Why is the USA attacking Iran and Venezuela?

This is the English version of an interview I made for Kayhan news of Iran, on April 15, 2019. The interview was published in Persian.

My interview was made prior to the USA announcement of April 22, 2019, that it would enforce zero-export of Iranian oil with heavy penalties against any non-compliant nation.

My interview explains why the aggressive warring sanctions should be expected, from the consistent USA campaign for world dominance, and why the USA wants war in both Iran and Venezuela.

<< Overall, the USA will continue its vile wars of sanctions against the peoples of all independent nations that have energy resources — Iran, Syria, Russia, and Venezuela — in a bid to reserve profit from oil and gas for itself and the allies it controls. The USA will also do everything it can to limit the development of China. China is responding with Eurasian trade development, by developing its massive coal reserves, and by energy security agreements with free nations. >>

I explain that the drive to war follows a clear longstanding pattern, anchored in preventing development of independent countries and regions, by imposition of the US dollar as the world currency, rather than being primarily the result of partizan politics or the interests of allies (see interview with Iran's Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif).

Here is the full unedited interview:


K:  What is the aim of America by designating IRGC as a terrorist group? What is Trump looking for by doing such an irrational international act?

DR:  The USA wants to control the Middle East because it wants to control both a high price of oil and who can benefit from selling oil; and gas, by extension.

Let us start at the beginning. The USA has been negotiating a dilemma since 1971 when it unilaterally cancelled the Bretton Woods trade agreement with its post-World-War-II allies and its controlled jurisdictions. The allies were developing too much. I explained this in my recent report entitled “Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering”.

The dilemma, since 1971, is that on the one hand the USA must have high oil prices and force oil contracts to be signed in US dollars in order to secure the US dollar as the de facto world currency, its main financial instrument of global exploitation, whereas on the other hand, nations not under USA control can produce oil and gas and greatly benefit from the high price, thus driving their independence and development.

Development of sovereign nations outside of USA control inescapably leads to a multipolar world with balanced competing regional interests, rather than a world dominated by the USA and largely held in underdevelopment. The USA is desperate to delay the inevitable natural emergence of economic and military multipolarity. The USA is insecure, rationally fearful of revenge, and addicted to its power. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov states this in his characteristically pithy and diplomatic words as: “The United States has a fear of fair competition”.

High-price commodities other than oil and gas also serve to artificially maintain the US dollar as the world currency. These include the payments on forced loans made in US dollars, US military hardware sales imposed on its subservient allies, and opium (Afghanistan) and USA-patented pharmaceuticals. 

In this context, Iran threatens USA domination in two ways. First, Iran is the anchor of an axis of resistance against USA-Israeli domination in the region. Iran is a rare entirely sovereign and strong nation. Second, Iran produces oil, which can be used to fund its own sovereign security, its own popular development, and its defensive influence and ties with neighbouring countries Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. As such, Iran has been identified by the USA regime as the main threat against USA-Israeli domination of the Middle East. Iran is a focal point of opposition against USA hegemony, so USA aggression against Iran will not end until the USA experiences sufficient backlash, producing a more balanced world.

That is the aim of putting the IRGC on the USA list of terrorist organizations. The unprecedented move is part of a USA declared war of sanctions, aimed at destabilizing and weakening Iran, in order to create opportunities for political interference, terrorist attacks, and military strikes, to provoke a collapse. The targeting of Iran is a long-term goal of Republican administrations. This goal was rejected by the Democratic Obama administration as too risky. Democrats wanted “containment”, although Hilary Clinton is an extreme war hawk. Republicans want war.

In terms of partisan factions, war in the Middle East (or Venezuela) helps the Republican energy (shale oil and gas) and arms sectors. Whereas contained stability with USA domination helps the Democrat base of financiers (Wall Street). War in the Middle East also props up Israel by giving it an expanded role within the USA regime.

Overall, the USA will continue its vile wars of sanctions against the peoples of all independent nations that have energy resources — Iran, Syria, Russia, and Venezuela — in a bid to reserve profit from oil and gas for itself and the allies it controls. The USA will also do everything it can to limit the development of China. China is responding with Eurasian trade development, by developing its massive coal reserves, and by energy security agreements with free nations.


K:  What would be the security and intelligence consequences of America’s decision for the region?

DR:  The USA has become an unlawful rogue regime, and the illusion that it created in the United Nations now frustrates its intentions to intimidate and destabilize in order to delay the inevitable emergence of independent nations and regions.

The unlawful, vicious, and rogue USA behaviour is now clearly seen on many fronts: Economic and trade sanctions used as weapons of mass suffering, covert wars by supporting terrorists, such as in Syria, support for the genocidal war against Yemen, fomenting deadly instability in Ukraine, the recent cold-blooded murder of the nation of Libya, interference and direct war threats against Venezuela, deciding that it can use its courts to prosecute alleged crimes in foreign sovereign nations, in absentia, demanding arrests of citizens of foreign sovereign nations (Julian Assange, Meng Wanzhou), running torture camps (Guantanamo), declaring sovereignty over militarily occupied territories (Golan Heights), and so on.

The USA is the main global security threat at this time, without any close competitor. Naming the IRGC as a terrorist organization is the new norm in its outrageous behaviour. Imagine that: Unilaterally deciding that a national military organization, created to defend against the main rogue regime on the planet, is a “terrorist organization”.  The USA is asserting that those who defend themselves are terrorists.

This is an interesting development. It means that the USA is setting the precedent that a national military can be termed a terrorist organization. There is no basis in international law for such nonsense. But if such are the new rules, then surely the greatest terrorist organization at present, occupying entire continental regions, has to be the USA military and the CIA.

In other words, Trump’s irresponsible move puts USA occupiers and covert operatives at risk everywhere, of being detained and prosecuted as terrorists. That is why top USA intelligence and military officials, including General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposed the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

The USA is in the throes of trying to slow the development of the free world. There will be more and more episodes of USA miscalculations. The designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization may turn out to be such a miscalculation. If so, it will not be the last.


K:  American intelligent services are blamed for murdering innocent people and covertly supporting terrorist groups, still they point to IRGC for terrorist acts while the entity has devoted itself to fighting terrorism. How does this paradox get answered in West?

DR:  My definition of stupidity is a chronic inability to perceive objectively, due to class immunity and subservience. The paradox (reality) is not perceived because of self-image-based allegiance to the USA regime. Therefore, there is no paradox, no perceived reality that could cause cognitive dissonance.

This explains why ordinary citizens do not actually oppose the USA regime’s domestic and foreign violence. The regime does everything to indoctrinate by effective propaganda, rather than allow individual thought. When propaganda and institutionalized indoctrination are not enough, then the USA regime jails its own citizens, at the highest incarceration rate in the world (almost 7 incarcerated citizens per 1000 population).

On the other hand, USA elite planners should be concerned about the paradox that you describe, because such incongruities produce vulnerability for the empire. An empire can topple very quickly by a cascade of reactions if it produces fertile ground for such reactions.

The USA has lost its ability to produce and promote great statesmen and has become a cauldron of often pathological special interests. At the same time, it pursues an arms race, and is itching to use nuclear weapons. The world needs to limit USA adventures and ambitions. This is the most urgent problem of our era. Thankfully, Russia, China, Iran, and others are highly mature nations, with strong institutions and internal incubation of thoughtful leaders.


K:  It is reported that the Pentagon severely disagrees with the Trump decision. What is the reason?

DR:  Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the Pentagon seems to be the voice of reason in this matter. Military men have strong classical educations, at military academies, and this education includes the societal conditions for national stability and successful military campaigns.

Wars are not won solely by technology. Advanced technology can be defeated in unpredictable ways. Furthermore, coercive systems are by nature unstable. I think the Pentagon often does everything that it can to inject components of “reality on the ground”.

Unfortunately, the Israel model is too often followed by the USA, both domestically and in its foreign projects. The Israel model is one of brutal occupation by overwhelming force, combined with a massive system to recruit, bribe and blackmail collaborators. This may or may not, in the end, achieve the desired genocidal outcome in Palestine, but it is not a model that realistically can be applied on the global scale, without major diplomatic concessions, in my opinion.


K:  Could this decision relate to the Israel election?

DR:  Of course, yes. Netanyahu publicly thanked Trump on twitter for declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization: “Thank you for accepting another important request of mine.” This would have given Netanyahu a boost of credibility in time to influence the Israeli election.  This would explain why the designation was done in such a rush by the Trump administration, according to insider accounts.

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

Published at Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/


SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.


The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is pushback from individuals and groups -- engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence -- which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential pushback is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations -- in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes -- has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties [1].

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state -- controlled by an elite class -- effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence -- otherwise known as “democracy” -- must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government [2][3], freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions [4].

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law [5]. They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:
•    being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
•    being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
•    being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
•    being induced to commit suicide
•    being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
•    being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail [5].

These anti-speech laws of course are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation” [6].

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.


Endnotes
[1] “Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html

[2] “Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013).

[3] “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press). https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state

[4] “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/towards-a-rational-legal-philosophy-of-individual-rights/

[5] “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. http://ocla.ca/our-work/reports/canadian-defamation-law-is-noncompliant-with-international-law/ (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2)

[6] “Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06. http://www.libelandprivacy.com/areasofpractice_injuriousfalsehood.html

A message to Naomi Klein

A message to Naomi Klein about her recent garbage for the progressive mind "No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need."

1. Casting the mass criminal actions of the USA Industrial-military-security-finance-congressional-lobby-media complex as exacerbated by Trump serves the said complex.


2. "Putting forward a credible alternate plan" is a (self-serving) recipe for ineffective civil engagement that neutralizes politicized individuals and serves the said complex.


3. Your promoter Democracy Now has been exposed as the foundation-funded instrument of the said complex that it is, and so have you Naomi. Whether you want to know it or not, Naomi, you work for the man.

See articles about Naomi Klein in Wrong Kind of Green.

Intl. Quds Day marks a global awakening leading to Palestine's liberation

This article is reprinted from its original publication at khamenei.ir.

Intl. Quds Day marks a global awakening leading to Palestine's liberation

• Jun 20, 2017
• Print

Palestine is holding strong, and the world is changing. This year’s International Quds Day has a new global context. The people of the world are peace-loving in their great majority, and the people of the world are seeing more clearly, than ever before, the true face of the USA.

By Denis Rancourt* 

The steadfast perseverance of Palestinians (their legendary “Sumud”) is an inspiration and a grounding force for all people of the world who fight for their homes, their lands, their dignities, and for self-determination.

Unless one is disconnected from reality, it is impossible to image a more honourable and effective viable resistance. This resistance is against the brutal and ideological occupying regime of Israel, and Israel is given virtually unlimited resources by the ruthless global occupier that is the USA.

The USA thinks nothing of mass murders of entire nations (the list is a long one), of empowering local monsters on many continents (another long list), and of covert proxy wars where UN approval for “no fly” carpet bombing cannot be stomached.

Likewise, Israel thinks nothing of military campaigns against Gaza, of indefinite and inhumane occupation, of mass detentions, of killing civilians at will, of condoning extreme settler terrorism, of depriving the Gaza population of basic needs, and of sustained “cleansing” against villages, neighborhoods, and Jerusalem itself.

I hope that the Palestinian diaspora is not being entirely sucked into the illusions of the Western regimes, and into the dulling superficiality that is offered to the Western middle class. I hope that Israel can never coerce all the occupied Palestinians to be collaborators.

On the contrary, the recent hunger strike of prisoners driven to the brink of destruction is a testament that the Palestinian will is strong enough to achieve liberation despite the increasing stranglehold that Israel is applying.

Palestine is holding strong, and the world is changing. This year’s International Quds Day has a new global context. The people of the world are peace-loving in their great majority, and the people of the world are seeing more clearly, than ever before, the true face of the USA.

The world is finally seeing what the American aboriginals have seen, what all the victims of USA state terror have seen, and what Yemenis, Syrians, Afghans, Libyans, Iraqis, Latin Americans, Filipinos… are presently seeing. Many Europeans and citizens of allied countries are seeing that the USA has led their states towards a policy of global terror.

More and more people correctly perceive that the USA wants continuous instability and violence because global stability and respect for national sovereignty (the very basis of the UN Charter) imply the natural development and independence of Eurasia, Latin America, Africa... and the natural loss of USA hegemony.

Likewise, as its victims know well, Israel wants continuous war and conflict in the Middle East to assert its military and enforcement hegemony, which is otherwise naturally eroded by regional development.

In contrast, Russia and China want diplomacy and collaboration to avoid USA mayhem and economic predation. The more the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia bully nations with sanctions and military campaigns and support terrorist proxies, the more emerging nations collaborate and respond.

The USA military regime enforces and thrives from global economic predation. However, the power of the USA dollar, printed at will by the hegemon, is being eroded and will soon collapse. In the new era, stable development will be based on fair trading of national human and natural resources. This model of development is being applied by the competing blocks. Only USA and Israeli blockades, sanctions and elite coercion stand in the way.

The present period is a dangerous period because the failing USA system is frantic and disorganised. The USA economy is a military and predatory economy. The USA regime will continue to inflict damage to slow the inevitable, and for short-term and domestic “gains”. This will accelerate its crisis of international legitimacy. As the storm passes, both the USA and Israel (and their clients) will need to face the new reality of emerging sovereign nations having mutual interests in stability and respect.

This transformation is occurring because regionally powerful nations are refusing to accept the USA nightmare and insist on sovereignty: Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran … because of the dedication and self-preservation of committed home combatants in Palestine, Syria, South Lebanon (Hezbollah), Yemen … and because of both designed and circumstantial increasing collaboration between independent nations against USA hegemony.

It is the global reality that is causing popular awakening. The USA no longer can intimidate as effectively and no longer controls the narrative. In such a world: war, murder, and genocide carry the consequences of loss of legitimacy and isolation. Does the USA really want to become closed onto itself, with only Canada to exploit? Do client states really only want the privileges of buying overpriced USA weapons and of being paid in soon-to-be-worthless USA dollars for everything they have? Do USA “allies” really want to adopt Hollywood-made pseudo-culture and values?

The answers are no, no, and no. The world is freeing itself at a fast pace. The USA cannot nuke everyone like it did against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are not enough bombs to destroy the emerging world.

This International Quds Day marks these profound changes and sits on the cusp of a global transformation that will include the liberation of Palestine, to the degree that occupied Palestinians will themselves mostly determine. All of this will make both Israel and the USA more humanistic, which is not difficult to imagine.

Occupied Palestinians constantly make brave contributions to humanity, literally with their lives. We celebrate their invaluable gifts to us and we reciprocate when we fight to secure our own self-respect and dignity.

*Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications in physics education research. Rancourt has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israeli lobby at that institution, which fired him under false pretext in 2009.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir.

US “sue Saudis for 911 law” would be a geopolitical tectonic shift because…

New law approved by Congress on September 9 violates international law, would destabilize the US regime

By Denis G. Rancourt

We live in particularly unstable and dangerous times. The US behemoth is forced to adjust to an increasingly multipolar world, as Eurasia and alliances such as BRICS coalesce.

The coup in Brazil, tripling US expenditures for suppression in Latin America, Israel’s frantic genocidal pace, the NATO build up to intimidate Russia, Syria’s miracle resistance against US-desired “regime change”, Trump’s nationalistic impulses, and a Philippine president’s angry words… are all signs of the changing world.

The US regime did not need a domestic crisis that threatens its geopolitical posture, but it certainly deserves one.

I don’t mean pipeline resistance or Black Lives Matter. Those can be bulldozed and bought out without much difficulty. And the occupying police gang is not about to be displaced by any rival. No, I mean the “sue Saudis for 911 law” crisis: a real shit-could-hit-the-fan doozy.

Let me explain. For this, I need to present the following elements: Relevant international law concepts, present US law that violates the state immunity principle, characteristics of the new “sue Saudis for 911 law”, and the three reasons that this lawmakers’ project is a threat to the US regime.

Must Watch video::: The real reason that Donald Trump is "unelectable"

Truth about US criminality in the Middle East is spelled out by Donald Trump.

Source: LINK.

Left Analysts: Clinton Presidency Would Be More Criminal and Murderous Than Anything Trump

Many left analysts from all sectors predict that a Clinton presidency would mean savage wars like nothing nationalist Trump would do.

Trump “the Fascist”: Backdoor Backing of a Political Psychopath Named Hilary Clinton
April 12th, 2016
James Petras

Want Endless War? Love the U.S. Empire? Clinton’s Your Choice
February 3, 2016
Marjorie Cohn

Trump and Clinton: Censoring the unpalatable
March 29, 2016
John Pilger

Hillary Clinton: the Queen of Chaos and the Threat of World War III
March 10, 2016
Maidhc Ó Cathail and Diana Johnstone

Exposed: The US is an Oligarchy Ruled by Billionaires and Dictators
April 17, 2016
Vanessa Beeley

We came, we saw, he died
February 2015
Jackson Lears

Hillary Clinton, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Establishment
February 24, 2016
Matt Peppe

Alwaght News interview with Denis Rancourt -- Every Day Must be Quds Day

Monday, July 6, 2015, 5:22 PM

Every Day Must Be Quds Day, We Must All Be Palestinians: Prof. Denis Rancourt

Alwaght - Professor Denis Rancourt, a Canadian scholar who was fired from the university where he was teaching under Israeli lobby pressures, is of the opinion that everyday should be marked as the International Quds Day, stressing that world’s nations ought to close ranks against the arrogant powers’ murder campaigns and support popular resistance movements.  
“Any country that serves US geopolitical machinations is protected by the US regime, and is thereby shielded from war crime prosecutions, no matter how horrendous and obvious its mass murders may be. The history of this pattern is unambiguous, and the protection typically extends to the economic, diplomatic, and military spheres. This is especially true for Israel which is in a symbiotic relation with powerful Israel lobbies in the US, France, Canada, Australia, … In the UK the domestic Israel lobby is somewhat kept in check by strong popular activism that impacts electoral politics,” Dr. Denis Rancourt said in an exclusive interview with Alwaght news website.
He also said that the Saudi regime, by its actions and alliances, is an integral part of the empire that is attempting to exterminate Gaza’s life and spirit, and the Saudi regime’s war crime of aggression against the people of Yemen is most despicable. Israel is not the only active war criminal aggressor in the region. All will enjoy immunity under the empire’s disproportionate influence on world institutions until the newly balanced emerging world has sufficiently matured. 

Alwaght: In August 1979, the late founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khomeini declared the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as International Quds Day, calling on Muslims across the world to mark the annual occasion by holding street rallies. Millions of people around the world take to the streets on this day in a show of support for the people of Palestine, demanding an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. What's your take on International Quds Day?

Rancourt: The International Quds Day is an important statement of recognition and of profound gratitude towards all occupied Palestinians who fight back and reject collaboration with the occupying force. We must honour and celebrate their inspiring, courageous and tenacious endurance, resistance, and dignified self-defence. Quds Day is a vital link to the extraordinary spirit and strength of occupied Palestinians, who are a world treasure in the global fight against organized oppression and evil. The world desperately needs Palestinians, and Palestinians need a conscious and moral world that respects itself enough to actually fight for justice. Every day must be Quds Day, and we must all be Palestinians. Our personal actions involving risk must oppose domination in every area of society, starting close to home in priority, and extending to all the peoples against which enslavements, genocides and wars have been and are being perpetrated.

We, free people of the world, owe much to Palestinians for their stellar and heroic resistance against a most brutal empire. That empire, which includes my country (Canada) as a participant in these global crimes, is vicious and immoral. It has enslaved and exterminated millions and millions of victims on all inhabited continents, in its insatiable quest for power and material gain. It strives for and imposes total and uncompromising dominance -- not just dominance over territory and national administrations, but over peoples and peoples’ minds and spirits also.

Quds Day is a statement that the dominant global empire will be stopped, and is being stopped, by the actuated will of people, who do not want to be dominated, by the actuated will of people who want freedom and influence over their own communities. Through widespread resistance, a new world is emerging as a mosaic of collaborating nations that control their own destinies and associations, and that do not want to be a plantation and killing field for a global empire. As this new reality is achieved, we must not allow Israel’s on-going genocide project to be continued any further, and we must not allow any more nations to be annihilated by total destruction. We must always stand against the empire’s brutal plans, most visibly, the on-going murder campaigns against Gaza, Palestine, Yemen, and Syria in the immediate, while continuing to support resistance in every region that it is manifested.

Alwaght: Palestinians are seeking to create an independent state on the territories of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and the Gaza Strip, and are demanding that Israeli regime withdraw from the Palestinian territories occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. Despite pressures by international rights bodies, it seems that Tel Aviv doesn't plan to put an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip and in fact is benefiting from the prolongation of the siege. Do you believe that Tel Aviv needs to keep the siege in place in order to safeguard its own existence and legitimacy?  

Rancourt: Israel’s blockade against the Gaza Strip, in combination with Israel’s periodic military massacres of Palestinians in Gaza and all-out destruction of public infrastructure, is an international crime of the highest order. There is no rational justification for the blockade against Gaza, unless the ultimate Israeli goal is progressive genocidal extermination and evacuation of Gaza. Israel’s policy and practice of periodic military slaughters and destruction of public and housing infrastructures, combined with an effectively permanent blockade, can only be objectively understood as a long-term Israeli goal to annihilate Palestinians. This is the on-going, systematic, and long-term Israel genocide that is clear for everyone to see, and that is explicitly managed by Israeli political and opinion leaders.

Israel’s mass crimes cannot be justified as part of any legitimate political or military tactic. There is no realistic existential threat to the Jewish State. Israel is the regional superpower, with one of the most powerful armies in the world. Israel’s fabricated myth of an existential threat is untenable in the face of its history and of the hard evidence. On the contrary, if anything it is Israel’s power, predatory designs, and influence and interference in the interest of empire that are a sustained threat to stability in the region.

There is no sign that enough will ever be enough. Israel could choose to respect human rights and the right of return, in negotiating reparations and resource sharing, or it can continue to practice its criminal campaigns. It has the power to make those decisions. There is every sign that Israel will never make just reparation decisions without sufficient global pressure.

Quds Day is one manifestation of a desire of world citizens to pressure their governments to bring Israel in line with international norms of decency. Quds Day should not be solely an expression of “hope” or solely an occasion for spiritual reflection. In my view, Quds Day also needs to be an affirmation of a moral contract to act and speak-out to exert needed political influence for good. When I have been honoured to be a speaker at Quds Day celebrations, I have expressed this view.

Alwaght: Israeli regime warplanes pounded residential areas in the Gaza Strip during Tel Aviv's 51-day war, killing and injuring thousands of civilians, mostly women and children. International rights bodies and the so-called advocates of democracy and human rights such the US and some Western countries are privy to the fact that the massacre of innocent people is a crime under international law. What has turned Israel into an immune regime while it has repeatedly violated international law by its ongoing atrocities?  

Rancourt: Any country that serves US geopolitical machinations is protected by the US regime, and is thereby shielded from war crime prosecutions, no matter how horrendous and obvious its mass murders may be. The history of this pattern is unambiguous, and the protection typically extends to the economic, diplomatic, and military spheres. This is especially true for Israel which is in a symbiotic relation with powerful Israel lobbies in the US, France, Canada, Australia, … In the UK the domestic Israel lobby is somewhat kept in check by strong popular activism that impacts electoral politics.

The UK is an example where represented active citizens can moderate some of the attempted excesses of the US regime. In response to such a democratic threat, the US and Israel have been using regional tensions and hired-thugs such as ISIS to attempt nation annihilation and dismantling through proxy wars, in targeted countries where collaborating elites cannot easily be installed, such as in Iraq and Syria. These fuelled proxy wars are the most despicable mass crimes imaginable, without declarations of war, without UN approval, and without the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
The Saudi regime, by its actions and alliances, is an integral part of the empire, the same empire that is attempting to exterminate Gaza’s life and spirit, and the Saudi regime’s war crime of aggression against the people of Yemen is most despicable. Israel is not the only active war criminal aggressor in the region. All will enjoy immunity under the empire’s disproportionate influence on world institutions until the newly balanced emerging world has sufficiently matured. 

A similar scenario of empire-supported fractioning and destruction was partly actuated in the Ukraine recently. The US regime is enthusiastic about fermenting war in such a way as to attempt to halt the inevitable global economic development of independent blocks, such as BRICS. Here and elsewhere, the empire’s now-common duplicitous use of economic “sanctions” is both morally criminal, in the potential harm caused to ordinary citizens, and geopolitically irresponsible, in the potential instability that is knowingly created. By any objective standard, the empire’s “sanctions” are mass criminal aggressions.

In view of the emerging world economic realities, the US regime is a failing empire with disproportionate military strength, which is a most dangerous situation. The best we can do in this transition period is to stop the ongoing nation destructions and genocides. And the best way to do that is to support the freedom fighters and resistors as much as we can by taking our governments out of the murderous US-led campaigns of destruction. We must impose domestic democracy as much as we can, in such a way as to protect Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and our own oppressed domestic populations that are needed in the unified struggle for actual democracy. This is why the present wave of US-empire campaigns of terror and proxy wars are currently accompanied by the most aggressive attacks against civil liberties in the US-aligned world seen in many decades, from criminalizing BDS and criticisms of Israel, to prosecuting thought crimes of every variety. Independent thought and democracy are the new undeclared enemies of satellite administrations such as France and Canada, and in the US itself. Even in Israel now, a world bastion of freedom of speech, Palestinian national politicians are being summarily imprisoned. These are all clear signs of a failing empire, and of an emerging generalized will to resist. More and more, every day is Quds Day.

Soon, I hope, in my naïve view, the Muslim world will find a way to unite and become the independent and powerful world leader that it deserves to be. It will further and effectively reject US regime interference, and any emerging interference, and it will negotiate and collaborate as an equal in the world, in the interest of its citizens and their diverse democratic ambitions. The fall of absolute US domination need not be a hell of destruction. It can be an occasion for unity and new possibilities. It can occur as an emergence of justice, with inspired and principled new and renewed leaders. This can even occur in the US and its satellite countries if we show these governments the way. Gaza is already eminently showing the way by its resourcefulness, determination, and pure courage; by its Sumud [Steadfastness]. Gaza calls for our involvement every day, which must be Quds Day.

Alwaght: Some certain Arab and Western countries have been always seeking to deflect world's attention away from the Palestinian Cause which tops the priorities of the Muslim world. What's your perspective on the issue of Cause of Palestine and the attempts to put it on the road of oblivion?

Rancourt: The Zionist project has shown itself to be an expansionist and genocidal project, rather than a benign national emancipation project. This has been more than clear to all observers for a long time. Israel is now seen for what it is: a criminal and rogue state deeply motivated by racist exceptionalism, with a majority population that apparently wants to exterminate Palestinians. Israel’s hate is the hate of a genocidal campaign. It can only be stopped by resisting the campaign and shunning the murderers. A sufficiently firm treatment of Israel can constrain it to follow international law, and to accept the needed reparations and equal-party justice-based negotiations regarding illegally occupied land and the right of return.

The US regime will continue to protect Israel’s immunity, even while the genocide is perpetrated, until the US itself sees Israel’s crimes as an intolerable liability. As the US Empire fails to maintain absolute dominance, even in its own backyard and over its own domestic population, it may come to see Israeli crimes as an intolerable liability. At that point, the US Israel lobby will also see the light. Therefore, this is a race for the survival of Palestine. Israel will do everything it can to steal and break Palestine before the circumstances of the faltering US and an awakening world put a definitive stop to the genocide. If Israel succeeds, the world will have lost Palestine, and we all will share responsibility for this greatest catastrophe. I just don’t know that Palestine can survive without our own real contributions to the global struggle, but I hope that Palestine can overcome even our cruel indifference if we cannot be moved beyond “remembering”.

Dr. Denis Rancourt was a professor for more than 20 years at the University of Ottawa, up to the highest rank of Full Professor, until 2009. In the fall of 2008, he was removed from all teaching duties under the pretext that he had granted A+ grades to 23 students in one course during the winter 2008 semester; however, it's quite clear to everybody that his outspoken criticism of Israel and his pro-Palestinian activism had triggered his dismissal from the university. Professor Rancourt's classes were always attended by tens of students and he was considered as one of the popular university professors at the Faculty of Science.

He has authored more than 100 articles published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, in the fields of physics, and environmental science. He is currently an independent social theorist and science critic, author of several social analysis articles posted on internet venues, and the author of the book “Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism” (Stairway Press, 2013). He is an active volunteer with the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, and an experienced self-represented litigant.
Interview by Javad Arab Shirazi

In support of Quebec's public intellectual Adil Charkaoui

By Denis G. Rancourt

Recently, in Canada, the combination of persistent racist fear in the Quebec nationalist movement, of broadly based Islamophobia in Quebec society at large, and of the Canadian government's de facto policy of energetically fabricating a frenzied public paranoia of "terrorism" as the main false pretext for Canada's new illegal war campaigns in the service of the USA (most recently against Syria), has given rise to a vicious media and institutional mobbing against Quebec's public intellectual Adil Charkaoui.

Charkaoui is a dedicated campaigner and organizer against Quebec's societal Islamophobia, arguably the most prominent figure in this battle. In 2003, he was intimidated by the state and jailed under a "security certificate", the infamous secret-trial instrument implemented by compliant courts in this country. He won that case against the government, in a long and gradual battle leading to full release in 2009, largely thanks to his courage and public presence. The government has to this day refused to disclose (even to the defendant) the evidence against him, under the pretext that this would show how it gathers evidence for these secret trials. Indeed.

Charkaoui is also a teacher and a leader of community-based education in support of proud and productive Montreal Islamic youth. His community organization rents out rooms in government schools for such activities among the large range of classes that he offers.

Recently, one such school cancelled its contract to rent rooms to Charkaoui, apparently in relation to it being possible, within "three clicks" from Charkaoui's school's web-site to arrive at some "terrorist site". Charkaoui was understandably outraged and went public with his complaint.

What followed was the establishment's backlash against his being so bold as to go on the offensive, best illustrated by this incredible mainstream TV interview (below) in which so-called journalist Anne-Marie Dussault acted like an unrelenting vicious attack dog.

The attack is not masked at all. It is a straight-up mobbing, and a most disgusting display of media bias, journalistic sophistry, and bald-faced Islamophobia. Charkaoui's response is consistently brilliant and informed. He does not allow the toxic questions to be accepted as objective, and he does not allow himself to be victimized by this grotesque show of force.

Non-French speaker will need to await a transcript of this epic interview, which so clearly exposes what Canada and Quebec "stand for", namely geopolitical criminality and the lies that mask Canada's role in these crimes against peoples.



This is disgusting media at its worst. I had never seen anything like it before in Quebec. This is a sign that the Quebec intelligentsia is losing its morality. I have not heard the needed condemnation against Radio-Canada.

The less-complete official Radio-Canada video link is this one:



Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK. 

Has the Israel Lobby lost ground in its perpetual war against US academia?

By Denis G. Rancourt


The US Israel Lobby is dedicated inter alia to suffocating academic freedom and to intimidating all scholars away from any educational, research, or political stance against Israeli war crimes.

The Lobby does win victories, such when it blocked the tenure and all academic appointments of the outstanding scholar Norman Finkelstein, and too many others.

It wins, also, when it silences establishment critics of Israeli criminality, such as the remarkable and very recent case of Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, who made the cardinal sin of authoring a letter in the New York Times that reads [1]:

Deborah E. Lipstadt makes far too little of the relationship between Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza and growing anti-Semitism in Europe and beyond.

The trend to which she alludes parallels the carnage in Gaza over the last five years, not to mention the perpetually stalled peace talks and the continuing occupation of the West Bank.

As hope for a two-state solution fades and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel's patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.

(Rev.) BRUCE M. SHIPMAN
Groton, Conn., Aug. 21,2014

The writer is the Episcopal chaplain at Yale.

Within two weeks, Shipman resigned "on his own initiative", as per THIS YALE-STATEMENT.

Overall, the Lobby's seemingly-permanent territorial victory is evidenced by:

• the silence of the great majority of US academics, even in the face of the recent, overt, and graphic slaughter in Gaza
• the willingness of many academics to parrot the Lobby's talking-points on Israel (right to defend itself, Hamas charter, their own children as human shields, blah blah blah)
• the acceptance by academics and their associations of the false notion of legitimate divides between professional work and political expression and engagement, and between cantonized fields of knowledge

On the other hand, I argue below that there is significant evidence that the Israel Lobby has lost some ground in the wake of the latest steps in Israel's progressive and on-going genocide against Palestinians [2].

Existence of empire

A premise of this article is that the US finance-military-corporate empire (US-Empire or Empire) exists. This empire is the largest human dominance-hierarchy to ever occupy the planet. It is based on economic and finance coercion, enforced by the most powerful military and covert-operations apparatus ever assembled.

The US has over 1000 military bases, on every continent except Antarctica. The US military can deploy anywhere and can control any airspace on any of its continental regions of direct exploitation.

The US controls the World money supply and is the sole provider of the dominant World-currency, the US-dollar, which the US prints at will. Any potential threat to the US-dollar (petro-dollar) by disallowed alternative currencies is met with military expediency.

Loans-followed-by-debt-extortion and corporate-predation are the preferred resource-pillaging mechanisms against national economies. When local elites do not enthusiastically cooperate, governments are overthrown and/or all-out paramilitary or military mass-murder and nation-destruction ensues. Ask any Latin American.

Irrespective of any academic debates about the mechanisms of global exploitation, a straightforward macro-economic view of World trade and of World debt is unambiguous, about the reality of the US-Empire [3].

Role of the Israel Lobby

Given the Empire, and given its special and apparently unconditional relationship to Israel, it is natural to ask: What is the complete role of the Israel Lobby?

If the reader does not accept the fact that there is a highly-financed and well-organized Israel Lobby that operates in all the major nations aligned-with and militarily-integrated-to the US-Empire, then the reader may consider some background reading [4][5], and a purview of the mainstream media in the aligned and militarily-integrated White nations.

The Israel Lobby has the role of chief-whip for the US-Empire. That is, the Lobby ensures doctrinal discipline among Western politicians, intellectuals, and the media, regarding the Empire’s Middle East policy. I mean “intellectual” in the broad sense of any professional who has influence, and “media” in the broad sense of anyone who communicates to others.

The Empire’s main geopolitical focus presently is the Middle East, where the Empire is dedicated to actively and continuously prevent liberation and coalescence of Arab nations, so as to keep control of the territory and the energy resources. To achieve this, the Empire’s main policy in the Middle East is Israel, which is charged with continual war and sabotage against all Middle Eastern entities that would vie for independence from the Empire.

Thus, the Empire, via Israel, is embarked on a vicious and murderous project without-an-end in the Middle East, and this unsavory project must be sold to the Empire’s home populations, including both managers and ordinary citizens. That is the role of the Israel Lobby; to sell Israel and the continuous and deliberate carnage as acceptable and unavoidable.

That is why the Israel Lobby is actively engaged is creating Islamophobia, in exaggerating anti-Semitism, in constructing Nazi-holocaust remembrance, in suppressing academic freedom, in suppressing freedom of the press, in “finding” and pursuing alleged “terrorists”, in developing anti-speech [or] “anti-hate” laws, in promoting cultural ties with Israel, in attacking Muslim associations, in promoting the myth of unique Jewish suffering [6], and so on.

Attacking academics

As such, the work of the Israel Lobby includes hundreds of ongoing campaigns to intimidate, discipline, fire, and vilify academics who dare to be critical of Israel or of US Middle East policy. The list of shut-out and targeted academics is a long one and includes the well-known cases of Joel Kovel, Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, James Petras, Terri Ginsberg, William Robinson, David F. Noble, Steven Salaita, Iymen Chehade, and many others. The more an academic is threatening to the Lobby, the more aggressively that academic is attacked. My own case is also an example [7][8][9].

Signs of recent Lobby losses

Salaita campaign

Here is the thing. When Lobby-influence recently had Steven Salaita summarily fired -- in the middle of the current slaughter in Gaza; for tweets he made about the slaughter -- there was some significant backlash. Professors identified with Salaita's impulse of spontaneous expression of disgust on Twitter, and were terrified that tenure might so easily be dissolved over social media exuberances.

Influential political scientist and academic blogger Corey Robin followed the Salaita story and nonchalantly suggested on August 8, 2014, that academics boycott the rogue university that had so misbehaved. Surprise. The boycott of the institution skyrocketed: Eminent scholars started publicly cancelling their invited appearances, and the protest movement was reported in the New York Times on August 31. By Robin's count on that day, 5 lectures were cancelled and almost 4000 boycotters had signed-on (all anti-Semites no doubt, :) ).

The backlash from the academic community was so massive, by academic-community standards, that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) acted quickly (August 29) with a remarkably strong letter statement, by professional-association standards, clearly siding against Lobby wishes on the issue.

The sting caused the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees to get palpably excited. The Board even went through the motion of revisiting the firing, as a late attempt to cure some of the massive procedural anomalies and in a lame effort to cool the mark out, with the community.

The point is: Academia flexed its underused muscle and those aligned with the Lobby were thoroughly exposed and embarrassed. There is now a believable threat of the future possibility of broad and sustained boycotts of institutions that go too far. In addition, it practiced non-aligned academia in the tactic of solidarity, which cannot please the Lobby.

It will have made a difference to the degree that it helped some academics to become radically independent, and committed to creating some change, beyond the sole-use of on-line petitions. It widened the pool of academics who are susceptible to become more radical; which, in-turn, puts the Lobby in danger of coalescence-of-resisters and multiple flashpoints. 

Boycott Divestment Sanctions

This is to be understood in the context of a growing and persistent academic boycott movement that is always finding new small pockets of adepts, and that derives strength from abroad, such as the UK. There are more and more constellations of academics in many fields that are joining calls for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel (LINK-BDSmovement).

The international Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement truly irks the Lobby because it is widespread and diffuse, and it is not effectively discouraged by high-profile firings. BDS is a powerful message and it is constant support for all those who want to join. While the economic impact of such a popular boycott is difficult to appreciate, its potential to change hearts and minds on all sides is significant.

Israel's massive efforts to fabricate cultural and institutional ties, and to counter the cyber movement, are proof of the threat that BDS represents. Brute institutional power is not sufficient -- Israel must dig deeply to constantly counter the awakening movement.

Amcha Initiative

A good illustration that the Lobby may be losing ground is a recent desperate and toothless move by the Amcha Initiative, a Zionist intimidation group that focusses on US universities.

Recently, hundreds of US Middle East Studies scholars signed a joint call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions [10]. At the time of this writing, 586 scholars and librarians had signed.

The Amcha Initiative decided to act. The Amcha Initiative is a "non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, educating about, and combating antisemitism at institutions of higher education in America". Or, simply put, as it states "Protecting Jewish Students" (sic).

The best that Amcha could do was to publish the names and affiliations of the first 218 US signatories of the said call for boycott. It called its list "AMCHA Publishes List of Over 200 Anti-Israel Middle East Studies Professors".

The Amcha statement suggests: "Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering." And it asks: "How can professors who are so biased against the Jewish state accurately or fairly teach students about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict?"

When the Lobby's actions are this ridiculous, it is a sign of weakness. Or spurious feebleness of mind? Amcha would have the state cull academia of those committing the thought crime of being "biased against the Jewish state", and would have us accept the mythical talking-point-notion that a professor can be free of bias.

Intellectual discourse and academic freedom are out. "Neutral" zombies are in. Criticism of Israel is bias, if not anti-Semitism (notice the weakened position here also), and recognizing the existential threat from the Gazan child-wielding terrorists is clear thinking. War crimes are self-defence, and so on, otherwise you are irrationally hostile against Jews, who have barely survived "The" Holocaust.

How long is this crap going to hold out? Amcha is one of many signals that the Zionist hold on US numbness-of-mind is falling apart. Soon there will be a renewed cycle of foreign policy examination in US elite circles -- brought on by social, if not academic, unrest; World, if not US, unrest.


Endnotes

[1] "Three-sentence letter in 'NYT' results in Yale chaplain's resignation", Mondoweiss, September 7, 2014. http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/sentence-chaplains-resignation

[2] "Israel's attempted genocide must fail -- Lessons from Canada's genocide" by Denis G. Rancourt, Dissident Voice, August 2, 2014; http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/08/israels-attempted-genocide-must-fail/

[3] "Global economic model of war" by Denis G. Rancourt, Veterans Today, September 3, 2013. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/03/global-economic-model-of-war-understanding-syria-and-more/

[4] "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by Mearsheimer, John J. and Walt, Stephen; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

[5] "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" by Norman G. Finkelstein, Verso, NY, 2000.

[6] "Israel Obstructs Gaza Rehabilitation" by Stephen Lendman, Global Research, September 8, 2014. http://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-obstructs-gaza-rehabilitation/5400272

[7] Recent interview of me by Kourosh Ziabari of the FARS News Agency: "Prof. Denis Rancourt: The United States Supports Israel for Constant Bloodletting in the Middle East", September 16, 2014. http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930616000976

[8] Many links here: http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/

[9] Present struggle and funding campaign: http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/donate.html

[10] "Over 100 Middle East Studies Scholars and Librarians Call for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions", Jadaliyya Reports, August 6, 2014. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18811/over-100-middle-east-studies-scholars-and-libraria


Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK. 

Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society

The US military-finance-corporate empire (US-Empire) is characterized by (LINK):

• global military projection using over 1000 military bases
• control over the global finance instruments (and the money supply)
• corporate exploitation of labour and resources on the scale of entire continents
• dominant influence on World organizations such as the United Nations
• a demonstrated willingness to annihilate entire populations and societies -- directly or by proxy -- in order to ensure complete compliance

The nations entirely destroyed recently by the US-Empire include: Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and so on. These actions are outright crimes of mass aggression viciously targeting entire peoples, using combinations of military devastation, political overthrows, and brutal economic blockades.

No other regime in today's world is responsible for such premeditated and repeated acts of mass murder against entire modern societies. The US with its military allies, most notably Israel, is presently by far the greatest threat to peace and the greatest purveyor of terror on the planet.

This is not debatable by reasonable people. The US-Empire's present preeminent position of brutal global thug is a self-evident truth based on hard facts regarding the magnitudes of death and destruction; counted in millions of lives, millions of refugees, and nation-wide obliterations of civil infrastructure, not to mention annihilations of national and civil institutions. US crimes do not diminish the importance of injustices perpetrated by non-aligned regimes, but there is an obvious asymmetry of magnitudes that simply cannot be denied.

It is also apparent that the US-Empire's projects of nation destruction are strategic and premeditated. Having built an instrument for annihilating nations, it appears difficult for the US-Empire to not use it, irrespective of any moral or legal considerations. US "diplomacy" has become strictly an exercise in promoting its wars for geopolitical design.

It is in this realistic context of a ferocious, rogue and barely-constrained superpower that we must understand Obama's emanations about ISIS as nothing but a pretext to "remove Assad". And "removing Assad" can only mean destroying the Syrian nation and its people because the Syrian army and the Syrian people stand together and overwhelmingly support Assad against the foreign invaders.

The legitimate political dissidence in Syria was used as a front and a pretext to inject massive numbers of externally-funded foreign rebels into a proxy war for the US-Empire and its regional partners-in-crime. This is established by every credible researcher. (And, of course actively masked by the US-Empire's propaganda.)

And now an element (ISIS) of the injected foreign rebels is used as a pretext for all-out war US-style. For Syria, this means complete annihilation of the national defence forces, and total destruction of civilian infrastructure to bring the population to its knees and lay siege to any resistance. Straight-up crimes against humanity as the modus operandi for "regime change", a la USA, followed by US corporation predation, territorial control, etc.

Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society.

Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society.

Obama's ISIS project is nothing but a pretext to murder and destroy Syrian society.

* * *

Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK. 

Sweeping agreements will further degrade university education in Ontario, "Canada"

 By Denis G. Rancourt


In mid-summer vacations we learned from the media that the "Ontario government has signed a sweeping set of agreements with universities and colleges that will oblige them to choose areas of specialty and avoid overlapping programs with one another". [1]

This is a structural change that goes to the heart of institutional identity and jurisdiction. Thus, it is important to ask what the large societal forces are that have driven this change, and what the foreseeable consequences of this change might be.

The significance of this massive legal and structural re-organization of the higher-education complex in Ontario is confirmed by the facts that these changes:

• were not subject to public consultation;
• were made entirely my management without seeking university senate approvals; 
• were negotiated behind closed doors without collegial participation;
• were announced when the students are away.

Since their creation, universities in Ontario have been independent bodies. This independence is statutory. Each university derives its legal authority from a law enacted by the provincial parliament. This gives each institution the responsibility to develop its academic programs through a collegial process culminating in decisions made by the university senate, subject to the management of financial funds overseen by the university board of governors.

The idea is that a university is suppose to serve the needs of the local (city and regional) population, although not exclusively, and that the collegial process involving students, professors, and community members, is best suited to identifying academic needs.

The university administrations (the executives) have now sold-off institutional independence without a fight, and without consulting their communities. They have collaborated with the service executives that run the province.

Increased specialization will necessarily have large societal costs, that will be paid by students and their families. Students will need to travel further and live away from home sooner, at great extra costs, without the option of a local institution that offers a desired program.

Increased specialization will eliminate much healthy inter-university competition, both competition for enrollments and intellectual competition between departments in a given academic discipline. Whereas, larger academic departments are known to be more hierarchical, often at the expense of the individual academic freedoms of professors and students.

As it stands, there is more variation in brilliance from professor to professor (and from student to student) than variation in brilliance from university to university. The academic reputation and influence of an individual researcher is relatively easy to gauge whereas the academic reputation of a department or university is ill-defined, and more often than not simply and superficially tied to size, and thus arising from the department's or university's political weight within the discipline.

Increased specialization will force-out individual brilliance by subjecting all the professors and students within a discipline to be subjugated to the authority of a large departmental hierarchy. All such hierarchies tend towards schools of thought, normalization of investigative procedures, and so on -- they constrain and stifle creativity and risk-taking.  

Increased specialization represents monopolizing and cantonizing of academic disciplines. The relative fluid ability that an institution possessed to create new programs and research areas will be replaced by fossilization tied to provincial funding.

Furthermore, the increased specialization will not produce savings for the province. Where are the studies that predict such savings and what are the underlying assumptions of those calculations?

The promise of savings for the province is a false pretext to achieve specialization. As with virtually all institutional changes, specialization is driven by covert underlying forces. Namely, the natural forces towards sharpening and consolidation of hierarchical control of the economy and of people who populate the economy. [2]

Specialization serves "globalization" and "corporatization" -- that is, further vassalization of "Canada" into the US corporate-military-finance empire (Empire).

Specialization of Ontario's higher-education complex enables a tighter control on students and professors in view of accepting "globalization", and of accepting their roles within the globalization project. Specialization facilitates indoctrination into the logic of the US corporate-military-finance empire. The mechanisms are as follows:

• Cross-fertalization between disciplines is physically barred.
• Disciplines that are potential threats are physically isolated and hierarchically controlled.
• Students with different perspectives cannot physically meet.
• Students in a given location are controlled by a single administration, allowing tighter discipline.
• Students are virtually all away from home and thus more vulnerable to hermetical training and indoctrination.

As a result, a student is more tightly indoctrinated into his/her role in the service of the Empire, and is thus made more stupid than he/she otherwise would be. He/she is also less able to adapt to any other role than the prescribed role -- a dangerous attribute in a changing world.

To give ONE EXAMPLE, the main geopolitical obsession of the US corporate-military-finance empire these days is its policy in the Middle East. Empire strategists believe that controlling the Middle East allows the US to control access to energy, and thus control development and a strategic resource. This militarily-enforced control of the Middle East and of the exploited realm also allows the US to impose the US-dollar as the World (energy) currency, and the dollar (which the US prints), in turn, is the empire's main economic exploitation device. [3][4]

In order to keep control in the Middle East, the US must constantly prevent the Arab Wold from coalescing and liberating itself. It must generate controlled perpetual war, as needed. It must kill Arabs. Its main agent in the region is Israel. [3][5]

In order to help make its perpetual waring acceptable to the citizens of the Empire, there must be a "war on terror", and there must be Islamaphobia, including regular discoveries of "sleeper agents", "terrorist plots", and so on [6]. All this is difficult to swallow for many students (professors generally have an easier time).

Overall, their is a risk that the Empire's perpetual waring, including Israel's pet project of its genocide against Palestinians, will become fatally unsavory to liberal citizens of the Empire (except in Israel where killing Arabs is, by necessity, culturally normalized by state indoctrination and enforcement). The main agent at home to align political positions, thought, and discourse on Israel is the Israel Lobby [3][7][8]. But the Lobby is becoming insufficient. Campuses are alight with "Israeli Apartheid Weeks" and with "BDS campaigns". And genocides and war crimes seen on YouTube make people quite angry.

One part of the solution, for universities, is a classic divide and conquer: Specialization. [9]

When campuses become unimodal professional-training boot camps, there is no campus activism that could poison societal consciousness [10]. And the professors are not disturbed by colleagues in other fields having different perspectives.


Endnotes

[1] "Ontario unveils deal with universities, colleges to specialize programs" by Adrian Morrow, Globe & Mail, August 8, 2014. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ontario-unveils-deal-with-universities-colleges-to-specialize-programs/article19969302/

[2] "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism" by Denis G. Rancourt, Stairway Press, Mount Vernon, WA, 2013; see chapter entitled "Institutions Naturally Evolve Toward More Control".

[3] "The Intended Roles of the Israel-Lobby and of Israel in the US-Empire are Incompatible with Peace" by Denis G. Rancourt, July 30, 2014; http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-intended-roles-of-israel-lobby-and.html -- and at Dissident Voice.

[4] "Global Economic Model of War: Understanding Syria and more" by Denis G. Rancourt, September 3, 2013; http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2013/09/global-economic-model-of-war.html -- and at Veterans Today.

[5] "Israel's attempted genocide must fail -- Lessons from Canada's genocide" by Denis G. Rancourt, July 29, 2014; http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2014/07/israels-attempted-genocide-must-fail.html -- and at Dissident Voice.

[6] "Canadian judge goes bonkers on a thought crime: Case of Mohamed Hersi defended by lawyer Paul Slansky" by Denis G. Rancourt, July 25, 2014. http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2014/07/canadian-judge-goes-bonkers-on-thought.html

[7] "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by Mearsheimer, John J. and Walt, Stephen; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

[8] "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" by Norman G. Finkelstein, Verso, NY, 2000.

[9] Similarly, all the major societal changes that have occurred in Canada since Jean Chrétien was ousted -- prominence of the Israel Lobby, change of position on Palestine at the UN, seeking foreign investments as the main economic "motor", allowing exponential increase in foreign ownership, privatization of public holdings, change of geopolitical stance from peace-keeping to war-mongering, treatment of refugees and immigration policy, politicization/corporatization/globalization of universities, militarization of police, surveillance practices, increased criminalization of citizens, reduction of democratic processes, alignment of the media, ... -- are attributable to the on-going vassalization of "Canada" into the US corporate-military-finance empire, and its pillaging.

[10] See "Disciplined Minds -- A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives" by Jeff Schmidt; Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.


Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK.