In what may be the most provocative escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia to date, the White House has confirmed that the US is planning to send NATO-made fighter jets to Ukraine.
John Kirby, the National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, confirmed that the Pentagon is discussing “providing fighter aircraft to the Ukrainians.”
Kirby’s statement marks a rejection of the Biden administration’s previous refusal to send fighter aircraft to Ukraine because, in Biden’s words, such a move would lead to “World War III.”
Friday’s announcement confirms the earlier statement by Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., that “discussions are ongoing” to send US-NATO fighters to Ukraine.
Speaking at the Aspen Security Conference, Brown was asked, “[i]s it possible the U.S could sell or provide Ukraine more U.S fighter platforms?” To this, Brown replied, “[i]t’ll be something non-Russian, I could probably tell you that.”
In May, the Pentagon rejected an earlier proposal by Poland to send Soviet-made MiG fighters to Ukraine, calling it “high risk.”
At the time, Biden declared that the move could start “World War III,” saying, “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews — just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what y’all say, that’s called World War III.”
In announcing the Pentagon plan, Kirby said the Pentagon is looking to solve logistical issues including training, maintenance, and spare parts.
The Wall Street Journal reported: “A former Pentagon official said F-15 and F-16 fighter jets have been discussed as options for Ukraine, though both aircraft require significant training and maintenance. The former official, now in private industry, says a separate contingent is pushing to get Ukraine A-10s.”
Also on Friday, the White House announced a further $270 million in weapons deliveries to Ukraine, in the 16th weapons package since the start of the war. The new package includes four additional HIMARS missile weapons systems, as well as hundreds of phoenix ghost “kamikaze” drones.
A clear strategy of the US in the proxy war against Russia is emerging. Washington apparently believes that by abandoning all restraints on the type of weapons systems being deployed to Ukraine, Kiev will be enabled to regain territories lost since the start of the war and achieve their aim, first stated in March 2021 as the official military doctrine, of retaking the entire Donbass (East Ukraine) and the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea.
“Our assistance is making a real difference on the ground,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said this week. “Russia thinks that it can outlast Ukraine — and outlast us. But that’s just the latest in Russia’s string of miscalculations.”
Under these conditions, Ukraine officials have categorically rejected peace talks. “All the territories must be liberated first, and then we can negotiate about what to do and how we could live in the centuries ahead,” Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “Our people are convinced we can do it. And the faster we do it, the fewer will die.”
In the process of building a fighting force they hope will be able to defeat the Russian military, the United States is supplying Ukraine with the exact same weapons systems used by the US military, and training Ukrainian forces to operate them just like the US military does.
To date, the United States has given Ukraine sixteen of its most advanced ground-based guided missile systems, the HIMARS, as well as its standard anti-ship missile, the Harpoon, and the anti-aircraft system used to guard the White House, the NASAMS, as well as over 100 top-of-the-line long-range artillery pieces, as well as hundreds of armored personnel carriers, and over a thousand lethal aerial drones.
In addition, the United States has provided hundreds of thousands of rounds of artillery ammunition, and millions of rounds of small-arms ammunition.
Since the start of the war, the US has committed $7.6 billions in military aid to Ukraine. The flow of US weapons to Ukraine has been so enormous that military officials have expressed whether this would deplete the United States’ own military stockpiles.
US President Joe Biden has repeatedly placed limits on the level of US involvement in the war, only to then overstep those limits.
After claiming the US would not provide Ukraine with weapons capable of striking within Russian territory, Biden announced that the US would provide long-range missiles to Ukraine. Now, the White House is moving rapidly to send fighter jets in a massive escalation of the conflict.
Even as the US is recklessly escalating the war with Russia, US officials told the media that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would travel to Taiwan, prompting Chinese officials to demand a “military response.” After Biden said Thursday that the trip is “not a good idea right now,” broad sections of the Republican party demanded that the trip go forward.
In its second editorial on the proposed trip this week, the Wall Street Journal demanded to know whether “The Pentagon fears China might shoot down a U.S. aircraft carrying the person third (sic) line to the Presidency,” and declares, “If China can stop a senior U.S. official from visiting Taiwan, how resolute is America going to be in a shooting war?
Under these super-charged conditions, Foreign Affairs ran an article this week entitled, “What If the War in Ukraine Spins Out of Control,” declaring, “a nuclear attack is still in the realm of possibility.”
Originally published in WSWS.org
In the largest crackdown on its film industry since 2010, Iran ordered internationally acclaimed filmmaker Jafar Panahi, 62, to serve a six-year jail sentence after he criticised the government.
Panahi was arrested on July 11 when he went to the prosecutor’s office to follow up on the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof, another well-known filmmaker, and Mostafa Aleahmad. The two were detained on July 8 after criticising the authorities’ response to the collapse of a multi-story building in Abadan, in the oil-rich, southwestern province of Khuzestan, on May 23, that killed 43 people. The Iranian authorities accused the filmmakers of having links to opposition groups outside the country and plotting to undermine state security.
Their imprisonment is part of a broader attempt by the clergy-led bourgeois nationalist regime of President Ebrahim Raisi to silence the filmmakers and politically threaten other critics of the regime. It takes place amid a government campaign of intimidation and repression against any opposition to the soaring cost of living that is making it impossible for workers and rural toilers, not just in Iran but across the globe, to feed their families.
This attack on democratic rights and free speech must be opposed and a campaign mounted by filmmakers, writers, artists, workers and youth everywhere to demand that the sentence be overturned immediately, and all filmmakers, artists and labour activists be released from Iran’s jails.
Following the Abadan building collapse in May, local officials, instead of sending in relief teams to help in the search, deployed anti-riot squads to disperse the crowds of volunteers and mourners and sent in security forces to demolish the building before the search for any survivors was complete. Angry crowds took to the streets to protest at the rampant corruption and breach of regulations that had led to the collapse, demanding the prosecution and punishment of officials.
Protests spread to other cities across the country that soon morphed into anti-government rallies. The authorities responded by shutting down access to the internet, ordering shops to close and sending in riot police to disperse the protests with teargas, warning shots, mass arrests and intimidation. Rasoulof wrote an open letter, signed by other filmmakers and artists, over the “corruption, theft, inefficiency and repression” relating to the building collapse and called on security forces to “lay down their arms.”
Panahi and Rasoulof were previously arrested in 2010 for “propaganda against the system,” critiquing the government in their films and at protests. Panahi was given a six-year suspended jail sentence after being imprisoned for two months before his trial. For the last 12 years he was subject to a travel ban and barred from making films, although his subsequent films, including his 2015 film Taxi, sought to evade these restrictions. He is now in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.
Rasoulof was given a one-year sentence in 2011. Just months after his film There Is No Evil, which related four stories touching on the death penalty in Iran and personal freedoms won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear prize in 2020, Rasoulof was sentenced to a year in prison for three films that authorities claimed were “propaganda against the system.” While he won on appeal, he was banned from making films and travelling abroad.
Panahi’s imprisonment comes two months after security forces arrested Firouzeh Khosrovani (director of Radiography of a Family and interviewed by the WSWS in 2021) and Mina Keshavarz, two internationally renowned documentary filmmakers, and Reihane Taravati, a well-known photographer, and raided the homes of at least 10 other documentary filmmakers and producers, seizing their mobile phones, laptops and hard drives. The three women were released on bail after their families surrendered their property deeds as guarantees, although none of the three have been formally charged.
This crackdown on filmmakers comes as Iran’s kleptocracy sits atop a social volcano as poverty soars to encompass 80 percent of Iran’s 85 million population and the middle class has all but disappeared.
Iran’s economy has been devastated under the impact of years of harsh economic sanctions imposed by Washington. After the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned the 2015 nuclear accords with the major powers aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear programme, it reimposed sanctions and piled on additional measures targeting Iran’s economy, including its oil and gas exports and banking system, to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran.
As a result, Iran’s oil and gas exports, a key revenue source, have plummeted. Iran’s increasingly beleaguered government responded by incrementally rolling back some of its commitments made under the nuclear accord, including increasing its uranium enrichment up to 60 percent purity, some way off from the weapons-grade level of 90 percent, and turning off the cameras at some of its sites, in a bid to demonstrate its refusal to submit to US pressure and strengthen its bargaining position in the talks with the Biden administration over returning to the accords.
Tehran had hoped that a renewed agreement would rescue its economy, particularly as oil and gas prices soared following the US/NATO-provoked war against Russia in Ukraine. But now, as Washington seeks to cement an anti-Iran alliance as part of its broader preparations for war with Russia and China—with whom Tehran has forged increasingly close relations—such an agreement is looking increasingly unlikely.
The US’s ever tighter economic blockade has deepened the poverty of the Iranian masses and strangled the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic which, according to official figures, has claimed the lives of more than 142,000 people. The currency, whose official exchange rate is 42,000 rials to the US dollar, is now trading in the bazaars at about 320,000 rials to the dollar, meaning that Iran’s currency is now worth one tenth of its value at the time of the 2015 nuclear deal—making it hugely expensive to source external goods and services and increasing the cost of locally produced goods.
The government has resorted to printing money to compensate for the loss of oil and other revenues and economic activities and to solve its budget deficit. It has dropped the official exchange rate of 42,000 rials for setting the price of necessities and food items in favour of the bazaar rate or “market approach” which is eight times higher, sending the cost of food sky high.
Iran’s official inflation rate has soared, with the monthly inflation rate reaching 12 percent in June, a 50 percent increase on a year ago, with no signs of slowing down. Food shortages and high prices, the drought that has affected the entire region, the decades-long mismanagement of the water system and agricultural production and the chronic shortage of electricity that has led to some factories operating at 50 percent capacity and others at 20-30 percent capacity, have combined to make living conditions intolerable.
The last few months have seen mass anti-government protests across the country, sparked by the government’s cuts to subsidies and the now worthless pensions. A major factor in the increasing poverty has been the ninefold increase in housing prices in the last five years that has priced the young middle class out of the housing market. Whereas 40 years ago, only one in five households rented their home, now one in three do so. The number of families renting is even higher in Tehran, where rents have risen by 50 percent this year alone, meaning that up to 60-70 percent of income goes on rent, under conditions where wages are low and often paid months in arrears. A shocking 19 million people are forced to live in slums.
With no respite from its imperialist foes, Iran’s ruling elite has responded to the protests with arrests, intimidation, violence and repression as it seeks to preserve its economic wealth and political power. The families of the trade unionists and labour activists imprisoned since May for leading or participating in the recent teachers’ protests in support of higher wages say that security agents have threatened them if they persist in publicising the arrests and detention of their relatives, while visits have been banned.
Originally published in WSWS.org
We know the United States is an outlier in abortion restrictions, but it is still startling to realize just how much.
In the last two decades, 50 countries around the world have liberalized abortion laws. Some reform is still restrictive, enabling abortion when there is a threat to the pregnant person’s life or when pregnancy results from rape. But while these changes have resulted in overturning total bans on abortion, the United States is going in the opposite direction.
The U.S. Supreme Court on June 24 overturned the nearly half-century-old Roe v. Wade case that guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion. The court enabled the ability of 50 individual U.S. states to ban abortion. Twenty-six states are either certain or considered likely to enact the ban.
Nowhere is the American outlier status more visible than among industrialized nations. In the 27 European Union members, abortion is completely legal in almost every country. One notable exception is Poland, which has a near-total ban.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson “all condemned the Supreme Court’s overruling of… [Roe v. Wade], while New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said the decision was ‘incredibly upsetting,’” the Guardian reported.
At the United Nations…
On June 24, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said, “The U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization delivered today represents a major setback after five decades of protection for sexual and reproductive health and rights in the U.S. through Roe v. Wade.” She added, “It is a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality.”
Bachelet also warned that “This decision strips such autonomy from millions of women in the U.S., in particular those with low incomes and those belonging to racial and ethnic minorities, to the detriment of their fundamental rights.”
That same day, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, said, “Sexual and reproductive health and rights are the foundation of a life of choice, empowerment and equality for the world’s women and girls,” adding, “Restricting access to abortion does not prevent people from seeking abortion; it only makes it more deadly.”
Still, the 193 UN member countries are not unanimous on abortion, despite Bachelet’s audacious statement. According to the UN’s most recently gathered report on world population policies (as interpreted in Wikipedia’s article on abortion law), as of 2017, “abortion is allowed in 98 percent of countries in order to save a woman’s life. Other commonly accepted reasons are preserving physical (72 percent) or mental health (69 percent), in cases of rape or incest (61 percent), and in cases of fetal impairment (61 percent). Performing an abortion because of economic or social reasons is accepted in 37 percent of countries. Performing abortion only on the basis of a woman’s request is allowed in 34 percent of countries, including in Canada, most European countries and China.”
Watch the Gag Rule, the Helms Amendment
The “global gag rule prevents foreign nongovernmental organizations [that seek funding from the U.S.] from using their own, non-U.S. funds to provide abortion services, information… or advocacy,” as the Guttmacher Institute, a research group into reproductive health care, explains. The global gag rule policy was first created at the women’s conference in Mexico City in 1984 and has since been the ball in political ping-pong in the U.S., having “been put in place by Republican presidents and rescinded by Democratic ones.” “President Joe Biden has rescinded the global gag rule” that his predecessor Donald Trump had imposed; but “that is only a short-term solution,” says the Guttmacher Institute.
Any future U.S. Congress or president can reimpose the gag rule with a stroke of the pen. Still in existence is the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which has prohibited the U.S. federal government from providing support for abortion services around the world, even in countries where abortion is legal. For example, this inhibits the U.S. Agency for International Development from aiding family planning services.
The answer is new legislation, such as the Global Health, Empowerment and Rights Act, that would end U.S. interference in what organizations do with their own money. It is still on the table in the House and the Senate.
As Human Rights Watch states: “Access to safe and legal abortion is a matter of human rights, and its availability is the best way to protect autonomy and reduce maternal mortality and morbidity.”
Evelyn Leopold is a writing fellow and correspondent for Globetrotter. She is an independent journalist based at the United Nations and the winner of a UN Correspondents Association gold medal for her reporting. She served at Reuters as a manager, editor and correspondent in New York, Washington, London, Berlin and Nairobi. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the Dag Hammarskjöld Fund for Journalists.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
Post World War II Germany has exhibited commendable characteristics — publicly atoning for its Nazi past, working assiduously to create a thriving nation, designing a truly democratic country, integrating its European compatriots into a common market, leading others in opening borders to refugees, and modifying its previous ultra-nationalism to form the European union. Behind these praiseworthy attributes lurks another Germany and with a deadly appearance. Germany, which committed the World War II genocide, actively aids and abets another genocide ─ the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Conferences, reports, articles, and discussions have described the programs and assistance by which Germany has politically, financially, and militarily supported Israel and enabled the Zionists to violate international norms, illegally seize control of Palestinian lands, and suppress Palestinian aspirations for freedom and self-rule. Slipping under the radar is how Zionists exploit German benevolence and subvert German institutions in foreign lands to serve Israel. After a brief summary of how Germany contributed to Israel’s destruction of the Palestinian people, an example of the deliberate subversion will be discussed
Starting in 1952, West Germany agreed to pay three billion Deutschmarks (DM) to the newly formed Israel and an additional 4.5 million DM to Jewish organizations for assistance to Holocaust survivors worldwide. Estimates have the total reparations paid to Israel accruing to between $25 and $30 billion. The United States State Department estimates that, by 2018, payments from various programs to all survivors were $86.8 billion. The final amount may reach $100 billion.
The Federal Republic of Germany’s reparations enabled apartheid Israel to develop infrastructure—roads, railways, and shipping. Israel used the funds to buy patrol boats, tanks, weapons, and Germany’s Dolphin-class submarines, which can be fitted with nuclear warheads. German reparations have contributed to the destruction of the Palestinian people and to the possible destruction of Iran.
Enhancing Israel’s military efforts is only one facet of Germany’s allegiance to the apartheid state. The Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, voted to declare Israel’s existence to be part of Germany’s national interest and passed a non-binding resolution that designated the BDS movement as anti-Semitic.
A peculiar coda to Germany’s guilt trip appears in a recent news report from Times of Israel, by David Rising, 14 October 2020.
Germany has agreed to provide more than a half billion euros to aid Holocaust survivors struggling under the burdens of the coronavirus pandemic, the organization that negotiates compensation with the German government said Wednesday. The payments will be going to approximately 240,000 survivors around the world, primarily in Israel, North America, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe, over the next two years, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference.
This “claim” embarrasses countries and Jews around the world. The Claims Conference continues to nickel and dime present day Germans, who can use the money themselves or, at least help the more unfortunates, especially recent immigrants in Germany. How many displaced people have little access to vaccination?
I have known and still know many Holocaust survivors, including my own relatives, and none of them have required financial care. Decades ago, all survivors were already established citizens in their nations and supported by their adopted countries. Wouldn’t the funds be better used for the one million plus refugees that Germany has absorbed or the tens of millions of widows and children of those killed by Nazi bullets, Nazi bombs, and Nazi vengeance? Don’t they deserve protection? Why does Germany feel its present citizens, who have no responsibility for the Nazi atrocities, must be financially and morally culpable? Do the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy still shoulder responsibility for the atrocities they have committed and the victims they created? Maybe, former German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, supplied the answer.
Le Monde diplomatique at https://mondediplo.com/2020/05germany-israel relates that Adenauer, in a 1966 television appearance, was asked about his reparations policy. The former Chancellor replied that “the German crimes against the Jews had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing”. He then added, “the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”
Germany’s reparations position has set the tone for Remembrance curricula that have little basis to exist in foreign nations and especially in those nations that do not offer Remembrance curricula for the atrocities they have committed upon other peoples. The American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) at Johns Hoping University in Washington DC is a prime example of how the Remembrance curricula in German institutions, in a quiet and not aggressive manner, influences the public in other countries.
AICGS defines itself as “a center for policy research and scholarship dedicated to the most important political, economic, and security issues confronting Germany and the United States in the global arena. AICGS anticipates challenges, proposes solutions, and bolsters the German-American partnership.”
In 2007, the Federal Republic of Germany established an independent charitable association called the Förderkreis des American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS). The charitable association allowed German residents to make tax deductible donations to support the mission of the AICGS and circulate one of its principle issues ─ Memory Politics.
AICGS explains its Memory Politics as:
Germany’s approach to acknowledging and providing redress for past crimes has offered other nations around the world a guide to reconciliation. While Germany’s efforts resulted from a unique situation and are not considered a blueprint for other nations to emulate, they have nevertheless informed and impacted other countries dealing with the difficult processes of memory, commemoration, and rebuilding bilateral relationships.
How does Memory Politics fit with AICGS thrust, which is “a center for policy research and scholarship dedicated to the most important political, economic, and security issues confronting Germany and the United States in the global arena.”
An AICGS discussion, Thursday, July 7, 2022, on Documenta 15 and the Controversy over Anti-Semitism displayed the dubious nature of this fit.
Even before the June opening of the fifteenth iteration of the prestigious Documenta contemporary art exhibition in the city of Kassel, several controversies, including alleged anti-Semitism on the part of the Indonesian organizers and some artists, had been swirling. Then, a banner was unveiled on the first day in which several Jewish figures were depicted in offensive, anti-Semitic ways. These took the form of a clearly labeled Mossad agent with the head of a pig (Mossad is Israel’s secret service), and a caricature of an Orthodox Jewish man wearing a black derby hat bearing the insignia of the SS, the Nazi unit responsible for the mass extermination of Jews. This has unleashed a torrent of critical commentary. AICGS has brought together three leading experts to help us to understand the controversies and the debates surrounding them in Germany.
In any discussion, the moderator is obliged to take a neutral position and serve to lead the discussion so that all sides are properly presented. At this discussion, if anybody represented Documenta 15 and its defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, I did not hear it. I did hear its moderator, Dr. Eric Langenbacher, behave as a Zionist representative.
Shown below are the banner drawings that received condemnation.
Critics charged the left drawing as an ant-Semitic presentation of an Orthodox Jewish person, with SS credentials on his hat.
The right drawing seems to depict a uniformed person as a pig. Why this drawing is considered to be of a Mossad agent is not clear.
Interpret the drawings from a deliberately biased perspective, and one can quickly jump to charging offensive characterizations. Perceive them as emotionally charged expressions from those disturbed by Mossad actions and Orthodox Jewish settlers who daily harass and even kill innocent Palestinians, and the drawings become protest street art, which is supported by hundreds of millions non-racist people throughout the world.
The photo on the left is Baruch Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish settler who murdered 29 and wounded 125 Palestinian Muslim worshipers at the1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron. The photo on the right depicts Orthodox Jewish settlers who are harassing Palestinian farmers.
A foreign observer from Indonesia who wanted to draw murderous settlers in a gruesome manner would naturally draw what he/she knew from newspaper reports and images accompanying them, including images of Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall. Seems perfectly rational and without derogatory motives. Maybe this report from Basil Adra, a +972 reporter, agitated the artist.
Last September, I ran up a mountain, panting, while being chased by dozens of masked Israeli settlers near my home in the South Hebron Hills. I was filming them descending with clubs upon a small village, Mufagara, located in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, where over 1,000 Palestinians are facing imminent expulsion from their homes.
The settlers smashed the windows of homes, vandalized cars, and beat up families, stoning them with rocks and wounding several residents. They fractured the skull of a three-year-old child, one of my neighbors, as his mother tried to hide him and the other children in a small room.
The one-sided discussion revealed its total bias when the moderator, Dr. Langenbacher, asked the commentators to express opinions on the “dark side” of anti-Semitism, audaciously citing a comparison of Islamists with Nazis, and characterizing Hezbollah and Hamas as anti-Semitic.
The dictionary defines an Islamist as “someone who believes strongly in Islamic ideas and laws.” Dr. Langebacher, savior of the Jews from anti-Semitism, blithely commits a bigoted statement that compares Islamists with Nazis.
What do Hezbollah and Hamas have to do with the questions posed by the Documenta 15 exhibition? By what right does Dr. Langenbacher, living in the United States, impugn the motives of those who fight against Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and destruction of the Palestinian people?
Documenta 15 committed no offense against any peace loving ethnicity. It only portrayed the racist and murderous elements of Israeli society in a metaphoric manner. German authorities were incorrect in removing a banner, which should preferably circulate throughout the world.
The Federal Republic of Germany and the United States share responsibility for empowering Israel in its destruction of the Palestinian people, soothing their guilt by donating money and supplies to the Palestinians and their unwanted government, and enabling the Palestinians to survive another day before the next onslaught. A preferred argument against Documenta 15 is that it erred by not including drawings of these two “angels of death” in its popular and informative exhibition.
Dan Lieberman edits Alternative Insight, a commentary on foreign policy, economics, and politics. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name)
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