Obama, Israel & America's Problem

Change never came to America. Guantanamo was never closed, American support for dictators never waned, the Bush war crimes never made it to court and Obama added a few of his own. In fact, murder has been made legal by a man whose supporters oppose the death penalty.

On top of it America’s “unique (read shameless) defence partnership” with Israel continues at the cost of blown up children.

I think most American liberals realize this, even if they won’t admit it. The left in the US would have been appalled by all that Obama has done if it were John McCain doing it. So why haven’t they lashed out against Barack? The “our guy” mentality? Perhaps. But is there more to it?

Mitt Romney talked after defeat about Obama giving things to certain groups and, in a way, he was correct. Obamacare, birth control, gay marriage, immigration and taxing the rich, Obama has pushed, or at least talked about pushing, the right buttons for his support groups.

While the left counts it's victories, human rights and peace are the casualties and there’s no one left to talk about them. Where once an American liberal was criticizing the right for Bush bombing everything that moved, he would now say “See, our guy is bombing people too” pointing to Pakistan, Libya or Yemen.

Obama has thus single-handedly killed the “Let’s stop bombing people” argument from mainstream American discourse.

In the context of Israel’s latest killing spree, all of this looks particularly depressing, especially for people outside the USA. Obama had given hope not only to Americans, but also to many victims of US foreign policy. That got a boost recently with the frosty relationship between Obama and the Israeli Prime Minister. So to see Barack perfectly adapt to the role of Netanyahu’s bitch leaves us with one question.

What the hell happened?

Well, AIPAC is one answer. Money is the other.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee has been accused of spying for Israel in the past. Apart from that, AIPAC is the most prominent, and arguably most powerful, of the many PACs that lobby for Israel in Washington.

According to MapLight, Pro-Israel groups’ contribution to US Congressional campaigns in the last 2 years stood at $ 9.9 million. By contrast, Pro-Arab groups contributed a whopping $ 85,950 over the same period. These groups have considerable influence on US foreign policy, and use anti-Semitism propaganda against anyone who challenges the Israeli right wing narrative, stifling space for debate.

Still, they aren’t the root of the problem, or the decisive factor in formulation of American foreign policy. That crown goes to money.

How?

Obama wasn’t always the stout Israeli he is today. Before becoming a United States Senator he was actually very perceptive of the woes of Palestinian people. As you make your way up the American political ladder though you need some financing, and that is where the likes of AIPAC come in, along with banks, oil companies, defence contractors and other assorted do-gooders.

The American political system ensures that the financing bug catches you early, before you make an impact on the national stage. So the powers that be can mould any young aspiring politician in their own image before the general population catches a glimpse of him/her.

And it doesn’t end there. As a politician aspires for higher office, he needs bigger cheques and as the cheques get bigger, the conscience gets smaller. It simply doesn’t matter then who’s the guy running for office.

This is why despite stabbing America in the back, and then slitting her throat, the bankers were paid upwards of 7 trillion dollars by the US Government. Meanwhile, the much vaunted Dodd-Frank, a bill meant to regulate said bankers, never saw the light of day. Now these are people that hurt Americans, that have public opinion stacked against them enough to ignite the occupy wall-street protests. They got 7 trillion dollars.

That’s the power of money in the United States political system.

The foreign policy isn’t too different from the monetary policy in that it is also dictated by campaign contributors like AIPAC, oil companies and defence contractors. And while these are devastating for the rest of the world, they also harm the general American public.

The media machine can spin it as much as it wants, but when you support occupation and dictators, oppress the people and use holy warriors to fight the USSR, there is bound to be blowback. It is not because “they hate our freedom”.

Apart from global enmity towards Americans, which often has violent manifestations, there are other repercussions for them. Many freedoms that the American people fought hard to attain over decades have been forfeited as a consequence of their campaign contributor devised foreign policy.

Think the Patriot Act and what it has done to privacy in the United States, and of course President Obama now has the authority to murder any American he wants. Think the $ 1.3 trillion the US has spent on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while American schools face budget cuts and teacher layoffs.

Not a pretty picture is it. There are people in the US who realize all of this and are trying to push back. So far though, it’s not working.

This is because as much as money in politics is a curse, it does not hold a candle to money in the media.

The run-up to the 2012 US Presidential election threw up two candidates that could have changed things.

Ron Paul has been an outspoken critic of America’s foreign and monetary policy for a very long time. His supporters thought this could be his year, but if you oppose the system, it strikes back.

The media machine, subservient to money, did a tremendous and sometimes brutal job of destroying Paul’s candidacy. Even with Paul polling 2nd or 3rd in Republican primaries, the anchors at CNN, MSNBC and especially FOX, simply refused to discuss him. When he was given airtime it was to criticize, mock or dismiss his campaign.

His stances were against most power wielders in America, i.e. campaign contributors. In the end, Paul announced he would stop active campaigning, shockingly, because of a lack of funds.

The other candidate to challenge the system went straight for the jugular; money. Buddy Roemer didn’t mince words. He rejected the “Washington is broken” line, insisting that it was corrupted. The corrupter of course was money, so Roemer designed his campaign in a way that would protect him from influence.

According to his website, Roemer accepted no PAC or Super PAC money. He did not accept contributions from any corporation and not from lobbyists. Contributions were accepted only from the general public, fully disclosed and topped off at $100.

He really was asking for it. The GOP and the media never invited him to any of the 23 republican debates and if it wasn’t for an appearance on the Colbert Report, many people wouldn’t have known he was running for President.

Roemer and Paul looked like serious men and, whatever the merits of their positions, actually talked about policy. The media however spent more time promoting a candidate who didn’t know what Libya was and one who wanted the Moon to become the 51st American state.

This didn’t happen only because journos are stupid assholes, it happened because the media is corrupt. Everything on it is monitored and controlled by the people who pay the bills, and there are marked lines you are not allowed to cross. When the lines are crossed, retribution is savage.

Dan Rather was a CBS anchor for 24 years and probably bought his own lies about freedom in America. One fateful day he did the story about George W. Bush going AWOL back when America was bringing democracy to Vietnam. He was shown the door.

Rick Sanchez is another one. He suggested, and later apologized for suggesting, that Jews controlled the American media. He was proved wrong by a prompt firing from CNN.

Therefore, it’s safe to say that the media doesn’t provide information, it filters information. In doing so it protects the interests of those with money. Hence you see top CNN whore Wolf Blitzer running for cover in Israel as actual journalists are targeted and killed in Gaza.

There is still dissent that gets through, but the system works overtime to plug the gaps. With Obama, the establishment has found the way to shut up the increasingly annoying folks at Hollywood, and the Bill Mahers and the Jon Stewarts. And when the left isn’t going to call you out because you have bought their man, you can do whatever you want.

The politicians are under control on both sides, be it republican or democrat, in both houses, Congress and the Senate. The media makes sure that doesn’t change, it makes sure the focus is not on real issues and it obfuscates repercussions of money-driven policy.

Thus the policies don’t change and the atrocities never stop. In the end, what the American people get to choose is only the colour of the man who will do war crimes in their name.

Black just means lesser dissent.

"I’ve been in this business a long time and believe me there is essentially no difference from one administration to another no matter what the platforms.... The foreign policy stays the same, the monetary policy stays the same." – Ron Paul, on Obama and Romney.

Numbers of Terror.

A while back I came across a claim regarding Pakistan’s human loss in the so called War on Terror; 43,733 Pakistanis have been killed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Nothing startling, the TTP have all the requisite appetite for mass murdering, not to mention the tools and the 40,000+ figure has been doing the rounds for a while. Yet this was not just anyone stating the figure, it was a retired army brigadier and current “security analyst”.

Here is the claim.





Since the man had some security credentials, and since he had the number down to the last digit, I thought he would be a good person from whom to inquire about the source of the figure and break down of the casualties.

Mr. Munir however instructed me to use Google and find out myself. I did what I was told, and I would like to share what I found.

Google showed that the 40,000 plus innocent Pakistanis killed by terrorists figure is used basically by the who’s who of Pakistani journalists, which meant it couldn't be true. Predictably enough, I wasn't able to find any article quoting the source. The first source I found with any detail of the data was a blog by the name of FATA Awareness Initiative.

The FATA Awareness Initiative blog has data till the mid of 2011 and claims that terrorist attacks across the country have left 10,268 civilians and 3,549 security personnel dead since 2003. Total therefore comes up to near 14,000. The method for data collection isn’t clear.

The South Asia Terrorism Portal was seemingly more credible. At the time of quoting they had data till October 14, 2012.

The SATP believe that since 2003 14,510 civilians and 4,687 security personnel have been killed in Pakistan by terrorists. This would add up for a total of around 20,000.

The SATP website claims that figures are compiled from news reports and are provisional. The website also states that for the years of 2011 and 2012, these figures include killings in Karachi.

Note that in both cases, the FATA blog and the South Asian Terrorism Portal, very high numbers of terrorist fatalities are reported. SATP reports as many as 24,930 terrorist/insurgents killed by the Pakistani security forces.

It is not clear if this number includes civilians killed by the security forces. A report titled “War Related Death and Injury in Pakistan” by Neta C. Crawford, Boston University, available on the internet could suggest so.

According to the report, in the three years of 2008, 2009 and 2010 around 12,000 Pakistani civilians died at the hands of their own military. The number of dead terrorists in the SATP data also spiked against these three years.

The report cites two sources, the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies and the US National Counter-terrorism Centre, to suggest that during the same 3 years somewhere in the range of 7,000 to 8,000 Pakistani civilians were killed by terrorists.

In short, more Pakistani civilians died at the hands of Pakistani military during the operations than by terrorist attacks, for the 3 years.

The data thus far, however well researched, is still not official and mostly based on media reports, therefore the deviations. It wasn't until I came across a report by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute for any official data to come to light. In the IPRI’s report titled “Pakistan: A Victim of Terrorism - III”, the Government of Pakistan, Interior Ministry data is presented.

According to the Interior Ministry of Pakistan statistics quoted in the IPRI report, up till January 2011, 7770 civilians and 2704 personnel of Law Enforcing Agencies had been killed by terrorists, or the TTP.

This amounts to a total of 10474 Pakistanis killed by the terrorists, till January 2011. Either they have killed over 30,000 more in the last year and a half, or some people in the media have their facts horribly wrong.

Speaking of horribly wrong facts, there are some to be found about the terrorism in Karachi, aka target killings. A conservative estimate presented in the Friday Times by A.K Chisti suggests that in the year 2011 approximately 1,891 people were killed by in the city, bringing total death toll to around 7,000 from 2007-2011.

I call it conservative because according to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan 1,138 people were killed in Karachi just in the first 6 months of 2011. The figure for the first 6 months of 2012, according to HRCP, is 1,257 dead.

That means over 8 thousand people have been killed by Karachi terrorist groups. The Pakistan Body Count website tracks suicide bombings and drone attacks in the country. PBC puts the death toll from suicide bombings at 5,246 and from drone attacks at 3,028.

What that means is that the Karachi terrorists have killed roughly the same number of people as killed by suicide bombings and drone attacks, combined.

The most significant figure in all of this though is 0.

0 is the number of times drone strikes have been suggested as a way to tackle the deadly terrorists in Karachi.

0 is the number of military operations conducted during the last 5 years to flush out the terrorists from Karachi.

0 is the number of media houses, or personalities, willing to even name the Karachi terrorists.

Chances of Pakistan winning its fight against terrorism with such blatant hypocrisy crippling the discourse?

Zero.

Saroop’s Moral Nihilism

This is regarding Saroop Ijaz’s latest masterpiece; Game of Drones. While I enjoy baseless allegations as much as the next person, I could not help but notice that Mr. Ijaz was particularly flamboyant in labelling Imran Khan “cowardly” and accusing him of not only surrendering before the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, but also “elevating their ideology of murder to the mainstream”.

The esteemed lawyer, however, has based his rather unsavoury characterization of Imran Khan on two flimsily constructed falsehoods.

For one, Saroop claimed that Imran Khan “has sought and successfully received the permission of the Taliban” for his march. This is tantamount to taking most indecent liberties with the truth and there is no story filed by this newspaper that suggests otherwise. Second is the claim that the PTI received an “offer of protection from the militants”, which is also a, blatant and most obnoxious, lie. This newspaper carried a story confirming that it is indeed a distasteful falsehood.

If the exalted lawyer had spent a little less time looking up words like “nihilism” and a little more time checking facts, the glaring errors and their implied apocalyptic consequences could have been avoided. There is though scant evidence to suggest Mr. Ijaz wasn’t familiar with the facts, i.e. the lying wasn’t on purpose.

These two utterly incorrect statements allow Saroop to go on what is a thinly veiled slandering rant against an imagined foe. As unmerciful as he is dishonest, Mr. Ijaz creates a whole host of hypothetical scenarios where Imran Khan is colluding with the Taliban in every atrocity imaginable, and adds yet more lies along the way.

For example, at one point in his grand stand against the forces of evil, Mr. Ijaz claims “Mr Khan and other anti-drone activists lump them together with terrorists”, them being the “innocent who died as collateral damage to drone strikes”.

Let me belabour the obvious; not only is Saroop astonishingly nonsensical, he is also despicably dishonest. It takes a special kind of demented Neanderthal to make such an accusation.

The activists who have worked to highlight civilian deaths while Mr. Ijaz watched with glee as drones fought “these militants” (Yes, he turns drone apologist and labels everyone militant IN THIS VERY ARTICLE) do not deserve such vile slander. Neither does a leader who called on the USA to reveal identities of drone victims so we know the militant from the innocent.

It is no doubt “contemptuous and contemptible” to accuse the very people struggling to separate innocent and guilty of doing the exact opposite. Shame, or for that matter dignity, appear alien to Saroop.

Now, the lazy explanation for these factual inconsistencies would be that Saroop Ijaz is a pathological liar with an unhealthy bias against the barbaric Imran Khan. However, we must not rush to conclusions, as there are other plausible explanations for Saroop’s latest intellectual obscenity.

Consider the fact that Imran Khan asked for security from the tribes of Waziristan. Now it wouldn’t be wholly unreasonable to assume that Saroop is a CIA operated drone and mistook the tribals for militants, a very common issue with these mechanical remote weapons of destruction. If that is the case Saroop should be taken into custody by the relevant authorities for reverse engineering.

In the highly unfathomable circumstance that Saroop Ijaz is steadfast in his statements; an even more disconcerting scenario arises. Saroop Ijaz then most probably is a member of the TTP, for how else would he be privy to secret TTP information not available in the public sphere. With a heavy heart, ET should hand him over to the police for questioning.

An interesting theory that cannot be ruled out is that this was the first in a series of “what if” columns from Mr. Ijaz. In that the events he mentions have no basis in this reality, they might have taken place in an alternate universe and Saroop feels most obliged to decipher their impact and implications on that parallel dimension. So vociferous is the man’s appetite for knowledge that our single, linear version of reality appears most discombobulating to him.

All so fascinating.

In closing it must be stressed that printing an article that is no less than an accusation of aiding and abetting terrorism, against a public figure on a peace march no less, is a very serious matter. Doing so relying on assumptions, based in turn on complete lies and invented facts, not to mention Neanderthal logic, is graver still.

It is therefore to be expected that Express Tribune check the alarming quantity of lies and appalling quality of bias in their columns. Hiring thesaurus savvy delusional hate-mongers is a most inadvisable endeavour.

Plight Of The Left

The last week and a half was not the best time to be a liberal in Pakistan.

First, the so called capitulation of the Pakistan People’s Party Government to the religious right in the shape of that holiday. Really went down well that decision.

A more severe blow came as ANP stalwart and porn king Ghulam Bilour announced a $100,000 bounty for the filmmaker behind “Innocence of Muslims”. Not only that, he asked his “brothers” from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to help.

Raja Pervez Ashraf has since distanced the Pakistan government from Bilour’s statement and views, as have the ANP. Talk of Ghulam Bilour being disciplined by the government or party has quickly died down.

The usual “betrayal by the PPP” line has been picked up by many in the liberal press and on social media, regards to their latest so called appeasement of the religious right. Granted there’s some genuine anger, but it will subside by next weekend and liberals will return to “their” party.

Until next time. And the time after that, and so on and so forth. Never realizing that PPP is not “their” party and it hasn’t been for a long time. But hey, better denial than anger, right?

As much as everyone wants to forget, this is a party whose lawmaker believes they have a right to corruption and defended that right on TV. That’s their ideology: corruption. They genuinely believe that they have the right to loot and steal and make money in all imaginable and unimaginable ways. Co-Chairman of PPP and President of Pakistan Asif Zardari - of course - wrote the book on said ideology and the exploits of Prime Minister Gillani are well known now.

Is there anything liberal or leftist about those two? The son of a tribal chief and a “Gaddi Nasheen”. Or about Rehman Malik? Or Raja Pervez Ashraf?

Truth is PPP doesn’t resemble a leftist party at all. Mian Mithu cancels more than Raza Rabbani, shut up. It is an apolitical entity at best and a criminal empire at worst.

Meanwhile everyone in the “party” wants a piece of the pie, which happens to be Pakistan. The ministers, the MNAs and the MPAs, down to the “jiyalas”. While MNAs get ephedrine quotas, the Jiyalas are rewarded with governmental jobs and paid bundled salaries as per the reinstatement policy. This is their politics, this is how loyalties are bought and/or strengthened.

Add to it the cult status in Sindh and new voter hiring through Benazir Income Support Program and you have a robust machine that doesn’t need to care about the left, or the right. They can afford to just do nothing, and that’s actually what they do; nothing.

So whoever shouts the loudest at them, or whoever cuts a deal, gets what they want.

Therefore, this talk of a betrayal just sounds desperate.

Liberals are a non factor for the PPP. They are useful for painting a good picture in the press, and maybe in front of Washington. So the PPP uses them, gets the columns in, gets two wise old men on TV to sing their praises and then settles to the right of Jamaat-e-Islami on Friday.

Why do the liberals go back? Well, partly because many are deeply invested in the PPP, either financially or emotionally, and partly because seemingly there’s nowhere else to go.

ANP, although staunchly secular, is more a regional party and would never be able to press ahead liberal agendas nationally. The worry now is that ANP have not only fallen prey to the disease of corruption, they have also taken up arms in Karachi. And once you cross those lines, there’s not much reason for you to shy away from anything else.

That’s where Bilour’s statement came from. Expect more of the same from ANP in an election year with anti-Americanism rife in KPK.

So what do the liberals do? The worst thing possible, of course.

The advance guard of PPP propagandists has already set foot in the MQM camp. Apparently, Altaf Hussain is the new benchmark for progressive and secular ideals and must be championed for his bravery and other assorted bullshit.

Make no mistake - the MQM is one of the biggest most lethal terrorist organizations in the world. According to Wikileaks the US believes MQM have 10,000 active fighters and 25,000 reserves in their ranks and draw funding through an extortion racket which is one of the most effective and punishing in the world. Granted MQM does have a political wing but that hasn’t made the killing or extortion go away.

Needless to say, this is a death-trap. MQM has the blood of thousands on its hands, and as other ethnic groups in Karachi start to fight for a share of the spoils, represented by yours liberally PPP and ANP of course, the violence will only increase.

I know that the propagandists have to earn bread and have already killed their conscience. They know all of the above better than me, and are not in the slightest bit bothered. The rest of you lot need to realize that this will not work, and it is not working.

The liberal cause has only suffered in the hands of the PPP, ANP and MQM the last 5 years and space for the right has expanded. These are people who do not care about any law and they don’t care about human life, what to speak of an ideology.

Pakistan needs all the liberals and progressives it can get, but their continued indulgence with the PPP and now MQM renders them indefensible and takes away any moral authority. Calls for introspection are raised regularly by the left. They would do well to know charity begins at home.

If a day’s mayhem in Islamabad shook your confidence in the Pakistan People’s Party while four years of slaughter in Karachi did not, you need to take a hard look in the mirror.

Please stop prioritizing ideology over humanity. It is time to start over.