Real Revolution Versus Fake Revolution

The Syrian Revolution as fake revolution.

I honestly do not think much of this Syrian revolution. Almost all of the revolutionaries are Sunni Muslim Arabs. Few to none of them are Shia, Alawite or Druze Arabs. There are almost no Christians in the ranks. And there are few to no Kurds in the ranks. In fact, the revolutionaries are hostile to all of these groups last time I checked. That’s why those other groups are not signing up. There have been many attacks on Syrian Christians, Shia and Alawites by the revolutionaries. Many from these groups have been kidnapped, beaten, tortured and murdered.

In a city of 50,000, all of the Christians were ethnically cleansed from the city. They received a “leave or die” order from the rebels. Many Syrian churches have been blown up or damaged by the rebels. The Druze are not signing up for the fight, and the Sunni Muslim rebels may not like the Druze very much. No doubt they see them as some sort of heretics or possibly even infidels.

The Syrian Kurds do not like the regime very much, as the regime has not been too kind to them to put it mildly. However, the regime made some huge concessions to the Kurds in recent days, and the regime has now vacated the Kurdish area and the Kurds are more or less in control of their own part of Syria. Why the regime vacated the area, I am not sure, but the Kurds are hostile to the rebels and maybe the regime just felt that the area was not worth fighting for.

A political party which is frankly the Syrian arm of the Turkish PKK has now taken over that part of Syria. The result is that Turkey has threatened to attack and occupy that part of Syria as it is serving as some sort of a PKK base. These threats have not been carried out. The Kurdish government in Iraq has refused to support their brethren in Syria as they are seen as too close to the PKK, and the Iraqi Kurds want to distance themselves from the PKK. The best description of the Syrian Kurds at this point would be to say that they are hostile to both the regime and the rebels. The rebels do not like the Kurds because the Sunni Arab rebels are Arab nationalists and see the Kurds as secessionists.

The revolution has a strongly Islamist character and has had it from the very start. Al Qaeda type groups now form a large part of the rebels. Al Qaeda types from Iraq and hardline Islamists from around the Arab world are going to Syria to fight in the “jihad.” It’s a jihad because they are fighting against the Alawi, who are seen as heretics by many Sunni Muslims. The fight is being manipulated from abroad. The rebels get much of their money and arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf Arabs hate the Syrian regime because it is made up of Alawites, who they see as heretics.

Turkey has also helped the rebels a lot for reasons that are not clear. However, they are Sunni Islamists who have an Alawi type group in their country that they don’t treat very well. Turkey is also trying to be seen as the light among Sunni Muslims and is attempting to gain points with them that way. The United Snakes is also involved because Syria is one of the pillars of the resistance front against the Zionist regime in Israel. Syria and Iran along with Hezbollah and Hamas make up the resistance front at the moment, although the Egyptian regime may be leaning in that direction. Lebanon is also a sworn enemy of Israel, but they are usually not thought of as part of the resistance front.

Iran is listed because they support Hezbollah and Hamas with arms. The Syrian regime helps ferret those arms from Iran to Hezbollah and also gives Hezbollah a lot of arms of its own. In addition, Syria is still a sworn enemy of Israel because Israel occupies Syrian land in the Golan Heights. It’s also said that Syria supports Hamas, but all they do is give refuge to their leaders. Qatar also gives refuge to Hamas leaders and no one talks about that.

Israel also continues to occupy Lebanese territory in the Shebaa Farms and makes all sorts of phony excuses as to why they can’t give it back. One of the excuses is that the land is really Syrian, but Syria says that even if that is true, they don’t want the land, and Lebanon can have it. Israel is such a disgusting country! This occupation is the stated reason for Hezbollah continuing existence. I really don’t see why Israel doesn’t give the land back to Lebanon to get rid of Hezbollah. I don’t get it.

It is true that another issue is three Lebanese villages that Israel conquered in 1948. Israel invaded far south Lebanon during this war and conquered three villages. They ordered all of the Shia Muslims out at gunpoint, and they went to Lebanon as refugees. I am not sure of their status now. The towns are now 100% full of Israeli Jews. Lebanon says she wants those towns back.

If the Syrian regime can be removed, one leg of the Syria – Iran – Hezbollah axis can be eliminated. The new regime will be Sunni Muslim and will be hostile to both Iran and Hezbollah since Iran and Hezbollah have both helped the regime during the war. They would have been hostile to them anyway though because Sunni Muslims in that region are notorious Shia-haters and both the Syrian and Iranian regimes are Shia.

With the new regime in power, Iran would no longer be able to supply Hezbollah via Syria. She might be able to supply them directly, but that might be pretty difficult. Iran would then be even more isolated in the region. Without the support of its main patron, Hezbollah may wither on the vine. Hezbollah has currently moved into Syria to protect some Syrian Shia villages on the border. The Syrian rebels have ordered the Shia residents and Hezbollah both to evacuate these villages. They refused to leave, and there has been some heavy fighting in the area lately. There have been many reports that Iran has advisers in Syria helping the regime. The reports have been hard to validate, but they are probably true.

So the whole reason for the US supporting Syria is part and parcel of US support for the Zionist regime in Israel. It’s just more “USraeli” foreign policy (the two countries can be seen as one merged entity that I call “USreal”).

What Is Zionism?

Repost from the old site.

I was visiting my Mother the other day (she lives 33 miles away) and she had just read some articles on my blog. She made some negative remarks about “Zionists”, at which point I informed her that she was a Zionist. She looked horrified, which is the way any decent person should look when accused of such a thing. I then patiently explained to her than anyone who supported a Jewish state in Palestine was a Zionist.

She looked disappointed. On further questioning, it turned out that she pretty much thought that the founding of Israel was a great big mistake and a crime – like the founding of the USA via the conquest of the American Indians. However, she said you can’t undo history, and people have to try to make do with reality as it is.

I then told her that her views were probably “non-Zionist” – that being someone who disapproved of the Zionist project, but that that we should live with the reality of it, as Israel is there, and it’s not going away. My brother, on questioning, also did not really know what Zionism is, and also qualified as a non-Zionist who thought we needed to deal with reality as it exists, not as it ought to be.

The views that they espouse – “That the creation of Israel was a mistake, but they are there, they’re not leaving, and we have to deal with that” – ought to rationally be considered by progressives as neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism, but non-Zionism.

In the course of my conversations with these two brilliant, highly-educated immediate family members, I realized that even the best and the brightest in the US did not really know what Zionism was.

So, with that in mind, I felt it was time for a post describing exactly what Zionism was and is, its history and its various forms. Obviously, this brief post will barely begin to nudge the edges of this subject, but still it ought to serve as a nice primer.

What is Zionism anyway? I see Zionism every day on the net. In a nutshell, most Zionists, but not all, argue that both the formation of the state of Israel and the settler-colonial project that created it were right, just and proper.

A principal Zionist argument (though not shared by all Zionists) is this:

1. Jewish land, not Arab land – All of Israel is Jewish land. The Arabs have no right to any of this land.

Several arguments are used to defend this view:

1. Historical- Jews had a continuing presence in the land for 3,000 years, so therefore it is their land. The Arab presence is illegitimate. When the Zionist project began, there were only a few Arabs in Palestine anyway, and they were the ancestors of Arabs who invaded Jewish land in 640 and have been occupying Jewish land ever since.Arabs never controlled Palestine anyway, and all Palestinians are Arab invading colonists who have no right to be there and need to go back to Arabia where they came from. Jews were completely in their right to reclaim their homeland after so many years in exile.This is one of the most vicious and wicked Zionist arguments, and it is extremely popular amongst the hardest of the hardline, blood-and-soil, organic nationalist types.One can argue that this is the philosophy that it is at the core of the mindset of the leaders of the Zionist movement from 1897 to the present. It is this argument, that, like most primordialist ethnic nationalist projects that rose out of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1800′s, is most similar to Nazism.On the other hand, all modern ethnic nationalisms (in particular Arab nationalism, Indian Hindu nationalism, Lebanese Phalangist nationalism and all of the ethnic nationalist projects that swept Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920′s and 1930′s) came from the same 19th Century core as Nazism, so it is somewhat unfair to single out Zionism in that regard.
2. Religious – God gave the land to the Jews. It is Jewish land and will always be so. God watches over the Jews and Israel, and no one can mess with them. Anyone who messes with the Jews or Israel gets punished by God. This is obviously a favorite of conservative Zionists, though some secular liberal Zionists use it too, usually cynically in an effort to get Gentile Christians to go along with the project.
3. Holocaust – Jews needed a safe haven in Israel due to the Holocaust, and it was ok to throw out the Arabs to get this haven. A favorite of liberal Zionists, many of whom are ignorant of the specifics of the project. When questioned, many of this type will insist that no Arabs were thrown out to make the Jewish state. Apparently the land was just empty or something.
4. Freedom From Persecution – Related to the above. Jews have been persecuted everywhere they have been, so it is reasonable for them to have their own state where they can be safe. A favorite of more liberal Zionists. One of their favorite lines is that Zionism is “affirmative action for Jews”. Micheal Lerner of Tikkun is fond of that phrase.
5. UN and League of Nations – These two organizations agreed to give away Arab land to Jews for a homeland at different times. Therefore, Israel is legitimate. Once again, a favorite of more liberal Zionists and folks who are fond of the UN and international law.
6. Self-determination and National Liberation – All other ethnic groups have a right to self-determination on their homeland, and many have developed national liberation movements to obtain their nation-state. Zionism is the Jewish equivalent. This argument is a favorite of Zionist liberals and Leftists.
7. British Donation – Britain gave the land – British land – to the Jews. Therefore, it is the Jews’ land. This one is also a favorite of more liberal Zionists, because it avoids the question of whether or not Israel is Jewish land.

A number of the National-Religious types (see arguments A and B above – they are typically combined into a highly toxic form called National-Religious Zionism) claim that the land of Israel extends from the Nile to the Euphrates. It encompasses most of Lebanon and Syria, all of Jordan, part of Iraq, all of the Sinai, part of Arabia and all of Kuwait.

There are actually a fair number of Zionists who feel that all (or some) of this should be reconquered.

When an aide to President Truman visited the Holy Land around 1947 to try to understand the Zionist-Arab conflict, he said that all of the Jews he met there held the Nile to Euphrates view. He also noted that they did not like to talk about it too much, and they seemed to want to keep it a sort of secret, as if they were afraid of the reaction of outsiders if they learned of the Zionist plans.

Despite super-liar and modern-day Crusader Daniel Pipes’ articulate lie, The Nile to Euphrates Calumny, Nile to Euphrates Zionists are not mythological, and I have run across them fairly regularly on the Net, especially lately.

Does Mr. Pipes feel that I have hallucinated all of these Greater Israel types? Were they all just Arab agents out to make the Zionists look bad? Inquiring minds want to know. Mr. Pipes or his supporters are encouraged to email me here to explain how it is that I keep running into these nonexistent phantasms.

A lesser view holds that “Eretz Israel” at least covers all of Green Line Israel, all of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip. Some also include the Sinai Peninsula (or at least a small part of it up to the Wadi Arish) and southern Lebanon to the Litani River.

A map demonstrating Zionist armed settler-colonialism in action. Note the progressive loss of Arab land to Zionist colonization. This was deliberate and planned from the very start. It all stems from the Zionist principle that all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is Jewish land and that the local Arabs are “squatting” on Jewish land and live there only at the whim of the Zionist owners.

Presently, the project is to make the remaining Arab enclaves so miserable that the Arabs will leave and then the Zionists can colonize their land.

This is a Minimal Greater Israel view and is very common. It was the “minimal view” adopted by the “progressives” of Left Socialist Zionism under David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel. It could logically be called Minimal Greater Israel.

Ben-Gurion’s ideological opponents, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists, held similar views, except that they typically claimed all of Jordan for the Jewish state also.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement. He authored The Iron Wall in 1923, in which he openly advocated a Zionist settler-colonial movement, to be implemented by armed force backed by an imperial power. The reason armed force was needed, he said, was because of inevitable Arab resistance. Before that, Zionism had been largely focused on buying out the Arabs’ land, then throwing them off the land and settling it with Zionists.

 

A poster for the Irgun Zionist armed guerrilla group. This was one of the three major armed Zionist guerrilla factions in Palestine. It focused on attacks against both the British and the local Arabs. Note that Irgun claimed that not only all of Palestine, but also all of Jordan, was Jewish land, to be cleansed of Arab “squatters”, and to be conquered by force (note the rifle).

Irgun dissolved after the founding of Israel, and since then Mainstream Revisionist Zionism has gone pretty quiet about claims to Jordan. Look carefully at the map to see that Irgun also claimed the Golan Heights for the Zionists.

I have recently met Zionist Jews on the Net who are still upset at the British and the League of Nations for “promising” all of Jordan to the Zionists in the early 1920′s, and then “going back on their word”. Actually neither party did any such thing, and such thinking is based on a misreading of the League of Nations Mandate.

In a recent interview, a leader of the Zionist Organization of America, a very powerful, very militant Jewish Zionist group in the US, noted with a twinkle in his eye that all of Jordan was actually part of Israel and implied that Israel should conquer it at some future time. The attitudes of ZOA fanatics are rampant amongst the neoconservatives who were associated with the Bush Administration.

The notion of Greater Israel, not some phony notions about buffer zones or security zones, is and was the real reason for the occupation and colonies in the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai, and for the occupation of Southern Lebanon.

As you can imagine, this political project, Zionism, terrifies the Arabs and sends them into conniptions. My opinion is that Zionism is poisonous and that no people should have to put up with such a dangerous project, least of all the backwards Arabs.

There is a lot of nonsense about Greater Israel on the Internet, with devious Zionist sophists like Pipes holding that it is just a deranged, paranoid Arab fantasy. On the other hand, many anti-Zionists, especially Islamists, insist that all Zionists hold the radical Nile-to-Euphrates view.

As you can see above, that is not the case. The truth is that some Zionists do hold the Nile-to-Euphrates view, but the Israeli government does not, and most major Israeli political parties and political figures do not either.

The Minimal Greater Israel project described above is much more common and relevant. Anti-Zionists should focus on the minimal project for now and forget about the Nile To Euphrates project until we get some evidence that it amounts to more than the ravings of some Zionist radicals.

Anti-Zionism is a radical position, like Zionism. In general, not only do anti-Zionists strongly oppose the whole Zionist project, but they go usually so far as to say that, ideally, Israel has no right to exist, and should be dismantled in one way or another. The vast majority of Arabs are anti-Zionists in one way or another. If they tolerate Israel’s existence at all, it is only grudgingly.

Anti-Zionists differ on what should be done with the Zionist Jews who have settled in Israel.

Some say that all of those who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was signed, have to go back where they came from.

This was the line espoused in the original PLO Charter of 1964 and continues to be espoused by some very radical Arab nationalist types, especially some Arab Communists.

Examples of organizations holding such views are NACAZAI (North American Congress Against Zionism and Racism), headed by Ziad Shaker AlJishi, a Palestinian refugee living in the US, and the the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) militants who run the Free Arab Voice website.

The FAV site is edited by Ibrahim Alloush and Mohammad Abu Nasr. Everyone associated with the FAV website is apparently a member of the political wing of the PFLP.

One of the editors takes the not-so-obvious nom de guerre of Nabila Harb. This pseudonym derives from Nabil Harb, an obscure PFLP cadre from the 1970′s who was part of a small PFLP cell that hijacked a Lufthansa airliner in Spain in an attempt to win the release of German urban guerrillas from the Baader-Meinhoff Gang.

The attempt failed when the plane was stormed by German Special Forces in Mogadishu, killing 3 of the 4 PFLP terrorists, but not before the cell had executed the captain of the plane in Yemen an act of gross criminality and stupidity.

The imprisoned members of the German ultra-Leftist group committed suicide right afterwards, effectively ending the existence of Baader-Meinhoff. But from its ashes would rise its successor, the much larger and more successful Red Army Faction.

However, unlike the PFLP, which is fairly heterodox and not necessarily extremely Arab nationalist anymore, the FAV is a hardline, pro-Saddam Arab nationalist site that is an excellent example of Arab Nationalist “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, as is NACAZAI. Free Arab Voice would be better characterized as a Palestinian Baathist site.

The 40 year old Dr. Alloush is a son of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. He is a Professor of Statistics and Economics at a university in Amman, Jordan. The mysterious Abu Nasr (a nom de guerre) is the author of the Iraqi Resistance Reports that can be found on the Internet.

The 59-year-old Nasr is a Palestinian who may have left Palestine after the 1967 war, may live somewhere in the West, and may have a PhD. He is fluent in Russian as well as English, which suggests he may have received education in the former Soviet Union. The PFLP was sending its higher-ranking cadres to the Soviet Union for education some years ago.

Alloush also runs an Arab nationalist list on the Net and a Yahoo group by the same name. Alloush has received some notoriety for appearing at a conference of Holocaust Deniers in Lebanon and endorsing their views. In fact, the FAV website foments Holocaust Denial itself. Both Nasr and Alloush are virulently anti-Semitic Arab Communists and excellent examples of “Arab fascism” and “Arab Nazism”, to their eternal discredit.

NACAZAI also holds Holocaust Denial views, in addition supporting the genocidal Khmer Rogue, being strongly pro-North Korea, pro-Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime and in favor of the genocidal ultra-racist Arab-Nazis in Sudan. FAV takes similar positions, except I don’t know how they feel about the Khmer Rogue.

Even worse, a virulently anti-Semitic, Nazi-like position statement by NACAZAI shows that the Zionists and neocons who rant about the anti-Semitic Left are not entirely incorrect. Such beasts do exist.

Other members of NACAZAI include John Paul Cupp, a Communist supporter of North Korea who lives in Oregon, and Kevin Walsh, a Communist white supremacist who was recently arrested in Arizona for threatening to kill President Bush and has been diagnosed as mentally ill under suspicious circumstances (I suspect he may be bipolar). Both Cupp and Walsh are virulent, Nazi-like anti-Semites.

The entire Left should distance itself from Cupp, Walsh, AlJishi, Nasr and Alloush, along with Arab Nazis and Arab fascists in general (which includes a large segment of the Arab nationalist movement) until they pull their heads out and quit preaching racism in the name of anti-racism.

I would like to point out that the ultra-radical views of Nasr and Alloush and some of their colleagues are not held by the PFLP leadership, which envisions a single state in Palestine for both Jews and Arabs (see the recent interview with top PFLP leader Leila Khaled, for example).

The view that all Jews coming after 1917 need to take off was recently reiterated by the late Sheik Yassin, spiritual leader of Hamas, who was assassinated by an IDF missile.

Another related view is held by others, including Ayatollah Khameini, spiritual leader of Iran, who has stated that ideally all of those Jews who themselves or whose relatives came to Palestine after the 1948 founding of the Israeli state have to go back where they came from. It is possible that Hezbollah may hold similar views, due to the close relationship of its leadership with that of the Iranian government.

Other Arab radicals say that Mizrachi Jews (Jews who lived in the Arab World) can stay in the region, but that Ashkenazi Jews, who trace their recent ancestry back to Europe, have to go home.

Many anti-Zionists (especially progressives and Leftists) believe that all of the Jews can stay in Israel, but that they must share the state and land with the Arabs and dismantle the Jewish state.

This view has been espoused by the leadership of the DFLP and PFLP leftwing Palestinian armed fronts, some members of the PLO, the Hamas Charter, an Islamic Jihad leader in an interview 13 years ago, and Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, who proposed a state called Izratine.

This view has been quite popular with Palestinian Christians and secularists like Edward Said, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Ghada Karmi.

In general, the vast majority of anti-Zionists do not advocate killing all the Jews in Israel, though I have heard some Arab hotheads say that on the Internet. No Arab or Muslim armed group (including Al Qaeda) takes that position, to my knowledge.

Yet this is a staple of Zionist propaganda – that all anti-Zionists and armed anti-Israel groups are all intent on “carrying out a second Holocaust”. If it were true, it would be an excellent reason to support Israel, but there is little evidence for this.

Furthermore, there is a question of how killing 5 million Jewish residents of an industrialized society in a rapid manner in our day and age, given recent human historical memory, is even feasible.

That said, I do not think that Al Qaeda or the groups allied with them are good for the Jews, to say the least. I can’t prove they want to kill all of the ones in Palestine, much less all the ones on Earth, but I do not think these radicals have the best interests of the Jewish people at heart, to put it mildly.

The official Al Qaeda line is that after the liberation of Palestine by Islam, all of the Jews will have to leave. According to Al Qaeda, once the Caliphate is established on Muslim lands, all non-Muslims in these lands will have to either convert to Islam if they wish to remain in Caliphate lands, or leave if they do not convert. Those who will not convert or leave will have to be killed.

For the record, some of those associated with the British Al Qaeda fronts Al-Muhajiroun, The Savior Sect and Al Ghurabaa such as Omar Bakri Mohammad and Abu Hamza have made statements that all Jews on Earth must be killed.

Variations on Qaddafi’s one-state solution, described above, are called the one-state project. That is the position of this blog. There are many variations on this view. Some hold that ideally the region should be an Islamic state and that the Jews should have to live under Islamic Law. This position is held by Islamists and is strongly opposed by this blog.

It is interesting that Qaddafi’s Izratine was considered a slap in the face to Hamas, who apparently are not wild about living in a state with 5 million Jews.

Some high-ranking Hamas members have said as much, admitting that they have had enough misery from the Jews in the region and want a “divorce” from the Jews, hence the popularity of 2 states as an interim solution by some high-ranking pragmatists in the Hamas leadership.

Others hold that the single state should be a “secular state”, which is a great idea except that most citizens of such a state would be anything but secular. Many Arabs (especially Arab nationalists) insist that the single state be an Arab state and that Jews should live as a minority in such a state. Obviously, that view is not popular with Jews at all.

Does the two-state solution look feasible to you anymore? Me either. Note how the Separation Wall actually snakes far into the West Bank to include as many Zionist colonies as possible. Note also the Zionist theft of much of the West Bank (in dark green). The logical progression of history is rendering the 2-state solution a complete non-starter.

Others would grant Jews and Arabs some sort of local rule akin to Switzerland’s cantons. One proposal wants to make the single state a homeland for the Jews and Palestinians, two terribly persecuted peoples. This proposal would retain aliya rights for Jews while allowing all Palestinians to have their own sort of aliya.

It’s clear there are many versions of this single state project. The primary resistance to this project at the moment comes not from Arabs or Muslims but from the very real fears of the Jews in Israel. These reality-based fears will have to be addressed in any such single state solution.

As you can see, there is not much left of the 2-state solution, since Zionist colonialism has devoured much of what was to be the Palestinian state. The remaining Palestinian enclaves are nothing more than disconnected bantustans, surrounded by armed Zionist colonies, bases and roads for colonists. It’s like living in a home but being locked in only one room so you could not access the other rooms in the house.

Getting back to Greater Israel, the Internet is full of statements by Zionist fanatics fantasizing about Greater Israel. They are not made-up lies but instead are well-documented statements. Here is one by David Ben-Gurion (formerly David Green):

David Ben Gurion, Report to the World Council of Poale Zion (the forerunner of the Labor Party), Tel Aviv, 1938. Cited by Israel Shahak, Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1981.

“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria, and Sinai.”

Keep in mind that this frighteningly fanatical statement was uttered by the founder of the state of Israel, a socialist, a liberal and a moderate. Note that his rightwing opponents were even more extreme. Note also that his rightwing Revisionist opponents were the forerunners of the modern-day Likud and Kadima Parties, not to mention the many smaller rightwing parties.

Lenin on Anti-Semitism

Excellent video from Lenin on anti-Semitism.

This is an excellent analysis of the phenomenon, though I do know some true leftwing, liberal and Leftist anti-Semites, they are not common. Actually, they are pretty rare.

However, on the Arab Left, there is a tremendous amount of overt anti-Semitism. I used to associate with some folks who were linked to the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Basically Arab Commies. They and their friends were very anti-Semitic, not just anti-Zionist. They were also very anti-Iranian, which is typical of Arab nationalists.

Eventually they accused me of being a “Zionist spy” and threw me out of their little circle (I was doing some media work with them). Pretty paranoid group of people, not that I blame them.

However, anti-Semitism is basically at its heart a rightwing movement. You can see that in that the various anti-Semites who have shown up on this site are by and large rightwingers of one type or another. In particular, they are social conservatives. After all, the Jew is the bearer of modernity in all of its depravity and moral dissolution, no?

Anti-Semites also tend to be anti-Communist, as the Jews brought us Communism, eh? Especially in China. After all, that fellow Mao was a Jew, right?

Those of us on the Left who are not opposed to progress and all of the various social and political revolutions of the last 200 years would error in making enemies of the Jews. Anyway, we on the Left owe a vast debt to the Jews, as they were very important to our movement. And sympathizers with various progressive revolutions from Napoleon’s time on must sympathize with the Jews, as the Jews were typically in the forefront of social progress for one reason or another.

Yes, Jews can be silly, crazy and obnoxious, but even most Jews are well aware of that.

At the end of the day, there really is not much in anti-Semitism for those of us on the Left. There is nothing in it for us, and it’s fundamentally reactionary anyway.

But we can always be critical of the Jews in a good way. After all, nobody does this better than the Jews themselves.

There is a trend on the Right, especially the Jewish Right, to say that Communism was anti-Jewish. Well, the Jewish Right thinks everything is anti-Jewish. As you can see in this video, it is not really so. Yitzak Shamir was correct when we called the Soviet Union an “anti-anti-Semitic state,” perhaps the first that had ever been created. Stalin signed a bill making anti-Semitism a crime punishable by death. Stalin was an anti-Semite? Come on now.

George Habash Obituary

Repost from the old site.

The logo of the PFLP, founded by Habash in 1967, after the Arabs’ cataclysmic loss to Israel in the Six Day War. The logo implies Palestine as a whole entity that is part of the Arab World.

George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, (this blog strongly supports that group) died January 26, 2008, in Amman, Jordan, at age 82.

A PFLP poster issued postmortem commemorating the life of George Habash, founder of the organization. Click to see larger version.

He had been ill for several months. He died of a massive heart attack after an operation to put a stent back inside of him. He also had cancer.

Habash with his wife, Hilda Habash, in later days. She was a cousin of his and he married her in 1961 at age 36.

His wife and his two daughters, one a physician and the other an engineer, were at his bedside when he died.

A younger Habash in an undated photo. He was apparently a smoker, which is odd for a physician, but smoking is epidemic amongst Arab males, especially in Palestine. Habash graduated first in his class at the Medical School of the American University in Beirut in Lebanon in 1951 and founded the Arab National Movement (one of the first Arab nationalist movements) one year later in 1952. He was very close to the archetypal Arab nationalist Gamel Nasser. This blog is also fond of Nasser.

Habash suffered his first stroke in 1979. That left him partially paralyzed, after which he moved about with a cane and was increasingly confined to his office in Syria.

Habash in 1979 at age 54, railing against some Israeli fake “peace proposal”. He had a stroke that same year. My, what a dashing figure of the dapper revolutionary. At this time, Habash was seriously on the run from the Mossad, who tried for many years to kill or capture him. During this period, he was often holed up in various places, and he would only pop up, often in some strange place, usually unannounced, to make an appearance and then disappear again.

Around this time, the Israelis diverted a Jordanian airlines passenger jet and forced it to the ground in the Galilee, thinking that Habash was aboard. The plane was three hours late landing in Jordan, and Habash’s doctor had just told him that he was in no condition to fly due to a heart condition. He decided not to board at the last moment. A popular Israeli lie is that Habash walked with a cane due to an Israeli assassination attempt. Actually, it was due to a stroke.

After a second stroke in 1992, he moved to Jordan. In 2000, he resigned as General Secretary of the PFLP due to ill health.

Habash was known as Al-Hakim, which means both “doctor” and “wise one” in Arabic. The dual meaning was intentional and that is why he was given that nom de guerre. Like Arafat, he mostly stayed off the battlefield, but he did have a brief stint fighting on the side of the Leftists in the Yemen Civil War in the 1960′s. During this war, Leftists from the South battled Rightists from North. The Right was supported by Saudi Arabia and the Left was supported by Nasser’s Egypt.

The war ended with a Marxist South Yemen and a tribalist, monarchist and Islamist conservative North Yemen. Right now, the Northerners are in power in Yemen and the Southerners are being locked out of power, which is the source of a lot of demonstrations now.

His parting address, Palestine Between Dreams and Reality – Are We Closer or Further Away?, is a beautiful document that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Palestinian cause. All of the following quotes are from that address.

Habash from a meeting of the PFLP Central Committee in 2000, when he resigned as General Secretary of the PFLP at age 74. It was here that he delivered Palestine Between Dreams and Reality.

The paper shows increasing pragmatism on the part of Habash, and he makes a great point about Israel. Did Israel solve what we Marxists call the Jewish question? No, there have been four major wars and and an endless guerrilla war in between. Here, he seems to make an analogy between the ghetto Jew who refuses to assimilate and Israel, the ghetto Jewish state that refuses to assimilate to its environment.

Both, the individuals and the state, have provoked angry reactions amongst their neighbors due to their refusal to assimilate. Most negative Jewish stereotypes portray less assimilated ghetto Jews. The more assimilated the Jew, the more I get along with them. The best solution to the Jewish Question is the assimilation of the Jews:

Israel is an entity that refuses to assimilate. It is chauvinist and racist; it excludes the other and yet it does not even solve the Jewish question, for it has driven the Jews into four wars already. The very map of Israel completely betrays its alien nature, foreign to the fabric and history of the region. Its supremacy kindles aggressive and arrogant tendencies within itself.

Later, he touches on one of the primary issues of the conflict, the plight of the Palestinian refugees. It is true that this is one of the drivers of the conflict – the issue that will not go away. Most other refugees say the heck with it, we are never going back. But Palestinians, rather uniquely among refugees, demand right to return and are being denied it:

Even though the international will has combined to support the settlement and the Palestine Authority has pledged to fulfill its obligations, including its security obligations, even if the cities and densely populated areas were all covered by the settlement, the problem of the refugees inside and outside Palestine (who account for more than half of the Palestinian people) would remain without a solution.

Yet it was they who drew their guns after the defeat of June 1967. Then there is the time bomb of one million Palestinians inside the borders of 1948 who remain also without a solution. There is the still unassuaged ache of the people in rural areas to be rid of the settlers and to regain their land.

There is the people’s desire for independence and sovereignty, a desire that reflects their level of development, whether in terms of social or political crystallization, or the requirements of their economic life. Finally there is the people’s legal need to assure the basic prerequisites for organizing, protecting, and choosing their path of development.

When people like me slam Arab culture as backwards, we are just echoing an old line of the Arab Left, dating back at least to the Palestinian Uprising of 1937, which was thwarted in part by reactionary Palestinian mullahs who sold the people pie in the sky in the name of maintaining the status quo.

Here Habash discusses the cynical game of the Arab rulers, who make cozy alliances with the US and then crack down forever on dissent on the basis that there is still a state of war with Israel going on. A state of war that the Arab states wish to perpetuate forever so as to permanently keep their population diverted from the horrific corruption and lack of democracy in the Arab lands:

The official Arab regimes have been tireless in scaring the masses and emptying their rejection (of settlement with the Zionists) of any content. At the same time the regimes roll out the red carpet for foreign companies, foreign capital, and the western cultural assault, in order to prevent the rise of resistance and national revival. Only rarely will a regime find itself in the same trench as the masses.

Yet the tune that the regimes sing over and over again to justify their denial of freedoms, their obstruction of the winds of democracy, their hunting down of alternative ideas and their torture of alternative thinkers is always that the state of war with Israel demands this.

So the Arab defeats repeat themselves again and again while Israel wins one victory after another.

Plans laid out purely on the level of individual Arab states have lost their progressive character and have failed to attain any major achievement in more than two decades. Not one modern Arab state has been formed that enjoys technological and economic development providing the people job opportunities and a reasonable living standard without massive unemployment, deep indebtedness, and unlimited dependency.

Not one Arab state has enjoyed an active civil society, genuine legislative authorities, a competent, independent judicial structure, and a peaceful transfer of authority from one leader to the next. The worst thing is the failure to attain true independence and true sovereignty.

This to me is the best part of Habash’s address: the notion that there are moderate Israelis that can be worked with. Politics, after all, is the art of compromise. And of course, not every Jew is a Zionist.

This is in contrast to the anti-Semitic view espoused by so many Muslims, especially fundamentalists like Hamas, that sees Jews are permanently tainted due to their religion, and only redeemable by converting out, preferably to Islam.

Habash is also rejecting the driving vision of Hamas, based on Islamic supremacism, that Palestine is owed to the Muslims since it was once Muslim land. By that outrageous equation, so is Andalusia. According to this formulation, any land conquered by Muslims is “consecrated to the Muslims” by God for eternity.

That is as ridiculous as Zionism itself, that holds that God gave Palestine to the Jews 3000 years ago, and this gives them to the right to reclaim a land deed after 2000 years of departure.

Let try an allegory. Suppose there is an ancient castle somewhere that is now converted into a home. Suppose I can prove that my ancestors lived there 2000 years ago, but they were thrown out by some newcomers. According the Zionist logic, I can go back 2000 years after the fact and throw out the present owners and reclaim the land based on that ancient land deed. Such is the insanity and criminality of the Zionist enterprise:

Nevertheless, the Zionist entity, like all societies, is rent with diverse contradictions that are held in check by the Zionist enterprise, despite the success of a few voices to be heard in favor of the radical view that finds in the democratic secular state a solution to the conflict, and the narrow circles that recognize the catastrophe inflicted upon the Palestinians in 1948 and accept their right to return to their homes.

There is also a current that is larger, yet still in the margins of Israeli society, that at least condemns the occupation and the expansion of settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza.

Common denominators can be established with these kinds of people; for not every Jew is a Zionist.

Here is an interesting assessment of the globalization project, which Habash saw as led by the US. I think he is onto something with this analysis:

The decline that the Arab Nation is living through is preparing the way for a sweeping popular revival. A thing gives rise to its opposite.

What globalism is planning for — a center that produces and a consuming periphery, an America that thinks and a world that repeats — whether it is called the “Americanization of the world” as Alexander Haig saw it, or the “globalism of the world under American leadership” as Zbigniew Brzezinski called it, or “American capitalism as the last stage in history” as Francis Fukuyama wrote, or the “struggle between cultures that impels the west to destroy the east and its legacy and to deny its right to specificity” as Samuel Huntington suggested — all of this is but the prologue to a great enterprise.

An excellent biography is here, and is one of the only ones that discusses the reason that Habash became a revolutionary. He was evicted with his family in July 1948 at age 22 from the city of Lydda (now Lod). According to the excellent blog of Christian Palestinian Umkhalil, 95% of the population was evicted from the city.

You should hear Umkhalil vent on young American Jewish women “making aliyah” to Israel – a sight to behold! Her attitude is “how dare you ‘return’ to my country, where you have no right to live in without our permission”.

It is interesting that most of the eulogies about Habash in the US focused on his life as a terrorist and almost none discussed that day in Lydda, that set George Habash on his life course. 10,000 Arab residents were evicted by the Jews from Lydda and marched to the Arab front lines in the searing desert heart in what has been called the Lydda Death March. 344 people, 3.4% of the population died in the march, including many children.

Zionist propaganda says that the Arabs fled, but actually they were ordered out at gunpoint. In addition, 250 Arabs were killed during the attack on the city. Many young Arab men were killed in a massacre at a mosque. Habash had been away at college but returned due to the war. His own sister died of typhus during the Jewish attack on Lydda. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Jews killed her.

After the war, the refugees were forbidden from returning, a violation of the UN Resolution that allowed Israel entry into the UN. On that basis, I feel that Israel should be evicted from the UN as it has not fulfilled the rationale for its charter entry.

Soon after, Israel passed the outrageous Absentee Property Act, in which all property belonging to the refugees was given to Jewish residents of Israel. The Habash family home was taken over by Jews, and George Habash’s revolutionary destiny was sealed.

Habash about the singular event in his life, the ethnic cleansing of Lydda:

It is a sight I shall never forget. Thousands of human beings expelled from their homes, running, crying, shouting in terror. After seeing such a thing, you cannot but become a revolutionary.

Many of the obituaries in the press are focusing on the terrorist acts that the PFLP committed. It is true that the committed some, and they are probably the founders of modern airline hijacking. They made it into an art form.

A great poster of the PFLP’s 10th anniversary in 1977. The peak airline hijacking phase occurred in 1968-1972. In most of the hijackings, no one was killed or even hurt. In one case, a passenger jet was blown up in mid-air.

In 1972, the PFLP committed the Lod Airport Massacre, when the Japanese Red Army was hired to shoot up the terminal in Lod, Israel. Most of those killed were Puerto Rican Catholics on their way to a tour of the Holy Land. This act was so brutal that the PFLP had a very hard time getting Palestinians to volunteer for it, so they outsourced the work to the JRA. The Red Army is apparently now defunct, but they were active for a long time.

Most of the worst terrorist acts during this period were committed by a split-off faction led by Waddi Haddad, the PFLP-EO (for external operations). Haddad was later expelled by Habash for these terrorist acts, notably including airline hijackings. Both sides have committed a lot of nasty crimes in this dirty war.

The obits also talk about Habash being resolute in his total rejection of Israel, including peace negotiations. This is also true – the PFLP were like the ultimate “rejectionist” Palestinian group.

But it is not really correct to say that Habash’s PFLP vowed no peace was possible until Israel was destroyed, as Debka suggests. In recent years, the PFLP was willing to settle for a state in the Occupied Territories as a preliminary solution to the liberation of all of Palestine. Further, destruction of Israel implies killing all or most of the Jews there.

I feel that the PFLP is one of the few Palestinian organizations that is actually willing to live with Jews in Palestine. They are also less anti-Semitic than most other Palestinian organizations, including Fatah. Arafat was always a bit of the Muslim Brotherhood member that he was in his youth.

In contrast, Habash was a Greek Orthodox Christian. The reasons that the PFLP can tolerate Jews have to due with their Marxist nature, which tends to rule out racism and bigotry. Further, their secularism prevents any anti-Semitism rooted in Koranic hatred of the Jews.

George Habash was born into a wealthy Greek Orthodox Christian family in Lydda in 1925. His funeral will be in the form a mass in a Greek Orthodox church in Amman. Habash reportedly felt that the reason he was denied leadership of the PLO was that he was a Christian.

Bedouina, a leftwing secular Lebanese Christian who authors the Dove’s Eye View blog, has a good post on how members of the PFLP and other groups destroyed her grandmother’s village and killed her grandmother in the process during the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.

As’ad Abukhalil of the Angry Arab blog has the usual brilliant yet excessively critical post on George Habash. The problem with As’ad is that one gets the impression that he doesn’t really like anything or anyone very much.

Good biographies: The LA Times, Time Magazine, The Telegraph and the BBC.

Al-Hakim, George Habash, in later life. The PFLP was always the most popular organization with Palestinian Christians due to its staunch secularism. Many became members and even took up arms against Israel. PFLP members today tend to be young secular intellectuals.

They often rebel against the rules of their Muslim societies, drink, attend unchaperoned co-ed parties and put up Christmas trees, even if they are nominal Muslims. In fact, for a while there, a ritual in one West Bank city was that after you joined the PFLP, you had to go out to the local bar and drink. This has made them less popular among the more religious, some of whom have abandoned the PFLP for Fatah, who are seen as more traditional.

The excellent PFLP website finally has an English version.

A great PFLP poster from the Arabic PFLP website.

A look at the Arab version of the site shows a series of photos and martyr posters of the typical clean-cut secular Palestinian intellectual that is attracted to the PFLP. To finish, from Umkhalil:

Dr. George Habash was born in Lydda, Palestine on August 2, 1926 and he died today, January 26, 2008.

May his memory be eternal.

Does Multilingualism Equal Separatism?

Repost from the old site.

Sorry for the long post, readers, but I have been working on this piece off and on for months now. It’s not something I just banged out. For one thing, this is the only list that I know of on the Net that lists all of the countries of the world and shows how many languages are spoken there in an easy to access format. Not even Wikipedia has that (yet).

Whether or not states have the right to secede is an interesting question. The libertarian Volokh Conspiracy takes that on in this nice set of posts. We will not deal with that here; instead, we will take on the idea that linguistic diversity automatically leads to secession.

There is a notion floating around among fetishists of the state that there can be no linguistic diversity within the nation, as it will lead to inevitable separatism. In this post, I shall disprove that with empirical data. First, we will list the states in the world, along with how many languages are spoken in that state.

States with a significant separatist movement are noted with an asterisk. As you can see if you look down the list, there does not seem to be much of a link between multilingualism and separatism. There does seem to be a trend in that direction in Europe, though.

Afterward, I will discuss the nature of the separatist conflicts in many of these states to try to see if there is any language connection. In most cases, there is little or nothing there.

I fully expect the myth of multilingualism = separatism to persist after the publication of this post, unfortunately.

St Helena                        1
British Indian Ocean Territories 1
Pitcairn Island                  1
Estonia                          1
Maldives                         1
North Korea                      1
South Korea                      1
Cayman Islands                   1
Bermuda                          1
Belarus                          1
Martinique                       2
St Lucia                         2
St Vincent & the Grenadines      2
Barbados                         2
Virgin Islands                   2
British Virgin Islands           2
Gibraltar                        2
Antigua and Barbuda              2
Saint Kitts and Nevis            2
Montserrat                       2
Anguilla                         2
Marshall Islands                 2
Cuba                             2
Turks and Caicos                 2
Guam                             2
Tokelau                          2
Samoa                            2
American Samoa                   2
Niue                             2
Jamaica                          2
Cape Verde Islands               2
Icelandic                        2
Maltese                          2
Maltese                          2
Vatican State                    2
Haiti                            2
Kiribati                         2
Tuvalu                           2
Bahamas                          2
Puerto Rico                      2
Kyrgyzstan                       3
Rwanda                           3
Nauru                            3
Turkmenistan                     3
Luxembourg                       3
Monaco                           3
Burundi                          3
Seychelles                       3
Grenada                          3
Bahrain                          3
Tonga                            3
Qatar                            3
Kuwait                           3
Dominica                         3
Liechtenstein                    3
Andorra                          3
Reunion                          3
Dominican Republic               3
Netherlands Antilles             4
Northern Mariana Islands         4
Palestinian West Bank & Gaza     4
Palau                            4
Mayotte                          4
Cyprus*                          4
Bosnia and Herzegovina*          4
Slovenia and Herzegovina*        4
Swaziland                        4
Sao Tome and Principe            4
Guadalupe                        4
Saudi Arabia                     5
Cook Islands                     5
Latvia                           5
Lesotho                          5
Djibouti                         5
Ireland                          5
Moldova                          5
Armenia                          6
Mauritius                        6
Lebanon                          6
Mauritania                       6
Croatia                          6
Kazakhstan                       7
Kazakhstan                       7
Albania                          7
Portugal                         7
Uzbekistan                       7
Sri Lanka*                       7
United Arab Emirates             7
Comoros                          7
Belize                           8
Tunisia                          8
Denmark                          8
Yemen                            8
Morocco*                         9
Austria                          9
Jordan                           9
Macedonia                        9
Tajikistan                       9
French Polynesia                 9
Gambia                           9
Belgium                          9
Libya                            9
Fiji                             10
Slovakia                         10
Ukraine                          10
Egypt                            11
Bulgaria                         11
Norway                           11
Poland                           11
Serbia and Montenegro            11
Eritrea                          12
Georgia*                         12
Finland*                         12
Switzerland*                     12
Hungary*                         12
United Kingdom*                  12
Mongolia                         13
Spain                            13
Somalia*                         13
Oman                             13
Madagascar                       13
Malawi                           14
Equatorial Guinea                14
Mali                             14
Azerbaijan                       14
Japan                            15
Syria*                           15
Romania*                         15
Sweden*                          15
Netherlands*                     15
Greece                           16
Brunei                           17
Algeria                          18
Micronesia                       18
East Timor                       19
Zimbabwe                         19
Niger                            21
Singapore                        21
Cambodia                         21
Iraq*                            21
Guinea-Bissau                    21
Taiwan                           22
Bhutan                           24
Sierra Leone                     24
South Africa                     24
Germany                          28
Namibia                          28
Botswana                         28
France                           29
Liberia                          30
Israel                           33
Italy                            33
Guinea                           34
Turkey*                          34
Senegal                          36
Bangladesh                       39
New Caledonia                    39
Togo                             39
Angola*                          41
Gabon                            41
Zambia                           41
Mozambique                       43
Uganda                           43
Afghanistan                      47
Guatemala                        54
Benin                            54
Kenya                            61
Congo                            62
Burkina Faso                     68
Central African Republic         69
Solomon Islands                  70
Thailand*                        74
Iran*                            77
Cote D'Ivoire                    78
Ghana                            79
Laos                             82
Ethiopia*                        84
Canada*                          85
Russia*                          101
Vietnam                          102
Myanmar*                         108
Vanuatu                          109
Nepal                            126
Tanzania                         128
Chad                             132
Sudan*                           134
Malaysia                         140
United States*                   162
Philippines*                     171
Pakistan*                        171
Democratic Republic of Congo     214
Australia                        227
China*                           235
Cameroon*                        279
Mexico                           291
India*                           415
Nigeria                          510
Indonesia*                       737
Papua New Guinea*                820

*Starred states have a separatist problem, but most are not about language. Most date back to the very formation of an often-illegitimate state.

Canada definitely has a conflict that is rooted in language, but it is also rooted in differential histories as English and French colonies. The Quebec nightmare is always brought up by state fetishists, ethnic nationalists and other racists and nationalists who hate minorities as the inevitable result of any situation whereby a state has more than one language within its borders.

This post is designed to give the lie to this view.

Cyprus’ problem has to do with two nations, Greeks and Turks, who hate each other. The history for this lies in centuries of conflict between Christianity and Islam, culminating in the genocide of 350,000 Greeks in Turkey from 1916-1923.

Morocco’s conflict has nothing to do with language. Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony in Africa. After the Spanish left in the early 1950′s, Morocco invaded the country and colonized it, claiming in some irredentist way that the land had always been a part of Morocco. The residents beg to differ and say that they are a separate state.

An idiotic conflict ensued in which Morocco the colonizer has been elevated to one of the most sanctioned nations of all by the UN. Yes, Israel is not the only one; there are other international scofflaws out there. In this conflict, as might be expected, US imperialism has supported Moroccan colonialism.

This Moroccan colonialism has now become settler-colonialism, as colonialism often does. You average Moroccan goes livid if you mention their colony. He hates Israel, but Morocco is nothing but an Arab Muslim Israel. If men had a dollar for every drop of hypocrisy, we would be a world of millionaires.

There are numerous separatist conflicts in Somalia. As Somalians have refused to perform their adult responsibilities and form a state, numerous parts of this exercise in anarchism in praxis (Why are the anarchists not cheering this on?) are walking away from the burning house. Who could blame them?

These splits seem to have little to do with language. One, Somaliland, was a former British colony and has a different culture than the rest of Somalia. Somaliland is now de facto independent, as Somalia, being a glorious exercise in anarchism, of course lacks an army to enforce its borders, or to do anything.

Jubaland has also split, but this has nothing to do with language. Instead, this may be rooted in a 36-year period in which it was a British colony. Soon after this period, they had their own postage stamps as an Italian colony.

There is at least one serious separatist conflict in Ethiopia in the Ogaden region, which is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis. Apparently this region used to be part of Somaliland, and Ethiopia probably has little claim to the region. This conflict has little do with language and more to do with conflicts rooted in colonialism and the illegitimate borders of states.

There is also a conflict in the Oromo region of Ethiopia that is not going very far lately. These people have been fighting colonialism since Ethiopia was a colony and since then have been fighting against independent Ethiopia, something they never went along with. Language has a role here, but the colonization of a people by various imperial states plays a larger one.

There was a war in Southern Sudan that has now ended with the possibility that the area may secede.

There is a genocidal conflict in Darfur that the world is ignoring because it involves Arabs killing Blacks as they have always done in this part of the world, and the world only gets upset when Jews kill Muslims, not when Muslims kill Muslims.

This conflict has to do with the Sudanese Arabs treating the Darfurians with utter contempt – they regard them as slaves, as they have always been to these racist Arabs.

The conflict in Southern Sudan involved a region in rebellion in which many languages were spoken. The South Sudanese are also niggers to the racist Arabs, plus they are Christian and animist infidels to be converted by the sword by Sudanese Arab Muslims. Every time a non-Muslim area has tried to split off from or acted uppity with a Muslim state they were part of, the Muslims have responded with a jihad against and genocide of the infidels.

This conflict has nothing to do with language; instead it is a war of Arab Muslim religious fanatics against Christian and animist infidels.

There is a separatist movement in the South Cameroons in the nation of Cameroon in Africa. This conflict is rooted in colonialism. During the colonial era, South Cameroons was a de facto separate state. Many different languages are spoken here, as is the case in Cameroon itself. They may have a separate culture too, but this is just another case of separatism rooted in colonialism. The movement seems to be unarmed.

There is a separatist conflict in Angola in a region called Cabinda, which was always a separate Portuguese colony from Angola.

As this area holds 60% of Angola’s oil, it’s doubtful that Angola will let it go, although almost all of Angola’s oil wealth is being stolen anyway by US transnationals and a tiny elite while 90% of the country starves, has no medicine and lives unemployed amid shacks along former roads now barely passable.

The Cabindans do claim to have a separate culture, but language does not seem to be playing much role here – instead, oil and colonialism are.

Syria does have a Kurdish separatist movement, as does Iran, Iraq, and Turkey – every state that has a significant number of Kurds. This conflict goes back to the post-World War 1 breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The Kurds, with thousands of years of history as a people, nominally independent for much of that time, were denied a state and sold out.

The new fake state called Turkey carved up part of Kurdistan, another part was donated to the British colony in Iraq and another to the French colony in Syria, as the Allies carved up the remains of the Empire like hungry guests at a feast.

This conflict is more about colonialism and extreme discrimination than language, though the Kurds do speak their own tongue. There is also a Kurdish separatist conflict in Iran, but I don’t know much about the history of the Iranian Kurds.

There is also an Assyrian separatist movement in Iraq and possibly in Syria. The movement is unarmed. The Assyrians have been horribly persecuted by Arab nationalist racists in the region, in part because they are Christians. They have been targeted by Islamo-Nazis in Iraq during this Iraq War with a ferocity that can only be described as genocidal.

The Kurds have long persecuted the Assyrians in Iraqi Kurdistan. There have been regular homicides of Assyrians in the north, up around the Mosul region. This is just related to the general way that Muslims treat Christian minorities in many Muslim states – they persecute them and even kill them. There is also a lot of land theft going on.

While the Kurdish struggle is worthwhile, it is becoming infected with the usual nationalist evil that afflicts all ethnic nationalism. This results in everyone who is not a Kurdish Sunni Muslim being subjected to varying degrees of persecution, disenfranchisement and discrimination. It’s a nasty part of the world.

In Syria, the Assyrians live up near the Turkish and Iraqi borders. Arab nationalist racists have been stealing their land for decades now and relocating the Assyrians to model villages, where they languish in poverty. Assad’s regime is not so secular and progressive as one might suspect.

There is a separatist conflict in Bougainville in New Guinea. I am sure that many different tongues are spoken on that island, as there are 800 different tongues spoken in Papua New Guinea. The conflict is rooted in the fact that Bougainville is rich in copper, but almost all of this wealth is stolen by Papua New Guinea and US multinationals, so the Bougainville people see little of it. Language has little or nothing to do with it.

There are separatist movements in the Ahwaz and Balochistan regions of Iran, along with the aforementioned Kurdish movement. It is true that different languages are spoken in these regions, but that has little to do with the conflict.

Arabic is spoken in Khuzestan, the land of the Iranian Arabs. This land has been part of Persia for around 2,000 years as the former land of Elam. The Arabs complain that they are treated poorly by the Persians, and that they get little revenue to their region even though they are sitting on a vast puddle of oil and natural gas.

Iran should not be expected to part with this land, as it is the source of much of their oil and gas wealth. Many or most Iranians speak Arabic anyway, so there is not much of a language issue. Further, Arab culture is promoted by the Islamist regime even at the expense of Iranian culture, much to the chagrin of Iranian nationalists.

The Ahwaz have been and are being exploited by viciously racist Arab nationalists in Iraq, and also by US imperialism, and most particularly lately, British imperialism, as the British never seem to have given up the colonial habit. This conflict is not about language at all. Most Ahwaz don’t even want to separate anyway; they just want to be treated like humans by the Iranians.

Many of Iran’s 8% Sunni population lives in Balochistan. The region has maybe 2% of Iran’s population and is utterly neglected by Iran. Sunnis are treated with extreme racist contempt by the Shia Supremacists who run Iran. This conflict has to do with the fight between the Shia and Sunni wings of Islam and little or nothing to do with language.

There is a separatist movement in Iran to split off Iranian Azerbaijan and merge it with Azerbaijan proper. This movement probably has little to do with language and more to do with just irredentism. The movement is not going to go very far because most Iranian Azeris do not support it.

Iranian Azeris actually form a ruling class in Iran and occupy most of the positions of power in the government. They also control a lot of the business sector and seem to have a higher income than other Iranians. This movement has been co-opted by pan-Turkish fascists for opportunistic reasons, but it’s not really going anywhere. The CIA is now cynically trying to stir it up with little success. The movement is peaceful.

There is a Baloch insurgency in Pakistan, but language has little to do with it. These fiercely independent people sit on top of a very rich land which is ruthlessly exploited by Punjabis from the north. They get little or no return from this natural gas wealth. Further, this region never really consented to being included in the Pakistani state that was carved willy-nilly out of India in 1947.

It is true that there are regions in the Caucasus that are rebelling against Russia. Given the brutal and bloody history of Russian imperial colonization of this region and the near-continuous rebellious state of the Muslims resident there, one wants to say they are rebelling against Imperial Russia.

Chechnya is the worst case, but Ingushetia is not much better, and things are bad in Dagestan too. There is also fighting in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia. These non-Chechen regions are getting increasingly radicalized as consequence of the Chechen War. There has also been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Chechens to expand the conflict over to the other parts of the Caucasus.

Past rebellions were often pan-Caucasian also. Although very different languages are spoken in these areas, different languages are still spoken all across Russia. Language has little to do with these conflicts, as they have more to do with Russian imperialism and colonization of these lands and the near 200-year violent resistance of these fierce Muslim mountain tribes to being colonized by Slavic infidels.

There is not much separatism in the rest of Russia.

Tuva reserves the right to split away, but this is rooted in their prior history as an independent state within the USSR (Tell me how that works?) for two decades until 1944, when Stalin reconquered it as a result of the conflict with the Nazis. The Tuvans accepted peacefully.

Yes, the Tuvans speak a different tongue, but so do all of the Siberian nations, and most of those are still with Russia. Language has little to do with the Tuvan matter.

There is also separatism in the Bashkir Republic and Adygea in Russia. These have not really gone anywhere. Only 21% of the residents of
Adygea speak Circassian, and they see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. This conflict may have something to do with language. The Adygean conflict is also peripherally related the pan-Caucasian struggle above.

In the Bashkir Republic, the problem is more one of a different religion – Islam, as most Bashkirs are Muslim. It is not known to what degree language has played in the struggle, but it may be a factor. The Bashkirs also see themselves as overrun by Russian-speaking immigrants. It is dubious that the Bashkirs will be able to split off, as the result will be a separate nation surrounded on all sides by Russia.

The Adygean, Tuvan and Bashkir struggles are all peaceful.

The conflict in Georgia is complex. A province called Abkhazia has split off and formed their own de facto state, which has been supported with extreme cynicism by up and coming imperialist Russia, the same clown state that just threatened to go to war to defend the territorial integrity of their genocidal Serbian buddies. South Ossetia has also split off and wants to join Russia.

Both of these reasonable acts prompted horrible and insane wars as Georgia sought to preserve its territorial integrity, though it has scarcely been a state since 1990, and neither territory ever consented to being part of Georgia.

The Ossetians and Abkhazians do speak separate languages, and I am not certain why they want to break away, but I do not think that language has much to do with it. All parties to these conflicts are majority Orthodox Christians.

Myanmar is a hotbed of nations in rebellion against the state. Burma was carved out of British East India in 1947. Part of Burma had actually been part of British India itself, while the rest was a separate colony called Burma. No sooner was the ink dry on the declaration of independence than most of these nations in rebellion announced that they were not part of the deal.

Bloody rebellions have gone on ever since, and language has little or nothing to do with any of them. They are situated instead on the illegitimacy of not only the borders of the Burmese state, but of the state itself.

Thailand does have a separatist movement, but it is Islamic. They had a separate state down there until the early 1800′s when they were apparently conquered by Thais. I believe they do speak a different language down there, but it is not much different from Thai, and I don’t think language has anything to do with this conflict.

There is a conflict in the Philippines that is much like the one in Thailand. Muslims in Mindanao have never accepted Christian rule from Manila and are in open arms against the state. Yes, they speak different languages down in Mindanao, but they also speak Tagalog, the language of the land.

This just a war of Muslims seceding because they refuse to be ruled by infidels. Besides, this region has a long history of independence, de facto and otherwise, from the state. The Moro insurgency has little to nothing to do with language.

There are separatist conflicts in Indonesia. The one in Aceh seems to have petered out. Aceh never agreed to join the fake state of Indonesia that was carved out of the Dutch East Indies when the Dutch left in 1949.

West Papua is a colony of Indonesia. It was invaded by Indonesia with the full support of US imperialism in 1965. The Indonesians then commenced to murder 100,000 Papuans over the next 40 years. There are many languages spoken in West Papua, but that has nothing to do with the conflict. West Papuans are a racially distinct people divided into vast numbers of tribes, each with a separate culture.

They have no connection racially or culturally with the rest of Indonesia and do not wish to be part of the state. They were not a part of the state when it was declared in 1949 and were only incorporated after an Indonesian invasion of their land in 1965. Subsequently, Indonesia has planted lots of settler-colonists in West Papua.

There is also a conflict in the South Moluccas , but it has more to do with religion than anything else, since there is a large number of Christians in this area. The South Moluccans were always reluctant to become a part of the new fake Indonesian state that emerged after independence anyway, and I believe there was some fighting for a while there. The South Moluccan struggle has generally been peaceful ever since.

Indonesia is the Israel of Southeast Asia, a settler-colonial state. The only difference is that the Indonesians are vastly more murderous and cruel than the Israelis.

There are conflicts in Tibet and East Turkestan in China. In the case of Tibet, this is a colony of China that China has no jurisdiction over. The East Turkestan fight is another case of Muslims rebelling against infidel rule. Yes, different languages are spoken here, but this is the case all over China.

Language is involved in the East Turkestan conflict in that Chinese have seriously repressed the Uighur language, but I don’t think it plays much role in Tibet.

There is also a separatist movement in Inner Mongolia in China. I do not think that language has much to do with this, and I believe that China’s claim to Inner Mongolia may be somewhat dubious. This movement is unarmed and not very organized.

There are conflicts all over India, but they don’t have much to do with language.

The Kashmir conflict is not about language but instead is rooted in the nature of the partition of India after the British left in 1947. 90% of Kashmiris wanted to go to Pakistan, but the ruler of Kashmir was a Hindu, and he demanded to stay in India.

The UN quickly ruled that Kashmir had to be granted a vote in its future, but this vote was never allowed by India. As such, India is another world-leading rogue and scofflaw state on a par with Israel and Indonesia. Now the Kashmir mess has been complicated by the larger conflict between India and Pakistan, and until that is all sorted out, there will be no resolution to this mess.

Obviously India has no right whatsoever to rule this area, and the Kashmir cause ought to be taken up by all progressives the same way that the Palestinian one is.

There are many conflicts in the northeast, where most of the people are Asians who are racially, often religiously and certainly culturally distinct from the rest of Indians.

None of these regions agreed to join India when India, the biggest fake state that has ever existed, was carved out of 5,000 separate princely states in 1947. Each of these states had the right to decide its own future to be a part of India or not. As it turned out, India just annexed the vast majority of them and quickly invaded the few that said no.

“Bharat India”, as Indian nationalist fools call it, as a state, is one of the silliest concepts around. India has no jurisdiction over any of those parts of India in separatist rebellion, if you ask me. Language has little to do with these conflicts.

Over 800 languages are spoken in India anyway, each state has its own language, and most regions are not in rebellion over this. Multilingualism with English and Hindi to cement it together has worked just fine in most of India.

Sri Lanka’s conflict does involve language, but more importantly it involves centuries of extreme discrimination by ruling Buddhist Sinhalese against minority Hindu Tamils. Don’t treat your minorities like crap, and maybe they will not take up arms against you.

The rebellion in the Basque country of Spain and France is about language, as is Catalonian nationalism.

IRA Irish nationalism and the Scottish and Welsh independence movements have nothing to do with language, as most of these languages are not in good shape anyway.

The Corsicans are in rebellion against France, and language may play a role. There is an independence movement in Brittany in France also, and language seems to play a role here, or at least the desire to revive the language, which seems to be dying.

There is a possibility that Belgium may split into Flanders and Wallonia, and language does play a huge role in this conflict. One group speaks French and the other Dutch.

There is a movement in Scania, a part of Sweden, to split away from Sweden. Language seems to have nothing to do with it.

There is a Hungarian separatist movement, or actually, a national reunification or pan-Hungarian movement, in Romania. It isn’t going anywhere, and it unlikely to succeed. Hungarians in Romania have not been treated well and are a large segment of the population. This fact probably drives the separatism more than language.

There are many other small conflicts in Europe that I chose not to go into due to limitations on time and the fact that I am getting tired of writing this post! Perhaps I can deal with them at a later time. Language definitely plays a role in almost all of these conflicts. None of them are violent though.

To say that there are separatists in French Polynesia is not correct. This is an anti-colonial movement that deserves the support of anti-colonial activists the world over. The entire world, evidenced by the UN itself, has rejected colonialism. Only France, the UK and the US retain colonies. That right there is notable, as all three are clearly imperialist countries. In this modern age, the value of retaining colonies is dubious.

These days, colonizers pour more money into colonies than they get out of them. France probably keeps Polynesia due to colonial pride and also as a place to test nuclear weapons and maintain military bases. As the era of French imperialism on a grand scale has clearly passed, France needs to renounce its fantasies of being a glorious imperial power along with its anachronistic colonies.

Yes, there is a Mapuche separatist movement in Chile, but it is not going anywhere soon, or ever.

It has little to do with language. The Mapudungan language is not even in very good shape, and the leaders of this movement are a bunch of morons. Microsoft recently unveiled a Mapudungan language version of Microsoft Windows. You would think that the Mapuche would be ecstatic. Not so! They were furious. Why? Oh, I forget. Some Identity Politics madness.

This movement has everything to do with the history of Chile. Like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile was one of the Spanish colonies that was settled en masse late. For centuries, a small colonial bastion battled the brave Mapuche warriors, but were held at bay by this skilled and militaristic tribe.

Finally, in the late 1800′s, a fanatical and genocidal war was waged on the Mapuche in one of those wonderful “national reunification” missions so popular in the 1800′s (recall Italy’s wars of national reunification around this same time). By the 1870′s, the Mapuche were defeated and suffered a devastating loss of life.

Yet all those centuries of only a few Spanish colonists and lots of Indians had made their mark, and at least 70% of Chileans are mestizos, though they are mostly White (about 80% White on average). The Mapuche subsequently made a comeback and today number about 9% of the population.

Because they held out so long and so many of them survived, they are one of the most militant Amerindian groups in the Americas. They are an interesting people, light-skinned and attractive, though a left-wing Chilean I knew used to chortle about how hideously ugly they were.

Hawaiian separatism is another movement that has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism and little to do with language. The Hawaiian language, despite some notable recent successes, is not in very good shape. The Hawaiian independence movement offers nothing to non-Hawaiians (I guess only native Hawaiians get to be citizens!) and is doomed to fail.

Hawaiians are about 22% of the population, and they are the only ones that support the independence movement. No one else supports it. It’s not going anywhere. The movers and shakers on the island (Non-Hawaiians for the most part!) all think it’s ridiculous.

There are separatists in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, but I doubt that language has much to do with it. Like the myriad other separatist struggles in the NE of India, these people are ethnically Asians and as such are not the same ethnicity as the Caucasians who make up the vast majority of the population of this wreck of a state.

This is another conflict that is rooted in a newly independent fake state. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were incorporated into Bangladesh after its independence from Pakistan in 1971. As a fake new state, the peoples of Bangladesh had a right to be consulted on whether or not they wished to be a part of it. The CHT peoples immediately said that they wanted no part of this new state.

At partition, the population was 98.5% Asian. They were Buddhists, Hindus and animists. Since then, the fascist Bangladesh state has sent Bengali Muslim settler-colonists to the region. The conflict is shot through with racism and religious bigotry, as Muslim Bengalis have rampaged through the region, killing people randomly and destroying stuff as they see fit. Language does not seem to have much to do with this conflict.

I don’t know much about the separatist struggle of the Moi in Vietnam, but I think it is more a movement for autonomy than anything else. The Moi are Montagnards and have probably suffered discrimination at the hands of the state along with the rest of the Montagnards.

Zanzibar separatism in Tanzania seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with language, but has a lot more to do with geography. Zanzibar is a nice island off the coast of Tanzania which probably wants nothing to do with the mess of a Tanzanian state.

The conflict also has a lot to do with race. Most residents of Zanzibar are either Arabs or descendants of unions between Arabs and Africans. In particular, they deny that they are Black Africans. I bet that is the root of the conflict right there.

There were some Talysh separatists in Azerbaijan a while back, but the movement seems to be over. I am not sure what was driving them, but language doesn’t seem to have been a big part of it. Just another case of new members of a fake new state refusing to go along for the ride.

There were some Gagauz separatists in Moldova a while back, but the movement appears to have died down. Language does seem to have played a role here, as the Gagauz speak a Turkic tongue totally unrelated to the Romance-speaking Moldovans.

Realistically, it’s just another case of a fake new state emerging and some members of the new state saying they don’t want to be a part of it, and the leaders of the fake new state suddenly invoking inviolability of borders in a state with no history!

In summary, as we saw above, once we get into Europe, language does play a greater role in separatist conflict, but most of these European conflicts are not violent. In the rest of the world, language plays little to no role in the vast majority of separatist conflicts.

The paranoid and frankly fascist notion voiced by rightwing nationalists the world over that any linguistic diversity in the world within states must be crushed as it will inevitably lead to separatism at best or armed separatism at worst is not supported by the facts.

Understanding the War in Iraq

Repost from the old site.

I am not talking about the reasons why the US went to war with Iraq. Those reasons are so many and varied that we may never figure it out. I recommend The Assassin’s Gate – America in Iraq by George Packer as a good place to start. What I am talking about is the insane civil war that has ensued, or, to be precise, has been present from the very start.

Without an understanding in Arab, Persian and Islamic history, one is at a loss to explain the present conflict. Most Americans know almost nothing about this history. This excellent article in the LA Times – Iraq Returns to Its Persian Roots – is one of the most honest articles on the civil war that I have ever read.

The only thing we hear is silly sound bites about how Iran is “meddling” in the region (If we had a huge, hostile, menacing army in Mexico threatening to invade the US, we would act how?), how Iraqis all hate Iran, how Iran is 100% behind the insurgency, how the Sunni Gulf Kingdoms are US allies, how the enemy of the whole region is Iran and Shiism and the how the Wahhabis in the Gulf are our allies against the Shia threat, on and on.

The truth is, the neoconservatives started out wanting to install a pro-US Shia regime in Iraq. Iraq’s Sunnis were the enemy, not because they were Sunnis, but because they were Arab nationalists who were strongly anti-Zionist and anti- US imperialism. There is a reason why the statue of Michael Aflaq, the Christian founder of the Baath Party, was one of the first things destroyed by the American invaders.

At the same time, insanely, the fundamentalist Sunnis in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf were not seen as part of the problem. Why not? Because their leadership sold out and made face-saving alliances with the West, all while promoting or cottoning to fundamentalism and jihadism at home and even exporting it abroad as a way to get rid of rebellious young Islamists.

Qaddafi’s Libya was targeted for his rebellious, anti-Zionist and anti-US imperialist stance, even though his is one of the most secular regimes in the region. Syria was targeted solely due to its hostility to Zionism (and to a lesser extent, its patriotic Arab nationalism) and for no other reason, even though Syria is one of the most secular regimes in the Arab World, and one of the most pro-Christian.

The lunacy of US policy in the region is clear. We are aligned with some of the most fundamentalist Islamic states and promoters of terrorism (Sunni Salafism tends to come from the Gulf and Pakistan). At the same time, our worst enemies in the Arab World are some of the secular states that treat women and Christians best.

At the same time, the actual Sunni terrorists themselves are demonized and a fake war is invented against them, while the regimes that shelter and fund them (the Gulf and Pakistan) get off scot-free. The fundamentalist Shia in Lebanon and Iran are perversely lambasted as terrorists while the House of Saud and the Yemeni regime walk free.

Make sense yet? It won’t because it doesn’t. There’s no rhyme nor reason to it. Those who suck the US tit are good guys, whether they are Osama’s buddy or not. Those who oppose US imperialism and Zionism in the region are etched as the font of World Terrorism for standing up to colonialism in the region.

The plan for Iraq was US would go in, topple the rebellious Iraqi Sunnis, put the long-abused Shia in power, the resulting regime would be pro-US, make peace with Israel, dismantle the welfare state, and put in a radical free market economy open to rape by foreign corporations. One wonders what these people were thinking?

As the article makes clear, Iran is not meddling in Iraq. The Iraqi Shia, are, to a large degree, pro-Iranian. Many speak Persian, use Persian script and travel to Iran. Iranians regularly travel to the holy cities in the South. The pro-Iranian Shia are no more “traitors” to Iraq and than pro-Canadian Americans would be traitors to America.

As recently as 1900, up to 10% of Baghdad’s population was Persian. Najaf has always been considered to be an outpost of Persian influence by Iraq’s Ottoman and Arab rulers – it was not really considered to be a part of Iraq. Najaf has been a “Persian” city for several hundred years.

Recently, Persian is often heard in Karbala and Najaf, young Shia women are adopting the chic fashions of their Iranian contemporaries, posters of Ali and Hussein – Shia saints – dot the buildings as in Iranian cities, motorcycles have become popular as in Iran, and the youth have adopted a taste for opium and heroin along with Iranian youth.

Iraq – part of it anyway – is becoming an Iranian province. To Iraq’s Sunnis, this is the ultimate outrage.

This is not because the evil Iranians have put guns to innocent Iraqi heads and forced them into some Iranian cultural and military dictatorship. It is because many Iraqi Shia simply see themselves as having an affinity with Iran more than with the Arab World – it’s a voluntary association.

The entire history of Iraq in recent centuries has consisted of keeping the Shia majority down. First the Sunnis ruled through their association with the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Then the British came in, saw the Sunnis as natural rulers and installed them as Arab figureheads in British colonial Iraq.

Later, Arab nationalism replicated Sunni dominance – Arab nationalism is Sunni Muslim and Arab the same way that US nationalism is White and Christian.

Saddam tried hard to keep the Shia down. Motorcycles were banned as they smacked of Iran. The Ashura Festival, the commemoration of the the death of Imam Hussein, was banned by Saddam. Saddam destroyed many Shia shrines and executed many top Shia clerics and leaders. He ethnically cleansed 70,000 Iranians who had “Persian blood”, a chilling bit of racialism reminiscent of the Nazis’ racial laws.

He invaded Iran in a blatant war of aggression to annex Khuzestan (the richest oil and gas region in Iran), which he claimed was Arab land, an act reminiscent of Hitler’s attacking neighboring countries to win back parts of the True Germany.

In reality, Khuzestan has been an integral part of Iran for at least 1,800 years. Arab migrants filtered into the area over time. To Saddam’s dismay, most Khuzestan Arabs fought for Iran against Iraq.

Businesses were ordered to stay open on Nowruz, the Persian New Year. As far back as the late 1960′s, the Iraqi Shia who visited Sunni Tikrit, Fallujah and Samarra feared for their lives.

The Sunni insurgents have carried on the vicious racial hatred. From the very start, they were setting off huge car bombs in Najaf and killing top Shia politicians. The destruction of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra in February 2006 not only devastated one of the holiest sites in Shiism, it also destroyed a mosque built by Iranian designers.

There were three devastating suicide car bomb attacks in the Shorja Market in Baghdad in 2007. The name means “salty well” in Persian. Among other reasons, the market was probably attacked for what it represented – a market established by Persian traders long ago.

Even in the pronouncements of the “secular” Baathist insurgency, attacks on Shia civilians are justified as settling accounts with “Safavids”. The Safavids were an Iranian dynasty that conquered part of Iraq for 30 years or so in the early 1600′s. In part of the Arab World – especially the Levant, Mesopotamia and the Gulf – Shia are commonly and disparagingly referred to as “Safavids” – the equivalent of calling a Black a nigger.

In the 1500′s, Safavids made Shiism the state religion of Iran, forcibly converted and executed vast numbers of Iranian Sunnis, and invaded neighboring lands. The Ottomans and Safavids fought for decades over Iraq, the origins of the Sunni-Shia conflict in the region.

Iran has no designs on the region and is not interested in attacking any other country, in particular Israel and including any of the Gulf Countries. Sunnis rarely convert to Shiism, and Iran does not spend money trying to get Sunnis to convert.

There is no way that Iran can “control” or “dominate” the Arab World – a typical Arab nationalist or Sunni chauvinist fantasy. The Arab World does not want to be dominated by Iran, so it cannot occur, and Iran has no interest in dominating the Arab World anyway.

What’s Going On In Iran? (With Emphasis on Iranian Nationalism and Iranian Secessionist Movements)

Repost from the old site.

Updated February 6, 2008:

Most people do not realize that the famed Shah of Iran was actually a blood and soil, Persian supremacist, ethnic nationalist, primordialist, volkisch, fascist along the same lines as Hitler’s Nazis and Milosevic’s Serbs. Yet it is true – in fact, the Shah even formed an alliance with Nazi Germany.

The Nazis attempted to form all sorts of alliances with people they mistakenly regarded as genetic inferiors – including Bosnian Muslims, Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, Ukrainian, White Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian rightwing nationalists, Iranians and some of the upper-caste peoples of East India.

The East Indians, of course, are part of the original Aryans – the light-skinned invaders who descended from the steppes into India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan at various times in the past 3,500 years. In India, they displaced the native Indians – the Dravidians or South Indians – and pushed them to South.

They also twisted the Hindu religion by adding on their casteism, which was apparently not present in the original pre-Aryan system. Originally, in the caste system, those at the top were the lightest-skinned and the lowest castes tended to be the darkest. It is interesting that over thousands of years the Brahmins have become progressively darker.

The Nazis were fascinated that these Brahmins regarded themselves as fellow Aryans and even sent researchers over to India to measure skulls and analyze the facial characteristics of statues and engage in other peculiarities of Nazi racial research. The Brahmin class of India has always returned the favor and many have long been supporters of Hitler, Nazism and fascism in general.

The fascinating article linked above deals with something that is little known to most Americans – a neat summary of many of the views expressed by what are best termed Iranian nationalists. Americans have no understanding at all of this ancient, proud culture.

The piece notes the Western deceit that modern nationalism began with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1600′s Europe, when the principle of inviolable national borders was first codified. In fact, this is a Western narcissistic view. Other nations, in particular Persians and Iranians, have a long history of what could be called nationalism, depending on how one defines the term, dating back maybe 2500 years to Cyrus the Great.

US idiots like George Bush and the council of clueless super-Zionist advisors whispering in his ear provoke this ancient culture at their peril.

The piece goes on to discuss the Minorities Question in modern Iran. Most people do not recognize that Persian and Iranian are not synonymous. Persian is an ethnic group, but Persians only constitute 51% of all Iranians. Azerbaijanis are a huge group in the northwest, constituting 23%.

US imperialism and Kurdish nationalism make much of Azerbaijanis supposed desire to break away from Iran, but there is not much truth to that. Those who say such things do not understand history. It is true that there is an Azerbaijani minority that invokes irredentism and wishes to break away from Iran and reunite with “northern Azerbaijan”, the independent state of Azerbaijan.

But the majority of Azerbaijanis have no desire to do such a thing. People do not understand that despite the racist Persian ethnic nationalism of the Shah, Azerbaijanis have typically ruled Iran for many centuries now. In fact the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Khameini is an Azerbaijani.

The Sassanid Empire was one of the most prominent empires in the world from 200-600, a rival to the Roman Empire. This culture, to many, represents the pinnacle of Iran’s power in the world. Its religion was Zoroastrianism and it was characterized by great tolerance towards religious minorities, especially Christians and Jews.

The Sassanids were defeated in the mid-650′s by invading Arab Muslim armies, many Iranians were put to the sword, and many Iranian nationalists have resented the resulting forced imposition of Islam ever since. According to these nationalists, there is a difference between those societies where Islam was “native” – supposedly Arab societies, and those where it was imposed by force – supposedly all non-Arab countries.

This greatly simplifies matters, and in many ways is false. For instance, Islam has deep roots in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Muslim India, Eastern China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Albania, Kosova, Bosnia, the Caucasus and in Sub-Saharan Africa.

So the case of Iran is not generalizable. In most cases, where Islam conquered non-Arab lands, many of the natives converted and become passionate Muslims. In fact, some of the world’s most ferocious and fundamentalist Muslims have traditionally come from non-Arab lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan. But in Iran, something different happened: Islam ran up against Persian nationalism.

To understand the conflict between Iranian nationalism and Islam is essential to understanding modern Iranian culture. The Khomeinists have enraged Iranian nationalists by declaring wholesale war on Iranian nationalism. According to the mullahs, there is no need for Iranian nationalism since Islam supplants it. Iranian nationalists are often theologically diverse, secular, atheists, agnostics, or even Zoroastrians.

Even worse, the mullahs seem to have imposed a pro-Arabism on Iran. This is sure to infuriate Iranian nationalists. Iranian nationalists have always had a resentful and bigoted attitudes towards Arabs (and some towards Muslims – who they regard as having a barbaric Arab religion).

When you hear an Iranian nationalist hurl an insult like “lizard-eating Mohammadens”, this is the rage they are mining. It is the rage at a primitive culture of desert barbarian wanderers – so barbaric, in fact, that they “ate lizards” – that invaded the glorious, superior, Sassanid Zoroastrian Empire and destroyed it, supplanting it with inferior Arab Islamic culture and religion.

The mullahs have not only waged war on symbols of Iranian nationalism, but they have also tried to import Arab culture and language, much to the fury of Iranian nationalists. Since, to Islamic fundamentalists, Arabic is the language of Islam (a bigoted and irrational construct on its face), they tend to promote Arab culture and language over native culture and language.

This tends to produce friction between Islamic fundamentalists and non-Arab nationalists in the non-Arab parts of the Muslim World. For instance, it is often difficult to find a copy of the Koran in any language other than Arabic. And many non-Arab Muslims claim that Arabs, especially Gulf Arabs, look down on them and despise them when they go Mecca on hajj.

The Arab chauvinism in Islam has been a long-term hindrance to spread of the religion. Furthermore, for centuries after the conquest of Islam, the greatest Iranian poets, authors and scientists – beloved by all Iranian nationalists – were ordered to be killed by the fundamentalist Islamic morons ruling Islam at the time. Few of these heroes of Iranian culture were killed, but the fact that their deaths were even condoned stings.

It is important to note that Shia Islam was also imposed at the point of the sword sometime later and many Sunni Iranians were put to death.

The remains of this violent religious imposition can be seen today, when one notes that Sunni Islam (Iran is only about 75% Shia Muslim) continues to hold sway in the outliers of the Iranian state – in the desolate Balochi barrens of the southeast, in the northeast near Afghanistan, and in wild, mountainous Iranian Kurdistan in the northwest.

All of these parts of the Iranian state remain largely outside of the regime’s control, and Sunnis continue to complain, legitimately, of discrimination by Iranian Shia Muslims.

The rage between Iranians and Arabs is difficult for outsiders to fathom, but is essential to understanding the region. Sunni Islam is synonymous with Arab identity and nationalism, as Juan Cole astutely notes, in the same way that White Christianity is synonymous with American nationalism. Hence, the secularism of Arab nationalists has always been a bit of a lie.

The Arab masses and regimes are Sunni. Shia minorities have traditionally been suppressed in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and even in Lebanon. This is the root of the Sunni-Shia conflict that rages ferociously in Iraq today.

See here for a particularly bigoted and insane example of Sunni Iraqi bigotry from the interesting blog of a secular Iraqi woman. Note that she ridiculously claims that Shia Islam was invented by the Iranians to destroy the Sunni Islamic civilization of the Arabs.

I realize that sounds like the ravings of a mentally ill person, but this is how many Sunni Muslims, especially Sunni Arabs from Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Levant, regard Iran and Shiism.

When we understand this sick, crazy, racist hatred, we can understand why Saddam attacked Iran, and why he was supported in that war by all of the states in the Arab peninsula. We can understand why the secular King of Jordan intones darkly about a “Shia Belt” snaking ominously from Iran, across Iraq, to Syria and Southern Lebanon under Hezbollah control.

We can understand the insane, Nazi-like massacres of crowds of Shia civilians – men, women and children of all ages – in Iraq by both the Sunni Islamist guerrilla animals and Saddam’s secular, Shia-hating fascist Arab nationalists. We can understand why the government of Yemen launched a murderous war on the Zaidi Shia of northern Yemen, who constitute 40% of Yemen but are locked out of the state.

We can understand why the Sunni Muslim states of the Gulf are supporting the preliminary plans for a US attack on Iran, and why these states and the Iraqi Sunni-Nazi rebels will stand up and cheer till they can’t talk if the US invades Iran. We can understand why the viciously racist Sunni Arab bigots of Iraq intone darkly, “We will never be ruled by the blackhats (the Shia)”.

While the Arab attitude towards Iran and the Shia has always been one of sheer, Nazi-like racist hatred, the Iranian attitude towards Arabs has tended to be one of the disdain of a supposedly superior people for a supposedly inferior one.

I have droned on enough on this subject, and we need to move on to the rest of the post. If you wish to dive into this fascinating matter further, click the link above and take a crash course in Iranian history, the minorities of Iran and modern-day Iranian nationalism. I hope you enjoyed this excursion.

April 7, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot and seriously wounded Hojatoleslam Yusef Mohammadi Soleimani, a top cleric who represents Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the Centre for Higher Education here.

April 8, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: 6 armed Sunni Islamist guerrillas abducted Eshaq Nezamdoust, a local Iranian official who was in charge of distributing oil products here.

April 9, 2006

Iranshahr, Sistan-Balochistan Province: Sunni Islamist guerrillas shot dead 2 Iranian army officers here, Mostafa Ahmadi and Behzad Qolipour.

May 4, 2006

*****
Many of you are probably aware of the furor over Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the figurehead President of Iran, and his comments regarding Israel and the Holocaust. This much-distorted comments are grist for the propaganda for a campaign to get the US to wage a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, primarily for the benefit of the Zionist state in Israel.

If the US won’t do it, “mad dog” Israel says, then Mad Dog Israel herself may be forced to take matters into her own hand. Ahmadinejad shoots off his mouth quite a bit and says some dumb things, but it’s important to note that he is just a figurehead with little power. Remember when reformist Khatami had the same office as Ahmadinejad, and all the Iran-haters said that Khatami had no power anyway?

Well, shoot, Ahmadinejad has the same power as Khatami. If Khatami had no power than Ahmadinejad also has no power, logically speaking. In Iran, the office of the President seems to be mainly utilized these days to vent off steam from the unhappy population, to give them somewhere to channel their dissatisfied energies.

Ahmadinejad’s comments in question concern his purported remarks to “wipe Israel off the map” and his Holocaust denial. First of all, let us note that Holocaust denial in various forms is not unusual at all amongst Arabs and Muslims, especially Islamists.

Furthermore, many misguided non-genocidal persons on both the Right and Left, are caught up in the nonsense of Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Revisionism. Lamentable as it is, it does not necessarily make one a new Hitler.

As far as Ahmadinejad’s comments to wipe Israel off the map, Juan Cole makes clear that he was apparently paraphrasing Khomeini’s remarks from 25 years ago, when the Ayatollah compared Israel to the Shah’s regime, and said in poetic Persian that “the Occupation regime over Jerusalem shall vanish with the page of time”. Cole is adamant that there is no killing of anyone, much less military action, implied in that remark.

Nevertheless, led by the Jewish Lobby and their Gentile fellow travelers on the Fox TV circuit, the US neoconservatives have been hammering out a devious propaganda campaign designed to paint Ahmadinejad, and Iranian Muslims in general, as insane suicidal maniacs out to finish the work that Hitler started.

The supposed evidence is the Holocaust revisionist remarks and the “wipe Israel off the Earth” remark, which Cole has convincingly demonstrated that it is being misquoted. Supposedly, Ahmadinejad is a member of a Shia mystical sect that believes that the 12th Mahdi, or hidden Mahdi, who supposedly vanished on the site of holy Shia mosque in Samarra that was recently detonated by Al Qaeda, is going to return soon.

This religious belief is roughly analogous to the Christian crazies who think that the “end times” are here and Jesus is coming back soon. The common thread in both loony beliefs is that the world is coming to an end. Because Ahmadinejad believes in this nonsense and supports suicide bombers fighting the Zionist regime in Israel, the Israeli Lobby paints him, and an entire nation of Shia Muslims, as suicidal nutcases.

They want to get a nuclear bomb in order to suicidally fire it at Israel, which in the process will destroy Iran with the inevitable US and Israel nuclear retaliation. Clearly, this is a serious question: Is Iran actually capable of such an insane act? We can’t afford to be wrong about our answer here. I have thought about this for months now, and I do not believe that Iran or its leaders are suicidally insane.

I realize there are ominous consequences if I am wrong, including the deaths of maybe 100,000 Israeli Jews. But I am willing to stick my neck out here, just for the sake of argument. I would also like to take this time to argue passionately against any kind of lunatic US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, a disastrous idea with truly dangerous consequences.
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May 13, 2006

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Kerman Province, Between Kerman and Bam: Armed terrorists with the radical Sunni Islamist group Jundallah (Army of Allah) disguised themselves as cops and set up a roadblock on this highway deep inside Iran and stopped motorists and pulled them out of their vehicles. 11 males were lined up next to a ditch and executed. A 12th man was killed when another vehicle was sprayed with gunfire as it drove past.

A 12-year-old boy was wounded by gunfire, but instead of finishing him off, the terrorists strung him up on a power pylon. He survived, but was badly traumatized. Afterward, the terrorists fled into the Kofout Mountains southeast of Kerman.

The scene of the terrorist attack by Jundallah on the Kerman-Bam highway 130 miles from where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran come together. Terrorists set up a fake roadblock and murdered 12 civilians in cold blood here.

The murders stunned the nation, which despite its “terrorist” reputation, is actually a very safe country for travelers. Jundallah has its origins in the Sunni population of the Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan.

The Sunnis here complain of discrimination and ethnic cleansing by Iranian Shia officials, charges which have a basis in fact. There are suggestions that Jundallah may be based over the border in Afghanistan, possibly in the wild deserts of Nawruz Province. Clearly, Jundallah has a safe haven in the area where Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan all come together. This is one of the more dangerous places on Earth.

Travelers heading there are advised to take a bodyguard, or preferably several bodyguards. None of the three governments in the region have much control over this area. It is overrun with drug traffickers (usually smuggling heroin or opium), who travel in large, very heavily-armed convoys.

They periodically fight it out with Iranian troops. Iranian troops have lost an incredible figure of hundreds of troops in just a few years fighting running battles in this border region with drug traffickers. Jundallah has links to Al Qaeda. In March, they killed 22 people in Zahedan, a very wild and dangerous city located where Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran all come together. Last year, the group beheaded an Iranian security officer.

Iranian officials say that Jundallah is the arm of Al Qaeda inside Iran, and they say that Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi is bin Laden’s right hand man in Iran. That is probably correct.
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May 15, 2006

Kerman Province: Iranian Basij and Revolutionary Guard paramilitaries tracked down and killed 10 terrorists who murdered 12 drivers in cold blood on the Kerman-Bam highway 130 miles from where Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran come together (see May 13 entry for details).

May 19, 2006
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Syria: Syrian officials arrested dozens of leaders of the various Shia Arab Ahwaz fronts who are waging guerrilla war in Iran’s oil-rich Ahwaz Province. I cannot support this struggle, which is simply designed to steal much of Iran’s oil wealth. However, the Arabs in this region fought bravely in the Iran-Iraq War and suffered heavy casualties.

They complain that they do not see much of the oil wealth in this region. The area was heavily damaged in the war, and the Iranian government hasn’t even rebuilt it very much. The Arabs also complain of discrimination. There is some truth to all of this, but one of Iran’s top military leaders is an Ahwaz Arab.

If Iran had any sense, they would institute affirmative action to hire Ahwaz Arabs, rebuild the Ahwaz region and let the area see much more of their present share of the wealth. This conflict has always been fed by Arab nationalist fascists like the Baath fascists in Iraq, whose hatred of Iran borders on the insane and pathological.

Furthermore, in recent days, US and British Special Forces and intelligence are in the region assisting the insurgency. By arresting most of the top leaders of the insurgency, Syria is spitting in the eyes of Arab nationalist bigots all over the Arab World, and is throwing its lot in with Shia solidarity (Syria is ruled by a Shia sect) and Syria’s alliance with Iran.
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Where Helen Thomas is Coming From

This is the famous video where some rabbi set up Helen Thomas and got her on camera saying that the Jews should get out of Palestine and go back to Europe where they came from.

This comment has been attacked as everything from stupid to anti-Semitic. It’s neither, really.

The comment is best analyzed in seeing where Thomas herself is coming from. Helen Thomas is the child of Lebanese Christian immigrants to the US, specifically Greek Orthodox Arabs. These comments of hers are quite in line with the typical Arab attitude about the Zionist Jews forming their state on the ashes of Palestine. The attitude is that the Jews are occupying Arab land in Palestine and that they ought to go back to Europe where they came from. So, she’s just talking like a typical Arab, nothing more, nothing less.

Although many Arabs who say such things are anti-Semites, not all are. Surely they are anti-Zionists. Rather than a battle of racists, this is really a war between two tribes, the Arabs and the Jews, and increasingly between the Muslims and the Jews. Tribal wars are not very pretty affairs, but it’s often incorrect to accuse the parties involved in the war of racism. Were those who hated Germans and Japanese during WW2 a bunch of racists? Get real.

The Jews do not like Arabs very much. Understandably so, as the Arabs won’t stop trying to kill them. Likewise for the Arabs in turn. If members of some enemy tribe kept trying to kill my people and more particularly me, I would surely opt to paint myself with the flimsy stain of temporary racist sin as opposed to daubing my body with the sturdy blotch of universalist death.

But it’s not much of a choice.

Further, Thomas’ comments must be seen in terms of her Greek Orthodox Arab religion. There were many Greek Orthodox living in Palestine before the Nakba, and many were ethnically cleansed. George Habash, leader of the PFLP, was ethnically cleansed with his family from Lydda, and his own sister was killed by the Jews. He was permanently radicalized. The Greek Orthodox refugees spread out to the surrounding Arab states, and many were attracted to secular Arab nationalism. Waddi Haddad, another PFLP radical, was also Greek Orthodox.

In Lebanon, the Greek Orthodox live heavily in the South with the Shia, but they often have their own villages. During the latest Lebanese war, when Israel invaded a Greek Orthodox village, the Lebanese Army surrendered, but the Israelis were soon attacked by a Greek Orthodox militia from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a pro-Syrian and pro-Hezbollah political party.

In the early days of the Lebanon War of 1982, the first suicide bombers were often Leftists, often Lebanese Christians, typically Greek Orthodox, from parties like the SSNP. Only later did Hezbollah take up the tactic.

In Lebanon, the Greek Orthodox support Syria and Hezbollah and despise Israel. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem is a ferocious anti-Zionist and even anti-Semite who has supported suicide bombings and Hamas. The Greek Orthodox had a large population in Jerusalem. Recall that one of the four quarters of the Old City, the Christian Quarter, is mostly Greek Orthodox.

Unfortunately, the Greek Orthodox, and the Orthodox Church in general, has a long history of anti-Semitism. Note the anti-Semitism of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some say that Orthodox anti-Semitism is even worse than Catholic anti-Semitism. Note that the Orthodox Church sees itself as the true pure church, and has never gone through Vatican I, forget Vatican II. My understanding is that they don’t even like Catholics, and consider Catholics to be some sort of liberal deviationists.

The anti-Semitism of the Orthodox involves accusations that the Jews are Christ-killers and the ancient enemies of the Christians. In this way it is similar to Catholic anti-Semitism, which is all about a homicidal or even genocidal response to their descendants of those who committed the Deicide.

The Nazis killed 80% of the Jews of Greece, who were mostly living in the formerly majority-Jewish city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki).  Israelis who vacation in Greece report that Greeks are quite hostile, and describe them as anti-Semites.

One of the worst Christian anti-Semites was the 4th century Archbishop of Constantinople, Church Father Saint John Chrysostom. He delivered a series of homilies about Judaizing Christians, suggesting that they needed to choose one religion or the other.

The Jewish people were driven by their drunkenness and plumpness to the ultimate evil; they kicked about, they failed to accept the yoke of Christ, nor did they pull the plow of his teaching. Another prophet hinted at this when he said: “Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer.”…

Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said: “But as for these my enemies, who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them.”

Here’s an excerpt from Homily 6…

You [Jews] did slay Christ, you did lift violent hands against the Master, you did spill his precious blood. This is why you have no chance for atonement, excuse, or defense.

Pretty ugly stuff.

In spite of these sentiments, or, even more frighteningly, possibly due to them, this man was made an Orthodox saint! His hatred for the Jews was palpable. He wanted them hunted down and killed, and he wanted their synagogues burnt to the ground.

In that sense Orthodox anti-Semitism is worse even than Catholic anti-Semitism founded in part on Saint Augustine. At least Augustine felt that the Jews should be preserved in humiliation as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity. Neither accorded the Jews full humanity, but at least Augustine was willing to let them survive, albeit as some sort of Catholic version of the dhimmi.

So, while I have no knowledge of whether or not Thomas is an anti-Semite, this is the cultural milieu that she comes from. She may have heard dinner-table conversations like this while growing up in her Greek Orthodox home.

Settlers are Not Innocent Civilians

Retrospectively, I support the American Indians for heroically defending their lands against the White settler-colonial imperialist invaders. Defending the homeland against the invaders of all types is the sort of nationalism that is progressive and that everyone should rally around.

Not only that, but it is acceptable for the nationalists defending their homelands to kill the settler-colonial fascist invaders and colonists, including the so-called “innocent civilians” in their midst.

So it was right and proper for Amerindians to kill White adult settlers, for Uighurs and Tibetans to kill Han adult settlers, for Palestinians to kill Jewish adult settlers, for Sarahwi in Spanish Sahara to kill Moroccan adult settlers, for West Papuans to kill Indonesian adult settlers, on and on. I leave child settlers off the target list since they don’t have the ability to leave and go home.In this framework, settlers are not “innocent civilians” at all.

The Chinese fascist regime deliberately flooded Tibet and Xinjiang with Han settlers, who colonized these lands, monopolized the economy, relegated the natives to minority status, and oppressed the natives. This is sheer ethnic warfare of the most barbaric fascist type and it is what was behind the recent ethnic riots in Urumqi, Xinjiang, in China’s West.

The situation with the settler-colonialism of the fascist Jews in Palestine is well-known and needs no elaboration here.

Fascist Indonesia invaded the sovereign state of West Papua in 1965 after the Dutch colonists fled. Since then, they have committed genocide against the natives, most of whom are Melanesians or Papuans and are ethnically unlike the Malays of Indonesia. They have stolen the resources and flooded the land with fascist Malay settler-colonists.

The West Papuans are very poorly armed, often defending themselves with bows and arrows. The West has supported fascist Indonesia to the hilt in this conflict, probably because big US corporate interests have made alliance with the Indonesian fascist elite in plundering the land of West Papua for valuable natural resources.

Spanish Sahara was decolonized and immediately declared its independence in 1953. It was immediately invaded on very hazy and spurious grounds by Morocco. This blatant invasion and conquest of territory by armed imperial force, similar to the case of West Papua, has been supported to the hilt by every single US regime ever since.

The implication is that 65 years after the Great War Against Fascism, fascist regimes the world over continue to find a warm and fuzzy place to call home in the corridors of Washington, DC.

This is due to the fact that monopoly capital will always support fascism, and any state dedicated to monopoly capitalism as the US is will always support fascist regimes around the world, and probably has no choice about the matter. As long as monopoly capital rules the US, we are probably stuck with fascist-lovers in the White House.

The Algerian revolutionaries (I get a lot of my ideology from Frantz Fanon) targeted the pied noir settler-colonialists, and most of them fled.

The Role of Iran in Arab -Islamic Resistance to Imperialism and Zionism

This post will provide an overview of why the Iranian regime is hated so much by US imperialism and Zionism, and why they plotted a Green “color revolution” to throw out one of the last holdouts of Arab – Islamic resistance in the region.

Except for Iran, Syria, Hamas-Gaza and Hezbollah, all of the rest of the Arab and Islamic World has folded in the face of the Zionist onslaught or been bought off by US imperialism.

Saddam was another rejectionist, but the Zionist traitor neoconservatives engineered an illegal invasion to bring him down.

Ghaddafi was threatened with invasion by the same folks, and promptly folded.

The Palestinians now effectively have no outside support.

Egypt collaborates with Zionism to police the Gaza border and assists in the starvation and deprivation of the Gazans. Egyptian police prevent guns from flowing to the Gazans for their noble resistance to the Zionist enemy.

Jordan was captured long ago. Elections are not allowed in Jordan, because the 65% Palestinian population would elect a radical anti-Zionist regime.

Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are bought off and sold to the US. Anti-US and anti-Israel demonstrations are regularly crushed with brutality in Tunisia. None of these states are democracies, because democracy would allow an anti-Zionist and anti-US regime to be elected.

In Arabia, there are no democracies. All of the regimes are sold out to the US. There are US military bases in all nations, for the sole reason of policing the Arabian peoples. The effect is that the Arabian peoples are under a dictatorship of US military bases combined with local satraps and Quislings. It’s true the Saudis allow fighters to go to Arab lands, but only to Iraq to fight the Shia that they hate so much.

Lebanon has been under imperialist-Zionist assault for years now. With the election of a French Jew to head the French state, France is now firmly in the Zionist camp. This, along with a colonial attachment to the Lebanese fake state that never died, explains why France has gone along with imperialism-Zionism in Lebanon.

Iraq is now occupied by imperialism-Zionism in the form of the US military and will be occupied into the forseeable future. Iraq was attacked because it was one of the only Arab holdouts that stood steadfast against imperialism and Zionism in the region. Also, they allowed no bases and opened up their oil to non-Americans.

The invasion, in collaboration with the Zionist enemy, was planned to remove the holdout Saddam of the Arab resistance, to remove the competitors of US oil companies from the oil fields they were developing, to take over Iraq’s oil for the US, to use Iraqi oil to flood the oil market and lower the price, killing the Saudis and Gulf states of their oil weapon (the Gulf Arabians, while US allies, are distrusted by International Zionism, and they hatched the Iraqi invasion).

With permabases in Iraq and the biggest US embassy on Earth in Baghdad, US control over the region was seized by force.

It was only due to fortitude that the Iraqi resistance soon led an insurgency against the invaders. If they would not have done this, we know for a fact that the US military would have done a “left turn at Baghdad, and headed for Syria”, as their Zionist masters were ordering them too.

With Iraq out of the way, Libya was quickly subdued with threats of force.

Arafat was murdered by the Israelis. They placed a Mossad agent as his cook and poisoned his food. The Abbas clique went along with the poisoning since they hated Arafat. Getting Arafat out of the way was a long-standing goal of the Zionist agenda. Then elections were held in Palestine, but the results came out wrong and Hamas won.

The Abbas forces were trained by the US to be the shock troops of Zionism in Palestine. Indeed, Abbas forces are utilized primarily against those Palestinians in Hamas who still dare to resist the Zionist enemy.

A plot was concocted to oust the pro-Syrian regime in Lebanon, but it failed. Syria probably killed Hariri, but Hariri was selling out Lebanon to imperialism and Zionism, and Syria would not stand for that.

What does Syria want? One thing and one thing only. They want the Golan back. For this, they will sacrifice everything, the Palestinians, Arabism, you name it. The only card left that Syria holds to enable it to get back the Golan is their auxiliary force in Lebanon, Hezbollah. This is why Syria must not allow Hezbollah to be dismantled. If Hezbollah is dismantled, Syria has lost their last cards too get the Golan back, and they will never be able to get their land back.

The killing of Hariri resulted in international pressure against Syria, including sanctions. There was also an international effort made to disarm and dissolve Hezbollah. The effort to get rid of Hezbollah seems to have failed, although pro-Hezbollah forces won 45% in the last elections. The mini-Hariri crowd that won with 55% is widely seen as the voice of imperialism and Zionism in Lebanon.

A few years ago, with the connivance of US imperialism, US neoconservatives along with Israel concocted a plot to attack Hezbollah in Lebanon. The purpose here was to decisively defeat Hezbollah and wipe out their substantial missile stockpile. This invasion largely failed to accomplish this mission.

The UN was then given the task of occupying South Lebanon to enforce Zionist and imperialist rule on sovereign Lebanese land. This effort has largely failed, as Hezbollah has restocked their missiles and they are now better armed than before the invasion.

This background shows you that Ahmadinejad is one of the last holdouts in the region against total dominaton by US imperialism and Zionism. This is why the Iranian regime is being targeted so forcefully.