John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Thank you for this moving account of your treatment by Egypt’s el-Sisi government, but such horrors cause David Cameron, now welcoming el-Sisi to Britain, no loss of sleep.

The truth is that Israel could not tolerate the previous, elected government of Egypt a week longer, and that is why it was toppled. Cameron invariably extends his friendship towards anyone doing Israel’s bidding. Rupert Murdoch, his patron, undoubtedly insists.

We all know how Israel loves jabbering about democracy in public relations speeches, but, when it comes to any neighboring countries or people, the jabbering falls strangely silent. Democracy for any of Israel’s neighbors is viewed as toxic.

And just so, Hamas in Gaza, not a terrorist organization but a party representing Palestinian interests (one Israel even secretly assisted in its early days in order to sabotage Fatah), a party which was freely and fairly elected in Gaza and relentlessly attacked by Israel ever since.

With whom does Israel insist on dealing in all matters concerning Palestine, at least on the very few occasions it deigns to talk? Abbas, a man who is not elected.

Some democratic values. Some democracy.

I’m sorry, but Egypt will never have a democracy of any meaningful description so long as Israel remains what it is.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Ms. Colton, The U.S. Embassy spokeswoman, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the U.S. is not interfering in Egypt’s politics.”

Well, if that were true, it would mark a first.

CIA bribes and influence are the norm in all such countries; the CIA maintains a huge secret fund for just that purpose.

I also think the situation in Egypt is more complicated than this story suggests.

The United States always maintains a noisy public commitment to words about democracy, but that is a very different matter than what goes on behind closed doors.

Not only is the United States comfortable with the stability and predictability of rule by military groups in the region, it must always be looking to the interests of its client-state, Israel.

A truly democratic Egypt is unlikely to be overly friendly to Israel, but a group of well-bribed military men or others keeps things on course.

I have heard an eloquent expert speak on parts of the situation in Egypt, and he said that Egyptian military is perhaps the country’s greatest industrial operation, controlling many profitable factories and businesses, much as the military in China or the Republican Guard in Iran.

The small number of people who control these enterprises are reluctant to give up any influence to popular notions about democracy.

The feeling is that if they, the military, just go slowly, the people will tire of their demonstrations and demands, and things can settle to something they regard as normal.

It is hard to believe that the United States government would seriously oppose this strategy, although, as always, it will do some public blubbering.

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‘Claims of a “meddling foreign hand” have routinely found resonance among Egyptians.’

And, considering Egypt’s history, why would it be otherwise?

That kind of statement is completely naive or it is dishonest.

Once controlled by Turkey. Once controlled by France. Once controlled by Britain. Britain, France, and Israel conspiring to take over the Suez Canal in the 1950s?

A popular hero like Nassar the target of foreign plots and plans for assassination?

A tyrant president like Mubarak, completely in the pay and in the pocket of the United States, for thirty years?

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“Noticably absent from this is how Saudi Arabia has been furiously funding fundamentalist groups as they are also terrified about the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Why don’t the world powers call Saudi Arabia out on this?”

Sorry, but that is very naive.

Behind the scenes, the Saudi princes, the United States, and Israel have long been great pals.

They often work together secretly towards certain ends.

None of them would value democracy in Egypt, each for its own reasons.

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“Never trust muslims [sic].”

I prefer never trusting people who make ignorant statements like yours.

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“Democracy is not for everybody. To make it work you need an educated, enlightened and engaged population.”

That is a very old and rather trivial idea. It is also quite arrogant.

Just where, among advanced democratic states do you see these conditions?

In the United States?

The United States that believes in polls that Saddam assisted in 9/11 and had secret weapons of mass destruction?

The United States that has ignoramuses like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin seeking the highest office?

The United States whose greed and complete lack of self-control just pitched the planet into a years-long financial disaster?

“As a nation, Egypt would be better served by a benevolent tyrant.”

And who selects the tyrant? And who determines that he is off on the wrong path?

Churchill had it right when he said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others.

The historical truth is that democracy comes when a society has a large enough middle class who feel that their many interests cannot be properly looked after by a tyrant or king. Peasants don’t have many interests beyond keeping alive, but the middle class has business needs, investment needs, property-law needs, and many other interests.

Democracy flows naturally out of economic growth, always and everywhere.

The flow is often temporarily interrupted by old established interests, but only temporarily.

There is no reason to believe Egypt is not ready for democracy. It has a large middle class. It has millions of educated people.

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The Egyptian military has made deals with people like the Muslim Brotherhood in order to broaden its base of support.

That fact only points to the United States and Israel not being afraid so much of “Islamists” as democracies where people disagree with them.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, by the way, is not a terror organization of any kind. It is a rather tame organization.

Actually, many of the Muslim organizations in Egypt expect a form of Sharia Law to be established.

Now, we have been trained by an endless bombardment of Islamophobic propaganda to think that sounds terrible, but in fact is not much different to the fundamentalist Christians – millions of them – in the United States who demand the Ten Commandments in courts and prayers in schools and other public institutions.

And it is little different to the laws of Israel which enable ultra-orthodox Jews to practice their many ancient and backward rules, especially those concerning the inferiority and submission of women and the complete control of children by the husband.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

FURTHER POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY YOSSI KLEIN HELEVI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

It truly is time for Israel to come to its senses and live as a friendly state with its neighbors.

It very much does appear that the privileged, coddled world Israel has assumed and taken great advantage of – all at the vast expense of tens of millions of other people – is coming to an end.

Israel has demonstrated its tendency to take everything it can get away with, always asking for more, and giving nothing to anyone.

In so-called peace negotiations, it has played the world’s longest-running game of double-dealing. Most readers likely will not know that it has never been an official policy, and it still is not today, to accept a two-state solution.

It allows the naive in the world to believe otherwise, while doing everything in its power to work against the idea, whether its killing the Oslo Accords, trying to starve out the people of Gaza, or carrying on countless black operations to disrupt and destroy the lives of those it treats as enemies.

You simply cannot go on like that forever. Moreover, the situation violates the fundamental sense of fairness so many Americans have.

Up until now, that basic sense of justice has been kept quiescent by sentimental memories of Biblical Sunday School stories, constant reminders of the Holocaust of nearly three-quarters of a century ago, and pin-point work in campaign contributions by the huge Israel Lobby.

But visions of killing thousands of refugees (Gaza), the violation of property rights in Jerusalem and the West Bank, endless scenes of abuse, and the arrogant tone of Israel’s governments are awakening Americans and others to the reality of contemporary Israel.

Israel has had its own way for a ridiculously long time, never once sincerely trying to make a proper peace, yet always keeping its hand out for more American assistance ( more than $500 per year per Israeli), more American loan guarantees, more American privileges (like free trade), and more access to American weapons.

Under Bush, Israel went on an arrogant spree of murder and abuse, always hoping to drive the remaining Palestinians from their homes.

It has threatened virtually every neighbor in the Middle East, attacking most of them at one time or another.

But it has for the most part been the same from the beginning. Whatever original documents you examine which are generally credited with legitimizing Israel (Sykes-Picot Agreement, Balfour Declaration, and U.N. Resolutions) – regardless of the question of whether such authorities had any legal right to dispose of other people’s property – we find the idea of a Palestine Territory roughly equally divided between two states and Jerusalem shared.

But we do not see that today. Israel controls most of what was Palestine and works tirelessly to drive out the millions in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Mubarak has always cooperated in matters like keeping the border with Gaza closed so that his cheques from Langley, Virginia, continue flowing. He was even in the process of building a hideous steel wall that goes deep underground to prevent the tunnels which a desperate people use sometimes to relieve their misery.

He has been no friend to his own people, eighty million longing for responsible modern government, and he has been no friend to the poor Palestinians under seemingly endless oppression from Israel.

When you base international solutions on truth and honest dealing with real problems, you often get real, long-term solutions.

But Israel has lived in a fantasy world in which truths are never faced, dishonesty about democracy and human rights is the mantra, while gigantic subsidies and streams of weapons pour in from the United States to keep this Crusader garrison state going.

Israel is the most subsidized nation on earth. It receives about $500 per year in aid from the United States per citizen – more than hundreds of millions of people in this world must live on as their entire earnings.

It receives unparalleled access to the American President and its military and intelligence establishment. It has a free-trade treaty that would be the envy of scores of small countries. It receives billions in payments from Jews abroad and it has received billions in assistance from Germany in reparations for the Holocaust. It enjoys technology-sharing with the United States worth billions a year and it is given privileged access to contracts in the United States.

So subsidized is Israel that few people understand that when they pick up an Israeli tomato or Clementine or other produce, they are buying the most expensive produce in the world, all of it subsidized with “cheap” water from a very arid region, and a great deal of the precious water used hostilely diverted from Israel’s neighbors. To supply new water Israel uses desalination plants which produce some of world’s most costly water, not the kind of stuff a realistic economy uses to grow and export tomatoes.

With all its immense privileges and huge subsidies, why must Israel also demand that its neighbors live in governments of Israel’s choice, that eighty million Egyptians must live under oppression to make the 6 million Jews in Israel happy (population of 7 million is roughly 20% Arab). This is insanely unreasonable. It more than anyone is entitled to ask. It is beyond chutzpah. It is hubris, and if you know the Greek myths, you know the price of hubris.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Please, just whose creature is Mubarak?

For thirty years he has been protected, generously supplied with aid and arms, and literally paid by the United States.

He is only one of many such people in the world’s oppressive governments who has spent much of his adult life on the CIA’s payroll.

Just look at the pictures placed on the Internet by demonstrators in Egypt, people gasping for breath in clouds of tear gas, and the canisters they have desperately picked up off the pavement are clearly marked “made in USA.”

Just as they were in places like Pinochet’s Chile or the PRI’s Mexico or the military junta’s Argentina or Marcos’s Philippines or the Shah’s Iran or, for that matter, in the Palestine territories under Israel’s brutal occupation.

The United States’ regularly blubbering about democracy and human rights has become a parody, a dark comedy played out at the expense of the lives of others. Hearing a hardboiled-egg, human-rights phony like Hillary Clinton pronounce on these profound matters is repulsive, like the words of a snake-oil salesman commenting on people whose deaths were caused by his poisonous medicine.

It is fair to say that few countries on earth are responsible for more suppression of human rights, at least abroad, than America.

I am genuinely thrilled by the heroism of the Egyptian people. It is a feeling I recall last experiencing when the poor Romanians rose against “the dracula,” Nicolae Ceauşescu, with their red, blue, and yellow flags, the center communist emblem torn out. Ceauşescu was, by the way, another useful friend of the United States, actually quite a good friend of Richard Nixon’s.

The Egyptians have so much working against them, Mubarak himself perhaps the least of dark and terrible forces. The United States, with its imperialist concerns over Israel and the Suez Canal, I am sure is working night and day to thwart the Egyptians aspirations.

And, of course, there is neighboring Israel, again a country always blubbering about democracy, which has enjoyed a long cozy relationship with this dictator as it has had with others, including apartheid South Africa. One wouldn’t be surprised were teams of Mossad killers sent out to do their dirty work on the uprising’s leadership.

The odds are hugely against the heroic Egyptians, but one cannot help but share their hopes and aspirations.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven!”

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GIDEON RACHMAN IN THE FINANCIAL POST

“…it has provoked some American neoconservatives, previously firm friends of the Turks, into unrestrained fury.”

Neo-cons and unrestrained fury are old friends.

This group of crypto-fascists has spent years advocating virtually unrestrained use of American power, wars all over the globe, and especially in the Middle East.

Western Asia – a vast region of many proud and ancient peoples – cannot be expected to keep mildly accepting such stuff – piled high as it has been with many genuine atrocities.

Iraq was a ghastly mistake – a million killed and two or three million made exiles, and the United States didn’t even have the decency to accept a good share of the exiles. They left it to poor lands like Syria to stagger under the humanitarian burden.

Afghanistan was another ghastly mistake: only the goal of vengeance describes what has happened there. Any reasonable expectations by the U.S. of justice could have been met through diplomacy and economic pressures and police work.

Pakistan is being bombed on the flimsiest of excuses. Families and poor villagers are being murdered weekly – under Obama’s watch – in the name of trying to get a few “suspected” bad guys. The victims are in the hundreds, and it has terribly increased civil unrest in that land.

Yemen has been bombed. Recent evidence of the use of cluster bombs in the deaths of about fifty people has come to light.

Somalia has been kept under terrible pressure.

Israel has over the last few years called for attacks on Syria and Iran, buzzing the presidential palace in Damascus with jets and weekly making serious threats towards Iran.

Israel has, of course, invaded Lebanon.

It has treated an elected government and a whole people in Gaza to inhumane and anti-democratic pressure.

Somewhere in the heart of every thoughtful person in this region of the world, the idea will have occurred that American policy is just slightly skewed against them, all for the sake of a small new country of immigrants, most of whom have little sympathy with the people or traditions of the place to which they chose to migrate.

Now, most of these events, to one degree or another, center on some concept of keeping Israel going. That certainly, and not oil, was the reason for all that killing in Iraq.

The people of Western Asia are perfectly aware of that. Their views are based on what they see and hear from friends and relatives, not on the sanitized stuff seen on Fox or CNN or ABC.

And then they see Israel behaving even worse than the Somali pirates on the high seas, the pirates generally not killing any of their victims, and they see the United States saying it is just fine.

Well, it is not just fine. It is completely unacceptable.

Of course, coupled with this is everyone’s growing realization that Israel does not play by any rules but its own. It lied, cheated, and stole to build nuclear weapons. It thought nothing of sharing such weapons with a ghastly state like South Africa, all for benefit of some access to strategic materials.

It started the Six Day war to expand its territory, and continues a glacially-paced process of ethnic-cleansing to absorb those captured territories, minus their people. It steals and forges anyone’s passports over and over again to carry out murderous operations. It even ferociously attacked – a two hour assault with every weapon Israel’s air force had – a United States’ military ship in the Six Day war in an effort to drag the U.S. into the war.

And one or two of the most damaging spies in American history were Americans working on Israel’s behalf. Jonathon Pollard was perhaps the worst, yet Israel actually traded in some of the secrets he stole with the Russians and has never stopped asking for his release.

These states see Israel is always forgiven, indeed more than forgiven, Israel being the receiving end of the most extraordinary foreign aid package in history, five hundred dollars per year per Israeli, year after year after year, the virtual subsidy of a society. After all, there are many poor lands where the annual per capita income is not that large.

Erdogan has been friendly and reasonable in the past towards Israel, especially considering the fact that conservative Muslims are a large part of his secular state. But Israel’s behavior kicked him in the teeth, it having been Turkish forces (NATO) that inspected the convoy to make sure there were no weapons. Also, of course, Turkish humanitarians were on board and some were killed, others having been defamed by Israel’s early efforts afterwards to squirm out of what it had done before the eyes of the world.

What is one to make of these events, if you are a reasonable person who loves peace and democratic values?

I can only conclude Israel’s hubris and utterly unethical behavior and America’s unjust favoritism have driven the world pretty close to the brink of despair, and that likely is more keenly felt in those lands than elsewhere.

More unrest would be felt were more of these countries democracies. But many like “moderate” Egypt are hidden dictatorships, and people do not readily express their frustration and disillusion. Ironically, it is a place like undemocratic Egypt where Israel finds its best partner, while never stopping to remind everyone of how Israel is the only democracy in the region (and many might say, judging by acts rather than words, it’s a good thing there are not more such).

The Obama experience also undoubtedly adds to the great weight of these matters. With a name like his, and being the first black man elected president, Obama naturally raised new hopes for justice, and, indeed, Obama sounded good on the Mideast originally, seeming to understand that only American pressure on Israel can produce genuine peace.

But in far less than two years, all that has changed. Obama seemingly accepts every insult (Biden’s treatment on a visit) and bloody excess of Israel’s, just as Bush did, and Obama is the Commander-in-Chief whose orders see Muslims bombed in several countries.

In most important matters, Obama has proved himself little different to Bush, just a more polished and charming version.

He has left all those people with perhaps less hope than ever, a very dangerous situation.