Displaying items by tag: war on terror

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02 December 2021 (Thursday)
09:30am - 12:10pm (Malaysian Standard Time GMT +8)
 
Published in Past Events
Tuesday, 23 March 2021 13:21

Syria: The price of resistance

Few nations in recent decades have been targeted by a superpower the way the United States of America has subjected Syria to various forms of attack. Apart from military assaults and acts of political subversion aimed at overthrowing the government in Damascus, the US has also imposed crippling economic sanctions upon Syria, sometimes regarded as the crucible of human civilisation. These sanctions which intensified in the last few years have impacted adversely upon a huge segment of the population. They culminated in the Caesar Act of 2020 which prohibits any country or entity from engaging in any economic activity with any firm or institution in Syria. For transgressing the Act, the violating party can also be subjected to punitive action by the US.
 
The wide-ranging sanctions would be one of the primary causes of the humanitarian crisis confronting the Syrian people today. Many of them are in dire need of the essentials of life. Making ends meet has become a major challenge for even the middle-class. It must be emphasised that before the mainly orchestrated unrest beginning in 2011, the government was able to provide for the basic needs of the population and managed one of the best-run health services in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) that provided free medical care to the poor and marginalised.
 
 
The media has also distorted the first bombing of the Biden administration on 25th February 2021 against a militia in Syria allegedly backed by Iran. Most newspapers and television networks claimed that the bombing was in retaliation to a February 15th rocket attack in northern Iraq by that Syrian militia which killed a contractor working with the US military. Since the US bombing took place on Syrian territory, the Syrian government rightly condemned it as a violation of its territorial integrity. China and Russia also condemned it from the perspective of national sovereignty. The western media as a whole side-stepped the sovereignty issue and instead presented the US bombing as a response to Syrian-Iranian aggression. Both Syria and Iran denied any involvement in the February 15 rocket attack arguing that they sought a period of calm to encourage as it were the Biden administration to restore the earlier nuclear deal with Iran which president Trump had unilaterally aborted.
 
But the Western media’s agenda against Syria is so heavily skewed that it will not entertain any other interpretation of the US’s military action. The power of this biased agenda became even more blatant recently when the media ignored completely a huge scandal involving the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ (OPCW) investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018. When the OPCW published its final report in March 2019, some OPCW inspectors involved in the actual investigation raised fundamental and substantive questions about the report’s conclusions. These questions cast doubt about the claims of Western governments and the Western media of Syrian government involvement in the chemical attack. The inspectors wanted their views heard by the OPCW management which refused to grant them a hearing. Instead it chose to publicly condemn the inspectors for speaking out.
 
It is because of the unbecoming conduct of the OPCW leadership that five of its former inspectors and the first Director-General of the OPCW Jose Bustani decided to express their deep concern in a public statement recently. The statement has also been endorsed by outstanding public figures such as Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and John Avery Scales. It is telling that the statement has received so little attention from the media.
 
If news that is favourable to Syria within the context of the geopolitics of WANA is blocked out of the media, it is because those who dominate the region want it that way. The US, Israel and their allies do not want the truth about the interplay of politics and power in WANA to be known to the people. It is because Syria which is linked to Hezbollah and Iran has been consistent in opposing the hegemonic power of the US, Israel and their allies in WANA that it has had to pay such a high price. It is a price that the triumvirate of resistance is prepared to pay because it cherishes the independence and integrity of the citizens of WANA and the people of the world.
 
Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)
 

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Published in Media Articles

Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq.  It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people. The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake.  But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.............Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Published in Media Articles
Wednesday, 02 January 2013 15:54

Nuke Weapons' risks outweigh benefits

One of the most dispiriting features of today's international debates is the threat to humanity posed by the world's 23,000 nuclear weapons - and by those who would build more of them, or be only too wiling to use them........... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

 

Thursday, 03 January 2013 14:30

Law of the jungle governs us now

I DON'T know whether it has been reported in Malaysian papers but the Israelis bombed an arms factory in Khartoum two weeks ago. This outrageous act is an example of Israeli disregard of international laws.There is no war declared between Sudan and Israel. But that does not prevent Israel from bombing Sudan. As with the bombings of the Egyptian airbase, Iraqi nuclear facilities, again without war being declared, Israel feels entitled to bomb other countries in the pursuit of its own security........... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

 

Thursday, 06 December 2012 10:02

Iron Empires, Iron Fists, Iron Domes

I WENT to a synagogue on Saturday not far from the Syrian border in Antakya, Turkey.  Antakya is home to a tiny Jewish community. It is also famous for its mosaic of mosques and Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant churches. On Friday, just across the Orontes River in Syria, I had visited with Sunni Free Syrian Army rebels embroiled in a civil war in which Syrian Alawites and Sunnis are killing each other, Kurds are creating their own enclave, Christians are hiding and the Jews are long gone.......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

 

Friday, 01 June 2012 09:55

Use people power to outlaw war, too

FOR the past few years, the Perdana Global Peace Foundation has been trying to convince people that war is a crime; that war should be criminalised. If one thinks deeply enough, one must conclude that war is indeed a crime. We all, the whole human race, regard the killing of a person by another as a crime; a crime so serious as to warrant the stiffest punishment, including the death penalty.......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

 

Wednesday, 02 May 2012 11:39

Afghan peace talks hit brick wall

IN recent months, Kabul, Washington and the Taliban have made overtures to work out a negotiated settlement for Afghanistan and plan the impending exit of foreign troops from the country. Yet those gestures have not been followed through and the prospects are not getting any better -- as the spate of recent violent episodes and perverse behaviour of some American soldiers over the war dead have shown......... Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

 

Wednesday, 07 September 2011 09:38

9---11: Ten Years After

911WTC

On the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 tragedy, it would be instructive to reflect on the disastrous impact of that tragedy upon the entire human family.

 

One, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a couple of million, lives have been lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pakistan border and other places as a direct or indirect consequence of the so-called “war on terror”  that followed 9-11. It is not just the violence generated by the US helmed occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan that is responsible for this. Terror groups that resist occupation or are seeking to avenge the death of innocent children and women at the hands of the occupiers, or those who are embroiled in the tussle for power or enmeshed in inter-sectarian and inter-factional feuds---like Al-Qaeda--- are also culpable.

.......Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)

Published in Media Articles