Archive for the ‘Israel’ Category
Tolouse Killer’s Brother Abdelghani Denounces His Family’s Anti-Semitism.
A Just Man.
The Independent reports,
The oldest brother of the Toulouse scooter killer, Mohamed Merah, denounces the role of his own father, mother, sister and brother in spawning a “monster” in his new book.
Abdelghani Merah, 36, says the youngest of his four siblings was raised in an “atmosphere of racism and hatred” but also of violence and neglect. He has written the book – “Mon Frère, ce terroriste” (My brother the terrorist) – to try to counter the hero-worship of Mohamed, 23, among some young French Muslims. “I am the killer’s brother but I am on the side of his victims,” he says.
Mohamed Merah murdered seven people, including three Jewish children, in a series of scooter-borne attacks in the Toulouse area in March.
Le Monde portrays a worrying picture of that family.
Abdelghani secretly recorded the anti-Semitic rants of his sister Souad,
Abdelghani Merah, frère aîné du tueur au scooter, a déclaré lundi 12 novembre sur BFMTV avoir placé un micro pour “piéger” sa sœur Souad, sur des images tournées en caméra cachée et diffusées par M6, afin de prouver l’antisémitisme entretenu dans sa famille. Les propos de Souad Merah ont conduit le parquet de Paris a ouvrir une enquête préliminaire pour “apologie du terrorisme”.
Abdelghani Merah the elder brother of the ‘scooter killer’ on Monday stated to the BFMTV channel that he had placed a hidden microphone to “trap” his sister Souad. The images broadcast and filmed by hidden camera, by the M6 channel were there to prove the family’s anti-Semitism. Souad Merah’s remarks have led Paris magistrates to open a preliminary enquiry into “apology for terrorism”.
““Ma mère a toujours dit que les arabes sont nés pour détester les juifs, et cela, c’est une phrase que j’ai entendue tout le long de ma tendre enfance. Mohamed a baigné dans tout cela et les salafistes ont récupéré la bombe déjà prête à exploser”.
My mother always said that Arabs are born to hate Jews, and that is a phrase I heard throughout the length of my early childhood. Mohamed was immersed in that, and the Salafists took advantage of a bomb already primed to explode.”
What did Souad say?
«Je suis fière de mon frère, il a combattu jusqu’au bout (…), je pense du bien de Ben Laden.» «Les Juifs, tous ceux qui sont en train de massacrer les musulmans, je les déteste.»
I’m proud of my brother. He fought right to the end (…). I like Ben Laden.” “The Jews, all those massacring Muslims, I loathe them.
Libération reports,
Le recteur de la Grande mosquée de Paris Dalil Boubakeur a condamné mardi les «délires verbaux» de Souad Merah et s’est dit «atterré par la violence, la gravité et la dangerosité de ces propos incitant à la haine et nous regrettons la médiatisation de ces propos qui ne traduisent en rien le vrai islam, religion de paix». Le président du Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM), Mohammed Moussaoui, a quant à lui condamné «fermement» les propos «ignobles et choquants» de Souad Merah et a appelé au «respect de la mémoire des victimes des tueries».
On Tuesday the rector of the Paris Grande Mosque Dalil Boubakeur denounced the “verbal delirium” of Souad Merah and said that he was “dismayed by the violence, the seriousness and the dangerous nature of these hate-inciting remarks”. “We regret the media publicity given to these comments which have nothing in common with real Islam – a religion of peace”. Mohammed Moussaoui President of the Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM) equally condemned the “ignoble and shocking” remarks of Souad Merah and called for “respect for the victims of the killings.”
We note solely this: Abdelghani Merah proves that Arabs are not ‘born’ to hate Jews.
He is a just man.
Counterpunch’s Franklin Lamb Linked to Fascist ‘Voltaire Network’.
Counterpunch Linked to Far-Right Voltaire Net.
After Israel Shamir, we have Franklin P.Lamb.
He is a regular on the fascist ‘anti-imperialist’ Voltaire Network (23 articles – here).
His latest Counterpunch offering is an ‘analysis’ which claims that the Syrian uprising is being used to undermine the ‘resistance’ force Hezbollah,
Implementing the Feltman Project. Is the Syrian Crisis Being Leveraged to Weaken Hezbollah?
One expects the answer, given the premis that Hezbollah is the “leader of the international Resistance.”
He concludes by asking,
The coming weeks will reveal what, if any, success foreign and domestic anti-Resistance forces achieve in using the Syrian crisis to dismantle Hezbollah.
This is a curious way of putting things, until you realise where Lamb’s thought processes originate.
He wrote in May an article, Has the Tide Turned in Favour of Assad?
Several high rankling Syrians, particularly in the offices that work in press, printing, publishing and distribution of government information cogently explained that President Assad himself is leading the fight within the regime for meaningful change and that a majority of the population supports him and want to help change Syria for the better.
Talking with a range of Syrian citizens, one senses a general willingness to believe their President and certain of his advisers and to allow the regime a little more time to make good on its promises.
Lamb then added,
Bashar Assad’s regime will likely survive despite some foreign efforts to capitalize on domestic Syrian problems.
What is Lamb’s Voltaire Network?
The President of the Network of Thierry Meyssan, 9/11 The Big Lie, which claimed that the 11th of September 2001 was due to an internal plot within the US administration. The Network broadcast this declaration widely. Meyssan’s works appear regularly on the Holocaust deniers’ site, Entre la plume et l’enclume.
The Voltaire Network is better known under its French title, Réseau Voltaire.*
It has faced accusations of supporting the Chinese and Russian states, anti-Semitism, and alignment with Islamists.
Supporters who resigned in 2005 said,
« sous prétexte de résistance à l’impérialisme américain, les accommodements avec les impérialismes chinois et russe et les rapprochements avec les islamistes traduiraient une dérive antisémite latente au sein de l’équipe de direction ».
Under the pretext of resistance to American imperialism arrangements have been made with Russian and Chinese imperialisms, and their alignment with Islamists has led to a drift towards anti-semitism, latent amongst its leading figures.
Thierry Meyssan is closely associated with the fascist and racist Dieudonné and his ‘anti-Zionist’ Party (Parti Anti Sioniste).
There is not formal tie between the Réseau Voltaire and this, very marginal, political party.
But what is clear is that the Voltaire Network is pro-Assad, like the Parti Anti Sioniste as are many from this ‘nébuleuse‘.
Its director, Thierry Meyssan, wrote on the 19th of June, in The plan to destabilize Syria,
The operations conducted against Libya and Syria involve the same actors and strategies. However, their respective outcomes will differ since the situations in these countries are not comparable. Thierry Meyssan analyzes the semi-failure experienced by the colonial and counter-revolutionary forces, and predicts a pendulum reversal in the Arab world.
With yet another contributor to Counterpunch from this background we wonder why anybody takes it seriously, or indeed, took Alexander Cockburn seriously at all – ever.
“En février 2005, trois autres membres du conseil d’administration, Michel Sitbon, trésorier depuis la fondation en 1994, Gilles Alfonsi représentant le Parti communiste français, et Jean-Luc Guilhem, quittent l’association. Ils estiment que, « sous prétexte de résistance à l’impérialisme américain, les accommodements avec les impérialismes chinois et russe et les rapprochements avec les islamistes traduiraient une dérive antisémite latente au sein de l’équipe de direction ». Ils accusent l’association de servir secrètement la diplomatie française et de faire preuve de complaisance vis-à-vis de la Russie et la République populaire de Chine (l’un des administrateurs est conseiller économique de la ville de Shanghai.) Selon leur version, « le 26 février 2005, au terme d’une Assemblée générale à participation restreinte, convoquée dans des conditions sujettes à caution, les signataires de ce texte ont quitté le Conseil d’administration du réseau Voltaire tandis qu’y faisait son entrée Claude Karnoouh, chercheur au CNRS ». « Le 4 avril 2005 : Le nouvel organigramme du Conseil d’administration du réseau Voltaire vient de subir un nouvel aménagement : alors qu’il avait tout juste été intégré à l’instance de direction du réseau, Claude Karnoouh, chercheur au CNRS et soutien du négationniste Robert Faurisson dès 1981, vient d’en être débarqué. Les autres membres du conseil lui ont en fait demandé de se mettre en retrait pour ne pas être emportés avec lui dans la tourmente », affirme le site web Amnistia.net
Piers Paul Read, the Dreyfus Affair and its Tribes (and Israël Sahmir).
Piers Paul Read, the Dreyfus Affair and its Tribes.
“Juif insolent, tais-toi!
Voici venir le Roi!
Et notre race
Court au-devant de lui
Juif, à ta place!
Notre roi nous conduit.
Battle Song of the Camelots du Roi – Action Française, founded 1899.
“C’est la revanche de Dreyfus!”
Charles Maurras, leader of Action Française, at his trial for Collaboration. 1945.
The Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894 and “ended” with Dreyfus’ naming as a Chevalier de la legion d’honneur in 1906, was a “defining moment in the history of the Catholic Church.” For Piers Paul Read it “is only intelligible if it is seen in the context of the ideological struggle between the France of St Louis and the France of Voltaire.” (Page 4) Three decades ago Read expressed his pride in the Christian tradition, “I have never for a moment doubted either the teachings or the disciplines of the Catholic Church”. (1) Now, in The Dreyfus Affair (2012) he announces he is willing to look at the “pathologies of western Christian thought” and to understand anti-Semitism and anti-Semites. Yet he has just asked, “Can anything be said for the anti-Dreyfusards?” In the eyes of Israël Shamir, there’s quite a lot to speak about, some of which he finds in Read’s book.
The story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s wrongful conviction has withstood a great deal. But Read, who begins with such honourable intentions, may not be pleasantly surprised to find his book seized upon by Shamir, a prominent contributor to Entre la Plume et l’enclume. This is a Web site broadcasting a form of ‘anti-imperialism’ that includes attacking not just Zionism and Israel, but Jews. It defends Holocaust deniers. Shamir’s publishers now include, apparently the leftist, and not notably Catholic, Counterpunch.
Dreyfus and Tribes.
The Dreyfus Affair is subtitled The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History. There is often vivid account of the legal process. Reviewers’ have praised Read’s dramatic touch. There is a sketch of Dreyfus’s military career and background as an Alsatian Jew. The key players – the Dreyfus family, his defenders, such as Bernard Lazare, and, famously, Émile Zola, their upright Military ally, Georges Picquart, are turned out, the latter more sympathetically than in most accounts. The slippery Ferdinand Esterhazy, the writer of the infamous “bordereau” (list) of military information that led to Dreyfus’s conviction, is seen juggling his finances by real collaboration with the German secret services. The forger from the Intelligence Bureau, Joseph Henry, who added “proof” of Dreyfus’s guilt, is followed to his suicide. Many readers interested in the Affair will be more than familiar with this, and it would be hard to find anything ‘new’ in this side of The Dreyfus Affair. This is because there is very little novel or original there.
In one, unpleasing, aspect, Read nevertheless stands out. He portrays the Dreyfus affair as a war between different “tribes”. These were not absolutely exclusive but they mean rather more than freely chosen camps, or sides of an argument. In general, “Jews, Protestants and free-thinkers thought the worst of the Jesuit-educated officers on the General Staff, while the Catholic, conservative, aristocratic elements in society had a blind faith in the integrity of the High Command.”(P 211) Furthermore, “Each side had its bogymen. For the anti-Dreyfusards, it was the syndicate – these secretive, transnational network of world Jewry with its allies, or stooges, the Protestants and Freemasons. For the Dreyfusards, it was the Catholic Church, in particular the Society of Jesus, and its schools, its members taking oaths of blind obedience to their General in Rome – the ‘back pope’ – and the Pope himself.”(P 260) Read the rest of this entry »
Hands off the People of Iran! Report on HOPI Saturday School.
No to imperialist war! No to sanctions!
No to the theocratic regime!Active Soldarity with the Masses in Iran!
Hands off The People of Iran (HOPI) is holding a Weekend school at ULU Malet street.
The threat of war against Iran is growing. It is important that opponents of armed Western intervention also stand against the theocratic regime. HOPI is concerned about the role that Israel may play in any potential attack. But it will not ‘defend’ the Tehran regime, or try to find ever more ingenious excuses for Ahmadinejad (as this site here does).
On Saturday about forty people came to what were extremely useful talks and fruitful discussions on Iran and world politics.
Majid Tamjidi, an Iranian trade union activist, and political analyst, gave an important account of the position of the land’s working class and employees.
This is the background,
His intervention comes at a time when thousands of jobs are being lost. Many people have returned from the New Year holidays on April 1 to be told that their jobs have gone. Others haven’t been paid for many months. We know of many people who now have to move out of their homes, because they cannot pay the rent anymore.
The Iranian theocracy has played a big part in destroying the once so mighty Iranian working class – but the sanctions are doing the rest. Some believe that sanctions are an alternative to war. But in reality, they are a form of wardesigned to soften up a country for regime change from above. But the ruling elites in the US, the UK and Israel have no interest in establishing genuine democracy in Iran – or their own countries, actually. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan brutally underlined this.
Against those who imagine that Iran’s rulers are ‘anti-imperialists’ and that their regime has a ‘social’, even quasi-socialist, dimension, Tamjidi, outlined how Western ‘flexible labour markets’ are being imposed in the Country. This led to redundancies even before the sanctions, and subjects the working class to the same relentless pressure and precarity, inflicted across the capitalist world. Ahmadinejad’s sole social policy (after having reduced subsidises on basic foodstuffs) is to offer a small monthly stipend to those in need willing to support him.
I have highlighted this but there were two other major contributions.
The day began with an important contribution by Mike Macnair 
f the Weekly Worker on the geopolitical and economic context behind the threatened war on Iran. Mike argued that there was a “cyclical return of political irrationalism’. That the idea that globalisation would lead to hyper-imperialist harmony, and the possible creation of an international state of law, was misjudged. That the last half of the 19th Century, the epoch of Peace and Free Trade, has itself been the seed-bed for wars and clashes. That states were essential to the logic of capital (debt enforcing, guaranteeing property rights). Mike made interesting comparisons with late feudal states (Venice, Holland) and the fading of the British Empire. The main framework was the ebbing of the power and authority of the American ‘hegemon’. The decline of capitalism, for him, was an underlying cause.
In this context Mike said that the main British anti-war organisation, the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), was making futile demands for Western states to act rationally.
The audience responded with range of comments. Rather than dogmatic exchange, they ranged from in-depth counter analyses of the process of globalisation to specific points about the nature of just how far governments could act with a degree of certainty about what their interests were. Many questioned Mike’s claim that the series of Western interventions that began in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, were increasingly ‘irrational’ given that the conditions in which they took place were themselves ‘unreasonable’. It was remarked that we were not in a position to always describe the ‘rational’ (‘imputed class consciousness) of the ruling class and its political representatives.
Others (myself to begin with) began by observing that China did not look as if it was a sign of capitalist decline. It is possible to cast doubt on the principle that the kind of market state and rent-seeking private bodies living off public money that are so important in Britain, which do illustrate a decline in capitalist dynamism, are typical in a world where ‘new economies’ such as China, are emerging. Western decline in productivity, or in profit rates, (if this is the case) is not the same as a weakening in the mode of production itself.
In his reply Macnair compared China’s growth to the outer rim of coral reef which continues to expand long after the initial spark of life is weakening.
Moshé Machover talked about the role that internal Israeli concerns are playing in the threat to attack Iran. He outlined the potential use that the Tel Aviv government would make of this crisis to drive out sections of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and expand Israel. contributors pointed to the wider context, from the Syrian uprising, and the position of Iraq, and the effect these might have on any potential assault on Iran.
The day was extremely productive.
HOPI will be playing a significant role in organising solidarity with the Iranian people.
It is important to support it.
The school continues today.
