From the
moment that she came to public attention Aretha Franklin appeared to be an
anointed figure, elevated to a pantheon of greats that include Bessie Smith, Ma
Rainey, Billie Holliday and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Songs such as Respect, Natural Woman and I Say A
Little Prayer testify to the power of her artistry.
Like Ray
Charles and Sam Cooke -the key progenitors in transforming Gospel music into
Soul music- she succeeded in working out an innovative hybrid of Black American
music styles. But unlike Charles and Cooke, she was able to return to her
gospel roots and receive popular and critical acclaim in 1972 by creating the
seminal Amazing Grace, the highest
selling album of her life, and the greatest selling live gospel album of all
time.
She showed
great versatility by recording songs for a cross-over audience such as her
remake of Ben E. King’s Spanish Harlem
and for the Disco-Funk era offered the classic Jump to It in 1982.
An indicator
of her significance in popular music was the fact that like Elvis Presley, she
became one of the few artists to be known by first name alone. As a celebrity
stories of her marriages, weight battles as well as her loss of innocence at an
early age under the parental regime of her father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin
became the staple of news magazine gossip and book revelations.
It is true to
say that she reflected the era that she lived in. Her afros spoke to the ‘Black
Pride’ movement and her songs about freedom and respect attested to her
commitment to the Women's Liberation and Civil Rights movements. She helped
finance several civil rights programmes and participated in fundraisers. Of her
willingness to post bail for Angela Davis, the black, feminist radical in 1970,
Franklin said the following:
Jail is hell
to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not
because I believe in communism but because she’s a black woman and she wants
freedom for black people.
The wealth of
connections provided by her father meant that she had known the Reverend Martin
Luther King since she was a young girl and he presented her with an award in
Detroit only shortly before his assassination in 1968.
As a singer,
Franklin was seemingly always on a pedestal and remained there until her death.
Needless to say that she was the quintessential soul and gospel singer. She
was, is and will be the standard by which serious singers will be appraised and
defined.
Aretha Franklin was born on March 25th 1942 in Memphis, Tennessee and
died on August 16th 2018 in Detroit, Michigan.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon,
alternately known as ‘Tommy Robinson’
The jailing a couple of months ago of the nationalist activist Tommy
Robinson on a charge of contempt of court and his recent release on bail
pending a re-trial has evoked much emotion among both his supporters and his
detractors. While the former revere him as a staunch defender of British
values, the latter consider him a rabblerousing bigot feeding off anti-Muslim
sentiment. My view is that the frequent assertions made by his supporters that
Robinson is a martyr in the cause of freedom of speech is a misguided one. He
is riding on the coattails of genuine grievances felt by segments of the
British population, but has contributed little of substance to the causes he
claims to promote. He is a provocateur and a publicity hound whose ultimate
loyalty on closer examination, ironically, arguably does not lie with England.
Tommy
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is not a thinker and cannot
by any stretch of the imagination, be considered to be an investigative
reporter. Instead, what Robinson quite clearly is, is a provocateur and a rabble-rouser
who is merely feeding into the celebrity cult of modern media.
It is
important to note that Robinson has never been responsible for unearthing a
single case of ‘Muslim gang grooming’ subsequent to the uncovering of the
scandal in Rotherham by two women who worked for the relevant social services
department.
After burying
their heads in the sand, and even actively attempting to suppress the initial
revelations, the authorities are doing something about it by putting suspects
on trial and securing convictions.
Yet, in the
guise of an activist and ‘investigative reporter’, Robinson showed up at a
trial and began filming within the precincts of the court. What did he hope to
achieve by doing this? Nothing it would appear - except to jeopardise the
trial.
As a
self-appointed standard bearer for English or white nationalist identitarians,
Robinson ought to have thought about upholding centuries-long practised legal
procedures relating to trials. His claim to have been “exposing Muslim rapists”
was devoid of any logic given that the relevant defendants were part of a
series of linked trials, and that their names would be revealed after the
completion of the trials. Besides, it appears that the principle of innocent
until proven guilty did not occur to Robinson. Instead he risked having the
trial collapse with all the attendant ramifications of costs and of enabling
the likely guilty to have got off on a technicality. He was not thinking about
the time and effort put in by police, forensic experts, and other professionals
involved in collecting the evidence and the hundreds of thousands of pounds of
tax-payers money spent on this.
Robinson was
already under a suspended prison sentence and yet he went to the courthouse knowing
the inevitable outcome of his juvenile adventure. Before his arrest, he was
bragging that the police were begging him not to show up. He could not wait
until the end of the trial when reporting restrictions would be lifted.
There is
nothing sinister about imposing reporting restrictions especially as the group
of suspects at whose trial Robinson sought to intrude were being tried in
multiple proceedings. Once the series of trials end and restrictions are
formally removed, those convicted will have mug shots posted and the full glare
of the press will be brought on them.
The narrative
of his supporters that Robinson is being persecuted by the ‘evil multi-cult
state’; that he was arrested for no good reason at all, does not stand the test
of scrutiny. Instead, Robinson’s activities can readily be ascertained to have
been a vehicle for incitement and the furtherance of his personality cult. What
he is doing is designed to boost his earning capacity while being egged on by
his gullible cheerleaders.
An
interesting and revealing aspect of Robinson the activist and whose interests
he serves beyond the street level ‘defence’ of English culture is the source of
his funding. The Middle East Forum (MEF), a hardline pro-Israeli think-tank
admitted last month that it had helped fund Robinson’s legal expenses as well
as the protests which had taken place in support of him while in jail.
The statement
issued by the MEF said that it helped Robinson “in his moment of danger” in
“three main ways”. These were: using “monies to fund his legal defence”;
“bringing foreign pressure on the UK government to ensure Mr. Robinson’s safety
and eventual release”; and “organising and funding” a rally held on June 9th.
The fact that
groups associated with the Israel lobby fund parties and individuals associated
with the cause of white nationalism should come as no surprise. The pioneering
‘Alt-Right’ news outlet Breitbart, while founded in the United States, had been
conceived in Israel when its founder, the late Andrew Breitbart, was touring
Israel on a media junket in the summer of 2007. And while it has resorted to
what is perceived as anti-Semitic stances, it is avowedly anti-Muslim. This, it
appears, is the underlying attribute sought by pro-Israeli groups and the
Israeli government itself in lending covert support to the far-right and the
alt-right.
The presence
of Israeli flags at rallies of Pegida, the German nationalist movement which is
anti-Muslim and anti-immigration, has not gone unnoticed. It is a phenomenon
repeated at similar rallies at off-shoot groups in other countries such as
Britain and Australia where Israeli flags are flown alongside banners
identifying with neo-Nazism and neo-Fascism.
The history
of Zionism is replete with collaborations with both Nazism and Fascism. The
Transfer Agreement between the Nazi regime and German Zionists in the 1930s is
one example, and a proposed alliance between Avraham Stern’s Lehi group and the
Nazis another. Furthermore, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the author of Zionist
Revisionism as well as the founder of the Haganah, the precursor of the Israeli
Defence Force (IDF), made an alliance between his Betar youth movement and the
fascist regime of Benito Mussolini when Betar established a naval training
academy at Civitavecchia, a naval base north of Rome. Jabotinsky, to whom
Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s present prime minister served as
secretary, is the ideological progenitor of the ruling Likud party.
The tactic of
supporting and giving succour to today’s nationalist parties may be
rationalised as a meeting of minds between those who believe as Zionism does in
the creation of ethno-states. The idea is to support those European
nationalists and white identitarian activists who foment anti-Muslim sentiment
so long as they remain silent on the traditional focus on ‘Jewish power’ with
its perceived manifestations in terms of media ownership and banking. This is
the deal allegedly offered to Nick Griffin by shadowy “American” sources, whose
condition for financial support for the British National Party (BNP), which he
then led, was to focus all its energies on Islam as the enemy.
Stirring up
anti-Muslim sentiment has been an avowed goal of Israel for many decades now.
The rationale behind this strategy has been for Israel to reframe its conflict
with Palestinians and the wider Arab world from one that is between acolonising power and a people with genuine grievances
about being dispossessed of their land, to that of a conflict between two
antithetical philosophies with Israel purportedly reflecting the values of the
West, that is, of ‘democracy’ and ‘tolerance’, and the majority Muslim Arabs
reflecting ‘tyranny’ and ‘intolerance.’
Robinson has
gone on at least one tour of Israel during which he posed, machine gun in hand,
on top of IDF tanks in the occupied Golan Heights where he proclaimed himself a
“Zionist” (as he has done on several occasions), even though one result of
Political Zionism was the ethnic cleansing of Arab Christians from their homes
in Palestine and the marginalisation of Christian communities in Israel.
While being
interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox TV, Robinson, playing the role of the
victim to the hilt made the claim that state persecution had induced symptoms
of post-traumatic stress syndrome and that he had been “reluctant” to disclose
this so as not to “insult” members of the military who “have witnessed war”.
Robinson, of course, would never acknowledge that these soldiers have come back
from a succession of illegal wars fought in Muslim lands such as Iraq at the
prompting of many of those who constitute the Israel lobby. But the connection
with soldiers, albeit ‘reluctantly’ made, is revealing. Robinson thinks of
himself as a soldier of sorts and wishes for others to see him that way.
It has to be
said that the drift towards identity politics has made the politics of white
identity something of inevitability. And the anger and disgust over the
discovery of the authorities ‘head-in-the-sand’ attitude towards grooming gangs
targeting young white girls is understandable. However, to embrace a
woman-beating, convicted fraudster as a beacon of nationalism as well as a
defender of moral and cultural values is one of the most peculiar developments
in this dumbed-down age of vacuous celebrityhood.
His
supporters, who include a significant group of fascist-saluting thugs, cannot
see beyond their hatred of all Muslims and immigrants to see who is pulling the
strings, and that Robinson is using his activism to generate a healthy income
for himself. They cannot work out that he cannot serve two masters, and that
when it comes to the crunch, he is not serving Albion, but rather the
overarching goals of Zion.
To them
Robinson is a ‘hero’, a ‘martyr’ and a ‘soldier of truth’. And with regard to
the last, he has the ‘battle scars’: a self-disclosed and uncorroborated
diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Poster displaying the
emblem of Irgun, the Jewish terror group of Mandate-era Palestine
Oded Yinon, whose 1982 paper for Kivunim (Directions) entitled “A
Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, is often used as a reference point for
evidence of an Israeli aim to balkanise the surrounding Arab and Muslim world
into ethnic and sectarian mini-states, was recently interviewed. He discussed
the notoriety of the document which came to a wider audience a few years later
after it was translated into English by Israel Shahak. But while Yinon down
plays the specific application of his paper to actual geopolitical events, the
ideas posited in his article have arguably formed an enduring central policy
plank of the Zionist state; balkanisation having been a necessary condition
first in creating the modern state of Israel, and thereafter as a means of
ensuring its survival and maintaining its military dominance in the Middle
East.
The theme of
balkanisation has always formed an essential part of the rationale of Political
Zionism. The refusal by Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Theodor Herzl’s offer of £150
million (sterling) as a down payment towards the Ottoman national debt in
exchange for a charter enabling Zionist settlement in Palestine meant that the
early leaders of Zionism would in due course redirect their efforts in seeking
a means of creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East.
A necessary
precondition of this would be the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, and a step
towards favourably positioning Zionist aspirations in the event of the
liquidation of that empire came with the agreement struck during the First
World War between the Zionist movement and the British government. The Balfour
Declaration and the implementation of the Sykes-Picot accord created the basis
through which the goal of securing a future Jewish state within the territory
designated as a British Mandate could be focused.
After the
establishment of Israel in 1948, a national policy of weakening Arab and Muslim
states, balkanising them, or keeping them under a neo-colonial state of affairs
has persisted. The prevailing logic was and always has been that any stable,
nationalist government in the Arab world poses an existential threat to Israel.
For instance, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was vehemently
against President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to grant Algeria independence.
Setting
communities against each other with the aim of weakening ‘national spirit’ and
balkanisation was at the heart of the policy of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan when
it came to Lebanon, Israel’s northern neighbour. As Moshe Sharett, an early Israeli
prime minister recorded in his diaries, both men were keen to exploit the
differences between the country’s Muslim and Maronite Christian population.
They also desired the creation of a Christian state. In a letter written to
Sharett in February 1954, Ben-Gurion stated the following:
Perhaps … now
is the time to bring about the creation of a Christian state in our
neighbourhood. Without our initiative and our vigorous aid this will not be
done. It seems to me that this is the central duty, or at least one of the
central duties, of our foreign policy … We must act in all possible ways to
bring about radical change in Lebanon … The goal will not be reached without a
restriction of Lebanon’s borders.
Ben-Gurion
had wanted Israel’s northern border to extend to the River Litani. This was
made clear through the plans submitted to the Versailles Peace Conference in
1919 by the representatives of the Zionist movement. The water resources
provided by the Litani, the River Jordan, and the Golan Heights were considered
to be essential prerequisites for the sustenance of the inhabitants of a future
Jewish state.
For his part,
Dayan, who served as army chief of staff during the 1950s, envisaged that
Israel could groom a Christian military officer who would declare a Christian
state in the southern part of Lebanon, out of which the region south of the
River Litani would be ceded to Israel. This is evidenced by an entry into
Sharett’s diary dated May 16th, 1955:
According to
Dayan the only thing that is necessary is to find an officer, be he just a
major. We should either conquer his heart or buy him with money, to make him
agree to declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population. Then, the
Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory and will
create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory
from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel.
Dayan’s hope
for a surrogate militia would come to pass in the 1970s with the creation of
the South Lebanon Army (SLA), which did the bidding of Israel in its battles
with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and other sources of
resistance to Israeli power. In 1979, the leader of the SLA, Major Saad Haddad,
a renegade officer of the Lebanese Army and a true life incarnation of what
Sharett referred to as the “puppet” desired by Dayan, would even proclaim an
area controlled by his group as ‘Independent Free Lebanon’.
While the SLA
is now defunct, the leaders of Israel continue to covet parts of south Lebanon.
It remains an important factor behind Israel’s goal of destroying Hezbollah,
the Lebanese Shia militia which forced the withdrawal of the Israeli Defence
Forces (IDF) from south Lebanon in 2000, and which repelled the IDF’s incursion
into south Lebanon in 2006.
It is
important to note that the intellectual, if not moral, justification for the policy of balkanisation has come from many position papers produced by Israel-friendly
(many would argue Israel-First) neoconservative think-tanks and other
right-wing organisations, which have supported the idea of breaking up the Arab
Muslim lands of the Middle East and North Africa. These include those
disseminated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Rand
Corporation. A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm, a document prepared in 1996 by the
Israeli-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and
presented to Binyamin Netanyahu during his first tenure as prime minister,
called for Israel to “contain, destabilise, and roll back” a number of states
including Syria and Iraq.
Allied to the
intellectual justification is the use of military force to practically effect
such balkanisation. This has come through using the United States, over which
the the Israel lobby has continually had a decisive influence, as either the
main protagonist in military actions such as the invasion of Iraq, or as the
overseer of covert operations geared towards destabilisation as has been the
case in the Syrian conflict.
In January
1998, members of PNAC wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton urging him
to remove “Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.” This forceful plea was
followed by the passage in Congress in October that year of the Iraq Liberation
Act which made it official US policy to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was always
understood that the termination of the rule of Saddam’s Baathist Party would
run the risk of fracturing the Iraq state into three component parts as Yinon’s
paper suggested: A Sunni, a Shia and a Kurdish mini-state.
Israeli
politicians including serving prime ministers have at times openly petitioned
US presidents to destroy Arab and Muslim countries perceived as threatening
Israel’s security. For instance, in January 2003, when the invasion of Iraq was
brewing, Ariel Sharon called on President George W. Bush to also “disarm Iran,
Libya and Syria”. Also, Binyamin Netanyahu has since the 1990s been actively
calling on the Americans to intervene in Iran, another state with a
heterogenous mixture of cultures and religious sects, which is viewed as
inherently vulnerable to efforts geared towards destabilisation and
dismemberment.
Iran formed a
central part of the ‘Bernard Lewis Project’, a proposal contrived by the
neoconservative academic in 1979, which argued the efficacy behind the West
pursuing a policy aimed at dividing the countries of the Middle East along
ethnic and religious lines. By encouraging groups such as the Kurds, Lebanese
Maronites, Azerbaijani Turks and others to seek autonomous rule, Lewis
envisaged an ‘Arc of Crisis’ which would spill over into the Soviet Union.
Lewis’s project encompassed the breaking up of Turkey and Arab states such as
Iraq and Syria since the creation of a Greater Kurdistan would necessitate
this.
The
usefulness of Lewis’s worldview to the cause of Israel was explicitly
acknowledged by Binyamin Netanyahu who, in eulogising Lewis when he died in May
2018, said that “we will be forever grateful for his robust defence of Israel.”
Lewis, whose influence in the corridors of Washington has remained strong over
the decades, supported the White House and Pentagon planners of the invasion of
Iraq, a conflict which Netanyahu admitted in 2008 “benefited” Israel.
Oded Yinon
unsurprisingly singles Lewis out for praise in his interview.
Lewis’s
influence on US foreign policy was apparent in the doctrine of the ‘New Middle
East’ unveiled by the then serving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in July
2006. The aim of securing change through the fomenting of violence and disorder
hinted at the ‘Arc of Crisis’ rationale posited in 1979, with the neutralising
of the ‘Shia Crescent’, consisting of Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah being
the centre of focus. The ultimate objective of balkanisation was alluded to in
a map prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired US Army officer
which was published in the Armed Forces
Journal in June 2006. It depicted a redrawn Middle East map which included
a Kurdish state, the creation of which is a present priority for the state of
Israel.
To the
perpetual Israeli goals of weakening and destabilising Arab and Muslim states
must be added the objective of acquiring more land for the state through
territorial conquest, a notable example of which was the annexation of Syria’s
Golan Heights in 1981 after it had been taken by the Israeli Defence Force
during the war of 1967. The conflict of 1967 was a war of conquest prosecuted
by right-wing ‘hawks’ who had seized control of prime minister Levi Eshkol’s
cabinet with the aim of completing the task of acquiring land which had not
been taken from the Arabs during the War of 1948. One of the most important
aspects of this reach for ‘Greater Israel’, in which Israel conquered territory
that tripled its size, was the desire to capture Jerusalem.
The war of
1948, while often posited in Zionist historiography as a defensive war, had
been waged to seize as much land as could be taken in excess of what had been
provided under the vitiated United Nations Partition Plan. An important part of
that campaign was Plan Dalet, which sought to expel Arabs from key areas so as
to ensure a Jewish majority in all territories which would be controlled by the
nascent Jewish state.
That Israel
at its inception was a belligerent power intent on extending its borders and
its sphere of influence cannot be denied. Just ten days after the declaration
of Israel’s independence, Ben-Gurion said the following at a meeting of the
general staff of Haganah, the precursor of the IDF:
We must
immediately destroy Ramie and Lod. … We must organise Eliyahu’s brigade to
direct it against Jenin in preparation for the Jordan Valley … Maklef needs to
receive reinforcements and his role is the conquest of southern Lebanon, with
the aid of bombing Tyre, Sidon and Beirut. … Yigal Allon must attack in Syria
from the east and from the north. … We must establish a Christian state whose
southern border will be the Litani (River). We will forge an alliance with it.
When we break the strength of the (Arab) Legion and bomb Amman we will
eliminate Trans-Jordan too, and then Syria falls. And if Egypt still dares to
fight, we will bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.
While Yinon
claims in the interview that Israel does not require more territory, which he
links solely to the capacity it has of protecting its existing borders, this is
contradicted by the creeping colonisation of the West Bank, considered in
Zionist belief to be that part of the ‘Land of Israel’ known as Judea and
Samaria. Arab settlements continue to be constricted into small, increasingly
non-contiguous entities that many have referred to as akin to apartheid-era
‘Bantustans’. The stringent blockade of Gaza and the intermittent war and
military strikes on the territory appear designed to make living conditions so
unbearable and hopeless as to convince Gazans to pack their bags and migrate.
And if acquiring neighbouring land is not explicitly mentioned, the quest to
create additional territory by stealth through the creation of security ‘buffer
zones’ on its borders with Syria and Lebanon is real enough.
But just how
much more of the ‘Promised Land’ Israel would wish to acquire is an issue not
openly discussed in contemporary times. Yinon smirked at the tendency of
articles on his paper to reference a map of the Zionist ‘Land of Israel’ in its
maximalist borders extending from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River.
Indeed, the claim that Israel continues to seek these borders is one which
Zionists point to as a ‘conspiracy theory’.
Belief in
Israel’s maximalist borders, which have a biblical origin, was taken up by many
in the modern Zionist movement. It was explicitly referred to in the emblem of
the Irgun terror group. However, since the creation of Israel, most hardline
Zionists have been content to publically refer to securing what they term the
sovereign right of the Jewish people to what was the western part of the
British Mandate of Palestine, with the Palestinian Arabs entitled to the land
east of the River Jordan, that is, the modern state of Jordan. However, until
Israel formally declares where it considers its final borders to be, fears that
it wishes to acquire more land will legitimately persist.
In the
interview, Yinon claims that his plan has never really been implemented by any
Israeli government, save for the adoption of some of his ideas by Israeli
military intelligence (AMAN) during the present Syrian conflict. An obvious manifestation
of this has been the medical and logistical support given by Israel’s military
to jihadist militias fighting the Syrian Arab Army near the Golan Heights.
It is clear
that the largely jihadist insurgency in Syria which aimed to bring down the
secular-nationalist government of Hafez al-Assad has been overseen by the
United States as a means of aiding Israel’s geopolitical goals. The objective
of American-sponsored balkanisation was clear from a US Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) document which noted that a declaration of a Salafist principality
in the eastern part of Syria would serve the interests of the internal and
external opposition to the Assad government. With most of the jihadists
defeated by the Syrian Arab Army in concert with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah,
this goal has been continued by American and Israeli support for Kurdish
militias in that part of Syria.
The
deliberate and calculated intervention in the affairs of the Arab world is something
which Yinon is content to admit is unnecessary given the artificiality of the
states which are the product of imperial draughtsmen. That was the criticism
levelled at his paper by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former head of Israeli military
intelligence, who questioned the wisdom of working towards the dissolution of
such countries if the initial analysis is that they will eventually fall apart.
Moshe Sharett
warned against Ben-Gurion and Dayan’s plan to “transform” Lebanon because of
what he correctly claimed would be “an adventurous speculation upon the
well-being and existence of others”. The corpses of the victims of attempts in
recent times to reshape the Middle East testify to that.
Yinon’s claim
that an application of the spirit of his strategy has been limited only to the
conflict in Syria is patently wrong. The neoconservative-inspired wars waged by
the United States on behalf of the state of Israel in Iraq, Libya, as well as
the ongoing plans to destroy the Shia Crescent by attacking Iran provide
contrary evidence.
The ‘Yinon
Plan’ after all merely encapsulates Israeli policy of the past, the present and
the future.
“I have great admiration for Israel’s nation-state Law. Jews are, once
again, at the vanguard, rethinking politics and sovereignty for the future,
showing a path forward for Europeans.” - Richard Spencer, poster boy for the
‘Alt-Right’ and White Nationalist Movement.
The
aforementioned statement, sent out by Spencer as a tweet on July 21st, was made
in response to the passage through the Israeli Knesset of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the JewishPeople. It was his acknowledgement of Israel’s formal
declaration of itself to be a racialist, ethno-state.
It is
important to clarify what the primary objective of Political Zionism was from
the outset: This was to found a Jewish state centered in Palestine to the
exclusion of all other races and religions.
The founding
of the State of Israel would entail ethnically cleansing the territory
earmarked for colonisation, with the inhabitants being supplanted mainly by
Jews from Eastern European lands. It was never intended to be a multi-racial
state, but a ‘Jews only’ state, something which the founders of Zionism
envisaged would be achieved by ‘transferring’ the indigenous Muslim and
Christian Arab population to outlying Arab territories.
The term
‘transfer’ as used by Theodor Herzl and David Ben Gurion was Zionism’s
euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Where Herzl envisaged this as been achievable
through the offer of inducements: by alternately getting property owners to
vacate their land by paying them off at higher than market prices, and by
securing employment in “transit countries” for the “penniless population”
(failing which they would be “discreetly and circumspectly” spirited “across
the border”), Ben Gurion and the leaders of the Jewish Agency in Palestine,
although supposedly representing the ‘Accomodationist’ wing of Political
Zionism, knew like the Revisionist Zionist apostles of Vladimir Jabotinsky that
this would only be achieved by force of arms.
This was
largely accomplished through the implementation of ‘Plan Dalet’ during the war
of 1948.
Israel’s
Basic Law, which stipulates that only Jews have the right to self-determination
in the country, merely formalises what was already at the heart of the
philosophical and ideological foundations of Israel.
Its drift to
a more obvious form of a racial-based state was predicted by a group of Jewish
intellectuals including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, who felt compelled
to write an open letter to the New York
Times in 1948. It was an action prompted by the formation of the Right-wing
Herut Party by Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun terror group, in the same
year. The establishment of Herut was, they believed, a development full of
ominous portent that would lead Israel down the path which would legitimise
“ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority.”
Herut was the
precursor of the Likud Party, which first came to power in 1977, and which has
ruled Israel for the majority of years since, usually at the head of a
coalition of parties with extreme social, political and military agendas.
It is clear
why Richard Spencer approves of the Basic Law. He and like-minded white
nationalist ideologues envisage a ‘whites first’ form of governance in European
countries as well as in the European-majority nations of North America,
Australia and New Zealand.
It is not the
first time that Spencer has spoken favourably about Israel serving as a beacon
for the new order racial societies desired by the alt-right movement.
Speaking
before an audience at the University of Florida in October last year, Spencer
ruminated over those states from past to present which have influenced his
thinking and concluded: “the most important and perhaps most revolutionary
ethno-state, the one that I turn to for guidance, even though I might not
always agree with its foreign policy decisions - the Jewish state of Israel.”
He is not the
only one on the political Right to think this way. Geert Wilders, the Dutch
politician who has never failed to express his affinity and admiration for
Israel, praised the Israeli move by referring to it as “fantastic” and an
“example to us all”. Wilders elaborated:
Let’s define
our own nation-state, our indigenous culture, our language and flag, define who
and what we are and make it dominant by law.
And while
Israel and its supporters rail against those who claim that Israel’s laws and
values should not be construed as being similar to those of the now dismantled
apartheid regime of South Africa, Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime architect of the
system, said the following in response to an Israeli vote against apartheid at
the United Nations in 1961:
Israel is not
consistent in its new anti-apartheid attitude … they took Israel away from the
Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with
them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.
And with laws
which include prohibitions against the renting and selling of properties to
Arabs and to African migrants, secret policies which sterilised Jewish
Ethiopian women, and proposed legislation aimed at making DNA testing a
mandatory requirement for an immigration system predicated on a Jews-only Law
of Return, who can argue against the proposition of it being a racialist
apartheid state?
A recently released animated video produced
by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) depicts the body as being
resolutely involved in what the video describes as the “international fight
against terrorism”. The irony, however, is that NATO has a history of
perpetuating terror in order to achieve the objectives of its political
masters.
How can one
not react with cynicism to NATO’s claim to “fight terrorism everyday” when its
actions in attacking Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 have facilitated the
creation and sustaining of Islamist terror organisations?
The
occupation of post-war Iraq led to an insurgency by malcontents from the Sunni
community, who felt deprived of the power and privileges they had held during
the rule of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party. It is from the initial rebellion
that the seeds of future Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and
the Islamic State (IS) were sown.
NATO’s
strategic bombing of Libya’s infrastructure and its armed forces was done with
the specific aim of overthrowing the secular government of Colonel Muammar
Gaddafi. These actions were in support of a rebellion by Islamist groups, the
most notable at the time being the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group (LIFG). In fact, it was revealed that British Special Forces trained
these rebels and were embedded with their brigades.
The result
was not only the entrenchment of Islamist-friendly militias in what had
previously been hostile territory for such groups, but also that Libya became
the repository of battle-hardened jihadis who transferred their expertise to
Syria where NATO countries were also trying to engineer the overthrow of the
secular government of Bashar al-Assad. What is more, sizeable quantities of the
munitions depots of the fallen Libyan army have got into the hands of
Islamist groups active in North Africa such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
(AQIM) and further south, in West Africa, where Boko Haram continues to wreak
havoc in Nigeria and Cameroon.
NATO has not
only created the conditions for terrorism to flourish, member states have
actively utilised Islamist groups as proxies in pursuit of the geopolitical
goals of the Western alliance. The aforementioned training of members of the
LIFG by British Special Forces is not the only documented interaction between
the armed forces of NATO members and Islamist groups. The Turkish High Command
was involved in setting up training camps for rebels, and enabling their
infiltration of Syria. In March 2013, the British Guardian newspaper reported that British, French and American
military officers were giving rebels what it termed “logistical and other
advice in some form”.
The truth is
that NATO has a troubling historical connection to terrorism.
NATO, to this
day, refuses to give a full or even
partial disclosure of its role in managing the stay-behind networks in its
member states, and the role they allegedly played in fomenting terror as a
means of discrediting the political Left during the Cold War era. For instance,
an Italian investigating judge named Felice Casson was able to link the bomb
which exploded and killed three Carabinieri in Peteano in 1972 to
military-grade munitions (C4), only available to NATO, discovered at an arms
dump created for the Italian stay-behind.
The
stay-behinds were groups of secret soldiers who were tasked with the role of
fighting occupying troops of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in the
event of an invasion of Western Europe. The networks were supervised by the
Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers
Europe (SHAPE). In Italy, the secret army was known by the code-name ‘Gladio’.
It is widely
believed in Italy that Gladio was used to facilitate many key terroristic
outrages during the anni di piombo
(Years of Lead), which lasted roughly from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
The idea was to forestall the coming to power of the Italian communists and
other Leftists who were gaining a significant amount of electoral support.
This, it was reckoned, could be achieved by putting in place a strategy of
tension, that is, creating the conditions where terror outrages, carried out by
state-aided neo-fascist groups, would be blamed on the Left, and the resultant
high level of fear and outrage on the part of the population would lead to
widespread calls for the firm rule of a Right-wing government.
This modus
operandi as applied in the Peteano attack involved using Vincenzo Vinciguerra
of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo to plant the bomb, and then calling on the
services of Marco Morin, an explosives expert for the Italian police, who
forged a report which asserted that the explosive was of a kind traditionally
used by Brigate Rosse, Italy’s foremost Left-wing terror group. Morin, was also
a member of Ordine Nuovo.
The true
origin of the bomb used for the Peteano outrage, Judge Casson later discovered,
was from a Gladio arms dump hidden beneath a cemetery near Verona. They were
military grade C4 plastic explosives used by NATO.
It should
also be noted that Gladio’s commander at the time of the incident, General
Geraldo Serravalle, would later testify to an irregularity at another munitions
dump near the city of Trieste. Gladio had logged seven containers of C4, but
when the Carabinieri had stumbled upon a cache of weapons there in February
1972 -two months before the Peteano incident- there were just four containers
left.
At the time of
the Trieste discovery, the police had assumed that they had stumbled across an
arms cache owned by a criminal syndicate. The connection to Gladio was not
discovered until Casson’s investigation.
Vinciguerra
himself explicitly linked NATO to many of the outrages perpetrated during the anni di piombo beginning with the
bombing at Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969. In 1990, he issued the following
statement to the Guardian newspaper:
The terrorist
line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security
apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or
collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted
into a single, organised matrix… Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo, were
being mobilised into battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating
not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within
the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s
relations within the Atlantic Alliance.
Although
General Paolo Inzerilli, the head of Italy’s secret service would announce in
the latter part of 1990 that Gladio had been disbanded, there is no evidence
that this was ever done, or that it was simply transformed into a new model of
Special Forces irregulars.
Meanwhile,
the communist enemy has been replaced by an Islamic one, and it would not be
unreasonable to consider whether Gladio-type units are active in fomenting
outrages which give the politicians from NATO countries the excuse to sanction
military interventions in Middle Eastern countries, as well to pass legislation
of the sort that has been gradually eroding civil liberties since the beginning
of the so-called ‘War on Terror’.
It is while
bearing these historical and contemporary events in mind that one pauses to
reflect on NATO’s fight against terrorism. Its motto, Animus in consulendo liber, Latin for “A mind unfettered in
deliberation” could arguably be more fittingly expressed as “A mind
unrestrained by diabolical conspiracies”.
Fritz Walter (left) and
Ferenc Puskas, respectively the captains of West Germany and Hungary, exchange
pennants before the 1954 World Cup Final in Berne, Switzerland.
Throughout its history, the popularity and influence of the game of
association football has been consistently subjected to a great deal of
assessment and analysis through the respective lenses of culture and politics. Football
has been posited as the bringer of war and as an arbiter of peace. While some
view football culture as the vulgar exercise of tribal rites in modern society
and the World Cup tournament an excuse for the mass indulgence in crude
jingoism, others have noted its redemptive qualities: To this day, many Germans
believe that winning the 1954 World Cup signified the rebirth of their nation,
which less than a decade earlier had lain in ruins after the fall of the Third
Reich.
British
Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson believed that he lost the General Election
of 1970 to his Conservative Party rival Edward Heath, because of England’s
shock 3-2 defeat to West Germany in a World Cup quarter-final match held in
Leon, Mexico. And while myth surrounds a claim that Pele’s visit to Nigeria
with his club Santos in 1969 led to a ceasefire between the warring armies of
Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra, it was certainly the case that a
two-legged World Cup qualifier between El Salvador and Honduras sufficiently
exacerbated already existing tensions between the two states to cause a war. La guerra del futbol lasted for 100
hours.
As is the
case with national achievements in sporting events, football events have
allegedly caused spikes in birth rates. This was apparently the case with
Germany -a country which perennially struggles with a low rate of birth- in the
aftermath of the 2006 World Cup tournament. Such is the hold which football has
over the minds of millions that Bill Shankly, the man behind the rise of
Liverpool Football Club as a force in British and European football, once
famously claimed the following:
Some people think football is a matter of life
and death, I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.
While some
might consider Shankly’s words to be verging on the pretentious –if not
outright preposterous, they tend to strike a chord with others. For many German
people, the victory of an unfancied national team in the 1954 World Cup Final
was more than a temporary moment of popular exhilaration: it was a
transcendental event of profound significance to the psyche of a recently
defeated and divided nation, and one which would shape their collective destiny.
Dubbed Der Wunder von Bern, the match was a
clash between pre-tournament favourites and a team of underdogs that the
Hungarian side had trounced 8-3 in an earlier match held in the group stage.
It cannot be
overstated just how lauded and respected the Hungarian team were. They were
Olympic champions, had a lengthy unbeaten run, and could boast of many great
players including Ferenc Puskas. One highlight of the ‘Golden Team’ was the 6-3
dismantling of England at Wembley Stadium the previous year. That victory
irrevocably changed the English, who for decades had remained aloof and
unimpressed about the development of the game they had created.
While Josef
Herberger, the West German coach, had left out several first choice players in
the group match for tactical reasons, no one could foresee his team beating the
‘Mighty Magyars’. And victory for the Hungarians seemed a certainty when they
quickly raced to a 2-0 lead.
But captained
by Fritz Walter, the Germans came back. All seemed to be in their favour.
Fortune smiled in the form of two Hungarian plays bouncing off the German
goalpost, and a Puskas effort which ended at the back of the net was
disallowed. The weather elements played their part, because the rainy
conditions in which the match was played was known to German football fans as
‘Fritz Walter Weather’. The more adverse the conditions, the better Walter’s
game is claimed to have got. Technology also played a part. The Germans were
kitted-out with Adidas boots, which had revolutionary screw-in studs. And the
German players were emboldened and fortified by what was claimed to be a
pre-match injection of either glucose or Vitamin C, but which some suspect may
have been Peritin (methamphetine), a stimulant which had been given to German
soldiers during the Second World War.
West Germany
won the match 3-2.
Only nine
years previously, their nation had been reduced to ruins by allied armies
advancing from the west and the east. Many German footballers had been consumed
by the flames of war. For instance, the talented Adolf Urban, a player for
Schalke who had represented the pre-war German team, was posted to Stalingrad
where he perished alongside the many dead of the vanquished Sixth Army.
The aftermath
of the war had been a horrific episode in German history. Defeat did not end
with the people being subjected to inevitable physical and material privations
of what came to be known as “Zero Hour”. Widespread anti-German sentiment meant
that they suffered pogroms across the continent, while German females were
victims of mass rapes conducted by soldiers of the Red Army. They were also
subjected to sexual abuse and exploitation by occupying allied soldiers. Across
Europe, ethnic Germans had been ejected from lands on which they were long
settled such as East Prussia, the Sudetenland and Volga-Land.
While the
reasons for the subsequent Wirtschaftswunder,
or economic miracle, are manifold and complex, many Germans continue to insist
that victory in the 1954 World Cup was a key factor in the economic and
political resurgence of West Germany in the post-war period. For them, German
football commentator Herbert Zimmerman’s exhultant proclamation to millions of
his countrymen listening on the radio that “Deutschland ist Weltmeister” symbolised
their collective emancipation from “Zero Hour”.
As Joachim
Fest the German historian put it, the game marked the “true birth of the
country.”
French President Emmanuel
Macron poses with Femi Kuti (Left) and Youssou N’Dour (Second from Right) at
The Afrika Shrine in Lagos on Tuesday, July 3rd 2018. (PHOTO: Ludovic Marin,
Getty Images)
So French President
Emmanuel Macron made good on his promise to visit ‘The New Afrika Shrine’ in
Lagos.
The venue was
built as a homage to the late Nigerian musician-activist Fela
Kuti, who was a vehement critic of the military and civilian administrations
that governed Nigeria during his lifetime.
I wonder how
President Muhammadu Buhari took to Macron’s initial announcement of the visit.
You see, Buhari was a member of the military government which on February 18th
1977 attacked and burned to the ground, the original ‘Shrine’. Fela’s ‘Shrine’ was
considered by Nigeria’s rulers to have been a den of political subversion and
deviant behaviour. And Buhari was of course the person who effectively set Fela
up to be jailed for a currency violation offence during his later tenure as
military dictator.
Like Barack
Obama, who once mildly admonished an NBA basketball star for deigning to
introduce him to Fela’s music by promising to gift him a Fela album (Obama:
“You think I don’t know who Fela Kuti is?”), Macron is clearly one of these establishment-sponsored,
high-achieving politicians who are nonetheless familiar with the pulsating beat
and firebrand lyrics of fundamentally anti-establishment music.
Macron’s
contradictions are legion. For instance, while he often speaks of his
determination to restore French grandeur, he also calls for deeper European
integration, a policy which necessarily entails French acceptance of German
domination. Also, his initial highly publicised flattery of Donald Trump was
followed by a severe rebuke of Trump’s policies in a speech that he gave before
the American Congress.
His inconsistencies
are underlined by his often used phrase: “en meme temps”, which means “at the
same time”. So maybe the conversation with Buhari, or rather, his monologue to
Buhari went something like this:
Monsieur
President, I am totally against decadent marijuana-smoking, hyper-sexual
persons like Fela, who wish to overthrow the existing social and economic
order. At the same time, I will be going to pay homage to that principled and
rebellious musician who you jailed in 1984 - the same chap who referred to you
and other Nigerian dictators as “animals in human skin”.
