go back to the basic principles, and fix this fault, which is not like submitting to terrorism. This idea (of free speech), first of all, you exercise it in a wrong way, so exercise it in a right way. Apply it to Muslims as you apply it to non-Muslims (and Jews in particular). Be fair, be honest. Insulting our dignity, the dignity of our Prophets, of our Prophet, this cannot be tolerated by any Muslim in the world.
And I want to tell you in all clarity: even the political regimes of the Arab-Muslim world, which can buy and sell (anything), and find pretexts in front of their people to engage in plots, concessions and betrayals (of Palestine, etc.), they cannot, in front of their people, be silent or cover up the attack on the Prophet of these people, whom they respect, sanctify and love passionately. This is why this battle (against Islam and Muslims) that you insist on waging and in which you persist is a losing battle for you. Where are the interests of France and the French people? (What will happen) to your political and economic interests, to your relations with the Muslim peoples, with the Muslim world, if the French authorities wish to persist in this direction? This issue needs to be resolved, and you are able to find a (reasonable) solution to it.
Towards international legislation banning blasphemy
I conclude by telling you that instead of trying to resolve the consequences, to put more and more soldiers and security services on alert to prevent such terrorist acts, forget the empty pretexts and solve the root of the problem. Do not allow this denigration, this humiliation to persist, this aggression, this attack (against Islam and Muslims). Only then will the whole world be with you. Anyway, terrorist acts are (clearly) condemned, as I said at the start of my remarks. But your responsibility and everyone’s responsibility is to get to the root of the problem and solve it (once and for all). In this regard, it is possible to rely on the proposal of His Eminence the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, and his call for international legislation banning such attacks against Muslims and the Muslim community. It is possible to rely on a similar formulation, for example an international law criminalizing the attack against the Prophets and Messengers, or attack against heavenly religions, or attack against what the Communities consider sacred, for example. Anything like this would do. Of course, if such international legislation is enacted, it will constitute a legal framework for freedom of speech, and a way out (which will allow the) French government (to break the stalemate while saving face) and for all other governments who claim to protect freedom of speech and claim that it is part of their values and laws.
A way out must be found to this problem. It is not tolerable (to let it go on), the world having enough problems, confrontations and wars already. It is not tolerable, on the pretext of vain, ridiculous and doubtful claims as to their humanity, their morals and their legality, to push the world and the peoples of the world, and especially our Muslim community, as well as the countries of Europe which have this position and this status, to confrontations and wars of this type. The responsibility for solving this problem now lies with the French authorities in the first place. Everyone must cooperate to resolve this issue and put an end to this source of sedition. […]
Nasrallah concluded his speech by giving the example of Yemen, where despite the war and the catastrophic humanitarian situation, millions of people participated in the demonstrations commemorating the birth of the Prophet, denouncing France and affirming their readiness to defend the dignity of the Prophet. and the holy places of Islam, especially Palestine. He invited the Lebanese to scrupulously respect the health rules (masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing) against the coronavirus.
***
Here is how Kadyrov, President of Chechnia, replied to Macron (machine translated):
“The French authorities support the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. This was stated by President Emmanuel Macron. He calls the actions that are offensive to almost two billion Muslims of the world “freedom of speech.” Moreover, Macron decided that he would change their religion and create “enlightened Islam” in France.
I do not know what state Macron was in when he made this statement, but the consequences of such a reaction can be very tragic. The French President himself is now becoming like a terrorist. Supporting provocations, he covertly calls on Muslims to commit crimes.
Macron cannot fail to know that the cartoons of the Prophet are painfully perceived by believers. And by his actions, on the contrary, he fans the fire, and does not extinguish it, as any adequate leader should have done. Never in history has such a policy ended well. But the President of France needs such upheavals related specifically to the Muslim world.
Hiding behind a desire to restore order, he is developing some new laws, talking about the need to control mosques and religious organizations. But in fact, the whole problem lies in himself. Until he and the leaders of other European countries begin to respect concepts such as “RELIGION”, “CULTURE”, “MORALITY”, there will be no worthy future and order in their States. Mockery of religion, mockery of it, they consider all this to be an observance of freedom of speech, but at the same time they themselves encroach on the values of other people.
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is an example for all Muslims in the world. We are all, almost two billion people, followers of his sunnah. And this, among other things, unites us. The most important thing in a Muslim’s life is religion. No one has the right to treat it in a mocking manner. Muslims will not forgive this.
Stop it, Macron, before it’s too late, stop provocations and attacks on faith. Otherwise, you will go down in history as a President who made extravagant decisions. Your absurd position on the publication of cartoons today is condemned not only by Muslims around the world, but also by any sober-minded representatives of other faiths.
You don’t even have the courage to admit that the mockery of faith and parodies of it became the reason for the tragic fate of the teacher in the suburbs of Paris. He tirelessly went to this result, defiantly provoking pupils, regardless of their indignation and requests to stop displaying offensive drawings. As a result, you elevate him to the rank of a hero of France, and the person he provoked is made a terrorist.
Well, Macron, if you call him a terrorist, then in that case, you are a hundred times worse, because you force people to terrorism, push people towards it, leave no choice, create all the conditions for nurturing extremist ideas in the minds of young people. You can safely call yourself the leader and inspirer of terrorism in your country.
Hiding behind all this time with false words about the highest human values, you by your behavior and actions are forcing people to commit crimes. And if you do not want to understand simple truths, then be prepared for the fact that Muslims around the world will not allow the name of the great Prophet Muhammad ﷺ to be insulted. You can not even doubt it!
I just read your piece on Freedom of Speech & Holocaust Denial. It was like a breath of fresh air in the putrid atmosphere choking us around here. I don’t think you follow the situation in France, but things are crazier than ever since the gruesome murder of a teacher, Samuel Paty. In the name of Free Speech –because the only country criminalizing the slightest questioning of the Holocaust’s official version thinks he’s the world leader in this area– all Muslims are now explicitly branded as fair game, and the public debate revolves around Charlie Hebdo’s pornography and the alleged courage & wisdom it takes to publish their hateful caricatures or show them in class to 13 years-old pupils, many of them Muslims.
Let me fill you up with the details as they unfolded.
In the first days of October, in a Middle school located in the Paris suburb, a History-Geography teacher showed Charlie Hebdo caricatures of the Prophet to his 13-years-old pupils in a Moral & Civic class devoted to Free Speech. A pupil and her father denounced it on Facebook videos, stating that the following had happened:
The teacher told his pupils that he was about to show some depictions of the Prophet that might shock some of them. Before doing so, either he asked the Muslims in the classroom to identify themselves and get out, or merely allowed them to do so. Most of the Muslim pupils got out, but this particular girl chose to stay and then protested against this outrageous display. One of those drawings was among the most offensive ones, showing the Prophet totally naked in a lascivious position, zooming on his hairy testicles & dripping penis, and depicting his anus as the Islamic five pointed star, with the legend “A star is born”. The pupil claimed that she got expelled 2 days for refusing to leave the room that day. The father denounced this teacher online as a “thug” who “ought to educate himself before educating others”, and called on people to protest by contacting the Middle School, giving its address and the name of the teacher. He said he was submitting the case to the CCIF, the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. He also went to the police and filed a complaint for display of pornographic images to children (rightly so in my eyes, there is no other way to put it).
Later it was said that this particular pupil wasn’t even in class that day, and that she was expelled from the school for 2 days for other (unspecified) reasons. But the teacher’s account to the police is roughly the same as to what happened, and he just denied having asked Muslims pupils to identify themselves or go out, saying he only suggested those who might be shocked to look away. He filed a complaint against the father for defamation.
The case got some attention on social media. From here, I suppose that the murderer, an 18-years-old of Chechen background living 50 miles away, saw the case online and decided to come and kill the teacher. On the afternoon of October 16th, he went to the school and asked some pupils to show him the teacher, paying them to do so according to the police (they are now indicted for complicity in the murder, though they had no way to imagine he intended to kill him). He followed him as he was going home and murdered him. He beheaded him and posted the severed head on Twitter with this message: “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. From Abdullah, the Servant of Allah, To Marcon, the leader of the infidels, I executed one of your hell dogs who dared to belittle Muhammed (peace be upon him), calm his fellows before you are inflicted harsh punishment.”
Police found him right after the killing and as he refused to surrender and “opened fire” (with an “Airsoft gun”, as the media puts it, instead of using the much more common “soft ball gun”), they killed him.
From here, the collective anti-Islam hysteria reached new depths. News shows are awash with hatred against Muslims (most of the time, only the right, far right and extreme right are seen debating on BFM and CNews, our CNN & Fox News channels), the Charlie Hebdo caricatures of the Prophet are shown on TV (though the most offensive one shown by the teacher is rarely to be seen), cities project some on buildings, and the government wages war on the most prominent Muslim organizations, branding them as “enemies of the Republic” and vowing to banish them for the most preposterous reasons (anonymous comments on social network mentioning them, etc.). A mosque that merely shared the father’s original video is already shut down.
The police arrested the father and another man who denounced the case online –as well as the killer’s family and some pupils–, indicting them for complicity of murder & terrorism (while only defamation seems relevant if they indeed lied). Macron came to the place of the killing right away and made a fiery speech, vowing that “They shall not pass” –a few weeks ago he had devoted a whole speech to denounce “Islamic Separatism” and vowing to reform it (a project Law against Separatism was rebranded Law for Secularism for fear of being censored by the Constitutionnal Council, as had happened shortly before with the Avia Law against online hatred that was rejected as violating free speech, as it was forcing websites to preventive censorship of all suspected contents). Our Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin (accused of rape & abuse of a vulnerable person: he asked for sexual favours in exchange for providing social housing to a woman in need when he was mayor; despite multiple blowjobs, she never got the house), vowed to dissolve 51 Muslim organizations, including mosques, private schools, a Charity called Baraka City, and the CCIF, merely because it was mentioned by the father in the video. It’s a real crackdown against Muslims, linked or not to the case. Darmanin clearly said that Police operations have been launched against “dozens of individuals” who are not “necessarily linked to the investigation but to whom we want to send a message”. Here is the reaction of VIGI, a very tiny & marginal Police Union (most cops are with the fascist Union “Alliance”): “We are not thugs who pass a ‘message’, at the request of a mafia godfather, but law enforcement police, dear @GDarmanin. The nuance is important.”
Darmanin went as far as saying that he is shocked that supermarkets have shelves with exotic food, thus shaping a new concept: culinary separatism. I didn’t believe it at first. Things got so far it’s hard to tell between the real news and satire.
What happens with the Collective Against Islamophobia, is revealing: simply because they were mentioned and informed of the case by this angry father, the government wants them banned. It’s an all-out, blind witch-hunt, chasing any display of Islam. It’s like they are encouraging terrorists by blocking the way to any kind of defense or legal complaints in cases of Islamophobia. The far right coined a nice concept years ago, “judiciary djihad”, but now it has gone mainstream. If you kill you are a terrorist. No problem with that. But even if you protest legally and file a complaint to the police, you are a djihadist & complicit of murder. If you denounce something online, it means you called for violence, even if you didn’t, so you’re still an “online terrorist”, the “intellectual author” of a future crime. The media & government clearly denounced the two men who went online with the case as being complicit with the terrorist, without any proof whatsoever (“The video was made to lead to something violent”, claimed the Education Minister, as if he was the public prosecutor). I guess following this logic, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists could be indicted as well, if the one making things public is responsible for any reaction of any madman. I’m sure that if you were French, your own article comparing Charlie Hebdo to Der Sturmer would have gotten you into trouble.
And don’t dare criticize the police. The Interior Minister himself filed a complaint for defamation against an obscure, anonymous blogger who denounced the systematic killing of terror suspects even when they pose no threat (the murderer was on foot and had a knife and toy gun, clearly identified as such by the police officers who surrounded him before the shooting began; he was riddled with 9 bullets, and killed -or “neutralized” as the bashful media put it- as he laid on the ground, Elor Azaria style).
The irony is that the murderer had the status of political refugee (he came with his family from Chechnya at 6 years-old). And some of his tweets simulating a decapitation were signaled months ago to the authorities who did nothing and didn’t even have him on their radar (I guess they’re too busy tracking Unionists, bloggers & Muslim charities), so it’s a clear fiasco for the Interior Minister. Our government is allied with the beheaders of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia & creates and supports terrorists everywhere, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to Libya to Syria to Yemen. In 2013 our Foreign Minister Fabius famously said that “Al-Nosra does a good job in Syria”, when he was protesting the US decision to brand them as terrorists. And when these terrorists come back home and attack the wrong innocents, they pin the blame on the main victims of the West’s plots, Islam and Muslims, before anyone can blame them. The Yellow Vests & awful management of the pandemic made them the most unpopular government in France’s history, and their last hope before the next elections is to capitalize on the tragedy and steal electors from the racist Far Right whose anti-Islam, anti-Immigration speech is now mainstream.
Thank God it’s holidays. Blanquer, the Education Minister, is preparing a “strong, powerful and strict educational framework” for November 2, when pupils will get back to school. Will he make the Charlie Hebdo pictures mandatory? We can’t rule out anything with such a world-class opportunist (in 2007, when Sarkozy was campaigning and cozying up with the UOIF, a Muslim’s organization, Blanquer kicked out a prefet, Alain Morvan, because he was delaying the construction of a Muslim school out of security & extremism concerns), considered as the grave-digger of what remains of school and teachers’ status and rights (for one, they have no right to express themselves, and can be disciplined for online comments or strikes). This man casually wears the kippa in the synagogue, along with all the government, but publicly said that the Islamic veil “is not desired” not only at school but in any part of society because of “what it says about women”. Funny conception of secularism that allows him to have the final word about what a religious item means. Blanquer also denounced the “ravages” of “Islamo-leftism” in Universities, in the student’s Union UNEF (I guess it’s because their spokesperson, a French-born convert, wears the Islamic veil) and teacher’s radical Union SUD, and in the France Insoumise, Mélenchon’s leftist political party allied with the Communist party, the only strong opposition besides Marine Le Pen’s neo-fascist far right: just because the left denounces Islamophobia, they are explicitly accused of paving the way for the terrorists (“These people favor an ideology which then, ultimately, leads to the worst.” Blanquer said.)
Even a Teacher’s Union, published a Charlie Hebdo caricature and called on teachers to use them in class, and all High Schools will have books devoted to them. It’s insane: do they want to make out of schools, supposedly neutral and peaceful, a violent battlefield? Given the racism & islamophobia of many teachers, many zealots will certainly show the Prophet’s pictures to their pupils, even in places with a majority of Muslims, and it’s asking for trouble. Here is how Pierre Tevanian, a High School Philosophy teacher, rare drop of wisdom in an ocean of madness, put it:
Then, just a few days after the terrible attack, without any consultation on the ground with the concerned profession (i.e. teachers), there was astonishing news in the press (that’s how we got the information, as usual): all the Regional Councils of France have decided to distribute a “collection of caricatures” (we do not know which ones) in all High Schools. “If one has to give his blood. Go give yours”, says the song. So let these elected officials go and distribute their little Republican Bibles themselves in the markets. But no: it is our own blood, shitty little teachers, despised, underpaid, insulted for years, that must be shed, it was decided in high places. And possibly the blood of our pupils as well.
Because we have to face the facts: if this information is confirmed, and if we accept this role of heroes and martyrs of a power that plays little tin soldiers with teachers and pupils of flesh and blood, we officially become the preferred target of terrorist groups. To an enemy which functions, in its choice of targets and in its political communication, only with challenge, symbol and the invocation of the honor of the Prophet, our leaders answer in full irresponsibility by challenge, symbol, and targeting the image of the Prophet. What should we expect? Are we ready for it? I am not.
All this is done in the name of Free Speech, Secularism & the Republic’s values. While Jules Ferry, the father of the so-called “Republican School” (and godfather of French colonialism and theory of “superior races having the duty to civilize inferior races”), stated in a famous “Letter to teachers” in 1883, about Civic and Moral classes (the very one Samuel Paty chose to illustrate with Charlie Hebdo):
“If at times you were embarrassed to know how far you are allowed to go in your moral education, here is a rule of thumb that you can stick to: before offering your students any precept, any maxim, ask yourself: Is there, to your knowledge, only one honest man who could be offended by what you are about to say? Ask yourself if a father, I say only oma single one, present in your class and listening to you, could in good faith refuse his assent to what he hears you say. If so, refrain from saying it; if not, speak boldly, because what you are going to communicate to the child is not your own wisdom, it is the wisdom of the human race, it is one of those ideas of a universal order that several centuries of civilization have made part of the heritage of humanity. However narrow such a circle of action thus drawn may seem to you, make it a point of honor to never go beyond it, to stay within this limit rather than expose yourself to crossing it; you’ll never touch with too much scruple this delicate and sacred thing, which is the conscience of the child.”
I can’t believe I miss this reactionary imperialist.
“Fear is going to change side… Islamists won’t sleep peacefully” said Macron. Since “Islamists” clearly means “Muslims”, he nailed it all right. My wife is afraid to go out with her hijab, especially after she heard that two Muslim women were savagely attacked next to the Eiffel Tower and stabbed a dozen times shortly after Samuel Paty’s murder. First the mainstream media ignored it completely, and it was only seen on militant social media –because Muslims cannot but be the aggressors. Then the main media outlets mentioned it as semi-fake news, denying the attack had anything to do with the women’s hijab. Then when the police opened a case for aggravated racist aggression, they were forced to accept the fact reluctantly (and without apologies, of course).
We’ll see what happens in November. I am really worried. I hope for the best but try to prepare for the worst.
Best,
SH
PS: Here are a few examples of the constant hatred heard on TV:
A BFM TV anchor deplored that he didn’t see many Muslims at the funeral of Samuel Paty, as if they all had visible features like beards and veils or represented more than 10% of the population; if they had come ostensibly anyway, it would’ve been denounced as a provocation, as happened with Muslims (veiled women) or pro-Muslims (UNEF members) who were insulted for their presence.
Eric Ciotti, official from the right party Les Républicains, said that the Islamic veil is a weapon, and that bearing arms should be forbidden to Islamists. Thus the veil is to be banned altogether. CQFD.
Ivan Rioufol, far-right columnist, stated about the Covid-19 that he is sick of hearing alarming news about the health situation, and that we should stop scaring people for nothing –after all, it’s merely a life-and-death matter– and care about what really matters, meaning France’s cultural death. Better dead than “colonized”!
Elisabeth Levy, far right anchor in Cnews, said that Muslim women should stop wearing the veil for 1 week to pay tribute to Samuel Paty.
Manuel Valls, former Interior Minister and Prime Minister, said that France should’t be afraid to trample on the rule of law and the European Convention on Human rights. “We are in a state of war. Now is the time to act, strike”, he said. Indeed, there is such a thing as blasphemy in European law, and France know they’ll be condemned if the case gets there. So they speak of forgetting the rule of law and forbidding Muslims’ legal defense groups like CCIF.
Marine Le Pen said the hijab should be forbidden everywhere, and that any person suspected of radicalism and holding 2 nationalities should lose his French nationality right away, without any kind of judicial procedure. However, it is known that Police’s files on terror suspects (“fiches S” as they call them) are merely a tool, encompassing the most innocent (like someone not shaking hands with women) and the most dangerous (like having fought with Jihadis in Syria) forms of radicalism, and often targets Unionists and bloggers.
Among the many questions of the TV debates, there was the expulsion of all women wearing the hijab (not only from schools & administration jobs, but also from universities, public places, streets and the country altogether), the forfeiture of nationality for those wearing it who would be French, the reopening of the “convicts penal colony” “in the Kerguelen Islands”, the reinstatement of the death penalty, and finally the “criminalization” of all conservative Muslim ideologies, “not only jihadism but also Islamism”.
Etc, etc.
PPS : Here are some pictures / cartoons I am sure no teacher will show his pupils, except if he wants to be disciplined (or indicted for apology of terror & incitement… against Charlie Hebdo!):
TEHRAN – In an indirect reference to the republication of cartoons insulting the Holy Prophet of Islam (PBUH) by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday slammed “institutionalized hypocrisy” under the pretext of the freedom of expression.
“Freedom of Expression? Or Institutionalized Hypocrisy? Instigate violence and hatred against 1.8 Billion Muslims by stereotypical defamation and desecration of their Holy Book and Prophet,” Zarif tweeted on Wednesday.
However, in an indirect reference to the Holocaust which is not tolerated to be questioned in the West, Zarif said, “Touch party line about events in recent history—repugnant as they are. Enough already.”
Freedom of Expression? Or Institutionalized Hypocrisy?
Instigate violence and hatred against 1.8 Billion Muslims by stereotypical defamation and desecration of their Holy Book and Prophet👏
Touch party line about events in recent history—repugnant as they are⛔
Mojtaba Zonnour, the chairman of the Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, who met with French Ambassador to Tehran Philippe Thiebaud on Wednesday, slammed Charlie Hebdo’s republication of cartoons insulting Prophet Muhammad (S).
“This action, under the pretext of the freedom of expression, has hurt the Muslims’ feelings,” Zonnour told the French diplomat.
The senior MP predicted that the action will add to complications in the region.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has also condemned the magazine’s move, saying the move once again exposed the enmity of the political, cultural centers of the Western world toward Islam.
“The unforgivable sin of a French magazine in insulting the Holy Prophet (PBUH) once against exposed the enmity and the vile spite of the political and cultural centers of the Western world toward Islam and the Muslim community,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a message on Tuesday.
He said freedom of expression is misused by some French politicians to not condemn such great crime. This is “completely wrong and demagogic,” the Leader noted.
The deep anti-Islamic policies of the Zionists and arrogant governments are the cause of such hostile moves, said Ayatollah Khamenei.
“This move at this time could also be a measure to distract the nations and governments of West Asia from the sinister plots of the United States and the Zionist regime for the region.”
“Muslim nations, especially West Asian nations, should maintain vigilance regarding the issues of this sensitive region and never forget the hostility of Western politicians and rulers towards Islam and Muslims,” the Leader concluded.
In a reckless and provocative move, on September 2 Charlie Hebdo republished the same cartoons about Prophet Muhammad (S) that prompted a deadly attack on the magazine in 2015.
The cartoons were republished so as to mark the start of the terrorism trial of people accused as accomplices in the attack. The magazine posted the cartoons online on September 1 and they appeared in print the next day.
13 men and a woman accused of providing the attackers with weapons and logistics went on trial on charges of terrorism.
Twelve people, including some of France’s most famous cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when two French-born brothers of Algerian descent, Said and Cherif Kouachi, went on a gun rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
The brothers identified themselves as belonging to the terrorist group al-Qaeda and cited “avenging the prophet” as their reason for the attack. The attack touched off a wave of killings claimed by Daesh (ISIS) terrorist group across Europe.
On January 9, 2015, Said and Cherif’s friend, Amedy Coulibaly, took hostages and killed four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris. Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers, who were in contact during the attack, were killed in standoffs with the police.
10 months later, in November 2015, a group of Daesh gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people and injured more than 400 at multiple sites across Paris, which became the deadliest of the attacks.
Throughout the world, many Muslims see the publication of the cartoons as a renewed provocation by Charlie Hebdo, which has a history of publishing material considered racist and anti-Muslim.
Tehran on September 3 strongly condemned the French magazine, saying any insult against the prophet of Islam and other divine prophets is not acceptable at all.
“The French magazine’s offensive move, which has been repeated on the pretext of freedom of speech, has hurt the feelings of the world’s monotheists, is a provocative move and an insult to the Islamic values and beliefs of over one billion Muslims in the world,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said in a statement.
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UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 