Social Democracy Now

The past week's astonishing wave of demonstrations in France only proves again something I have believed since 1995 (which was the last time that anything on the scale of the present demonstrations occurred in France): the French are the only people on the planet vigilant enough to deserve democracy. Almost everywhere else, apathy rules. In all the English-speaking countries, so-called 'reforms' have eroded wages and living conditions more or less continuously since the late 1970s. Hardly anyone has ever felt bothered to do something about it. Only in France, it seems, are people sufficiently motivated to take on their governments.

When you think about it, the rest of us are totally bloody pathetic. Here in Australia, in keeping with our reactionary Anglo-Saxon traditions, everyone grumbles every time the government does something to erode our living standards and/or working conditions, but does precisely nothing about it. People screamed blue murder, for instance, about the Howard government's introduction of a General Goods and Services Tax (GST) back in the late '90s, but in the end when the Democrats stabbed the Australian people in the back and the legislation was passed all people felt they could do was grit their teeth and bear it. In New Zealand and Ireland, on the other hand, they commit suicide (suicide rates rose dramatically in each country during the period of most intense 'reformism'), but suicide statistics have never deterred ideological fanatics from proceeding, like sleepwalkers, on their predetermined course.

In the U.S., at the other extreme, with the exception of the Latinos, who are currently fighting for the rights of illegal immigrants - I'm sorry to take an unpopular standpoint here, but I just don't think that a country has a chance of preserving decent wages and conditions for its workers if allows employers to continuously flood it with cheap immigrant labour - people rant and rave about using their constitutional rights to bear arms to resist oppressive governments - but, of course, they never do. Instead, they use their much vaunted guns to shoot fellow workers in these appalling workplace tragedies that occur there every so often. (So why exactly do so many Americans make such a fuss about how they need guns to resist the government, when all they really want them for is to shoot each other?)

What I most admire about the French is what others would dismiss as 'negativism.' It's true that people protesting the new law don't seem to have any better ideas as to how to reduce youth unemployment. That said, I think no change is better than a change for the worse. In reactionary times, the only thing socialists can do is wage a war of obstruction. The one misgiving I have about the French demonstrations is the concern that they might backfire. If Chirac and Villepin are finally defeated over this, then that may leave the way clear for Sarkozy, who is not a major player in this battle. If Sarkozy was able to capitalize on a Chirac/Villepin backdown, he would surely seek to implement many far more draconian 'reforms,' and would probably do so ruthlessly. There would be blood in the streets, but he would probably think of a few dead bodies as his administration's baptism of fire.

As is usually the case with current events, the best reporting on the French protests comes from the World Socialist Web Site. If you don't check this website daily (no updates on weekends though), you're really missing out. By the way, you don't have to share the website's politics to be suitably impressed. Most of the party's propaganda gets shoved into the last paragraph of each story: the rest is just excellent reporting and analysis, the sort that, in a genuinely democratic society, we'd be getting from mainstream outlets all the time.

TIRADE FOR THE DAY: In the course of a reasonable defence of the French protests, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research explains that the Great Neoliberal Desideratum, labour market flexibility, is not necessarily linked to low unemployment rates. He then writes, 'Why then is Europe's unemployment currently higher (8.4 percent for the high-income countries of Europe) than that of the United States (4.8 percent)? One possibility is that the European Central Bank (ECB) has kept interest rates higher than it should have in recent years. ...' (SOURCE)

When will Weisbrot stop promoting the hoary old myth of high European unemployment? For a rebuttal of this kind of nonsense, which is based upon rock solid faith in the veracity of the U.S.'s official statistics, however improbable (and there are very few people who really think the U.S. rate is as low as 4.8 percent), see James Paterson, "Deconstructing the 'European unemployment dilemma': A case study in the manipulation of statistics and conceptual models in the discourse of 'Eurosclerosis'" (pdf here).

HUMOUR: Tourism Australia has objected to Daniel Ilic's spoof of its "Where the bloody hell are you?" TV advertising campaign. According to the Sydney Morning Herald : "A comedy writer has been forced to take down an online spoof of the controversial "where the bloody hell are you" TV ad after legal threats. "Dan Ilic, 24, produced a parody of the ad, changing the jingle to "Where the f---ing hell are you?" and inserting negative images of Australian life. The video was viewed about 30,000 times on video website youtube.com. However, Mr Ilac removed it from his website, Downwind Media, after complaints from Tourism Australia, which last week described the ad as "mean spirited and humourless".'

It's actually pretty funny, and shows how Aussies, like the other Anglo-Saxon peoples, continue to sanitize their own images, in this case for the tourist buck, while doing everything possible to demonize immigrants and Muslims. See it here.

or, How the U.S. media struggles to keep the issue of Zionist control of American foreign policy buried.

Part I: The New York Sun campaign

The highlight of the past week was undoubtedly the publication of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a working paper by the dean of Harvard's prestigious Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Stephen Walt, who is also Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Politics, and Dr. John J. Mearsheimer, Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. (PDF download here)

This article was a clear, compelling and in every sense objective analysis of Israel's privileged relationship with the U.S. - one with which I am sure President Kennedy would have agreed heartily - even though I tend to disagree with the authors when they say that 'there is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway U.S. policy towards Israel.' (p. 16) (NOTE 1)

Even if you haven't read this outstanding article - and I urge anyone with even the slightest interest in the process by which American politics have become so debased that they can now be dismissed as a mere function of Zionist interests - you may still know that it's unleashed something of a media firestorm. (NOTE 2)

The New York Sun - a neocon rag whose editor-in-chief and managing editor are both Jews (I refer to Seth Lipsky, who is a former editor of The Forward, a Zionist magazine, and Ira Stoll, who is a former managing editor of The Forward and former North American editor of the Jerusalem Post) - seems to be spearheading the Zionist backlash against Walt and Mearsheimer. Particularly unsavoury was the Sun's piece "Kalb Upbraids Harvard Dean over Israel".

In this article, the Sun predictably solicited only the opinions of prominent Zionist rent-a-mouths like Martin Kalb, Dennis Ross, Mortimer Zuckerman, and Daniel Pipes who can be depended upon to denounce anything even vaguely critical of Israel, whether they know what they are talking about or not. (Who can doubt that if it was in Israel's interests to start lynching Palestinians, these psychopaths would not start insisting that it's nothing less than anti-semitic to criticize the practice?)

Particularly offensive was the claim of the other interviewee, the not-so-famous William Rapfogel, CEO of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, who had the audacity to compare the Kennedy School paper to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, thus proving that when it comes to smear tactics there is no low to which Zionist ideologues will not sink.

A trenchant article has already been written about the use of smear tactics in the Sun article by David Duke, so I won't dwell on the subject here. What I would like to point out is that the paper has stirred such fierce antagonism in Zionist quarters that 'the donor who underwrote the chair occupied by Dean Walt, Robert Belfer,' has expressed his displeasure. (NOTE 3) The paper has therefore been modified so as to emphasize the fact that neither the Kennedy School of Government nor the University of Chicago endorse the paper's contents. (SOURCE) Perhaps in time Belfer will force Walt to retire from the professorship he endowed, presumably as a means of enhacing Zionist influence over the Kennedy School of Government.

A point that cannot be emphasized enough is that academic institutions do not endorse, should not endorse, and, indeed, historically never have endorsed, all the research carried on by their staff. The very point of a high quality academic institution is to grant academic freedom to individuals of outstanding intellectual ability, not to supervise them so that they only do what is politically acceptable. (This, indeed, was one of the reasons Hitler lost WWII - he cared more about ideological conformity in academia than scientific progress.) Institutions like Harvard and Chicago are no more responsible for the research published by their scholars or what they say on radio or TV than ISPs, for example, are responsible for the emails sent on their servers.

But part of the Zionist agenda is clearly to confine and cramp academic freedom to the point where no academic would dare to say anything offensive to Zionists. In short, their aim is to eviscerate academic freedom, which has no meaning if it is circumscribed in any direction. Indeed, it's arguable that they have already achieved this end. Since most academics do not court controversy and do not wish to jeopardize their institutions' sources of funding, watchdog organizations like the David Project whose purpose is to monitor academics on issues relevant to Jews and Israel are probably most accurately described as engaged in mopping up operations. Scholars like Walt and Mearsheimer would seem to stand among the final holdouts.

It is therefore an irony not lost on David Duke - or me - that campaigns such as that currently being waged by the Sun against Walt and Mearsheimer only prove everything that anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists allege - i.e., that rich and powerful Jews aim to rule the world and will do everything they possibly can to pummel gentiles into submission. You really couldn't get more stark confirmationof the essential thesis of the infamous Protocols than the fact that every time an academic sticks his neck out to say something incisive about Israel-related issues, the Zionists orchestrate a media storm (remember those rent-a-mouths?) which promptly sends institution heads scurrying to limit the damage. This is true even of heads of institutions like Harvard and Chicago that one would assume would be powerful enough to resist such blatantly partisan pressures.

It is, therefore, absolutely damning that Walt and Mearsheimer only published their article as a Kennedy School of Government Working Paper because the magazine that had originally commissioned it in 2002 - I wonder if it was Harper's? - got cold feet, and the authors realized that their piece had no chance of being published in an American academic journal. And, it should be said, this is a paper whose only real point is that the U.S.'s unconditional support for Israel has been a marked disadvantage for the United States since the end of the Cold War. Imagine what (orchestrated) pandemonium would have erupted if, for example, the pair had suggested that the foundation of Israel was illegal (which it was) or had mentioned the Holocaust industry shakedown (which puzzlingly they don't)? (SOURCE)

One of the persistent allegations of anti-semitic propaganda has been that the Jews seek to rule the world. It's very easy to laugh at people who suggest such things, as it is hard to get out of the habit of thinking of the world as too large and complex for any one group to control. But what are we to think when, time after time, Jewish interests intervene in our institutions in ways that make it abundantly clear that in fact they already do rule the world? Or at least the richest and most powerful parts of it?

Part II: The Crimson

Whenever a reputable scholar has something critical to say about Israel, the news does get reported, but only in a way which turns the subject to the Zionists' advantage. The familiar strategy is to turn the story reporting the scholar's views into a vehicle for the dissemination of the ideas of jaundiced Zionist ideologues like Pipes and Dershowitz. The Jerusalem Post, for example, devoted the better part of its report on the article to the exposition of Dershowitz's views, even using a quote from him for the article title ("AIPAC study is ignorant propaganda").

I must admit to getting rather fed up with this strategy, so I was rather incensed when an article in the Harvard student newspaper The Crimson turned an article that was ostensibly about the Kennedy School paper into a pulpit for Dershowitz's predictable opinions. I decided to write to the lead writer of this piece, Paras Bhayani, to find out exactly why The Crimson's piece about the Kennedy School paper ("Dean Attacks 'Israel Lobby'") amounted to an opportunity for Dershowitz to shoot his mouth off yet again.

The questions I wanted answers to were 1) how did Dershowitz become the star of the story?; 2) what makes the opinions of such a disreputable figure as Dershowitz worth soliciting anyway?; and 3) is a possible explanation for the article's emphasis on Dershowitz the fact that Bhayani's co-author, Rebecca R. Friedman, is Jewish? Does she have links to Dershowitz or any of the pro-Zionist organizations that collectively constitute the Israel lobby?

Hell hath no fury like a college newspaper reporter who has been caught in the act of staging a propaganda stunt. Bhayani's emails were vicious, incorporating every imaginable smear tactic - for example, he accused me of anti-semitism merely for asking whether his Jewish co-author might have links to Dershowitz or the Israel lobby - and the sense in his messages, insofar as they contained any, revolved around the single idea that the article has to have been fair and impartial because The Crimson has a multicultural staff.

BELOW: Neocon hack Paras Bhayani:



I won't go into the question of the multi-tinted complexion of The Crimson's staff, since it's blindingly obvious that you can be both a Hindu and a neocon (Hindus and Israelis often share an anti-Muslim bias). You can even be a Muslim and a neocon, since in most Muslim countries, including rather obviously Syria and Iran, there are Americanized elites who stand to benefit if the governments of their countries of origin are overthrown by the U.S.

What matters are answers to my questions about Friedman and Dershowitz. Bhayani failed to answer my questions about Friedman, whom he depicted in aggrieved tones as the epitomy of journalistic rectitude, a virtual saint. (Does anyone recall what they say about people who protest too much?) While he was willing to affirm that Friedman has no connections to Dershowitz, he sidestepped the question of whether she had links to the Israel lobby. Rather than answer the question, Bhayani stated merely that he had no idea what the Israel lobby was anyway (which implies, of course, that he hasn't read the article in question).

As for Dershowitz, Bhayani seemed astonished that anyone would suggest that he was a less than reputable figure. He's a Harvard Law School professor! However, you'd have to be woefully ignorant not to know that Dershowitz's pseudo-scholarship has been completely and utterly discredited. That fact is blindingly obvious to anyone who has read Professor Norman Finkelstein's scathing attack on Dershowitz Beyond Chutzpah. (For a small sample of Finkelstein's discoveries about Dershowitz's latest Zionist diatribe, see "Alan Dershowitz Exposed: What if a Harvard Student Did This?" here.) Anyone interviewing Dershowitz ought to have been familiar with it.

A question I did not ask Bhayani - because I am not interested at this stage in receiving yet another of his abusive emails - is whether Ira Stoll may have had a hand in the affair. Stoll, mentioned above as managing editor of the paper spearheading the campaign against Walt and Mearsheimer, was formerly managing editor of - you'll never guess - The Crimson! That The Crimson's approach to the issue exactly mirrors that of the New York Sun hardly seems explicable as a coincidence. It may well be that Stoll left behind a thoroughly Zionized Crimson or that Stoll still possesses sufficient clout at his old paper that every so often he can call it up and get something written to his specifications. Clearly, there is co-ordination going on between The Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun and The Crimson. I suppose I was rather naive to think that Bhayani might have fessed up to the fact.

NOTE 1: My personal view is that lobbying to influence government policy is fundamentally undemocratic, and while it's bad enough when done by corporations it's doubly undemocratic when it is done in order to advance the interests of other countries. I would strongly disapprove (and in fact do disapprove) of lobbying in favour of U.S. interests here in Australia. What's more, one wonders whether Americans would have tolerated it if, during the Cold War, the Soviets had created a powerful lobby group on the scale of AIPAC? I think the answer to that question is glaringly obvious.

NOTE 2: The current text is 82 pages long, but don't be put off - the last half consists of footnotes. Please email me if you'd like me to send you a copy of the original text, which I retain.

NOTE 3: For those who might find the connection interesting, Robert Belfer is a Jewish billionaire and former director of Enron. He has also received an award from the Weizmann Institute of Science for 'his lifelong commitment to the values of Jewish philanthropy … and his strong identification with the aspirations of the Weizmann Institute in the service of Israel.' One hates to speculate what a science institute might have done or be doing now 'in the service of Israel.'

BELOW: Robert Belfer. Isn't it interesting the way obscene wealth, corporate crime, academia and Zionism come together in this one man's person?

There can be no question but that former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosovic, who died in his prison cell in Scheveningen in the Netherlands on March 11, was murdered:

"Milosevic’s lawyer ... reported that his client had written a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov just a day before he died pleading for help and charging that his jailers were giving him harmful drugs in an attempt to silence him. According to Dutch public television, a blood sample taken from Milosevic last month showed traces of a powerful drug used to treat leprosy which can neutralize other drugs the former Yugoslav leader was taking for high blood pressure and heart disease. ... [What's more] last month the court’s chief judge denied his request that he be allowed to receive treatment in Russia before resuming the trial." (SOURCE)

Milosevic's murder proves that the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) at the Hague is nothing more than a kangaroo court a la Nuremberg (where, as was pointed out in an earlier post, fake documents were used to incriminate surviving members of the Nazi regime). But unlike the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which was perhaps the greatest legal travesty in history, the ICT in the Hague respected basic legal proprieties and Milosevic was given enough latitude to defend himself, which he did ably enough. The longer the trial went on, therefore, the more obvious it became that the case against Milosevic had nothing but the prejudices of NATO war propaganda to sustain it. As John Laughland wrote back in 2004:

"Since the trial started in February 2002, the prosecution has wheeled out more than 100 witnesses, and it has produced 600,000 pages of evidence. Not a single person has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes. Whole swaths of the indictment on Kosovo have been left unsubstantiated, even though Milosevic’s command responsibility here is clearest. And when the prosecution did try to substantiate its charges, the result was often farce. Highlights include the Serbian ‘insider’ who claimed to have worked in the presidential administration but who did not know what floor Milosevic’s office was on; ‘Arkan’s secretary’, who turned out to have worked only as a temp for a few months in the same building as the notorious paramilitary; the testimony of the former federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, dramatically rumbled by Milosevic, who produced Markovic’s own diary for the days when he claimed to have had meetings with him; the Kosovo Albanian peasant who said he had never heard of the KLA even though there is a monument to that terrorist organisation in his own village; and the former head of the Yugoslav secret services, Radomir Markovic, who not only claimed that he had been tortured by the new democratic government in Belgrade to testify against his former boss, but who also agreed, under cross-examination by Milosevic, that no orders had been given to expel the Kosovo Albanians and that, on the contrary, Milosevic had instructed the police and army to protect civilians. And these, note, were the prosecution witnesses." (SOURCE)

Laughland concluded, "The possibility is now real that a conviction of Milosevic can be secured only on the widest possible interpretation of the doctrine of command responsibility: for instance, that he knew about atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs and did nothing to stop them." This would involve an extremely awkward legal problem however: for "if Milosevic can be convicted for complicity in crimes committed by people in a foreign country, over whom he had no formal control, how much greater is the complicity of the British government in crimes committed by the US in Iraq, a country with which the UK is in an official coalition? This is not just a cheap political jibe but a serious judicial conundrum: the UK is a signatory to the new International Criminal Court, and so Tony Blair is subject to the jurisdiction of the new Hague-based body whose jurisprudence will be modelled on that of the ICTY. So if Slobbo goes down for ten years in Scheveningen jail because of abuses committed by his policemen, then by rights his cell-mate should, in time, be Tony."

The political embarrassment into which the trial had descended "threatened to become even more of a problem for those who organized it after Milosevic, at the end of February, asked the tribunal to issue a subpoena ordering former US President Bill Clinton to testify, apparently with the aim of showing that Washington itself was responsible for crimes against humanity in waging an illegal war against Yugoslavia and conducting a sustained bombing campaign against civilian targets.' (SOURCE)

It is no doubt in order to forestall the possibility of former president Clinton being exposed as the real war criminal that NATO began thinking hard and fast about the best way to ensure that the trial would never be concluded.

COVER STORY (JUST IN): Milosevic took the fatal drug himself as a ploy to worsen his condition (to get a free trip to Moscow). Yep, read all about it here in the oh-so reliable Sydney Morning Herald. But, as Paul Joseph Watson points out, 'This is frankly absurd. Milosevic only had access to the drugs provided to him by UN appointed doctors and took them under close surveillance. Are we to believe that Milosevic had managed to set up a secret drugs lab in his closely watched prison prison cell and then substituted the drugs while under constant monitoring?' (SOURCE)

Further reading: Paul Joseph Watson, Why Milosevic Was Murdered here (Watson errs by referring to Milosevic as a dictator, however), Christopher Black, An Impartial Tribunal? Really? here and Barry Grey, The Milosevic indictment: legal document or political diatribe? here

POSTSCRIPT: SREBRENICA: It is important to remind readers - as well as to point it out to those who do not already know - that Milosevic had nothing to do with the alleged 'genocide' at Srebrenica in 1995. According to Watson, "Srebrenica was supposedly a 'UN safe zone', yet just like Rwanda, UN peacekeepers deliberately withdrew and allowed the massacre to unfold, then blamed Milosevic." (SOURCE) However, it has not been proven that a massacre took place at Srebrenica at all. As early as 1998, a Portuguese UN military observer, Carlos Martins Branco, who was present at the fall of Srebrenica, suggested that the massacre was a mass media hoax. (SOURCE) That it was indeed a hoax - and one wonders why Watson declines to acknowledge the fact - has been established beyond any doubt by George Pumphrey, author of the book Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching (1998), Jared Israel, Francisco Gil-White and, most importantly, by Peter Brock in his recent book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting Journalism & Tragedy in Yugoslavia (2005). (Incidentally, the latter work is held neither by the British Library nor the Library of Congress. I wonder why?) Here, Swedish peace activist Jan Oberg fights the lies about Milosevic with sarcasm. Brilliant and a must read.