Correspondent: Jeff J. Brown | Cross-linked with 44 Days and Sound Cloud

Dispatch from Beijing No. 1 /  2015.6.22
The Hong Kong “umbrella revolution”, managed by Washington, is merely the latest, most visible attempt to destabilize China, says correspondent Jeff Brown. The intrigues continue.

The modern Chinese calendar is a three-in-one affair. In the top center is the Gregorian date, Monday the 22^nd, along with its 26^th week and the month of June, up top, which is decorated with a stylish logo for the Year of the Ram. Below it on the gold scroll is the Chinese lunar date and below that is the Chinese solar calendar’s reminder that it is the summer solstice. Based on the solar agricultural calendar, to the left in red, is a list of “Do’s”, such as, get married, take a trip and break ground. On the right, in black, is a list of “Don’ts”, like, have surgery, (re)open a store for business or buy/sell an entry ticket. The Chinese calendars have been working like a charm for 4,000 years. (image by www.44days.net)

NOTE: Many links in this article lead to topical radio shows by the author.

Hong Kong

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]appy Dragon Boat Festival on June 20^th. Happy Summer Solstice on the 22^nd. The first European ship landed on China’s shores in 1513 (the story goes that they lied through their front teeth, to take advantage of oriental hospitality, claiming a damaged ship and severe illness, neither of which was true). Pope Gregory XIII would not correct the ever drifting Julian calendar for another 69 years, in 1582.

Yet, before the European colonialists’ arrival, China had and continues to use its own very sophisticated lunar and solar calendars, going back 4,000 years, around the time Abraham was making his way across the Fertile Crescent, from Sumer to Palestine. Chinese calendars know nothing of the Julian and Gregorian time units, like June, Saturday, Monday and the 20^th and 22^nd of the month. The Dragon Boat Festival, which dates back to 100-700 years before Christ, depending on which region of China celebrates it, is marked on China’s lunar calendar. The summer solstice is one of the 24 points on the solar, or agricultural version. Like these intertwined, ancient time chronicles, in order to appreciate and understand China, you must know a little about its long, illustrious history.

The Communists led the Chinese people in their heroic struggle to reconquer their dignity and freedom.  

The impact of Euroamerican-Japanese colonialism on China reached its zenith during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It took the Communists to finally liberate and modernize New China, from 1949 until today. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping brought their people from the cruelty and misery of Western colonialism, to China’s rightful place, as an economic titan on the world stage. Xi Jinping is melding their two starkly different visions into his own, the Chinese Dream, so that his citizens can continue to stand tall, proud and independent from foreign exploitation.

Mao during the Long March (Oct.1934-Oct 1935), an strategic retreat from Kuomintang forces to avoid annihilation, with elements of the First Red Army. Later this and other units would coalesce to form the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

But there were and are some historical blemishes on China’s modern narrative. Taiwan was created with the help of the United States, to serve as an anti-communist, rebel Chinese province.  Then, there are Hong Kong and Macau, former colonies of dying Western capitalism. There are also the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, “given” to the Japanese by Richard Nixon, just six months before his historic trip to Beijing, in 1972.  The many conflicting South China Sea claims are a legal matter that should be decided by the United Nation’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). But Uncle Sam’s pathological, imperial meddling off China’s shores, is making any proper ITLOS judgment impossible.

Last week, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (Legco, or unicameral legislature) refused to pass a law that would allow all Hongkongers to vote under universal suffrage, for the territory’s chief executive (governor) in 2017. The candidates running would be chosen by Hong Kong’s current Electoral Committee, which was a deal breaker for Hong Kong’s American manipulated, NGO “democrats”. If you are in front of the Great Western Firewall’s mainstream media, propaganda foghorn, you would almost think that China is gunning down these so-called democrats in the streets. The West ignores China’s and Hong Kong’s history for a reason, because the truth lies there for all to see.

Hong Kong’s Legco members, from its colonial founding in 1843, were totally under the iron fist control of London, as was the governor. Hongkongers were not citizens. They were vassal subjects of the British Empire and had few to no rights, except for wealthy local families and their compradors, who lorded over the local 99%, like Ellis, the Lackersteen’s and U Po Kyin, in George Orwell’s semi-autobiographical novel, Burmese Days. Orwell’s characters called the locals niggers, who were economic slaves and treated as such, Hongkongers included. I call these people The Dreaded Other. Andre Vltchek calls them Un-People. Both appellations are from the standpoint of white, Western privilege. The same is true today, as yesteryear. From my hopeful and respectful point of view, I call all the world’s dark skinned peoples, The Moral Majority or The 80%.

The constant repression and official violence needed in Orwell’s colonial Burma, to keep the “niggers” on their knees, was used in Hong Kong as well. Human dignity would regularly boil over and try to free itself from the boot heel of colonial fascism. In 1925-26, Hong Kong was almost destroyed by a mass exodus of locals to the north, into Guangdong (Canton), China. For sixteen months, Hong Kong’s courageous, oppressed 99% went on strike and created their own boycott-divestment-sanction (BDS) movement, in protest over the massacre of more than 60 fellow brothers and sisters, who were gunned down like dogs, on Shanghai’s and Shamian’s streets, by British brown shirts. Hundreds more were injured and many thousands imprisoned. After the popular pilgrimage north, BDS’ed Hong Kong literally became a Twilight Zone ghost town. Only a loan (being good capitalists, it was not a grant) to Hong Kong’s 1% treasury, prevented its opium and morphine fueled, colonial economy from imploding.

The main imperialists arguing at the table, while China protests: Britain, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan. Lesser powers also clawed their way into smaller shares of plunder.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ritain’s Hong Kong police state was able to keep Orwell’s “niggers” in their “proper” place, until these 99% were inspired by China’s liberating communist and socialist revolution. Like their soulmates to the north, Hong Kong’s Dreaded Other also wanted to free themselves from the shackles of Western colonialism and imperialism. So they rose up in violent protests in 1956, 1966, 1967, 1981, 1982 and 1984. Through all this, hundreds of Hong Kong’s Un-People were killed and injured, while thousands were arrested. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, “A riot is the language of the unheard”, which is true whether you are American or Chinese.

Except for Hong Kong’s privileged white people and their wealthy local compradors, such was the reality of life for the colony’s 99%, although behind the Great Western Firewall, the world’s former drug depot was and is vaunted as a halcyon utopia of unfettered “free” trade and “unregulated” capitalism. Thus, when Margaret Thatcher came to the negotiating table with Deng Xiaoping and China’s Communists in 1984, it was not out of altruism or a sense of justice. She and London were desperate to unhinge themselves from Hong Kong’s ignominious, 140-year Burmese Days history. They were sitting on a powder keg of anti-British hatred and they knew it.

SIDEBAR—CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW FOR A MINI REVIEW OF HOLLYWOOD’S ENDORSEMENT OF COLONIALISM

Eight nations participated in the defeat of the Boxer rebellion, and Britain invested some of her colonial and dominion troops.  (Click to expand image.)

[learn_more] [dropcap]T[/dropcap]he humiliating colonialist past is hardly forgotten in China. The West has never given up its habit of looking upon nonwhite populations as inherently inferior, or subject to domination, and for a long time regarded the Far East, along with Africa and other regions, as ripe for the plucking. China and India constituted the major prizes, and force and treachery were regarded as the natural and legitimate path, albeit idealized as a “civilizing mission.” As late as 1963, Hollywood, the West’s main engine for imperialist propaganda before worldwide television, was still producing blockbusters depicting the colonialists as the “heroes” in the plot. A good example of the genre is Sam Bronston’s blockbuster 55 Days at Peking, directed by veteran Nicholas Ray, with Charlton Heston, David Niven, and Ava Gardner in the leads. The film was a dramatization of the siege of the foreign legations’ compounds in Peking (now known as Beijing) during the Boxer Rebellion which took place from 1898-1900 in China. The “natives”, of course, were the heavies, the savages. But it was not difficult for Hollywood to turn the Boxers into villains: rising against highly photogenic heroes is bad enough, but having the temerity to rise against Christianity was seen as unforgivable. (In 1975, Hollywood did it again, this time producing Kipling’s classic The Man Who Would Be King, but this time the natives in the Indian subcontinent were mere silly canvas for the antics of the heroes, Sean Connery and Michael Caine, two non-com renegades in the British army, playing two ingratiating “buddies” bent on having a grand old adventure among the barbarians. Gunga Din had shown the way in 1939.

Main poster for 55 Days at Peking.

The besieged Europeans (and one Japanese diplomat) confront the Chinese hordes.

55 Days: Intrigue at the court.

Poster for Asian markets.

The refined, superior foreigners.

Boxer soldiers, 1900.

One of many images of the time, depicting the rebellion. Most of the time the Westerners saw the uprising as a form of insolence.

Magazine cover of the time.

Boxer prisoners, in chains.

White soldiers dispensing their civilizing mission.

The world powers fighting over the China spoils.

China: Spheres of influence.

The European powers fighting over China shares. Dignity does not exist among thieves.

A grande dame of the age (Ava Gardner). Esthetic beauty is supposed to go with higher political and moral purpose.

Rebels at the gates.

Caine and Connery in Man Who Would Be King.

Another still from Man Who Would Be King.

Heston proving his White superman chops with an uppity native.

Still from Gunga Din. The film saw nothing wrong with British colonialism.

Gunga Din's highest purpose in life is to die defending British rule in India. So say Kipling and Hollywood.

[/learn_more]

These negotiations went on for years and became what is known as the Basic Law, which came into effect in 1997. Relative to the aforementioned Legco’s vote not to allow universal suffrage for the chief executive in 2017, four Basic Law tenets are germane,

1. Hong Kong was reunified with the People’s Republic of China in 1997. In other words, it is 100% under the jurisdiction and control of Baba Beijing (my wry appellation for China’s Communist leadership).

1. With Hong Kong now an integral part of Communist China, Baba Beijing promised not to introduce Chinese socialism into Hong Kong for a period of 50 years, or until 2047. Baba Beijing is scrupulously respecting this and calls it one country, two systems, with the proviso that the sovereignty, unity and integrity of the one country takes precedence over the two systems. Until Hong Kong’s phony, fifth column Umbrella Revolution was hatched by Uncle Sam in 2014, Baba Beijing had no reason to be concerned about this caveat.

1. There is the possibility, but not the guarantee of universal suffrage for the election of the chief executive, starting in 2017. The key verb here is can be, which is conditional, not will, which is certain.

1. Article 158: most importantly, the final interpretation of the Basic Law is vested in the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) whose power is derived from the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. China’s NPC Standing Committee is 100% Communist Party and socialist. In other words, Baba Beijing makes the final determination on all of Hong Kong’s laws and regulations, in perpetuity. Go to Tiananmen Square, face west and see that big building there? That’s where they work.

Under the watchful eye of the Western mainstream media, the British finally allowed the first ever Legco elections, via universal suffrage, in 1991, after being shamed into having indirect Legco elections in 1985 and 1988. This would never have happened, if the colonial Brits did not have China’s Basic Law hanging over their heads, after 140 years of dictatorial rule. These Legco elections have continued successfully until now.

There are two broad camps in the Legco, Pro-Beijingers and Pan-Democrats. As a result of the latest 2012 election, the Pro-Beijingers hold a solid majority, with 43 of the 70 Legco seats and 400 of the 507 district (neighborhood) councils. Their platform: Chinese nationalism and socialism, conservatism (à la Confucius and Lao Zi) and economic liberalism (à la Deng Xiaoping). If the Hong Kong citizenry does not like this platform, they can vote for the Pan-Democrats, whose platform is direct, social and radical democracy and (social) liberalism. The people have spoken. The Pan-Democrats got their butts whipped by the Pro-Beijingers, in a free and fair election.

Thanks to the Basic Law, Hong Kong selects its chief executive just like the United States’ president, using the indirect voting process called an electoral college (committee). Hong Kong’s Electoral Committee is composed of 1,200 representatives and just like in the United States, they are chosen by the powers that be. In the US, it’s the Democratic and Republican wings of the unitary Corporate Party and in Hong Kong, it is status quo, establishment lobby groups, such as Tourism, Medicine, Finance, Insurance, Labor, Real Estate, Social Welfare, etc. – 38 in all – who pick their Electoral Committee members.

As usual, the US has sent powerful warships to the Spratly Islands in an effort to intimidate Beijing. Gunboat diplomacy has never really died. It has deep roots in the Western mind. (Pictured: USS Abraham Lincoln battle group. USN photo.)

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]aba Beijing is comfortable with Hong Kong’s Legco and district council direct elections, because they closely resemble China’s local elections at the village level. China’s one million villages vote for their leader (mayor), as well as their local People’s congress. And for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Baba is comfortable with its Election Committee, because in China, national, provincial, prefectural, and township congresses are elected similarly, via indirect vote, as is America’s president. Baba Beijing knows that Hong Kong’s sober, hard-nosed Electoral Committee is never going to allow a fifth column candidate to be chosen, who might try to destroy the Basic Law Treaty, turning Hong Kong into a color revolution bloodbath. Equally, the United States knows its Electoral College is never going to allow a socialist or a communist to have any serious chance of becoming president. Cornelius West said, “Obama was selected before he was elected”. You can go all the way back to George Washington. Nothing has changed.

As a backdrop to all of this, the United States has spent untold billions of dollars, relentlessly and pathologically trying to bring down Communist rule in China, via the US military, CIA, NSA and NGOs, using Tibet, Xinjiang, Vietnam, Burma, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, North & South Korea, Australia, the South China Sea and more recently, in Hong Kong (search any of these references at www.44days.net for well researched articles on this subject).

Hong Kong protests. The fuse can be traced to Washington.  (Click to expand.)

Baba Beijing continues to counterattack these aforementioned acts of war,  as well as studying assiduously the same Western modus operandi in the Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Macedonia, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mali, (South) Sudan, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, Argentina, Bolivia – and if you include Europe’s ongoing, secret service Gladio army  – Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, the UK – and on and on, around the planet, during 500 years of Euroamerican colonialism, which all intensified post-WWII, into anticommunist zealotry.

This excellent map does not include the many false flags in the US and UK (JFK, RFK, MLK, 9/11, IRA, etc.), nor destabilization in Venezuela, Thailand, Mali, Nigeria, Tunisia & elsewhere; CIA drug trade in Burma, financial plundering in Argentina (and support for a fascist military junta), safeguarding 9,000 Nazi criminals in South America (including unmarked Uruguay and Argentina), the military occupation of Japan and on and on. Throw in all the assassinations, government overthrows and rigged elections by France’s DGSE across Africa, (http://44days.net/?p=1971) MH370 in Malaysia (http://44days.net/?p=1776 & http://44days.net/?p=2356) – add them all up – and there are only a handful of countries in the world, if any at all, that have not been subverted by Western Empire (image from www.killinghope.org)

A pro-“democracy” protester, as featured on the South China Morning Post

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]aba Beijing understands that Hong Kong’s ersatz, American manufactured, financed and orchestrated Umbrella Revolution (Occupy Central) is all about spurning Hong Kong’s 2012 Legco and district council popular vote, which was for a solid Pro-Beijing majority, while trying to subvert Hong Kong’s Basic Law, in order to destabilize and eventually overthrow China’s Communist Party.  This, so that the West can balkanize and control the People’s Republic of China.

Despite Washington’s subterranean efforts, the Hong Kong “color revolution” unrest eventually fizzled out because the grievances were not deep, and the protesters were mostly comfortable members of the new middle  class, useful fools in the West’s new phony crusade. 

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]aba Beijing knows that the United States, its vassal countries and their 1% compradors around the world, lust for the glorious, colonial days of Orwell’s powerless niggers, to extract and profit usuriously, from these Dreaded Others’ precious natural resources, just like it did in China for 110 years, during what the Chinese bitterly call, their Century of Humiliation. Baba Beijing is not going to let Hong Kong be turned into another fascist hellhole, like the Ukraine.

Thanks to strong, national leaders like China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Cuba’s Raul Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Eritrea’s Isaias Afwerki and others, the Hyenas of the Western Empire, for the first time in five centuries, have a real, down and dirty, global fight on their genocidal hands.  Here’s to hoping the Dark Side finally loses in the 21^st century, spectacularly. The survival of a free humanity depends on it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Beijing correspondent Jeff J. Brown is the author of “44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass” (2013), “Reflections in Sinoland – Musings and Anecdotes from the Belly of the New Century Beast” (2015), and “Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English” (2015). He is currently writing an historical fiction, “Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping”, due out in 2016. He is a member of The Anthill, a collective of authors who write about China. Besides The Greanville Post, he also submits articles on Oped News and Firedog Lake. His articles have been published by Paul Craig Roberts, The Saker, Ron Unz, Alternative News Network, Russophile, 15 Minute News, The Daily Coin, Hidden Harmonies and many other websites. He has been a guest on Press TV.

In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm Literary Festival, the Capital M Literary Festival, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at international schools in Beijing and Tianjin. Jeff is a dual national French-American. [/box] 

SEE RELATED:

Hong Kong “Occupy Central” Funded by Washington: The Neocons and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

Hong Kong Umbrellas are Made in USA

Hong Kong “Occupy Central” Protest Scripted in Washington. Leaders Mislead Grassroots

Hong Kong’s Fight Against Neoliberalism

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RT.COM DISPATCH

Lieutenant Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hossein Salami (Reuters/Morteza Nikoubazl)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] top commander warned that Iran is ready for an all-out war with US, alleging that aggression against Tehran “will mobilize the Muslim world” against it. The remarks follow Secretary of State John Kerry’s claims that military force was still an option.

Brigadier General Hossein Salami, lieutenant commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), spoke Wednesday to a state-run TV channel as Western powers readied for a new round of talks on getting the Islamic Republic to curb its nuclear ambitions ahead of a June 30 deadline.

He also stated, “War against Iran will mobilize the Muslim world against the US, an issue which is very well known by the enemy.”

Iran recently agreed on a framework deal concerning its nuclear interests with the P5+1 group in Switzerland, which would pave the way for it to be finalized. However, Israel was highly critical of the move. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that it “would not block Iran’s path to the bomb. It would pave it.”

Kerry has recently appeared to try to ease tensions with the Jewish state by assuring it that war was still on the table. This and possible other similar remarks don’t sit well with Salami.

“We have prepared ourselves for the most dangerous scenarios and this is no big deal and is simple to digest for us; we welcome war with the US as we do believe that it will be the scene for our success to display the real potentials of our power,” Salami said, as cited by Iran’s FARS news agency.

The general’s rationale is that past US military victories owe themselves to their enemies’ “rotten”armies – not the case with Iran, he warned.

Addressing the officials currently at the negotiating table, Salami urged them to halt negotiations if any threat of force is issued again by a US official.

Salami echoed the words of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, who in a separate speech remarked that making simultaneous military threats while at the negotiating table will not fly.

READ MORE: Destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities would take ‘several days’ – US Senator Tom Cotton

“This is not acceptable that the opposite side continues making threats simultaneous with the talks,”he said at a public meeting with teachers in Tehran on Wednesday.

The Supreme Leader also referenced remarks from two US officials whom he did not name, but whom also said action wasn’t completely off the table, saying that: “Negotiation under the ghost of a threat is meaningless and the Iranian nation does not tolerate negotiation under the shadow of threat.”

As for any tangible possibility, Khamenei claimed: “First of all, you can’t do a damn thing.”

“Secondly, as I had already stated during the term of the former US president, the era of hit-and-run attacks is gone and the Iranian nation will not let go of anyone” with aggressive plans on it.

According to the religious leader, this is for the simple reason that the US needs the negotiations as much as Iran does, as it wishes to be seen as the country that put Iran in its place at the negotiating table.

But he added that while it would be best that the crippling economic sanctions by Western powers were lifted, it is “our own planning, will and ability, no matter the sanctions are in place or not,” that is crucial here.

He sent a message to the Iranian negotiators, asking that they “never allow the other side to impose its will, exercise force, humiliate or threaten you.”

Kerry is not alone in appearing to keep the threat of force alive. Last month Republican Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) claimed that it would take Washington just several days to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Cotton was the author of the letter signed by 47 Republican senators and sent to the Iranian leaders, saying that a nuclear agreement made without congressional approval might not last beyond the Obama administration.

On Thursday, the US Senate passed a bipartisan bill that would give Congress review rights over the White House’s Iran nuclear deal.

A faction led by Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio (R-FL) attempted to insert a number of amendments into the bill during the floor debate, including a provision requiring Iran to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

It echoes the demand of PM Benjamin Netanyahu who wants any final deal with Iran to include a“clear and unambiguous Iranian recognition of Israel’s right to exist.”  (This a red herring; Israel’s right to existence has never been the real issue. The problem is Israel’s criminal policies in the region, its role as the new imperial gendarme for the US, and its unrelenting expansionism, from its birth to this day.—Eds.)

READ MORE: Senate passes bill giving Congress right to review Iran nuke deal

Meanwhile, on Monday the Iranian foreign minister addressed Israel on behalf of the 120-nation Non-Aligned Movement, calling that it gives up the bomb, as well as renewing calls for a nuclear-free Middle East.

Israel has not signed up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), though it has sent an observer to the month long conference for the first time in 20 years.

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RON JACOBS

Occupation Explained

Gaza victims of Israeli aerial attacks in 2014. Expect these horrors to continue indefinitely.  On average about 70% of all Palestinian casualties are civilian, and many are children and women. (RT.com)

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I write this, Israel is holding an election and it appears the far-right under Netanyahu has won again. This result indicates that it will be Likud and its allies which will maintain the daily harassment and brutalization of Palestinians known as the Occupation. Even if a less rightist candidate had won there would not have been an end to the policy. Like a bulldozer, history pushes onward, shattering everything in its path.

In 1949, S. Yizhar, (Yizhar Smilansky) wrote a short novel titled Khirbet Khizeh. It is a story of the expulsion of Palestinians from their village (Khirbet Khizeh) by the Israeli military. Told through the eyes of a young soldier whose unit is doing the removal, Yizhar describes the tactics used. Although fiction, the tactics described are essentially no different than those in use today by that soldier’s successors: notifying the villagers they have a couple hours to pack their belongings, forcing them all to the town center, separating the young men from the old, the women and the children, and stealing or killing their livestock. As Yizhar’s protagonist carries out his orders, he records the reactions of his fellow soldiers. Like almost any fictional group of soldiers, these reactions range from an expressed disgust with the subjects of their maneuvers to an abject hatred. Then there are the doubts as to their morality—doubts quickly suppressed for fear of ridicule from their fellows or a sense of duty. Some of the soldiers justify their deeds by refusing to acknowledge the Palestinians humanity. Others recall a slight they received in another village and use that to justify their actions. Yizhar’s protagonist understands these attempts to rationalize the forced removals, but can no longer make them work for himself. Instead, he goes along with the squad, all the time questioning what he is participating in.

Over fifty years later, another Israeli soldier named Noam Chayut wrote these words to describe an encounter he had with a young Palestinian girl under occupation:

“For that girl, I embodied absolute evil. Even if I was not as cruel as the absolute—Nazi—evil in the shadow of which I had grown up, I didn’t have to achieve its perfection and force in order to fulfill my role in her life.”

Chayut’s book, The Girl Who Stole my Holocaust, is a memoir. It shares a philosophical and emotional motif with Khirbet Khizeh and just as evocatively expresses a moral concern with the nature of the expansion of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian lands. Chayut narrates a life probably quite typical for an Israeli born in 1979. He tells about patriotic indoctrination and membership in a patriotic youth group; trips to Auschwitz and lectures about the horrific evil that was the Holocaust. He describes his missions into Jenin and other towns in the Territories and the havoc his troops visited on the people living there. Like the fictionalized novella Khirbet Khizeh, The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust relates a horror perpetrated on a people in the name of righteousness; oppression of one people in the pursuit of another people’s justice.

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The IDF in Gaza. (IDF, flickr)

Similarly, it is also the story of an individual soldier, a child of the realm so to speak, experiencing a moral awakening. It is when Chayut is approached by the Israeli veteran’s group Breaking the Silence that his awakening truly occurs. These Israelis, like their fellows in the US who gather under the banner of Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, bear witness to their deeds—their crimes—they undertook in the name of their country. Also like their fellows in the US, the truths these veterans tell are not well received by many of their countrymen and women. In as much as the moral witness these veterans bring to their nations, their actions also serve as a moral reckoning for themselves. Never once in either of these books does the protagonist refuse an order, even after they have begun to doubt the morality of their mission. Like so many others who have worn (or are wearing) a uniform, it is this fact that often wreaks the most damage.

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Palestinian child victim of bombing. These images fail to move the Israeli public, and the world largely ignores them—that is, when the mainstream media dares to show them. (Credit: PCHR)

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Both of these books are stories of occupation and the dehumanization of the occupied. Even though they take place a half-century apart, they are also descriptions of the victim becoming the executioner, in the persona of the Jews that emigrated to Israel and their offspring. These narratives are important, even with all of their moral uncertainty. So, too, are the efforts of those Israelis who go one step further and change sides to bear witness for the situation their nation has placed the Palestinians in. Unfortunately, even despite these efforts, there has been no reversal of the march towards a greater Israel desired by many Israelis and their supporters. Moral witness assumes a shared sense of morality, something apparently not present at this point in time. These soldiers and others with a similar moral revulsion at the actions they have been a part of know that it is their nation that has given them the permission, the encouragement to commit the crimes against other humans. It is they who have accepted the rules of engagement which bureaucratize those crimes. In other words, it is like those people at protests who call “Shame!” when a cop beats someone, even though the cops generally have no shame when it comes to beating people.

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A support rally in DC. (Stephen Melkisethian.flickr)

Yizhar’s novel was once part of the Israeli high school curriculum. Nowadays, however, almost any questioning of the morality of Israel’s quest for an ever greater Israel is considered criminal. The ongoing reign of the far-right in that country ensures this denial will continue. Furthermore, although these stories are about Israel, they are not just about Israel. They are about every occupied people and every occupying nation.

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[box] Ron Jacobs is the author of a series of crime novels called The Seventies Series.  All the Sinners, Saints, is the third novel in the series. He is also the author of  The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground . Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden.    He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. His book Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies will be published by Counterpunch. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com. [/box]

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SOURCE: COUNTERPUNCH

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The Avant-Garde of Islamophobia

Front row hypocrites march in protest of Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. The most notorious in the bunch is without a doubt the cynical Benjamin Netanyahu (seen waving on the left). (RT.com)

Paris.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is a well worn refrain. You criticize Israel and Zionism? You are an anti-Semite! A French Jew wants to be able to ‘live fully his Judaism’? He is invited to make ‘aliyah’ and to do his bit for the colonization of Palestine. It is hammered into us that the history of Jewry has been brought to an end and that Israel is its end point. Israel functions as an eraser of Jewish history, of memory, of languages, of traditions and of Jewish identities. Israeli politics is not only criminal against the Palestinian people. It claims to be the heir of Jewish history when it has misrepresented that history and betrayed it. Israel knowingly puts the Jews in danger wherever they find themselves. And it transforms them into robots summoned to justify the unjustifiable.

Revisiting the recent past

The history of French Jewry has strictly nothing to do with Israel. Perennially dispossessed, massacred or expelled by a variety of very Christian Kings, the Jews have acquired French citizenship not least thanks to the advocacy of a priest, Henri Grégoire, during the Revolution. The last two centuries have been marked by a quest for citizenship and for equal rights under the law.

The Dreyfus affair highlighted that, if one part of French society was anti-Semitic, another part, ultimately the majority, considered that the acquittal and rehabilitation of Dreyfus was the objective of all those who were enamored of liberty and rejected racism. The history of French Jewry has been distinguished by its significant involvement in the resistance against Nazism and the Vichy regime, then by the engagement of many amongst them in progressive and/or anti-colonialist struggles. Among the notable Jewish intellectuals of this era were Raymond Aubrac, Marc Bloch, Laurent Schwartz, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Stéphane Hessel.

It was an era when many Jews thought that their own emancipation was part of a universal emancipation. It was an epoch when racism, fascism and the hatred of ‘the other’ were considered as utterly unacceptable and had to be fought. Jewish children went to the public school system; the idea of separating themselves from others into faith-based schools would never have occurred to them.

In Israel today, there has been a concerted attempt to erase the history of Jews in the different countries where they lived. If Jews have for a long time been considered by anti-Semites in Europe as inassimilable pariahs and if they have been persecuted because they have constituted an obstacle to the mad nationalisms which dreamt of ethnically pure societies, they have never sought separation but, on the contrary, the integration into the societies in which they lived.

A call to desertion

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne jumps forward to more recent times. At the head of a huge Parisian demonstration supposedly organized against terrorism, one finds three war criminals, Netanyahu, Lieberman and Bennett, who just made a name for themselves by massacring more than 2000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) in Gaza during the summer of 2014. Profiting from the emotion generated by the anti-Semitic murders at the Porte de Vincennes, Netanyahu is empowered (by the French government)1 to declare to French Jews that they live with insecurity in France and that they should move to their ‘true’ country, Israel.

In fact, Zionism has never combated anti-Semitism. It has always endlessly fed on it with a single and unique objective: to entice as many Jews as possible to immigrate to Israel. As a result, Netanyahu has not hesitated to put French Jews in danger. He makes them into foreigners in their own country, ‘tourists’ who have not understood that their ‘homeland’ is down there. Jews are enjoined to become either ‘traitors’ (to the single and unique cause, that of Greater Israel from the river to the sea) or accomplices. France has always been considered a failure for Israel: hardly 80,000 Jews have left since 1948 and half of them have returned to France. Then the propaganda becomes deafening. However, if there is clearly a country where Jews live in insecurity, it is Israel itself and it will be thus as long as Israel pursues the destruction of Palestine.

To the aliyah (‘going up’) of the living towards Israel, is now added that of the dead. The Israeli authorities actively incite French Jews to bury their dead in Israel. Thus the victims of the killing at the Porte de Vincennes have been buried at the Givat Shaul cemetery. This district of Jerusalem is actually the former Deir Yassin, the village martyred in the 1948 war where the Irgun militias directed by Menachem Begin massacred the entire population of that the village, which like so many others, could be erased from the map. How symbolic!

Israel in the avant-garde of Islamophobia

Jews have lived for centuries in the Islamic world. They have even been welcomed by the Ottoman empire after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Today, Israel participates in the demonization of Arabs and of Muslims by behaving as a model pupil in the ‘clash of civilizations’ classroom. Some politicians having made it their stock in trade, anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia is openly displayed, and acting on them is not uncommon.

The mass crime in Gaza or the multiplication of racist statements (for Rabbi Rosen, the Palestinians are akin to Amelekites and the Torah dictates that we should kill them as well as their wives, their children, their flocks) will create deep psychic wounds. How does one imagine that what is inflicted on the Palestinians will be without consequences?

In Israel, propagandists compete to explain that Jews have lived in hell in the Muslim world, concealing the fact that anti-Semitism has been above all of European and Christian origins. In Israel, Oriental Jews experience social discrimination and racist contempt. They have often been humiliated and discriminated against on their arrival. They are cut from their roots and urged to renounce their identity. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is presented as an ‘exchange of populations’ whereas Zionism is the principal cause, both of the Nakba and of the departure of Oriental Jews from their countries.

What does it mean to be Jewish in Israel?

Zionists have theorized the idea that Jews and non-Jews are not able to live together. This is totally contrary to all that has taken place for hundreds of years. It runs contrary to the aspiration of Jews to leave the ghettos, the mellahs and the juderias to become normal citizens.

Devout Jews who emigrate to Israel rarely encounter there the religion that they have practiced for centuries. The national-religious movement is dominant. This integrationist current has transformed the character of religion. A ‘chosen people’ never meant one having more rights than others but, on the contrary, one having more obligations. Among the precepts, there is ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was never meant as the inspiration for the ethnic cleansing now taking place but was an expression of eagerly ‘anticipating the Messiah’.

Hebrew has always been a religious language whose profane usage is forbidden. The Jewish religion is a religion of ‘exile’. The settlement on this land (of Israel/Palestine) before the arrival of the Messiah and a fortiori the creation of a Jewish state was forbidden. Besides, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 did not go to Jerusalem. Herzl met an almost unanimous hostility against the Zionist project from the rabbis when the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was proposed.

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From what Jewish heritage can the settlers and the military draw to justify in advance the violence and crimes committed against the Palestinians?

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For secular Jews, the dominant values of Israel are the antithesis of their understanding of the values of Judaism. Where does one find in the Jewish tradition the racism, the chauvinism, the militarism, the negation of the existence and of the dignity of the other? What is there in common between what great Jewish intellectuals (Einstein, Freud, Arendt, Kafka, Benjamin …) represented and the war criminals who run Israel? What has Israel done with their memory and that of those who struggled against fascism and colonialism (Marek Edelman, Abraham Serfaty, Henri Curiel …)? From what Jewish heritage can the settlers and the military draw to justify in advance the violence and crimes committed against the Palestinians?

As the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has written a propos the book of Yakov Rabkin Comprendre l’État d’Israël [Understanding Israel]2, “those who see in Zionism a continuation of Judaism would benefit from reading this book. But those who believe that the state of Israel is a Jewish state have an obligation to read it.”

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“Real Jews reject Israel’s war crimes.” ( via flickr)

Some Jews think that after the Nazi genocide, Israel is the ultimate refuge. On what grounds is the Israeli leadership able to brandish everywhere anti-Semitism and the memory of the genocide? Zionists played only a marginal role in the struggle against anti-Semitism and the resistance to Nazism. Some Zionist leaders had themselves engaged in shameful behavior during the rise of fascism (Ben Gurion with the 1933 Haavara Agreement) and during the period of extermination (the Stern group murdering soldiers and British dignitaries).

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How is it possible to not understand that the memory of the genocide signifies ‘never again’ and not ‘never again TO US’, the latter denoting a tribal vision of humanity in total opposition to all forms of the Jewish heritage.

Refusing dictates and fear, refusing all forms of racism and of discrimination

There are confrontations which make sense: struggles against oppression, domination, colonialism, for equality under the law. But we are being sold a war that is not ours: that of a world supposedly civilized against ‘Islamic terrorism’. In this war, Muslims are considered potential terrorists and are enjoined to ‘prove’ that they are not accomplices of Daesh.

And Jews are commanded to support without reserve Israeli policies that are criminal against the Palestinians and suicidal for Jews. This headlong rush into criminality works on fear. This syndrome assures consensus to a point such that a Palestinian negotiator (Professor Albert Aghazarian) has claimed that the Israelis fear no longer living in fear. This irrational fear has infected many French Jews.

In the context of the ‘clash of civilizations’, pretext for the powerful to drench the world in blood, there is in France a general escalation of all forms of racism. Contrary to the image manufactured by the mainstream media, racism hits essentially those ‘dominated’, all the victims of social apartheid: Arabs, Blacks, Roms. The trend takes a new form by concealing itself behind Islamophobia. As it is no longer politically correct to say ‘dirty Arab’, one demonizes Islam. There is also an incontestable and detestable increase in anti-Semitism. But the different forms of racism are not treated in the same manner.

The Israeli leadership, and CRIF [Conseil Répresentatif des Institutions Juives] in France, are actively involved in the stigmatization of Muslims. They assert, against all evidence, that there is only one racism to denounce (anti-Semitism) and that we are on the brink of a new kristallnacht. They identify Jews as those that the authorities protect; whereas the ‘law and order’ ideology, the declarations of the political leadership and the nauseating work of pseudo intellectuals, are aimed solely at a population which has been declared dangerous.

Moreover, the anti-Semitic stereotypes are nourished by the complicity of CRIF with Israeli policies and of the evident partiality of the French state. In this time of disarray, the legitimate indignation against Israeli crimes brings a rise in anti-Semitism and the few misfits attracted by the frightful violence of Daesh to commit criminal murders against Jews for being Jews.

The struggle against racism can’t be divided into isolated compartments. To choose certain ‘good’ victims against others is the antithesis of the anti-racist struggle. Israeli policies and the total negation of the rights of the Palestinian people cannot protect the Jews. On the contrary. To create the new Israeli, it is necessary to ‘kill the Jew’, the one who thought that his emancipation was dependent on the general emancipation of humanity. As the militant anti-colonialist Israeli Eitan Bronstein said: “we will never be free as long as Palestinians aren’t free”. In rejecting tribalism, French Jews reaffirm a history for which they can be proud.

Everybody is required to combat all racisms, all stigmatization, all discrimination. It is necessary for everybody to defend justice, in Palestine as well as here in France.

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This article was published on the site of the Union Juive Française pour la Paix. It has been translated by Evan Jones.

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[box] Pierre Stambul is co-President of the UJFP and the author of Israël/Palestine, du refus d’être complice à l’engagement, and Le sionisme en questions. [/box]

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Notes.

1. [EJ:] True, President Hollande and Prime Minister Valls would have preferred that Netanyahu not turn up to the demonstration and objected to Netanyahu’s invitation to French Jews to emigrate. However, the Hollande Presidency has reinforced France’s carte blanche given to Israel’s international impunity, leveraged further by Netanyahu himself. Netanyahu’s official visit to France in October 2012 had Hollande cravenly kowtowing to the Israeli agenda. Netanyahu then urged French Jews to emigrate to Israel, and was subsequently allowed to insert himself (and the Israeli meme) into a memorial gathering commemerating the ‘Merah’ Jewish school murders in Toulouse the previous March. At Netanyahu’s invitation, Hollande travelled to Israel in November 2013, where his kowtowing was again manifest. The government repressed demonstrations against the Israeli massacres in Gaza in the summer of 2014, and ignores the recruiting of French Jews by the Israel Defense Forces. When Netanyahu again, on French soil, claims to French Jews that Israel is their real home, he knows that any criticism of his actions by French authorities carry no force.

2. [EJ:] A nominal English title has been foreshadowed, What is Modern Israel?, but the book has evidently not been translated into English.

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CROSSPOSTED WITH COUNTERPUNCH 

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Felicity Arbuthnot

“Iraq may soon end up with no history.”—
(Archeologist Joanna Farchakh, quoted in Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, Pluto Press, 2010.)

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his indispensible book “from Sumer to Saddam” (1) Geoff Simons writes: “The region of the world that the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia (land between the rivers) … was a fount of civilization – a veritable crucible … cradle, womb of cultural progress … Here it was the first cities were born, writing began and the first codified legal systems were established. Here, through such ancient lands as Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria that the vital cultural brew was stirred, the quite remarkable concoction from which Western civilization would emerge.”

That chapter “The Ancient Crucible” concludes: “We may reflect also that a modern Iraq is entitled to contemplate with awe and pride the fructifying richness of the cultures that first emerged in this land more than five thousand years ago.”

 Team America: World Police, a comedy by the creators of South Park, a popular animated tv series, hit the nail on the head when it depicted an all-American lineup of (puppet) “counter-terrorist” heroes armed to the teeth, and incongruously committed to “destroying the world in order to save it.” It was a savage satire of US foreign policy conceits, and the massive barbarism represented by the mindless insertion of American military power into older cultures. (Paramount Pictures)

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rom the day of the US-UK invasion that “fructifying richness”, societal, cultural, historic has been systematically, deliberately erased in one of the most devastating, despotic, desecrating, pulverizing cultural armageddons in history.

March 19^th commemorates the twelfth anniversary of the destruction of that “crucible”, its wonders still unceasingly pillaged and destroyed.

When the National Museum was looted (10^th – 12^th April 2003) American troops stood by – whilst their colleagues diligently guarded the Oil Ministry.

Rumsfeld: A cretin and an unapologetic arch-criminal, still at large due to the massive ignorance of the American public. (Via DonkeyHotey, flickr)

As some of antiquity’s most sublime, wonders – fifteen thousand items – were looted, Donald Rumsfeld, demonstrably a cultural cretin, remarked: “stuff happens.”

The US military were given co-ordinates of all Iraq’s museums, monuments, archeological sites. “All of Iraq is an archeological treasure”, remarked an archeologist at the time. Yet the US troops led destruction’s way, creating a military base in Babylon (dating from c 2,300 BC) site of the Hanging Gardens. Ancient miracles were bulldozed to build a military helicopter landing pad. They did the same next to the believed birthplace of Abraham, near Ur’s great Ziggurat. Ur dates from 3,800 BC but is recorded in written history from 26^th century BC. War crimes of enormity.

After George W. Bush declared a “Crusade”, the (literally) crusading American soldiers entered predominately Muslim Iraq (as Afghanistan) with thousands of give-away Bibles, yet were clearly supremely ignorant that Babylon, as Ur, which they were destroying was sacrosanct in the three Abrahamic religions. Babylon is recorded in the Bible in the Books of Daniel, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Ur is recorded three times in Genesis and in Nehemiah.

The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq represents “one of the most devastating, despotic, desecrating, pulverizing cultural armageddons in history.”

The US soldiers’ criminal vandalism resulted in: “Babylon being rendered archeologically barren.” (Guardian, 8^th June 2007.)  The: “courtyard of the 10th-century caravanserai* of Khan al-Raba was used  for exploding captured weapons. One blast demolished the ancient roofs and felled many of the walls. The place is now a ruin.” Barbarians through the Ishtar Gate.

American barbarians in Iraq. Arrogant ignoramuses in a strange land.  (Aljazeera)

Destruction has continued across Iraq by both occupation forces and the unchecked gangs and factions which flocked in with the invasion and due to the feckless abandonment of border controls by the US and UK – countries near paranoid about such controls on their own borders.

The latest archeologists and historians compare again to the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.

ISIL has already razed two UNESCO world heritage sites in Iraq, drawing condemnation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon .[Reuters]

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Friday, 9^th March, the Muslim Sabbath, the ancient city of Nimrud was bulldozed by self declared “Islamic State” primitives destroying what became the capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire, dating back to the 13^th century BC. The site also contained the remains of the palace of Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria (883-859 BC) who made Nimrud his capital.

A local source told Reuters valuables were looted then the city razed to the ground. One entrance to this haunting place was guarded until last week by human headed bulls and lions with hawk’s wings. These guardians prevailed through the region’s turmoils for nearly three thousand years, to be destroyed with all they watched over by terrorists spawned by Bush and Blair’s criminal invasion.

In the south western palace is the temple of Nabu, God of wisdom, the arts and sciences, believed son of the Babylonian God, Marduk. Construction was probably between 810-782 BC.

Protesters denouncing Bush and Blair’s assault on Iraq. (Jon Deane, via flickr)

Historian Tom Holland told the Guardian: “It’s a crime against Assyria, against Iraq, and against humanity. Destroy the past, and you control the future. The Nazis knew this, and the Khmer Rouge – and the Islamic State clearly understand it too.”

Two days later another of the world’s wonders, Hatra, was reported largely destroyed. Hatra was built circa 3^rd or 2^nd century BC, at the same time as the great Arab cities of Syria’s Palmyra, Petra (“rose red city half as old as time”) in Jordan and Lebanon’s Ba’albek. Hatra withstood repeated attacks by the Roman Empire to be defeated by those spawned by Bush and Blair’s actions.

A 1982 Iraqi Ministry of Tourism guide describes in Hatra: “ … a frieze with sculptures which seem to tell a religious story enacted by Gods and musicians – the most beautiful work of art so far discovered” in this vast, ethereal city of creamy stone which shimmers golden under the sun, glowing amber under dawn’s rays and the setting sun.

The columns, temples, statues communicate not alone from the temples of the Gods, but surely from the architecture of the Gods, rendering a writer searching for words seemingly not yet devised.

Washington’s picked pro-consul in Baghdad: Kissinger disciple Paul Bremer was the yuppie bureaucrat that directed the corporate rape of Iraq. Others would follow.

There is the Temple of the goddess Shahiro (“the morning star”.) An area is: ”paved with veined marble, with walls decorated with geometrical designs and eagles – eagles being the main element in the Hatra religion. Over a decorative frieze, Arabic writing dates from the second half of the Abbasid era” (750-1258 AD.) The Abbasid Caliphate oversaw the “golden age of Islamic civilization.”

Hatra abounds with temples to creation. They were dedicated to the Sun God, to Venus (the morning star) “called variously Allatu, Atra’ta and Marthin – our lady.” The God Nergoul, also with a dedicated temple, symbolized the planet Mars. The revered, great, soaring eagle had his temple, where his statues looked down from on high.

The inscriptions are predominantly in ancient Aramaic, some reading: “Kings and princes of Hatra are the victorious kings of the Arabs.” They are surely weeping.

For those who know these marvels, hearts will never mend. Tears will never dry.

On my last visit I stood in front of the statue of Abbu, wife of Santruk 1^st. I remembered James Elroy Flecker’s reflections on the British Museum. I repeated them aloud, alone in an azure dawn:

“There is a hall in Bloomsbury


That no more dare I tread,


For all the stone men shout at me and swear they are not dead


And once I touched a broken girl, and knew that marble bled.”

The day after Hatra was destroyed, so was the fourth capital of Assyria, Khorsabad, built by Sargon 11 (721-705 BC.)

Writings show a city with a royal hunting park and gardens with: “all the aromatic plants” found in the fertile Euphrates river valleys. Thousands of fruit trees, including quinces, almonds and apples were planted.

Khorsabad was extensively looted by the French in the 19^th century and by the Americans in between 1928 and 1935.

In excavation initiated by the French Consul General in Mosul in 1842, an attempt was made to: “move two 30-ton statues and other material to Paris from Khorsabad on a large boat and four rafts”(2.) Two rafts and the boat were scuttled by pirates and Iraq’s stolen treasures lost for good.

In 1855, a further effort to ship remaining treasures: ” as well as material from other sites being worked by the French, mainly Nimrud, was undertaken. Almost all of the collection – over two hundred crates – was lost in the river. Surviving artifacts from this excavation were taken to the Louvre Museum in Paris.”

Between 1928–1935, American archaeologists from the Chicago’s Oriental Institute dug in the palace area. “A colossal bull estimated to weigh 40 tons was uncovered outside the throne room. It was found split into three large fragments. The torso alone weighed about 20 tons. This was shipped to Chicago.”

The British and Germans did a fair amount of looting in southern Iraq and notably Babylon and Ur, as their national museums bear witness.

ISIL destroying ancient statues in Mosul. (YouTube Screen grab)

The week before the destruction of Nimrud nearly 113,000 irreplaceable books and manuscripts in Mosul Library were burned by IS savages in what Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, described as “cultural cleansing” and: “One of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history.”(3) Some items were on a UNESCO rarities list.

Set alight in a pyre outside the library included Syriac books printed in Iraq’s first printing house; eighteenth century manuscripts; volumes from the Ottoman era (1534-1704 and 1831-1920.) Irreplaceable rarities – an astrolabe, an astronomical “computer” for calculating the timing of the positions of the sun and the stars, used in classical antiquity and the Golden Age of Islam also destroyed, as were superb sandglass creations.

Over a hundred personal libraries of notable families from Mosul held “over the last century” were also incinerated.

The library was then blown up.

In the same week, the Mosul Museum was also attacked. Assyrian and Hatrene statues – including one of a Hatrene King holding an eagle – were smashed, with a winged bull and the God of Rozhan. Other items are believed to have been stolen to sell, possibly in Turkey and Syria.

In July last year the centuries old tomb believed of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul was obliterated with ISIS laid explosives with the Mosque in which it lay, dating back to the 14^th century. Prior to that it was a church. “The Mosque of Jonah” was also reputed to have held part of the remains of the whale which swallowed him.

All destruction described here lay in Nineveh Province, of which John Masefield wrote:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. 

Iraq, as Palestine, is being erased, with Libya, Syria and even the great pyramids of Egypt now threatened by the monsters Bush and Blair’s “Crusade” has created.

The US, UK, Canada and other countries have “military advisors” in Iraq. They are silent and inactive on these war crimes of the new Mongols.

The US and UK Baghdad Embassy websites are equally mute. Yet on the  US Embassy’s site is:

“Regarding the Status of the Iraqi Jewish Archive:

“January 28, 2015

“The Iraqi Jewish Archive remains in the custody of the U.S. National Archives and Record Administration while plans are finalized on future exhibitions in the United States. None of the materials in the Iraqi Jewish  Archive have traveled outside of the United States.  The United States continues to abide by the terms of its agreement with the Government of Iraq.”

A government under occupation of course, cannot legally make such agreements.

“The exhibit of the material in Washington in 2013 and New York in 2014 has led to increased understanding between Iraq and the United States, and a greater recognition of the diverse heritage of Iraq.  We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the Government of Iraq on this matter so that the exhibit can be displayed in other cities in the United States.”(4)

Thus, Iraqi Jewish Archives (seized by the US in May 2003) safeguarded in Iraq for hundreds of years was spirited away by the United States. Yet they have been complicit in (Babylon, Ur, Baghdad Museum and more) or inactive as the “diverse heritage of Iraq” is systematically looted and destroyed.

John Yoo: a ruthless criminal who surely merits the tender mercies of the monsters he helped create. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)

Curiously, in 2005, former US Department of Justice lawyer, John Yoo, suggested that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion … ” (5) See also (6.)

Incidentally, Israeli and US “military advisers” were reported arrested  nearby as destruction befell vast swathes of Nineveh Province, in a story that has gone quiet.

There are far more questions than answers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box] British correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot is a veteran observer of Middle Eastern affairs and a recognized expert on Iraq, which she has visited numerous times. [/box]

* Early resting places for travellers and their beasts of burden within a walled exterior, arranged around a courtyard, with food for travellers and animals, shelter, shops, washing facilities and often baths.

NOTES

1.     https://www.questia.com/library/97576407/iraq-from-sumer-to-saddam

2.     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dur-Sharrukin

3.     http://globalvoicesonline.org/2015/02/25/isis-burns-mosul-library-in-iraq-destroys-thousands-of-valuable-manuscripts-and-books/

4.     http://iraq.usembassy.gov/pr_012815.html

5.     http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/x-admitted-false-flag-attacks.html

6.     http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-relationship-between-washington-and-isis-the-evidence/5435405

A detailed chronology of destruction of Iraq’s history 2003-2009, compiled by the Brussels Tribunal: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Looting.htm

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