FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH IN PARIS AND THE UGLY TRUTH OF STATE
TERROR
John Chuckman
Mass murder, as that which just occurred in Paris, is always
distressing, but that does not mean we should stop thinking.
Isn’t it rather remarkable that President Hollande,
immediately after the event, declared ISIS responsible? How did he know that? And
if he was aware of a serious threat from ISIS, why did he not take serious
measures in advance?
Within days of Friday 13, French forces assaulted an
apartment with literally thousands of bullets being fired, killing a so-called mastermind,
Abdelhamid Abaaoud. Just how are you instantly elevated to the rank of “mastermind”?
And if security people were previously aware of his exalted status, why did
they wait until after a disaster to go after him?
Well, the ugly underlying truth is that, willy-nilly, France
for years has been a supporter of ISIS, even while claiming to be fighting it.
How do I know that? Because France’s foreign policy has virtually no
independence from America’s. It could be described as a subset of American
foreign policy. Hollande marches around with his head held stiffly up after getting
off the phone at the Élysée Palace, having received the day’s expectations from
Washington. He has been a rather pathetic figure.
So long as it is doing work the United States wishes done,
ISIS remains an American protectorate, and regardless of Hollande’s past
rhetoric, he has acted according to that reality. But something may just have
changed now.
It is important to note the disproportionate attention in
the West to events in Paris. I say disproportionate
because there are equally ugly things going on in a number of places in the
Middle East, but we do not see the coverage given to Paris. We have bombs in
Lebanon and Iraq. We have daily bombings and shootings in Syria. We have
cluster bombs and other horrors being used by Saudi Arabia in Yemen. And of
course, there are the ongoing horrors of Israel against Palestinians.
We have endless interviews with ordinary people in Paris,
people who know nothing factual to help our understanding, about their reaction
to the terror, but when was the last time you saw personal reactions broadcast from
Gaza City or Damascus? It just does not happen, and it does raise the suspicion
that the press’s concern with Paris is deliberately out of proportion. After
all, Israel killed about twenty times as many people in Gaza not very long ago,
and the toll was heavily weighted with children, many hundreds of them. Events
in Paris clearly are being exploited for highly emotional leverage.
Leverage against what? Arabs in general and Muslims in particular,
just part of the continuing saga of deliberately-channeled hate we have experienced
since a group of what proved (after their arrest) to be Israeli spies were
reported on top of a truck, snapping pictures and high-fiving each other as the
planes hit the World Trade Center in 2001. What those spies were doing has
never been explained to the public. I’m not saying Israel is responsible for
9/11, but clearly some Israeli government interests were extremely happy about
events, and we have been bombarded ever since with hate propaganda about
Muslims, serving as a kind of constant noise covering the crimes Israel does
commit against Palestinians and other neighbors.
It is impossible to know whether the attack in Paris was
actually the work of ISIS or a covert operation by the secret service of an
ISIS supporter. The point is a bit like arguing over angels on a pinhead. When
you are dealing with this kind of warfare – thugs and lunatics of every
description lured into service and given deadly toys and lots of encouragement
to use them – things can and do go wrong. But even when nothing goes wrong in
the eyes of sponsors for an outfit like ISIS, terrible things are still
happening. It’s just that they’re happening where the sponsors want them to
happen and in places from which our press carefully excludes itself. Terrible
things, for example, have been happening in the beautiful land of Syria for
four or five years, violence equivalent to about two hundred Paris attacks,
causing immense damage, the entire point of which is to topple a
popularly-supported president and turn Syria into the kind of rump states we
see now in Iraq.
A covert operation in the name of ISIS is at least as likely
as an attack by ISIS. The United States, Israel, Turkey, and France are none of
them strangers to violent covert activities, and, yes, there have been
instances before when a country’s own citizens were murdered by its secret
services to achieve a goal. The CIA pushed Italian secret services into
undertaking a series of murderous attacks on their own people during the 1960s
in order to shake up Italy’s “threatening” left-wing politics. It was part of something
called Operation Gladio. Operation Northwoods, in the early 1960s, was a
CIA-planned series of terrorist acts on American civilians to be blamed on
Cuba, providing an excuse for another invasion. It was not carried out, but
that was not owing to any qualms in the CIA about murdering their own,
otherwise no plan would have ever existed. The CIA was involved in many other
operations inside the United States, from experiments with drugs to ones with
disease, using innocent people as its subject-victims.
There have been no differences worth mentioning between
Hollande’s France and America concerning the Middle East. Whatever America
wants, America gets, unlike the days when Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion
of Iraq, or earlier, when de Gaulle removed France’s armed forces from
integration within NATO or bravely faced immense hostility, including a coup
attempt undertaken by French military with CIA cooperation, when he abandoned
colonialism in Algeria.
If anything, Hollande has been as cloyingly obsequious
towards America’s chief interest in the Middle East, Israel, as a group of Republican
Party hopefuls at a Texas barbecue fund-raiser sniffing out campaign contributions.
After the Charlie Hebdo attack,
Hollande honored four Jewish victims of the thugs who attacked a neighborhood
grocery store with France’s highest honor, the Legion of Honor. I don’t recall
the mere fact of being murdered by thugs ever before being regarded as a heroic
distinction. After all, in the United States more than twenty thousand a year
suffer that fate without recognition.
Israel’s Netanyahu at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack actually outdid himself in manic behavior. He
barged into France against a specific request that he stay home and pushed
himself, uninvited, to the front row of the big parade down the Champs-Élysées
which was supposed to honor free speech. He wanted those cameras to be on him
for voters back home watching.
Free speech, you might ask, from the leaders of Egypt,
Turkey, the UAE, and Israel, who all marched in front? Well, after the free-speech parody parade, the
Madman of Tel Aviv raced around someone else’s country making calls and
speeches for Jewish Frenchmen to leave “dangerous” France and migrate “home” to
Israel. It would in fact be illegal in Israel for someone to speak that way in
Israel to Israelis, but illegality has never bothered Netanyahu. Was he in any
way corrected for this world-class asinine behavior? No, Hollande just kept
marching around with his head stiffly up. I guess he was trying to prove just how
free “free speech” is in France.
But speech really isn’t all that free in France, and the
marching about free speech was a fraud. Not only is Charlie Hebdo, the publication in whose honor all the tramping
around was done, not an outlet for free speech, being highly selective in
choosing targets for its obscene attacks, but many of the people marching at
the head of the parade were hardly representatives of the general principle.
France itself has outlawed many kinds of free speech. Speech
and peaceful demonstrations which advocate a boycott of Israel are illegal in
France. So a French citizen today cannot advocate peacefully against a
repressive state which regularly abuses, arrests, and kills some of the millions
it holds in a form of bondage. And Hollande’s France enforces this repressive
law with at least as much vigor as Israel does with its own version, in a kind
of “Look, me too,” spirit. France also has a law which is the exactly the equivalent
of a law against anyone’s saying the earth is flat: a law against denying or
questioning the Holocaust. France also is a country, quite disgracefully, which
has banned the niqab.
Now, America’s policy in the Mideast is pretty
straightforward: subsidize and protect its colony Israel and never criticize it
even on the many occasions when it has committed genuine atrocities. American campaign finance laws being what
they, politics back home simply permits no other policy. The invasion of Iraq,
which largely was intended to benefit Israel through the elimination of a major
and implacable opponent, has like so many dark operations backfired. I call the
invasion a dark operation because although the war was as public as could be,
all of America’s, and Britain’s, supposed intelligence about Iraq was crudely
manufactured and the reasons for undertaking an act which would kill a million
people and cripple an entire country were complete lies.
America’s stupid invasion created new room for Iran to exert
its influence in the region – hence, the endless noise in Israel and Saudi
Arabia about Iran – and it led directly to the growth of armed rabble groups like
ISIS. There were no terrorists of any description in Saddam’s Iraq, just as
there were no terrorists in Gadhafi’s Libya, a place now so infested with them
that even an American ambassador is not safe.
Some Americans assert that ISIS happened almost accidentally,
popping out of the dessert when no one was looking, a bit like Athena from the
head of Zeus, arising from the bitterness and discontents of a splintered
society, but that view is fatuous. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens by
accident in this part of the world. Israel’s spies keep informed of every shadowy
movement, and America always listens closely to what they say.
It is silly to believe ISIS just crept up on America,
suddenly a huge and powerful force, because ISIS was easy for any military to
stop at its early stages, as when it was a couple of thousand men waving AK-47s
from the backs of Japanese pick-up trucks tearing around Iraq. Those pick-up
trucks and those AK-47s and the gasoline and the ammunition and the food and
the pay required for a bunch of goons came from somewhere, and it wasn’t from
Allah.
A corollary to America’s first principle about protecting
Israel is that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in Israel’s neighborhood
that is not approved, at least tacitly, by the United States. So whether,
in any given instance of supply and support for ISIS, it was
Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or America – all involved in this ugly
business - is almost immaterial. It all had to happen with American approval.
Quite simply, there would be hell to pay otherwise.
As usual in the region, Saudi Arabia’s role was to supply
money, buying weapons from America and others and transshipping them to ISIS.
Ever since 9/11, Saudi Arabia has been an almost pathetically loyal supporter
of America, even to the extent now of often cooperating with Israel. That
couldn’t happen before an event in which the majority of perpetrators proved to
be Saudi citizens and which led to the discovery that large amounts of Saudi
“go away” money had been paid to Osama bin Laden for years. But after 9/11, the
Saudis feared for the continuation of their regime and now do what they are
told. They are assisted in performing
the banking function by Qatar, another wealthy, absolute state aligned with the
United States and opposing the rise of any possibly threatening new forces in
its region.
Of course, it wasn’t just the discoveries of 9/11 that
motivated Saudi Arabia. It intensely dislikes the growing influence of Iran,
and Iran’s Shia Muslim identity is regarded by Sunni sects in Saudi Arabia in
much the way 17th century Protestantism was viewed by an ultramontane Catholic
state like Spain. The mass of genuine jihadists fighting in Syria – those who
are not just mercenaries and adventurers or agents of Israel or Turkey or the
Saudis - are mentally-unbalanced Sunni who believe they are fighting
godlessness. The fact that Assad keeps a secular state with religious freedom
for all just adds to their motivation.
ISIS first achievement was toppling an Iraqi government
which had been excessively friendly to Iran in the view of Israel, and thereby
the United States. Iraq’s army could have stopped them easily early on but was
bribed to run away, leaving weapons such as tanks behind. Just two heavy tanks
could have crushed all the loons in pick-up trucks. That’s why there was all
the grotesque propaganda about beheadings and extreme cruelty to cover the fact
of modern soldiers running from a mob. ISIS gathered weapons, territory, and a fierce
reputation in an operation which saw President al-Maliki – a man disliked by
the United States for his associations with Iran and his criticism of American
atrocities – hurriedly leave office.
From that base, ISIS was able to gain sufficient foothold to
begin financing itself through, for example, stolen crude sold at a discount or
stolen antiquities. The effective splitting up of Iraq meant that its Kurdish
population in the north could sell, as it does today, large volumes of oil to
Israel, an unheard of arrangement in Iraq’s past. ISIS then crossed into Syria
in some force to go after Assad. The reasons for this attack were several:
Assad runs a secular state and defends religious minorities but mainly because
the paymasters of ISIS wanted Assad destroyed and Syria reduced in the fashion
of Iraq.
Few people in the press seem to have noted that ISIS never
attacks Israel or Israeli interests. Neither does it attack the wheezingly-corrupt
rulers of Saudi Arabia, the Islamic equivalent of ancient Rome’s Emperor Nero.
Yet those are the very targets a group of genuine, independent warrior-fundamentalists
would attack. But ISIS is not genuine, being supplied and bankrolled by people
who do not want to see attacks on Israel or Saudi Arabia, including, notably,
Israel and Saudi Arabia. ISIS also is assisted, and in some cases led, by
foreign covert operators and special forces.
There does seem to be a good deal of news around the idea of
France becoming serious in fighting ISIS, but I think we must be cautious about
accepting it at face value. Putin is reported as telling ship commanders in the
Mediterranean to cooperate and help cover the French aircraft carrier
approaching. Hollande keeps calling for American cooperation too, as Putin has
done for a very long time, but America’s position remains deliberately ambiguous.
A new American announcement of cooperation with Turkey in creating a “safe zone”
across the border with northern Syria is a development with unclear intentions.
Is this to stop the Kurds Erdogan so despises fighting in the north of Syria from
establishing themselves and controlling the border or is it a method for
continued support of ISIS along the that border? Only time will tell.
I do think it at least possible Hollande may have come
around to Putin’s view of ISIS, but America has not, and the situation only
grows more fraught with dangerous possibilities. I’ve long believed that likely
America, in its typically cynical fashion, planned to destroy ISIS, along with
others like al-Nusra, once they had finished the dirty work of destroying
Syria’s government and Balkanizing the country. In any event, Israel – and
therefore, automatically, America – wants Assad destroyed, so it would be
surprising to see America at this point join honestly with Putin and Hollande.
America has until now refused Russia any real support,
including such basic stuff as sharing intelligence. It cooperates only in the
most essential matters such avoiding attacks on each other’s planes. It also
has made some very belligerent statements about what Russia has been doing,
some from the America’s Secretary of Defense sounding a lot like threats. Just
the American establishment’s bully-boy attitude about doing anything which
resembles joining a Russian initiative does not bode well.
After all, Putin has been portrayed as a kind of Slavic
Satan by American propaganda cranking stuff out overtime in support of Ukraine’s
incompetent coup-government and with the aim of terrifying Eastern Europe into
accepting more American weapons and troops near Russia’s border, this last
having nothing to do with any Russian threat and everything to do with America’s
aggressive desire to shift the balance of power. How do you turn on a dime and
admit Putin is right about Syria and follow his lead?
And there are still the daily unpleasant telephone calls
from Israel about Assad. How do you manoeuvre around that when most independent
observers today recognize Assad as the best alternative to any other possible
government. He has the army’s trust, and in the end it is the Syrian army which
is going to destroy ISIS and the other psychopaths. Air strikes alone can never
do that. The same great difficulty for Hollande leaves much ambiguity around
what he truly means by “going to war against ISIS.”
It is an extremely complicated world in which we live with
great powers putting vast resources towards destroying the lives of others,
almost killing thousands on a whim, while pretending not to be doing so. We
live in an era shaped by former CIA Director Allen Dulles, a quiet psychopath
who never saw an opportunity for chaos he did not embrace.
The only way to end terror is to stop playing with the lives
of tens of millions in the Middle East, as America has done for so long, and stop
supporting the behaviors of a repressive state which has killed far greater
numbers than the madmen of ISIS could dream of doing, demanding instead that
that state make peace and live within its borders. But, at least at this stage,
that is all the stuff of dreams.
