Terrorism

By Peter Koenig Original post date: 31 January 2017 Where is Mr. Trump coming from and where is he going to? What is really on his...

ISIS has been trying for years to convince Muslims around the world that the West — and especially the United States — is at...

With superpowers backing different sides in the bloody conflict in Syria, Isis continuing to fight in the Middle East, a spate of terrorist attacks across the globe and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both talking a tough game, the YouGov survey of 9,000 people across nine countries found popular opinion thinks world peace has rarely been further away.

There is a long tradition in Germany of organizing state provocations for political purposes. In 1933, the Nazis organized the Reichstag fire and declared a semi-blind Dutch communist to be the sole perpetrator in order to crush the Communist Party and pass the Enabling Act, which sanctioned Hitler’s dictatorship.

If somebody asked me, in 2016, why I still consider myself to be on the Left, then I would undoubtedly start from my thoughts about the historical shift that occurred with the atomic bombings of two Japanese cities on 6th and 9th August 1945. Yet I would be the first to admit that the question of these weapons of mass destruction (and other such weapons) transcends the traditional spectrum of political ideologies, including those of the Left and of the Right.

54,000 Iraqi troops and 5,000 US servicemen supported by 90 warplanes and 150 heavy artillery pieces - were invested in the Mosul campaign when it was launched in October. They proved unable to beat 9,000 jihadists. Aware of the crisis on the Mosul front, the Pentagon has drawn up plans for sending out US reinforcements in the hope of turning the tide of the stalled battle.

The colossal hypocrisy of Obama’s speech, and the absurdity of his pose as the defender of “the rule of law” and democratic rights, are underscored by reference to the Nuremberg Tribunals. What Obama did not mention is the declaration of the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, that the basic crime alleged against the accused Nazi leaders was the planning and execution of a war of aggression, from which, Jackson said, all the other war crimes flowed. By this standard, the top officials of the Obama administration, including Obama himself, deserve to be hauled before a new tribunal to face war crimes charges.

Obama has approved a proposal to give JSOC independent authority to operate outside the regional commands, essentially as a globalized assassination force. JSOC units will bypass the regional commanders and report directly to Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the Pentagon.

Blood-curdling proposals for the persecution of Muslims played a central role in Trump’s election campaign. At one moment, he promised to stop all Muslims from entering the US, though this was later changed to “extreme vetting”. The use of torture by water-boarding was approved and applauded, and Hillary Clinton was pilloried for not speaking of “radical Islamic terrorism”.

The weight has fallen on those least able to survive, and when their own suffering was aggravated by the desperate plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees, and now millions, little help was given. What we have seen is the global market system, and especially the EU, lend people money to buy things and then strangle their hopes and futures when they cannot repay. What we now have is the biggest debtor's prison in European history.