What is Anti-Imperialism?

WHAT IS ANTI-IMPERIALISM ?

This year we have witnessed something that should be very worrying to all those that consider themselves anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-racist. The British state has been at the head of a colonial war in North Africa, and there has been practically zero meaningful opposition to that war within Britain. In February 2003, two million people marched in London against war in Iraq. Only eight years later, all it takes is some reasonably sophisticated propaganda from the press and suddenly nobody is motivated to take a stand against wholesale destruction, widespread massacres and racist lynchings.

The western empire is pushing its agenda of complete domination of Africa and the Middle East, by destabilising and attempting to overthrow all resistant, independence-minded states and groups (in particular Libya, Syria, Iran, Algeria, Hezbollah, Hamas). Dressing this up as a movement for democracy, they have thrown most people off the scent. We need to fully understand imperialist strategy and tactics, and develop our own strategy and tactics to oppose them.

Thanks to Carlos Martinez for organising this great event in the first place. Thanks to Harry Fear for the live-streaming and recording of this great event.

Talks by Marcel Cartier, Daniel Renwick, Francisco Dominguez, and Obiang Nsang. Chaired by Suzella Palmer

Marcel Cartier (Bronx-based rapper and activist, talking about organising against the US empire from within the belly of the beast)

Francisco Dominguez (Chair of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, talking about opposing imperialism from a Latin American perspective)

Obiang Nsang (All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, talking about opposing imperialism from a Pan-African perspective)

Daniel Renwick (Youth worker, writer and activist, talking about the anti-war movement in Britain)

London — November 28, 2011 18:30-21:11

You can read the poem Obiang Nsang performed at the beginning of this event here

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Between partying and ‘revolution’ – lessons from #Occupy Frankfurt

First of all let me say that i was happy to join all those people at Saturday’s #Occupy Frankfurt march. Police claimed it to be 2500 people, the organizer 5000.

The march started at the so called “Hauptwache” where we first headed towards a shopping spree and more and more people then started to join us. The march stopped several times so that the organizers could read/speak to the crowd. During the march the people were more quiet than i had expected. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” was the only slogan that was repeatedly chanted among most of the demonstrators.

Yet i haven’t seen anyone of the so-called 1% yet and the streets, that have been closed by the police in advance of course, felt empty to me although there were thousands of people. Finally we arrived at the banking district with all its skyscrapers, filled with the world’s corporate ownership. Before entering we stopped and the Guy-Fawkes-masked organizers wanted everyone to shout as loud as they can to tell the 1% that the 99% are here.

Up to that point i was still very curious about what’s going to happen when we arrive in the banking district. Will there be vast police brutality as seen in Oakland or Denver? Will there be a very angry crowd willing to take direct action and maybe enter one of those buildings? And the most important question to me, how would the occupation at the European Central Bank look like?

With all respect to this worldwide movement and the idea behind it, i have very significant criticisms to make when it comes to Frankfurt. I was in daily contact with the Frontline at #Occupy Wallstreet so i am very familiar with the events taking place there. I’ve seen pictures & videos from Oakland and Chicago and i stood and still stand in solidarity with them and this movement because i agree with their declaration.

But allow me to make my points.

So, after entering the banking district the next stop was set to be at the ‘Commerzbank’ building. The steps to the main entrance were crowded by the demonstrators within seconds so we decided to walk all the way up to get an idea of how many people we actually are. Finally, with most of the people standing in front of the Commerzbank building they started to play their (i guess) self-titled “Revolution Song” and the people started singing, dancing, clapping and some seemed to be having the fun of their life there. (watch the video to see it for yourself) There were two unarmed guards protecting the entrance of the bank’s building, with several hundred people directly in front of them, but nobody even thought of entering a building or at least demanding the leadership to come out and justify their actions. I am very well aware that to most people this may sound unrealistic or utopian but when we actually get people to come out and raise their voice, it must conclude with more than singing, dancing and laughing in front of the eyes of those people that are being protested against. Also, you can’t be seen as a real threat to the establishment, when the establishment knows every single step of you in advance. There was absolutely nothing i saw that one could actually call “police presence”. The cop’s i saw during the whole event can be counted with both hands.

Then the march came to an end and we finally arrived at the European Central Bank, where you could see the tents of those estimated 200 people that are occupying the ECB for over two weeks now. There were several stands that offered detailled information about the #Occupy movement and others selling buttons, books, Che Guevara shirts and alike but again, it felt really empty despite a high number of people actually being there so i went over to the convoy where several people held speeches about this movement I heard some students speak about the communal injustices in Frankfurt, about several cuts in the social sector and about how overcrowded our Universities are because of the cuts in this sector.

At that point i really started to think about the purpose of all this and suddenly, what Attorney Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party recently wrote about the #Occupy movement, came to my mind.

“First, I feel vindicated because all year some looked at me twisted when I called for 3 National-International Day of Action’s and Unity. We had to beg-and beg Black people just to stand up for ONE day. Now the white left has spearheaded organizing in the streets for several weeks in over 100 cities. Well, I guess the white left is suffering more than the Black’s.”

I started wondering how many people coming out to protest here were aware of what this corporate/banking system just did to the people of Libya, the Ivory Coast, what they did to Iraq & Afghanistan and in the words of Immortal Technique, that “slavery was the capital for capitalism”?

I listened to more speeches, talked to different people, read all those signs and i came to the conclusion that our white middle class, despite all efforts and the willingness to protest & demand changes, is still trapped in a eurocentric mindset. The speeches didn’t go far beyond Germany. Some showed their solidarity with Greece, but i didn’t hear anyone speak out against the latest imperial devestations of other countries. The white middle class cannot lead a struggle against a system to which they aren’t the main targets & losers. The system needs to face the people their dirtiest policies produced, all the oppressed and colonized people abroad, the black & brown people in the United States, the immigrants in Europe whose countries our people formerly colonized & are trying to re-colonize and those people whose leadership allows their resources & wealth to be literally stolen by the west, all over the world.

The last person i met there was this 75 year old american, who stood up against police brutality in the USA and he told me that he attended several marches in Frankfurt now and the police here are saints compared to the states so we discussed it and i told him the thoughts i have now written down. He agreed on most issues, but  was nonetheless happy to see so many people come out to peacefully protest. He told me that he served the  so-called 1% until he read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and became aware of what was really going on. Suddenly he went over to a guy holding the flag of a socialist organization and told him that socialism isn’t the answer so i needed to start a serious discussion. He was very kind and gave me all the time i needed to raise my points. After saying that he rejects any form of governing and is mainly focussing on domestic politics i gave him a short overview of the Libyan Jamahiriyah and how this system works. He got interested and asked me to tell him more about Libya & Gaddafi since he didn’t know too much about it, despite the mainstream media’s reports. After finishing my points his short but direct reply was “Damn, this guy was a serious threat then”. After recognizing my Hugo Chavez shirt we went on talking about Venezuela & Cuba. Just before exchanging our email adresses, he revealed that he’s also an alternative medium and that he believes that those changes around the world have something to do with a new kind of energy going around.

What i want to say is that we need to get people, whether 16 or 75 to see the bigger picture. To make them see that it is not just about us, having to pay higher student loans or taxes, but about the lives of black & brown people all over the world. We must show more solidarity to the people that are being oppressed by this system, because only they can put an end to it. The system makes 1% extremely rich because it holds 99% poor. But the system also killed and continues to kill millions of people from Afghanistan to Latin America, to Iraq, Libya, South Asia and most of Africa. The system only has the power to oppress our people at home because it got rich from enslavement, colonization and mass murder of non-white people all over the world. It is not only a unjust system, but a racist system and WE, the white middle class can never ever be the centre of this struggle. It’s our part to support those who really suffer under this current system and we have to think globally. The word revolution is all over the place, with little understanding of its real meaning. A revolution comes from below and as long as the needs of those below the white middle or working class aren’t put in the centre of this struggle it will impose no real threat to the system. Bridges need to be built and then the “people united can never be defeated”. But the people can’t be united if the poorest & most oppressed are only a part of the 99%. They must be the centre, and i’m not even talking about those at home.

While we were outside protesting against the system that imposes higher taxes/fees on us, we kept quiet about what the same system did, when it bombed Libya back into the stone age.

To perfectly understand and then be able to fight the system, the little boy/girl in Somalia, Iraq or Palestine must be the centre of our struggle because criticizing and fighting our system without putting those children’s future & their countries past & present situation into context makes us political active but naively egocentric at the same time.

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Despite all criticisms of the march in Frankfurt, i believe that the #Occupy movement has the power to be transformed into something bigger if some of the points i made are being considered in the future and i am open to discuss my thoughts on any occasion if you are willing to build bridges, not break them.

Destroying Libya, Lynching Gaddafi – Empire’s war on Africa to uphold unipolar world

The young Muammar Gaddafi with his mentor, the late Gamal Abdel Nasser

The reports from exactly one week ago that the NTC rebels captured libyan revolutionary leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi shook the world. Not only the libyan people’s reaction, wheter they cheered for or mourned his death, but also the mainstream media – the maybe most important tool to demonize him and turn this aggressive & illegal war on Libya into a legitimate revolution – was all over it. But what does the martyrdom of the libyan leader mean for Libya, the Global South & especially Africa?

Re-Colonization of Libya planned a long time ago

On February 15th an armed & brutal rebellion arised in the city of Benghazi. Only six days later, libyan justice minister Mustafa Abdul-Jalil resigned to set up his own government. Later on February 27th he set up the Transitional National Council, and on March 5th the TNC declared itself as the “sole representative of all Libya” with – of course – Mustafa Abdul-Jalil as its head. France & Britain didnt need more than a few days to recognize them as the legitimate government of Libya. The west’s democracy promotion in other regions only counts when everything has been prepared to be able to set up a “democratic leader”, meaning a western puppet president through “democratic elections”. Not only do the United States directly fund opposition movements as the NTC in Libya, the Green Movement in Iran, the venezuelan oligarchy opposed to Chavez etc but the leading figures of those movements have always had a history that ties them closely to the corporate or political body of empire. When they tried to topple Chavez, only a few hours later Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela’s largest business owners’ association, was named president, also without a people’s election or revolutionary movement that would legitimize his presidency. So their methods aren’t new to the Global South.

In Libya, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil led the release program of the anti-Gaddafi fighters, the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – the libyan branch of Al-Qaeda) along with Muammar’s son Saif al-Islam, who now deeply regrets what he had done then. The same people that have been released were now paving the way for this armed rebellion in Libya. Yet we hear voices calling the imprisonments of those fighters unjust and an act of authoritarian dictatorship, wanting to silence its enemies. Now imagine the United States released all Black Panthers, members of the Black Liberation Army and all other political prisoners. Again something no western government can equal, yet they’re pointing the finger at others.

To understand more about the role of Mustafa Abdul-Jalil & Mahmoud Jibril please go on reading this article.

Libya & the media

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing” – Malcolm X

The media was playing the major role from the beginning. Not only by showing the world a false one sided story of the events in Libya but whenever reliable reports of NATO or/and “rebel” atrocities against the civilian polulation showed up, the media blackout exceeded even their parallel blocking of the #Occupy movement. Now it is pretty clear that this war on Libya, which many people ironically still put in context of a so called “arab spring” was carefully planned a long time ago and has absolutely nothing to do with a revolution.

The american and european corporate owned media were closely working together, if not giving direct orders (as Wikileaks revealed) with/to Qatar-based Al-Jazeera and Saudi-owned, US-funded and UAE-based Al-Arabiyah in their campaign to distract people from the events and eventually falsifying and manipulating reports, so that their illegal war on Libya gained the wide acceptancy not only in the west, but also in the arab world, as their media monopolies cooperated with the western ones.

We saw falsified reports, such as news that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela, as british foreign minister William Hague lied to his citizens. We saw Al-Jazeera montaging footage, falsify reports that Gaddafi troops had bombed a civilian area, when in fact it was the shelling of a farm, most likely by NATO bombs of course. On one occasion a video where they claimed Gaddafi troops were raping women, it later turned out to be the audio source of a libyan porno movie, which means that they were actually montaging footage & audio reports they claim to be original sources. The news channels reached a new stage of bias reporting when they only showed armed rebel groups demonstrating against Gaddafi, but when on July 1st, 700.000 – 1.3 million people in and around Tripoli demonstrated in support for their leader Muammar Gaddafi and their system, the Jamahiriyah there was absolutely no equal, if no reporting about it. Those channels were also the first ones to report about african mercenaries hired by Gaddafi with no factual evidence, that led to the rounding up, beating, torturing and lynching of black africans in Libya. ITN reporters witnessed this at first hand. The population of the black down of Tawerga completely disappeared from libyan soil. Several thousand africans disappeared and to date, there is no investigation on it. Al-Jazeera played a major role selling this never proven story and thereby participated in a genocide. Yet where there is no investigation there is no justification. Those channels reported the death of Khamis Gaddafi several times, always just a few days before Khamis Gaddafi was filmed being alive. I checked his Wikipedia page and before anyone could even prove his death, Wikipedia announced him as dead – and later changed the status again.

To read more about the media role in Libya, especially by the left go on reading this article.

Supporting TNC means supporting neo-colonialism & racism

The people of Benghazi in 1911 and 2011 welcoming the colonialists

The media role is very clear now but there is another very important geopolitical issue to the events in Libya & now the death of Muammar Gaddafi that has been kept dead quiet. Libya is in Africa.

Before Muammar Gaddafi led the al-Fatah revolution in 1969 to overthrow western puppet King Idris, Libya was among the poorest countries on the whole planet. In 2011, before NATO bombed their infrastructure & key cities Libya has had the highest HDI (Human Development Index) in all of Africa. There was free healthcare, free education at home or abroad, government funded housing, just to name a few threats to western understanding of democracy. The life expectancy grew by a remarkable amount of years, the illiteracy rates decreased drastically and his “Great Man Made River” project provided water to build cities & agricultural facilities in the Sahara. Gaddafi successfully proved to the world that his third universal theory works and his african country had a higher living standard than Portugal for example. Tell anyone in Europe that there is an african country that has a higher living standard than a country in western europe and wait for the reaction. The United Nations were working on a report that would have honored and rewarded the religious, social & human rights standards in Libya. The report can still be read, but unfortunately the events in Benghazi started just some days before they were set to being awarded by the international community.

So what has he done for Africa? He was the one calling for a United States of Africa and also a great Arab Nation. He, himself is an arab, born in a tent in Sirte, but he always understood that his country is on african soil. He set up an african satellite so that Europe lost 500 million dollars a year and people could directly call Africa without paying extra money the EU. He gave african countries & institutions money at no interest rates so that they didn’t have to beg the economical terrorists IMF or World Bank for money at high interest rates plus having to accept structural adjustment programs (that include privatization of your countries wealth/natural resources). In 2009 he called for a million strong pan-african army to defend any african country from a fate that he and his country have now faced. He also invited thousands of african guest workers to Libya in order to work there. Whenever, wherever he could, he promoted african unity & funded steps towards it.

With the not only arab but african leader, Muammar Gaddafi being chased down and lynched by racist arabs, that were so happy and comfortable to be the slaves of NATO and doing their dirty work on the ground, the west did not only manage to get rid of key personalities of the Gaddafi family, but they can factually pretend to be innocent of the serial killing of a whole family. They also did not only manage to create friction between black africans and arabs, but they initiated a civil & tribal war in Libya. Tribes were now forced to choose on which side they are on, when under the Jamahiriyah dozens of major tribes could live peacefully and didn’t even have to get involved in other tribes businesses.

The NTC rebels’ (which me and others referred to as “NATO slaves”) only common ground is opposing Gaddafi. Today, the best evidence so far for the correctness of using the term “NATO slaves” appeared when british defence secretary Hammond said “It’s certainly not the way we do things” referring to the lynching of Muammar and Moutassim Gaddafi. This could be the first of many betrayals that the NTC rebels will have to face. They have done the dirty job for the west and their only reward will be immunity before international law. Who else could chase down a whole family, shoot at them, torture them, lynch them and then parade with their and other black africans dying/dead bodies on a pick-up truck while the whole word prints pictures of those atrocities on the front page of the major newspapers and calling it a victory for Libya or a victory for democracy?

British MC Akala pointed out the west’s racism best when he tweeted “If South Africa executed all those still alive who murdered and raped under Apartheid would there be this cheering?”. Think about it. Racism is not just the N-word or acting hostile towards coloured people, racism is also silently and sometimes comfortably accepting the racism that other people are practising. Desmond Tutu once said “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.

The death of Muammar Gaddafi is clearly a defeat for Africa. He knew he was dying a martyr. “Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called “capitalism”, but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer.”, that’s what he said when the war on Libya started.

He held strong ties to anti-imperialist resistance groups & governments all over the world. Before Burkina Faso’s president, General Thomas Sankara faced a pro-empire conspiracy that led to his death (by the same people that conspired against Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire earlier this year btw. Look it up) Gaddafi called his system the world’s second real Jamahiriyah. He held strong ties to several other african leaders, that have been the west’s enemies for many years. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe has been the west’s enemy for many years because of his strong stand and his unwillingness to compromise with people that impose sanctions on his country that – at the end of the day – only reach the civilian population. When Sarkozy came to Algeria in 2007 Bouteflika demanded an apology for what the french had done to Algerians in 132 years of colonial rule and especially between 1954-1962 in their war of independence. Sarokzy refused to do so but that’s another story. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was Gaddafi’s mentor and his vision, the vision of Kwame Nkrumah, the vision of Marcus Garvey was started to be taken into action by Libya under Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyah. Gaddafi already set up an african development bank to prevent many african states to be enslaved by the IMF or World Bank debt. He also urged african leaders to not give their resources to the west, whose products that were made out of that resources, were then sent back to Africa and sold at exorbitant prices.

In 2002, John Bolton handed over a plan to France and Britain, that considered the parallel overthrowing of Libya’s and Syria’s legitimate governments. The third country that fulfilled his vision of what the “axis of evil” is was North Korea. Now, what’s the difference between North Korea and Libya/Syria? Nuclear Weapons. As much as i am against the right of any country to possess or build nuclear weapons i must recognize that these weapons are the only vaccine to prevent an invasion or military coup against your sovereign nation. So Ali Abunimah was on point when he tweeted that “Kim Jong Il would be a fool to ever give up his nuclear weapons”. The reason they didn’t attack Iran yet, and in my opinion won’t do by military force in the future, is that one the one hand they know very well about their military power and strategic partners in the region and on the other hand, in order to keep the myth of Iran seeking nuclear weapons alive they must portray themselves as the victims that are hated and directly threatened by Iran, so that similar to the preparation of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasion following 9/11, the facts lose priority in the people’s judgment once they fell for the government’s agenda to spread fear among them.

So what future for Libya & Africa?

TNC rebels tearing down pictures of great african anti-colonialist leaders as Gamal Abdel Nasser or Kwame Nkrumah

In his interview with Russia Today’s Libya correspondent Maria Finoshina, Voltaire Network founder Thierry Meyssan, who has been working on & investigating the events in Libya provided a different story of the events in Libya this year, when he said:

“First of all, it’s quite obvious that the USA wanted to enter the war at the same time with Libya and Syria. That wish was made public by John Bolton in 2002. The plan was passed over to France and Britain who decided to bring it to life in November last year.
Secondly, it was neccessary to verify wheter an attempt to a coup had been made before that. A coup that could be organized by France or Britain. The attempt failed in October. After this failed attempt, another coup was planned. It envisaged killing all the heads of the libyan National Congress if they got together all in a place for a big celebration. That changed tho, after situation in the region changed, after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. At that moment, France and Britain decided to carry out a PR operation and present this coup attempt as a people’s rebellion.”

He went on saying that “However, in terms of basic goals (of the coup in Libya) it is worth noting changes that have started in Africa like those that began in large areas of the middle east. There are already two zones being created. First of all it was decided to create a westafrican zone with Ivory Coast as its centre.” … “block. In case all states are divided … a conflict will have to be created. Not between Shiites and Sunnis as was attempted in the Middle East but between Arabs and Berbers. This is where the real source of the events in Benghazi is.”

“The initial goal of this strategy was to overthrow the people’s government that was in power and to establish western authoritarianism in that country. I believe tho, that they had actually given up the plan because the military resistance proved stronger. Therefor it was decided to act in a different direction. We saw its western TV channels don’t speak of repression and rebellion anymore but it was still a war. Thus trying to prepare public opinion for a declaration that there is a need to divide the country into two parts. Cyrenaica on one side and Tripolitania on the other, with UN forces in between to separate the conflicting parties. They will say the were protecting the civilian population and that is enough and now they are deploying forces to separate the conflicting sides. Then they will declare Cyrenaica ‘s independence, set up the biggest regional U.S. military base, saying it is neccessary, you know, because they decided to start conquering Africa. They are planning to set up a military base in Benghazi to land and deploy their troops there and in about ten years to start conquering Africa. The reason even more serious problem NATO has begun a campaign on destroying the psychological resistance of the countries leaders.”

“What is interesting in this affair is to see that the operation in Syria and the operation in Libya had been designed exactly the same way and should normally have ended with the same war on both sides, but they let go off Syria and i think that some states, Russia included, thought better of it and prevented the course of those operations. So that is why, at the moment, there is no war in Syria. Even if some western leaders repeat almost every day that neccessary to go to war, one of the characteristics of the system is to have islamistic extremists on this part. Let us see networks, known as being those of Al-Qaeda, and i use this term on purpose as there are some chiefs of those units we see here for having fought in Afghanistan, in Bosnia-Herzegowina, in Chechnya, in Iraq, now in Syria or Libya. Some of them in the meantime had been detained for years in Guantanamo, freed by the United States and brought on spot to continue the fight.”

Now that’s a very important point because when Gaddafi gave an interview to the BBC right after the events started where he was accusing those “rebels” as being Al-Qaeda and the world started laughing and calling him insane. The english language Al-Qaeda newspaper “Inspire” painted him as a clown and tributed a whole page of demonization to him. They claim to be the west’s enemy but what is it worth when the facts are exposing you as a worthy servant to them. In nearly November now, we know that Gaddafi was right and those laughing were wrong. As wrong as ICC chief prosecutor Esteban Moreno-Ocampo (about whom there is actually a complaint from 2007 that accuses him of rape) when he claimed that Gaddafi’s troops had killed 6000 people, which had a significant influence on the agreement of UN Resolution 1973. “Later he was building up his evidence on 208 victims instead of 6000. Several more inspections will turn out that there were no victims at all. What happened in Benghazi is quite different from what we were told. In fact it was a staged event.” as Professor Thierry Meyssan found out. Now the TNC announced that there will be the “sharia law” in Libya once they hold official power over internal affairs. What’s interesting is, that the main character in the destruction of Libya & the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi, french president Nicolas Sarkozy was fighting domestically against the sharia in his own country. He criminalized not only those still dressing under the rule of sharia but also the Sinti and the Roma and other religious/social/cultural minorities, which led to a hatred towards him that doesn’t allow him to go to the “slums” around Paris anymore because in some areas the people were even calling for his head. Now the same man that is radically fighting the sharia in France is supporting, funding and promoting a libyan government that imposes the sharia on its women?

All African People's Revolutionary Party's solidarity march for the Libyan Jamahiriyah on Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's birthday in Accra, Ghana.

Thierry Meyssan was not the only one pointing out that the war on Libya is actually a war on Africa and a direct message to China. Award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger said – in context of Obama’s announcement that the U.S. will now sent U.S. special forces to Uganda and later to South Sudan, Congo & the Central African Republic – that “with Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.”

“However,” he went on pointing out “the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and NATO backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30.000 workers in Libya.”

“For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance.” he wrote.

When they tried to continue their crusade in Syria and wanted to achieve the same there as with UN Resolution 1973 in Libya, the russian and chinese governments used their veto in the United Nations Security Council. After not using their veto for UN Resolution 1973, they have now witnessed with their own eyes, that on what they agreed in the Security Council, “protecting civilians” did not match at all with the reality that happened to Libya and its civilian population after the west’s “humanitarian intervention” started, so blaming Russia or China for not being loyal to the Global South by not vetoing the resolution on Libya has very little reliability because if actually the UN Resolution would have been respected, the “rebels” and NATO would now face trial at The Haugue. Once again the west betrayed not only its own people but it comitted Genocide, Serial Killing, destruction of civilian homes and institutions, they violated the UN Resolution by not protecting but targeting civilians and they paved the rebel’s way to chase down, overthrow and legitimate government officials, including the widely known and accepted targeted murder of several grandchildren of Muammar Gaddafi, innocent little girls. Even Human Rights Watch, which shut its eyes and ears whenever they could during the war on Libya, reported a few days ago, that 53 pro-Jamahiriyah civilians had been executed in a hotel in Tripoli. This happened right after the pro-NATO slaves tortured Moutassim and later lynched him and his father, Muammar. They even filmed their lynching and parading of the dying body in a manner the Ku-Klux-Klan in the 30′s would have been deeply in awe. This brutal, disrespecting as criminal footage was shamelessly printed on the front page of nearly every major newspaper and yet most likely nobody will ever have to justify, let alone standing trial for this lynching.

Meanwhile, in the “civilized world”, Troy Davis had been executed with no evidence, right before police and special forces were attacking peaceful protestors that occupied the main locations of the world’s corporate and banking leadership that oppresses the working class and non-white races at home to have more investment money to fund wars in their ancestors foreign homelands. It’s about time to deeply re-think about what we are being sold as “democracy”. It takes some courage to acknowledge that the western needs and values that have been indictrinated into us for decades, if not centuries always brought enslavement, barbarism, destruction, death and misery to nearly all other places on this planet. It takes courage to accept that our white race carries more racism than we are willing to acknowledge. It takes courage to accept that being silent when we know about our government’s crimes makes us to an important part of the oppression. It takes some courage to point the finger at yourself and start with the man/woman in the mirror. And it takes a lot more courage to engage in the struggle to end this racist, destructive empire which robs and kills the 99% to serve the 1%.

Have some courage!

Libya: Illustrious corpses – the truth is always revolutionary

This is an absolute must-read analysis: one of the best reads in a long time — this correctly throws light on the blatant exposure of the numerous layers of gate-keepers from so many areas of life: media such as The Guardian and the New York Times to organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations, as well as journalists, intellectuals and activists…

by Toni Solo

September 25th 2011

Right now in Libya the UN recognized government and its NATO masters are bombing hundreds of civilians to death in Sirte, Bani Walid and Sabha. They have bombed schools and hospitals and murdered whole families. This infamy was sanctioned by the UN from the beginning and has been justified by many of the cream of international progressive intellectuals. It is long past time to identify and condemn these accomplices to the crimes against humanity in Libya committed by the Western elites and their puppet governments.

The colonial war against Libya has defined more sharply than ever the structures of knowledge, attitudes and behaviour that characterize progressive and radical intellectual production in Europe and North America. The war has thrown that production into crisis. It could not be clearer now that the class function of intellectual managers like Gilbert Achcar, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ignacio Ramonet and similar individuals is to neuter effective protest against corporate capitalism and imperialism.

The crypto-fascist Irish poet W.B.Yeats once wrote, “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” Intellectual managers like Achar, Ramonet and Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and Santiago Alba Rico might ask themselves, “Did our work prepare the vicious NATO genocide in Libya?” Of course, the answer is “yes, it did”. They also seem to think that reality is perfectly all right.

They avow they seek radical social change and revolution in theory. But wherever processes have achieved genuine social change in the real world, as in the Libyan Jamahiriya, they attack them or, as in Venezuela, seek to mould them to their own narcissistic criteria. If one looks at the expressions of dissent privileged under corporate consumer capitalism they are all varieties of anarchism.

Of course they are. Anarchist anti-communism is a spoilt child doted on and nurtured by the capitalist elites– a nuisance, but a useful one and very much part of the laissez-faire family. Capitalism easily accommodates and co-opts fatuous slogans like “Another world is possible”. We can see what world they have in mind by looking at Libya. The intellectuals who supported the murderous racist Libyan renegades and NATO’s contract putsch-insurrection are a good example of how the process of co-optation and accommodation works.

They assimilate themselves into the rituals and processes of public life in the plutocracies of North America and Europe. They shift between academic life, non-governmental activity and participation in the mass corporate psy-warfare media and their alternative counterparts, the gatekeepers of permissible dissent. Libya has finally brought this reality out into the open in the most categorical way. One has only to look back at what influential intellectual managers produced around the time of the March 19th UN Resolution 1973.

Here’s Immanuel Wallerstein (http://www.iwallerstein.com/libya-world-left/ [1]) :

“The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France.”

Here’s Ignacio Ramonet (http://www.monde-diplomatique.es/?url=editorial/000085641287216818681110… [2]) :

“Under such circumstances, any other reasonable leader would have understood that the time to negotiate and give up power had arrived. But not Colonel Gadafi. At the risk of submerging his country in a civil war, the “Guide”, in power for 42 years, explained that the demonstrators were “youngsters Al Qaeda had drugged by adding hallucinogenic pills to their Nescafé”. And he ordered the armed forces to repress the protests with heavy gunfire and extreme force. The Al Jazeera channel showed military planes strafing civilian demonstrators.”

and

“One can be against the current structure of the United Nations, or reckon that its operations leave much to be desired. Or that the Western powers dominate the organization. These are acceptable criticisms. But for the moment the UN constitutes the only source of international law. In that sense, and contrary to the wars wars in Kosovo or Iraq which were never sanctioned by the UN, the current intervention in Libya is legal, according to international law; legitimate according to the principles of solidarity among democrats; and desirable for the international community which brings together people struggling for their liberty.”

Here’s Gilbert Achcar (http://www.zcommunications.org/libya-a-legitimate-and-necessary-debate-f… [3]) :

“The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous. Equally preposterous is the idea that what they are after is laying their hands on Libyan oil. In fact, the whole range of Western oil and gas companies is active in Libya: Italy’s ENI, Germany’s Wintershall, Britain’s BP, France’s Total and GDF Suez, US companies ConocoPhillips, Hess, and Occidental, British-Dutch Shell, Spain’s Repsol, Canada’s Suncor, Norway’s Statoil, etc. Why then are Western powers intervening in Libya today, and not in Rwanda yesterday and Congo yesterday and today? As one of those who have energetically argued that the invasion of Iraq was “about oil” against those who tried to outsmart us by saying that we were “reductionists,” don’t expect me to argue that this one is not about oil. It definitely is. But how?

My take on that is the following. After watching for a few weeks Gaddafi conducting his terribly brutal and bloody suppression of the uprising that started in mid-February — estimates of the number of people killed in early March ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition’s estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000 — Western governments, like everybody else for that matter, became convinced that with Gaddafi set on a counter-revolutionary offensive and reaching the outskirts of Libya’s second largest city of Benghazi (over 600,000 inhabitants), a mass-scale slaughter was imminent.”

Counterfactual perception management

One could quote many more examples of the intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, stupidity, arrogance and cynicism of these prestigious writers and others like, for example, Santiago Alba Rico, Atilio Boron, Ramzy Baroud and Samir Amin. But the extra bulk of documentation would add nothing to the overall picture of narcissistic collaboration with the dominant NATO corporate psy-warfare machine. Nor is it worth dallying over the role of NATO’s favourite gatekeepers of permissible dissent like Counterpunch, ZNet, Rebelión and other similar alternative information web sites.

Those sites did their job of muting and censoring effective discussion and argument at crucial moments prior to the March 19th vote in the UN Security Council and around the decisive event of NATO’s ground invasion of Tripoli in August. A tiny handful of writers, among them John Pilger and Tariq Ali, spoke out against the war. But even they still swallowed hook, line and sinker the NATO psy-warfare caricature of Muammar Al Ghaddafi as a blood-on-his-hands dictator-clown.

While the individual errors of Achcar, Wallerstein and Ramonet may vary, all of them start from the central premise of NATO’s psychological warfare offensive, namely, that Libya was a dictatorship overthrown by a popular revolution. As part of their suspiciously coherent perception management of events in Libya, all these NATO psy-warfare collaborators omit the following facts:

• prior to March 19th the Libyan Jamahiriya had called for negotiations and a UN fact-finding mission – rejected both by the renegades and the dominant powers in the UN;
• the only reliably confirmed information about events in Libya between February 17th and March 19th came from the Libyan government the Libyan government’s account was confirmed by testimony from both Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen as well as by Russian military intelligence prior to the March 19th Resolution 1973.
• there was never any reliable evidence of the Libyan Jamahiriya bombing or machine gunning peaceful demonstrations in February or March;
• on the other hand credible accounts of racist pogroms and lynchings by the Libyan renegades were available from the very start of the events in Benghazi in February ;
• the African Union’s constant insistence from the very start of the conflict on a negotiated peace was welcomed by the Libyan Jamihiriya;
• the devastating role played by international sanctions imposed on the basis of the flagrant fabrication of Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie terrorist atrocity badly affected Libya’s development between 1992 and 2003;
• by 2011 Libya’s population enjoyed an unparalleled high standard of living relative to the rest of Africa;
• US$200bn in funds were saved by the Libyan Jamahiriya and administered for the benefit of the Libyan people and impoverished African countries;
• the Libyan Jamahiriya promoted innumerable significant and strategic development initiatives in other African countries;
• prior to their NATO supported putsch- insurrection, the currrent renegade leaders promoted corporate friendly Western neoliberal policies that were firmly resisted by Muammar Al Ghaddafi
• once they realized Maummar Al Ghadafi was resisting deepening neoliberal reforms, NATO planned and carried out the Southern Mistral war game in which they practised a military assault against Libya

Analysis with feet of clay

One could go on delving into more detail to rebut all the false claims and hypocritical assertions made by NATO psy-warfare fellow travellers like Ramonet, Achcar and Wallerstein. But it is enough to look at the excerpts quoted above to see how skewed, disingenuous, arrogant, cynical and downright baseless their arguments are. These are classic characteristics of NATO country perception management against targets from the Cuban revolution to the UN supported coups in Haiti and the Ivory Coast

Immanuel Wallerstein completely failed to predict the course of events in Libya in the most abject and ridiculous way. The UN Security Council did pass a resolution. NATO did resolve to go to war. President Sarkozy easily secured his country’s approval for French armed forces to participate in NATO’s colonial war.

Wallerstein demonstrated complete idiocy in his appraisal of events in March 2011. We can add his illustrious corpse to the Ship of Fools adrift over Libya full to the gunwales with NATO dupes who got things completely wrong on Libya. Wallerstein’s fatuous patronising arrogance duped him into hopeless error. By contrast, the appraisal of the facts by Fidel Castro and President Hugo Chavez was absolutely right.

The falsehoods of Ignacio Ramonet

Ignacio Ramonet completely misrepresented the nature of the events in February in Benghazi. No reliable evidence indicates that peaceful demonstrators were fired on. At the time, the Libyan government’s account was confirmed by testimony from both US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the US armed forces Chief of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, as well as by Russian military intelligence prior to the March 19th Resolution 1973. Now the highest estimates of deaths as a result of the armed insurrection in Libya between February 17th and March 19th are around 250.

Ramonet got things wrong because he took as his source a notorious NATO propaganda outlet, the UK Guardian newspaper. The Guardian’s foreign news coverage is at least as cynical and skewed as that of El País or Le Monde. Ramonet also relied on the Qatar dominated Al Jazeera, now overwhelmingly staffed by staff who previously worked with NATO country mainstream corporate media.

It is not as strange as it seems that a supposed radical like Ignacio Ramonet should ignore the entire history of imperialist interventions over the last 200 years. At one time Ramonet was extremely proud of his work promoting the World Social Forum. That body is thoroughly compromised by its links to corporate funders.

On Libya, Ramonet also dishonestly suggests as a fact something he most certainly does not know, namely that Muammar al Ghaddafi ordered the use of extreme force against peaceful demonstrators. That suggestion is pure propaganda as is his selective quote of Muammar al Ghaddafi’s comments at the time.. To write as Ignacio Ramonet then did, that UN Resolution 1973 was legal, legitimate and desirable, takes self-serving cynicism to its very extremes.

Former US Defence Secretary Robert Gates had already pointed out correctly that enforcing a no fly zone necessarily involved military aggression. But the UN Charter specifically rules out military action except in self-defence. Hence President Obama’s counterfactual statement that the United States is not at war against Libya. So much for United Nations legality.

In any case, Resolution 1973 calls for a peaceful negotiated solution. That option proposed by the Libyan government and the African Union and by Latin America’s ALBA bloc of countries had already been rejected by the Libyan renegades. They rejected negotiations on the strength of the support they were getting from the very governments who cynically passed the Resolution knowing neither they themselves nor the renegades had any intention of seeking a peaceful settlement.

Ramonet argues that the UN blank cheque for intervention was legitimate in terms of democratic solidarity. Here we come up against a fundamental contradiction of the international neocolonial Left. Igancio Ramonet, a famous critic of corporate capitalism, tacitly accepts, after all, that North America and Europe are composed of democracies and he explicitly describes the Libyan Jamahiriya as a dictatorship.

But it is the Libyan Jamahiriya that carefully saved and invested hundreds of billions of dollars which it then used very clearly for the benefit of the Libyan people and other African peoples. On the other hand, it is the rotten-corrupt plutocracies of Europe and North America that have sucked dry their peoples so as to enrich a tiny corporate elite of crooked bankers and speculators and to protect their criminal financial system. The democratic solidarity Ramonet is talking about is no more than a narcissistic construct conjured up to justify his ideological prejudice against the Libyan Jamahiriya.

To conclude, as Ignacio Ramonet then does, that the UN Resolution 1973 was in any way desirable is plainly disingenuous folly. The terms of Resolution 1973 left matters wide open to whatever interpretation the North American and European governments concerned chose to put on it. No serious observer expected anything less than the ruthless application of force to support the racist putsch-insurrection struggling for existence in Benghazi.

That putsch-insurrection completely lacked popular support in the rest of Libya. Like Achcar and Wallerstein, Ramonet ignored plenty of readily available information that indicated those very facts which have been confirmed over and over again since March 19th 2011. Ramonet’s reputation is one more illustrious corpse in the Ship of Fools illuminated by the flames of NATO’s genocide in Zliten, Tripoli, Sirte and Bani Walid.

Gilbert Achcar – psy-warfare operative

Gilbert Achcar’s is perhaps the most egregiously dishonest and overt case of collabroation in NATO’s psychological warfare against the Libyan people. With regard to Libya, Immanuel Wallerstein turned out to be a dunderhead and Ignacio Ramonet, more than anything, a narcissistic disingenuous buffoon. But Gilbert Achcar’s position is one carefully politically calculated in the most absolute bad faith.

Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at Britain’s Foreign and Colonial Office’s extra-mural School of Oriental and African Studies. He has taught in France and Britain for over 30 years now. Only the most naive would believe Achcar has not been utterly co-opted by his environment. His remarks on Libya demonstrate his moral and intellectual capitulation as a colonialist apologist to a fault.

“The idea that Western powers are intervening in Libya because they want to topple a regime hostile to their interests is just preposterous.” It is very rare for a NATO psy-warfare operative to out themselves like this. Self-evidently, it is Gilbert Achcar’s view that is truly preposterous, suggesting the Western regimes intervening in Libya have done so for any other reason than that the Libyan Jamahiriya blocked their plans on several fronts.

Achcar continues to out himself as a NATO apologist by shamelessly citing as categorical fact the most extreme and ridiculous figures of civilian deaths at the hands of the forces of the Libyan Jamahiriya with absolutely no basis in any legitimate reporting or investigation. “Estimates of the number of people killed in early March ranged from 1000 to 10,000, the latter figure by the International Criminal Court, with the Libyan opposition’s estimates ranging between 6,000 and 8,000.”

Only a NATO stooge would expect to be taken seriously when citing the International Criminal Court as a reliable source. As it turns out, the ICC on this matter has been completely discredited, along with its other ridiculous lie about allegations of mass rape by Libyan army troops on Viagra. The illustrious corpse of the ICC’s Luis Moreno Campo’s reputation, or its desiccated remains, joins those of Wallerstein, Ramonet and Achcar and their accomplices in the NATO fellow-travellers funeral Barge-of-Fools going up in flames in the sands of Libya.

The facts now established and accepted by all but NATO collaborators like Gilbert Achcar are that the Libyan security forces did not fire on unarmed demonstrators. Respected human rights organizations put the number of fatalities as a result of the armed insurrection between February 17th and March 19th at around 250. So it was extremely unlikely that Achcar’s scare of “mass-scale slaughter” was in any way likely, especially since the Libyan authorities were offering to negotiate. What is indeed absolutely clear is that Achcar is a fully committed psy-warfare operative in NATO’s war against Libya and everyone who expresses solidarity with the Libyan Jamahiriya.

Intellectuals and counterintelligence

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the CIA and its fellow intelligence agencies invested a great deal of money and resources suborning intellectuals in Europe and in North America. The story of Encounter magazine and the career of the poet Stephen Spender in Britain is emblematic. Other examples abound. It would be extremely foolish to think the same practices have not persisted and become more sophisticated into the present day.

An example of the way the counter-intelligence network of outright NATO collaborators and fellow travellers works has come to light in relation to Libya. One of the gatekeepers of permissible dissent, the Spanish web site Rebelión, prominently featured an article by Santiago Alba Rico. Like Achcar, Alba Rico is a prominent academic, a specialist on the Arab world in the best traditions of Orientalism. Alba Rico demonstrates that Edward Said’s critical concept of Orientalism can readily involute upon itself for the purposes of neocolonial propaganda.

In the course of his article Alba Rico writes of the situation’s complexity only to drastically simplify it in favour of his point of view. “Even Nato is aware of this complexity as is demonstrated by the fact – as Gilbert Achcar has pointed out – that Libya has been bombed very little, with the aim of lengthening the war and trying to achieve the defeat of the regime without truly breaking with it.” One pictures Achcar and Alba Rico in places like Zliten, or Sirte telling the mourning relatives of dead NATO victims there to stop crying, “After all, you’ve only been bombed a little…”

Only a shameless apologist for NATO would attempt to allege that Libya has been bombed “very little”. On cue, Alba Rico seizes on this and uses Achcar’s grotesque cynical falsehood to pad out his own apology for the colonialist onslaught against the Libyan Jamahiriya. At this point, it is possible to move on from the lies and hypocrisies of these NATO collaborators and fellow travellers and look at their claims for their own intellectual and ethical standards.

One useful source of information about what has really been going on in Libya beyond NATO psy-warfare disinformation reports has been Leonor Massanet. Someone who worked with Rebelión until very recently has confirmed that Santiago Alba Rico engaged in deliberate behind-the-scenes character assassination of Leonor Massanet. Alba Rico’s aim, in which to some extent he clearly succeeded, was to discredit Leonor because her plausible and credible account of events in Libya contradicted his own thoroughly false analysis.

When one comes across cases of people being turned into non-persons or being calumnied in this way, one is at the limits of legitimate intellectual disagreement. Beyond that frontier one, is then dealing with the abuse of power for counter-intelligence purposes to neutralize effective dissent. Right now, the whole world is a vast mess of low-intensity conflict and outright war. The Western elites are determined to dominate the world’s peoples and their natural resources. The activities of NATO fellow-travellers like Gilbert Achcar and Santiago Alba Rico are far from innocent or coincidental.

Here we are faced with the reality of the thorough hypocrisy of the co-opted alternative news and information media. All of them, whether it’s Rope-a-dope [4], Zzzz [5] or Sumisión [6] purport to deliver reliable factual information from a variety of viewpoints. All of them are infested with hypocritical self-regarding phonies who readily suppress views they dislike. They all engage in what Gilbert Achcar would term “Stalinist” censorship and the making of non-persons. Leonor Massanet is far from being the only victim of this pernicious deceitful managerial counter-intelligence manipulated culture.

Psy-warfare’s next offensive : ALBA

Psychological warfare is a vital component of total war. All through the 1980s and 1990s the North American and European NGO sector was systematically co-opted by NATO country governments to serve NATO propaganda ends. In effect, they are the soft extra-mural arm of their countries’ Foreign Ministries, and routinely project those countries’ foreign policies. That reality has been very well documented. It is as true of the structures available to progressive intellectual workers as it is of the NGOs that employ progressive aid and development workers.

The alternative media’s coverage of NATO’s contract putsch-insurrection against the Libya Jamahariya has demonstrated this with the most startling clarity. Along with the Libyan Jamahariya, other perennial victims of their deceit and hypocrisy have been the Sandinista Front for National Liberation in Nicaragua, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia as well as national Communist Parties in general. Presumably, other people devoted to other causes and issues will have had identical experiences.

It is a fact that neocolonial intellectual and cultural networks tend to dominate international anti-imperialist intellectual production. Their members have a vested interest in maintaining the class structure inherent to that production, one that effectively censors argument and maintains strictly policed parameters. The colonial invasion of Libya has demonstrated with absolute clarity that effective anti-imperialism – for example by the FSLN in Nicaragua or the PSUV in Venezuela – is under threat from both the right and the neocolonial left.

After Libya, a likely future target will be Nicaragua. But the NATO elites view Nicaragua as simply an hors d’oeuvre for the main course, Venezuela. The battle for Venezuela began back in 2002 and will get more and more fierce once President Hugo Chavez wins re-election ten years on, in 2012. The international neocolonial Left is hard at work sawing the floor away from under the Sandinista revolutionary process in Nicaragua. Nor is it in any way controversial to say they are busy trying to co-opt the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. Libya has shown they are capable of any infamy.

SOURCE

Dan Glazebrook on RT – “US biggest supporter of religious intolerance”

The leaders of France and Britain travel to Tripoli on Thursday, in a show of support for the regime their warplanes helped put in power. On the eve of their visit, the head of the National Transitional Council asked for more weapons to fight pockets of Colonel Gaddafi’s loyalists still in their strongholds. The rebel government thinks the ousted dictator is hiding in southern Libya and planning a fightback. However the new authority is asserting an increasing level of control over the country. The rebel government in Libya has a hard job ahead, with analysts warning that freedom and peace are a long way off. London based Middle East political analyst Dan Glazebrook told RT that with the new Libyan leadership Africa may face echoes of its colonial past.
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Syria – How the west hijacks demonstrations and orchestrates a pro-EMPIRE counter revolution.

First of all, to prove the necessity of the following article. Did you know about this?

or about this?

Media bias has reached a new level of insanity. If you didn’t know about this, you definitely need to take the time and read the following.

Syria, a religious melting pot.

A cultural & religious approach. Although 87 per cent of the syrian population are muslims one of Bashar al-Assad’s main policies is to uphold Syria as a secular state. Around 75 per cent of them are sunni. The remaining 25 per cent include shia, alevi and others. Although it is a predominantly muslim (sunni) state there aren’t any religious minoroties that are being oppressed or even prosecuted by the government as in other countries in that region. Actually Syria is a cultural & religious melting pot in which everyone can follow & practice their religion as free as in no other arab state. One reason for that may be that the syrian president, Bashar al-Assad himself is a religious minority, an alevi. Christians, jews and other religions can aswell practice their religion without the fear of being oppressed. Unlike in other muslim states, practically, punishment for homosexuality doesn’t exist anymore in Syria. Article 520 of the penal code considers it as an illegal act, but unlike in Saudi Arabia e.g. there is no remarkable prosecution anymore. That’s only one reason why Assad has gained much popularity and can easily be described as the most popular contemporary arab leader. The fundamentalist opposition in contrast is known for its homophobia.

In conclusion one has to agree that there is no religious & cultural freedom in the middle east as there is in Syria and from the narrative of muslim arabs, who strongly believe in Islam and don’t live in a “westernized” or western country it is pretty remarkable how his government managed to bring and uphold that kind of tolerance into an arab country.

Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s history & Bashar al-Assad

Counterpunch recently reported

“Also, a parallel can be made between Colonel Gaddafi’s authority and that of Hafez al-Assad (Bashar’s father). They rose to power during the same period and both made use of their intelligence and brutality to hold sway. Bashar al-Assad, on the contrary, did not seize power nor did he expect to inherit it. He accepted to fill the office of president when his father died because his older brother had perished in an accident and because only his family heritage could have prevented a power struggle among his father’s generals.

Although it was the army who went to look for him in London, where he was quietly practicing his profession as an ophthalmologist, it is his people who be-knighted him. He is undeniably the most popular political leader in the Middle East. Up to two months ago, he was also the only one who moved around without armed guards, and felt comfortable in a crowd.”

No doubt that Bashar al-Assad is far from perfect and Syria is far from what we could consider a model. No doubt that there are authentic demonstrations going on, pro-Assad aswell as anti-Assad. The main question we have to ask ourselves is why are there such protests, why pro & contra, why do we only hear about contra and what did the Assad rule since 1970 do for its people? Therefor the maybe most important part of this article is to understand Syria’s history. The best approach to understand the Assad rule i came across, is this one.

Syria’s Pandoran Box – Bashar Assad’s missed opportunities.

The destabilization/regime change of/in Iran, Libya, Syria was planned long ago

Why is the west all over Syria ?

On February 18, 2003 Haaretz reported the following:

“Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday that Iran, Libya and Syria should be stripped of weapons of mass destruction after Iraq. “These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve,” Sharon said to a visiting delegation of American congressmen.

Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials that he had no doubt America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea.

Bolton said the United States was striving to get a new UN Security Council resolution regarding Iraq and that the result of the vote would affect the U.S.’s relations with Western Europe and Russia, after the war in Iraq.

Bolton also met with Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky.”

A year earlier, on May 6 2002, John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called both states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 he said that the United States should have overthrown the syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein.

So obviously the plans to interfere in syrian internal affairs weren’t made yesterday. Now you have the so called “arab spring” which started with two revolutions that were based upon the masses & majority of people revolting against the regime. Ben Ali in Tunisia, aswell as Mubarak in Egypt have been very friendly towards the west, if not to say they were U.S. puppet states. Then the arab spring apparently reached Libya. The major difference between those “uprisings” was that in Egypt for example you could see the “made in USA” logo on the weapons used against the demonstrators. After Israel, Egypt was issued with more U.S. military aid than any other country . In Libya the so called rebels were issued by the west not only with weapons and other military equipment but they also had the largest army in the world, NATO, to bomb their way, killing thousands of civilians during the “revolution”. But that’s another story. The point is that the “syrian uprising” has absolutely nothing to do with the majority or even a notable minority of the syrian  population being upset with Assad’s “authoritarian regime” or “brutal regime” as the western media tries to portray it. The people engaged in overthrowing Assad are – of course – backed by the west but not to bring “democracy” but to destabilize Syrias stable cultural,religious & more or less political landscape.

From a United States’ imperialistic and hegemonic viewpoint there are several reasons why Assad’s Syria needs to be overthrown.

1. Close relations to Iran, Hezbollah and the palestinian resistance

2. Refusal of peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan & Egypt

Syria and the delusions of the western press

Here are several articles debunking the reliability and exposing the bias media reports on the so called massacres against his own people.

1 ) On April 15, Peter Lee wrote this for Counterpunch:

“On April 10, a mysterious and bloody incident occurred near the seaside town of Banyas, in Syria.

Nine members of a Syrian army patrol were shot to death and twenty five were wounded—the single bloodiest incident in the Syrian uprising to date.

Western news services largely ignored the incident and concentrated on reports of the army’s move to encircle and pacify Banyas.”

He then goes on:

“By a remarkable coincidence, the events in Banyas attracted the close attention of one of America’s chief Syria watchers: Dr. Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Landis’ wife is Syrian, and her cousin, Lt. Colonel Yasir Qash`ur , was one of the two Syrian army officers who died in the incident.

In an April 13 post titled, “Western Press Misled:  Who Shot the Nine Syrian Soldiers in Banyas?” appeared Not Syrian Security Forces, Landis debunked the claims reported by Agence France Presse  and the Guardian.  He also highlighted the pathetic ordeal of one wounded soldier badgered by anti-government activists but denying that he had been shot by security forces—only to have the video go out on Youtube the West with the canard attached.”

On June 23, Thierry Meyssan for GlobalResearch reported:

The Gay Girl In Damascus

An amusing example is the case of the blog “Gay Girl in Damascus”, created on 21 February 2011. Edited in English by 25 year-old Amina, the website became a source of reference for Western media. Therein the author described the plight of a young lesbian under Bashar’s dictatorship and the day-to-day unfolding of the terrible repression unleashed against the revolution. As a gay woman, she garnered the protective empathy of Western web surfers who mobilized as soon as her arrest by the secret services of the “regime” was announced.

However, as it happened, Amina was a fiction. Betrayed by his IP address, a US 40 year-old “student” was discovered to be the real author of this masquerade. This propagandist, who was allegedly preparing a PhD in Scotland, recently participated in a pro-Western opposition conference held in Turkey, urging for a NATO intervention. He quite obviously did not attend in his capacity as a student

3) The principle of reality reversal

“Reality reversal is a principle being applied on a large scale. We may recall the United Nations reports on the humanitarian crisis in Libya alleging that tens of thousands of immigrant workers were fleeing the country to escape from violence. The conclusion drawn and spewed by the Western media was that the Gaddafi “regime” had to be toppled in favor of the Benghazi rebels. And yet, it was not the government of Tripoli who was responsible for this tragedy, but the so-called revolutionaries in Cyrenaica who were hunting down black Africans. Stirred by a racist ideology, they accused them of being at the service of Colonel Gaddafi and lynched whoever they could get their hands on.

In Syria, the images of armed groups perched on the rooftops and firing at random into the crowd or on police forces were broadcast on national television networks. Yet, these same images were relayed and used by Western and Saudi television channels to attribute these crimes to the government of Damascus.“

Who are the syrian opposition and who backs/supports/funds them?

The following will show & expose the clear war agenda against sovereign Syria, orchestrated by the U.S. , Israel, Saudi Arabia in collaboration with the western media outlets and Al-Jazeera + Al-Arabiyah of course.

Anna Haq, for Counterpunch published an article called “The Complexities of Syrian Violence“, in which she also points out the syrian government’s mistake and  does not defend the treatment of the few “peaceful” protestors at all, but she points out something very important.

“Peaceful demonstrators are on the streets of different Syrian cities. They demand freedom, but they do so in the name of a majority that is not on those streets. Until April 22nd, these demonstrations did not exceed about fifty people at a time (in most cases, fifteen to twenty people would gather bravely). Mainstream journalists, perhaps buoyed by the Arab Spring, exaggerated the number of demonstrators (and perhaps tampered with pictures taken from pro-government demonstrations to make them seem anti-government gatherings) led the Syrian government to exclude all journalists. This was a bad decision. It meant that the reports coming out of Syria are mystifying; with the government’s own accounts always seen as suspicious while the anti-government accounts generally taken as truth.”

More Media Falsification & Manipulation

There is evidence of gross media manipulation and falsification from the outset of the protest movement in southern Syria on March 17th.

The Western media has presented the events in Syria as part of the broader Arab pro-democracy protest movement, spreading spontaneously from Tunisia, to Egypt, and from Libya to Syria.

Media coverage has focussed on the Syrian police and armed forces, which are accused of indiscriminately shooting and killing unarmed “pro-democracy” demonstrators. While these police shootings did indeed occur, what the media failed to mention is that among the demonstrators there were armed gunmen as well as snipers who were shooting at both the security forces and the protesters.

The death figures presented in the reports are often unsubstantiated. Many of the reports are “according to witnesses”. The images and video footages aired on Al Jazeera and CNN do not always correspond to the events which are being covered by the news reports.

THIS ARTICLE by Michel Chossudovsky EXPOSES THE MEDIA MANIPULATION & PROPAGANDA, which is now being used TO JUSTIFY SANCTIONS, EMBARGOS & A POSSIBLE ATTACK.

Al-Jazeera’s sneaky role – again.

Without evidence, the reports suggest authoritatively that the police is shooting at the soldiers and vice versa the soldiers are shooting on the police. In a April 29 Al Jazeera report, Daraa is described as “a city under siege:

“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out. Inside the city, shops are shuttered and nobody dare walk the once bustling market streets, today transformed into the kill zone of rooftop snipers.”

“Unable to crush the people who first dared rise up against him – neither with the secret police,  paid thugs or the special forces of his brother’s military division – President Bashar al-Assad has sent thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Deraa for an operation the regime wants nobody in the world to see.”

“Though almost all communication channels with Deraa have been cut, including the Jordanian mobile service that reaches into the city from just across the border, Al Jazeera has gathered firsthand accounts of life inside the city from residents who just left or from eyewitnesses inside who were able to get outside the blackout area.”

“The picture that emerges is of a dark and deadly security arena, one driven by the actions of the secret police and their rooftop snipers, in which soldiers and protestors alike are being killed or wounded, in which cracks are emerging in the military itself, and in which is created the very chaos which the regime uses to justify its escalating crackdown. (Daraa, a City under Siege, IPS / Al Jazeera, April 29, 2011)”

The Al Jazeera report borders on the absurd. Read carefully.

“Tanks and troops control all roads in and out”,  “thousands of Syrian soldiers and their heavy weaponry into Daraa”

This situation has prevailed for several weeks. This means that bona fide protesters who are not already inside Daraa cannot enter Daraa.

People who live in the city are in their homes: “nobody dares walk … the streets”. If nobody dares walk the streets where are the protesters?

Who is in the streets? According to Al Jazeera, the protesters are in the streets together with the soldiers, and both the protesters and the soldiers are being shot at by “plain clothes secret police”, by “paid thugs” and government sponsored snipers.

The impression conveyed in the report is that these casualties are attributed to infighting between the police and the military.

But the report also says that the soldiers (in the “thousands”) control all roads in and out of the city, but they are being shot upon by the plain clothed secret police.

The purpose of this web of media deceit, namely outright fabrications  –where soldiers are being killed by police and  “government snipers”– is to deny the existence of armed terrorist groups. The later are integrated by snipers and “plain clothed terrorists” who are shooting at the police, the Syrian armed forces and local residents.

These are not spontaneous acts of terror; they are carefully planned and coordinated attacks. In recent developments, according to a Xinhua report (April 30, 2011), armed “terrorist groups” “attacked the housing areas for servicemen” in Daraa province, “killing a sergeant and wounding two”.

While the government bears heavy responsibility for its mishandling of the military-police operation, including the deaths of civilians, the reports confirm that the armed terrorist groups had also opened fire on protesters and local residents. The casualties are then blamed on the armed forces and the police and the Bashar Al Assad government is portrayed by “the international community” as having ordered countless atrocities.

The fact of the matter is that foreign journalists are banned from reporting inside Syria, to the extent that much of the information including the number of casualties is obtained from the unverified accounts of “witnesses”.

It is in the interest of the US-NATO alliance to portray the events in Syria as a peaceful protest movement which is being brutally repressed by a “dictatorial regime”.

This article , although it had only been confirmed by Syrian state TV, reveals that two terrorists confessed that they fabricated news for Al-Jazeera & received money to buy weapons in order to attack security forces in Hama.

U.S. secretely funding syrian opposition, Wikileaks cables reveal

Follwing released Wikileaks cables, The Washington Post admitted that,

“the State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables.

The London-based satellite channel, Barada TV, began broadcasting in April 2009 but has ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria as part of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad. Human rights groups say scores of people have been killed by Assad’s security forces since the demonstrations began March 18; Syria has blamed the violence on “armed gangs.” “

Saudi / Zionist involvement

Bassam Abu Abdulla, from the Al Watan news agency in Damascus’ reply to PressTV’s question “How’s the situation in Syria compared with other events taking place in the region?”

“Now, about the role of the foreign factors. Yesterday, I think, The Washington Post newspaper published that the United States Department of State supported the Al-Barada TV channel, a TV channel in opposition of Syria, paying them USD 6 million to secretly support some so-called opposition leaders.

I don’t trust these kinds of people who are living in Washington, Paris, or London.

The real situation is that because the Syrian position is against the American plans in the region and against Israel, and because Syria is supporting the resistance movements — generally, Hezbollah and Hamas [that are] against the American plans — the conspiracy against the US is continuing.

We are talking about different parties participating in these conspiracies. We can watch these different groups. The first group is the corrupted people inside Syria.

The second group is the Salafi group who is being supported by [Saudi Arabia's] Bandar bin Sultan, the American CIA and [Israel's] Mossad.

The third group is composed of some regional parties against Syria.

The fourth group is the Muslim brothers in London, and now they are in Saudi Arabia.

All these groups, besides the TV channels war, are working against Syria now. The Syrian government will soon face this situation because we are not talking about severe demonstrations, but we are talking about the Salafi group – those who speak a very strange language in the Syrian society and who want to divide the Syrian nation, which is a redline for all Syrians. Because of that we will soon see the Syrian government deal with them in another way.“

Personal thoughts

The manufactured consent, especially the leftists & progressives support for western aggression against a sovereign country has dramatically changed since Libya. While the same people that opposed the complete operation against Iraq in 2003 were shockingly quiet about the NATO attacks on Libya and the violation of UN Resolution 1973 that called for the protection of civilians, not for regime change.

It was no secret that Saddam Hussein’s troops used terrible weapons in the war against Iran, aswell as against the kurds in his own country. Nonetheless the left & progressive completely opposed not even the NATO attacks on Iraq, but also the sanctions imposed that caused at least several hundred thousand civilian casualties. There was no question about wheter one has to decide to stand with Saddam or with the west. It appeared pretty obvious that the west’s interests had nothing to do with even caring about one single Iraqi, so the question was more to dedice wheter we let Iraq be imperfectly theirs or if it is going to be imperfectly ours. Ironically enough that we in the west claim to have the moral/political decision to make regarding what’s good or bad for a foreign, sovereign nation. Not only was it the west that issued Saddam the weapons & more or less forced him & his military to use them against Iran, but it was again us not only arresting him, bringing him to court & hanging him on a muslim holiday for exactly those crimes but all of this happened in context of the bloodiest & inhumane invasion since Vietnam.

Now the west is on a hunt for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, obviously trying to kill him & his family as they did to Saddam. There’s not only no evidence that troops loyal to Gaddafi commited some kind of a mass murder or genocide against its own people, speaking of directly targeting ‘innocent civilians’ but there’s far more evidence, admitted & confirmed by the west and their media that NATO killed thousands of civilians in context of UN Resolution 1973. Furthermore we didn’t see a third to half of the Iraqi population getting out on the streets in solidarity & loyalty to their leader, as libyans did for Muammar Gaddafi & their system, the libyan arab Jamahiriya. The western media treats those people as unequal as their own people at home. While there were no remarkable reports on the 1.7 million people on Green Sqare on July 1st of 2011, the media only reported some small ‘rebel’ protests where – taking a closer look – you can hardly find any notable civilian support for the rebels, even in the videos & pictures provided by the corporate media. The same bias took place in the United States. When Minister Farrakhan & others spoke on the Millions March in Harlem in support for Gaddafi & libyan arab Jamahiriya no notable media outlet reported about it. Then again, when the Tea Party is holding a rally with a few thousand supporters it is all over the media, newspapers & magazines.

Now the west, along with his corporate media, with the support of Al-Jazeera & Al-Arabiyah is preparing for eihter a massive destabilization, if not even a war against Syria. President Assad now tries not to let any foreign, private media into his country. On first sight this may sound harsh for our understanding of democracy but – assuming Assad is an intelligent man – we, aswell as his government know what foreign media can do to you if the agenda is clear, which it obviously is. So, let me address the people in the west, who, like myself have the power to make other people aware of the current situation in Syria. Let’s for one second assume that those attacks on protestors have taken place, which i would totally condemn of course. Now, we must ask ourselves several questions.

Do we really want our tax money being spent on another war on a country in the middle east?

Why are we funding & therefor creating opposition movements all over the world, from Venezuela over Iran until Syria, and if the state fights back we try to call it “mass murder/genocide against its own people”?

Only imagine what happened in London if Syria or Iran would have issued the rioters/protestors with money & weapons to create chaos & destabilization in the streets of the UK. Regardless wheter you believe in the necessity of the people rioting there or not, the state has the right to – lawfully & righteously – prosecute the people who broke the law during the riots. So now, even in London, UK, the streets where David Cameron, Sarkozy’s partner in bringing “democracy” to the arab world is the current president, people have been killed, injured and in the outcome many were unlawfully jailed & prosecuted. One man even faces a 4 year prison sentence for a comment he made on Facebook encouraging people to riot. Only imagine if such happened in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria etc.

Although undeniably, there is a need for reforms it is pretty obvious that there is absolutely no need for a regime change in Syria. The “freedoms” or “democratic changes” the peaceful protestors (which are only a small number compared to the US-backed salafists & other fundamental groups) demand will not at all be taken seriously by any possible oppisiton right now, so the syrian demonstrators should actually be very careful what they wish for, going out in the streets and demanding regime change instead of reforms. Bashar al-Assad should have used his large popularity to address his people and introduce reforms earlier than he did. No doubt there are some authentic demonstrations going out on the streets, but yet, neither any media outlet can prove wheter Assad is giving the orders or the combined Alawite dominated Security, Military, Ba’ath Party and the Shahiba thugs. Since he’s head of state he will be held accountable. The people who jump on the bandwagon of the syrian demonstrations similar to those in Libya should be very careful since we know way better now, now when it’s too late. Personally, i call upon the BRICS states to mediate & try to get a dialogue in that region, but the first premise would be complete western withdrawal, and by that i mean the western media bias, the intelligence, the Saudi, Qatari & of course turkish influence. There will never be an authentic revolution – backed by the west. If we learned one lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Venezuela etc then to NEVER TRUST THE WEST, and as sad as it may sound, when people die, people die but then the BRICS states or the ALBA states should make demands and call upon Assad. How can you call for empire, which killed millions of arabs only in the first decade of the 21st century, to help you? Western double standars reached a point of insanity and we in the west must acknowledge  that we don’t care about any Syrian, nor do we care about any protestor who may have been shot, nor do we care about the level of freedom the syrians enjoy. It’s mainly about destabalizing the country & destroying the religious freedom, to once again promote fundamentalist religion in the region to cause & directly fund friction among muslim people. I’m actually not sure if the plans are to invade or bomb Syria. In my opinion the west will mainly focus on  managing to get regime change & establish an eliteist, fundamentalist religious government as Saudi Arabia to prevent a real arab uprising, based on unity against western imperialism. Iran, Syria & the Hezbollah are the remaining powers in the middle east that will never back down from their strong supporting & funding of the palestinian resistance to one day see the liberation of Palestine, the end of the zionist regime and the establishment of a state in which muslims, christians, jews, blacks, browns & whites can peacefully live together. Nonetheless an attack on Syria is very likely to happen. There is already an oil embargo and voices are calling louder and louder for a no-fly zone, what always led to air strikes or/and a ground invasion. The difference between Syria and Iran/Lebanon is that Syria won’t be able to defend themselves against NATO or Turkey as western proxy. The zionist regime already lost its war against Hezbollah in 2006 and, in my opinion, the west will never attack Iran by a military strike, not even a NATO attack because they know very well that Iran has the power to strike back and aswell attack the western metropolies as direct answer. So it is pretty obvious that empire’s next target is Syria.

The media-blocked protests in Israel are also an indicator of people recognizing the dirty war games their government is playing together with the west, the Saudis & their support from Al-Jazeera. I believe that israelis do not necessarily support their zionist regime, they are just being indoctrinated with fear and hatred against the palestinians which causes them to rather be quiet about their own governments crimes against the palestinians. The real revolution doesn’t start on the streets, but in the minds of the people, especially the young generation. If the majority of the “arab spring protestors” were aware of the geostrategic plans of the west and their real agenda in the region, not Libyans, Syrians or Iranians would see a necessity to rise up, but first of all the people in the gulf states would then see the dramatic need of getting rid of their western puppets in power when their natural resources make them the richest nations on earth. Only then, when Iran, the Hezbollah & Syria don’t face threats from the west anymore, there can seriously be talks about more democratic freedoms in those countries and if people outside of the Global South should be involved in it or not.

In the following days i will cover & write down some important issues about Turkey’s role as US proxy, the underestimation of the religious meaning of the Assad’s & the syrian opposition, reports from people who have visited the refugee camps in Syria and report what some voices directly from Syria & the Hatay region in Turkey, which formerly belonged to Syria, in which lots of  Syrians live say.

Lowkey – Obama Nation II (feat. M1 of Dead Prez & Black The Ripper) + LYRICS

Unofficial LYRICS: (by Daniele Puccio & Amin Iranian)

Chorus

I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …

Lupe Fiasco:

“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”

M-1 of Dead Prez

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign
Its all simple an plain, American took the stands to gain
Your president got an african name, now who you’re gonna blame?
When you’re dropping them bombs out of the planes using depleted uranium
Babies looking like two-headed aliens
Follow the money, trail the leash to the criminal
Ain’t nothing subliminal to it, that’s how they do it
See the game they’re running give a fuck if he’s cunning articulate and handsome
Afghanistan held for ransom by the hand of this black man
Neocolonial puppet, white power with a black face, he said fuck it, i’ll do it
A master of disguise,  expert in telling lies
Then they gave him a nobel peace prize
Shoulda known he was trained in Chicago, word to Chairman Fred & Mark Clark
What they’re doin in the dark will come out in the light
Like a wikileaks site, so i guess Nkrumah was right
Who’s ready to fight? Last stage of imperialism, i ain’t kiddin
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye “This ain’t livin”

Chorus

I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …

Lupe Fiasco:

“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”

Black the Ripper

O-B-A-M-A , you ain’t fooling everyone, i see the games you play
You was VIP at the BIC and we know that’s codename for CIA
The same way your cameras are watching us, we are watching you
Think we’re easy to control? You ain’t got a clue
Revolution’s on the way, let’s see what you gonna do
You gonna send the troops? You gonna drop the nukes?
See it’s not where you from, it’s where you at
He’s sitting in the White House so who cares if he’s black?
And why is soldiers still out there in Iraq?
Natural Resources ain’t yours, it’s theirs, give it back
You’re just another puppet, but i’m not surprised
Look at Collin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice
They didn’t change shit, house niggas fresh off the slaveship
You’ll all burn in hell, even Michelle … Obama Nation

Chorus

I support no Obama-Obama Nation
I’m not gonna vote for your inarguration
Cause i don’t need a Obama Nation
I’m not gonna …

Lupe Fiasco:

“Glen Beck is a racist, Limbaugh is a racist, Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit”

Lowkey

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa
I say things that other rappers won’t say
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay
Hope you didn’t build a statue or tattoo you arm
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador
Morales and Chavez, the state’s are on a hunt for ya
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia
Take a trip to the past and tell em i was right
Ask Ali Abunimah and Jeremiah Wright
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Libya
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry
But the same president just bombed an african country

________________________________________________________

Kein “arabischer Frühling” – Kolonialkrieg gegen Afrika / Der Krieg gegen Libyen

Von Joachim Guilliard

Teil I: Über den Charakter der Revolte und die Opposition im Land

In der Nacht zum 17. Juli erschüttern zwei Stunden lang die Abwürfe von rund 70 Bomben mehrere Wohnviertel in Tripolis. Die Hochhäuser in der ganzen Stadt erzittern wie bei einem Erdbeben, viele Anwohner flüchten voller Angst auf die Straße. Zahlreiche Gebäude werden zerstört und die Bewohner unter den Trümmern begraben – seit 120 Tagen ist dies nun Alltag in Libyen. Das besonders schwere Bombardement an diesem Sonntagmorgen war offenbar die Antwort der NATO auf die Großdemonstration vom Freitag (22. Juli), wo erneut Hunderttausende gegen den NATO-Krieg protestierten und ihre Unterstützung für die Regierung demonstrierten.

Seit über vier Monaten führen Frankreich, Großbritannien und die USA nun schon mit Unterstützung der NATO Krieg gegen die »Sozialistische Libysch-Arabische Dschamahirija (dt.: Herrschaft der Massen)« – mit dem erklärten Ziel, das derzeitige Regime zu stürzen. Seit 120 Tagen gehen Tag für Tag und Nacht für Nacht schwere Bomben und Raketen auf libysche Städte nieder. Dennoch wird die neueste Aggression gegen ein Land des Südens in der westlichen Öffentlichkeit nicht als Krieg wahrgenommen. Gingen bei den vorangegangen Kriegen gegen Jugoslawien, Afghanistan und den Irak Zehn- und Hunderttausende auf die Straße, so regt sich gegen die Zerstörung des nordafrikanischen Landes im Westen kein nennenswerter Protest.

Viele, auch in der Linken, halten den Aufstand in Libyen immer noch für eine Fortsetzung des »arabischen Frühlings« und stehen hinter den als »demokratische Opposition« idealisierten »Rebellen«. Vorbehaltlos übernahmen die meisten das von der Kriegsallianz in kürzester Zeit erschaffene Feindbild. Hartnäckig hält sich– ungeachtet aller historischen Erfahrungen – die Hoffnung, die NATO würde eine fortschrittliche Entwicklung im Land herbeibomben.

Außerhalb Europas und Nordamerikas stößt der Krieg auf breite Ablehnung. Hier sind die meisten davon überzeugt, daß er nicht zum Schutz der Zivilbevölkerung oder für Demokratie geführt wird, sondern für den unmittelbaren Zugriff auf die libyschen Öl- und Gasvorräte. Die parallele militärische Intervention Frankreichs in der Elfenbeinküste und die forcierte Ausweitung der militärischen Präsenz der USA in Afrika deuten zudem auf Ziele hin, die darüber hinausgehen: die Sicherung und Ausweitung westlicher Dominanz auf dem gesamten afrikanischen Kontinent.

Es begann mit einer Lüge

Wie jeder Krieg von NATO-Staaten begann auch dieser mit einer großen Lüge. Der Ruf nach einer Flugverbotszone über Libyen wurde damit begründet, Machthaber Muammar Al-Ghaddafi würde die Luftwaffe gegen friedliche Demonstranten einsetzen und die »eigene Bevölkerung abschlachten«. Doch selbst US-Verteidigungsminister Robert Gates gab vor Kriegsbeginn zu, dafür keine Beweise gesehen zu haben. Weder die UNO noch die westlichen Botschaften in Tripolis konnten irgendwelche Belege vorweisen. Mittlerweile sind die Vorwürfe eindeutig widerlegt.[1] Auch für das vielbeschworene Blutbad, das bei der Einnahme der Rebellenhochburg Bengasi durch Regierungstruppen drohe, gab es keine ernstzunehmenden Hinweise. Libysche Truppen hatten in den Tagen vor der Verabschiedung der UN-Resolution mehrere Städte zurückerobert. In keiner war es dabei zu Massakern gekommen, und es gab keinen Grund anzunehmen, daß dies in Bengasi anders sein sollte.

Eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Manipula­tion der öffentlichen Meinung spielte der Satellitensender Al-Dschasira, dessen gute Reputation wesentlich zum Erfolg der Propaganda beitrug. Dieser wertete, so der algerische Politologe Djamel Labidi, in erster Linie die von den Aufständischen präsentierten Meldungen zu Nachrichten auf. In einer Zeit, in der wir ständig mit Live-Bildern von den Schauplätzen des Geschehens informiert werden, traten dabei plötzlich »Zeugen« auf, die man nur hört, ohne sie zu sehen, und die ihre Eindrücke schildern, ohne daß sie mit Bildern unterlegt werden.

In der Nacht vom 17. auf den 18. März, d.h., unmittelbar nach dem Sicherheitsratsbeschluß, der die »Willigen« zur Intervention ermächtigte, inszenierte Al-Dschasira beispielsweise ein regelrechtes Drama. »Augenzeugen« erschienen, die behaupteten, die libysche Regierung würde, entgegen ihrer Zusage, die verordnete Waffenruhe nicht respektieren, Regierungstruppen seien »in die Vororte von Bengasi eingedrungen«. Gleich darauf interviewte Al-Dschasira die US-Botschafterin Susan Rice, um ihr mit großer Empörung vorzuwerfen, daß nichts unternommen würde, den bedrohten Rebellen zu helfen, »bevor es zu spät ist«. Minuten später verkündete Rice, als habe sie auf nichts anderes gewartet, unter Berufung auf Al-Dschasira, daß Ghaddafi den Waffenstillstand gebrochen habe. Andere Medien übernahmen diese Nachricht sofort wie eine offizielle Verlautbarung. Deren Reporter hatten selbst nichts gesehen, verfügten über keinerlei Bilder, befanden sich aber »vor Ort« und verliehen dadurch ihren Aussagen die nötige Glaubwürdigkeit. Der Druck durch die Medien nahm am folgenden Tag immer mehr zu, passend zum gleichzeitigen Gipfeltreffen in Paris, auf dem der Beginn von Luftangriffen beschlossen wurde.

Weitere Propagandalügen – wie etwa die »angeordneten Massenvergewaltigungen« unter Einnahme von Viagra (!) oder der Einsatz von Streubomben durch libysche Truppen – folgten. Obwohl sie meist rasch widerlegt wurden, prägen sie nach wie vor das Feindbild im Westen.

Anders als in Tunis und Kairo

Die Entwicklung in Libyen ist mit den Revolten in den anderen arabischen Ländern nicht vergleichbar. In Tunesien und Ägypten war es eine überwiegend gewaltfreie Oppositionsbewegung, die allein durch ihre zahlenmäßige Stärke und ihre enorme Ausdauer die Machthaber in Bedrängnis brachte, die Zentren der Bewegung waren überall – mit Ausnahme des gleichfalls atypischen Syrien – die Hauptstädte. In Libyen konzentrierten sich die verhältnismäßig kleinen Demonstrationen mehr auf den Ostteil des Landes.

In den anderen arabischen Ländern waren es der soziale Niedergang in Folge der neoliberalen Wirtschaftspolitik, die materielle Not und die völlige Perspektivlosigkeit, die die Leute auf die Straße trieben. Im Vordergrund standen soziale Forderungen. In Libyen hingegen mit seinem relativen hohen Lebensstandard leidet kaum einer materielle Not.[2] Im wesentlichen geht es hier um die Verteilung von Einfluß und Macht, um Rivalitäten zwischen Stämmen und zwischen der unter der Monarchie dominierenden, religiös-konservativen Kyrenaika im Osten und dem bevölkerungsreicheren Tripolitanien im Westen. Demokratie und Menschenrechte sind dabei höchstens Rhetorik.[3]

Zweifelsohne gingen auch in Libyen junge Leute, Anwälte und Akademiker gewaltfrei mit der Forderung nach mehr Freiheit, mehr Demokratie auf die Straße, veröffentlichten Manifeste oder bildeten Arbeitsgruppen, die eine demokratische Verfassung ausarbeiten wollten. Sie waren aber nie besonders zahlreich und in dem Maß, wie die militärischen Auseinandersetzungen eskalierten, wurden sie von den bewaffneten Aufständischen, den abtrünnigen Regierungspolitikern und der gut organisierten Exilopposition an den Rand gedrängt. Mit Beginn der NATO-Intervention waren sie endgültig aus dem Spiel.

Bereits Tage vor den Zusammenstößen am 17.Februar, die als Auslöser der Revolte gelten, hatten oppositionelle Kräfte schon zu massiver Gewalt gegriffen. Am 15.2. waren in Zintan und Al-Baida Polizeistationen in Brand gesetzt worden. Auch in den folgenden Tagen wurden vielerorts Polizeireviere und andere öffentliche Gebäude niedergebrannt. In der Großstadt Al-Baida wurden fünfzig als Söldner bezeichnete Schwarzafrikaner exekutiert und in Bengasi zwei Polizisten gelyncht. Bewaffnete Islamisten stürmten schließlich in Derna ein Armeedepot und den daneben liegenden Hafen, nahmen eine größere Zahl von Soldaten und Zivilisten als Geiseln und drohten sie zu erschießen, falls die libysche Armee sich nicht aus der Stadt zurückziehe.

Es waren diese Angriffe, gegen die die libysche Polizei und Armee mit Waffengewalt vorgingen. In westlichen Ländern hätte man mit Sicherheit nicht zurückhaltender auf eine solche massive Gewalt reagiert.

Was zunächst als Protestbewegung erschien, ging auf diese Weise unmittelbar in einen bewaffneten Aufstand über. Erste Anhaltspunkte über dessen Charakter gaben die sich bald häufenden Berichte über brutale Angriffe von Rebellen auf schwarzafrikanische Fremdarbeiter. »Bekanntlich versucht Ghaddafi wie kein anderer regionaler Führer, das Image des arabischen Rassismus zu durchbrechen«, so Gunnar Heinsohn, Autor des »Lexikons der Völkermorde« in der FAZ. Seine »Bemühungen um Schwarze« komme diese jetzt allerdings teuer zu stehen. Eine Million afrikanische Flüchtlinge und Tausende afrikanische Wanderarbeiter sind nun in Gefahr, ermordet zu werden.[4] Als Vorwand für die Übergriffe dient meist der Verweis auf schwarze Söldner in den Reihen der Regierungstruppen. Opfer sind jedoch meist einfache Arbeiter und Flüchtlinge. Ein türkischer Bauarbeiter berichtete der britischen BBC, daß er mitansehen mußte, wie siebzig bis achtzig Arbeiter seiner Firma aus dem Tschad mit Baumscheren und Äxten niedergemetzelt wurden. Aktuell sind u.a. die Bewohner von Tawergha von Gewalt und Vertreibung durch Rebellenmilizen bedroht. Hier, 40 Kilometer südlich der unter der Kontrolle von Aufständischen stehenden Hafenstadt Misurata, wohnen– ein Erbe des Sklavenhandels im 19. Jahrhundert– überwiegend schwarze Libyer.

Von langer Hand geplant

Der Aufstand war keineswegs, wie meist angenommen, spontan, sondern schon seit langem geplant. Die Protestbewegungen in den arabischen Ländern waren nicht die Ursache, sondern nur ein willkommener Aufhänger.

Eine zentrale Rolle spielt dabei die Nationale Front für die Rettung Libyens (NFSL). Diese wurde bereits 1982 mit israelischer und US-amerikanischer Unterstützung gegründet, um Ghaddafi zu stürzen. Unter Führung des zur CIA übergelaufenen Kampfgefährten Ghaddafis, Khalifa Haftar, legte sie sich 1988 mit der Libyschen Nationalarmee (LNA) auch einen militärischen Arm zu. Die von den USA ausgerüstete kleine Untergrundarmee unterhielt in Virginia ein Trainingscamp und führt seit den 1990er Jahren Aufstandsversuche und Terroraktionen in Libyen durch. 2005 gründete sie mit sechs kleineren Gruppen die Dachorganisation »Nationale Konferenz der Libyschen Opposition« – Vorbild war hier offensichtlich die Irakische Nationalkonferenz von Ahmad Tschalabi (»Irakischer Nationalkongreß«), während die NFSL analog Iyad Allawis »Irakischer Nationaler Eintracht« gestrickt wurde. Beide spielten und spielen eine wichtige Rolle bei der Vorbereitung des Irak-Krieges und der folgenden Besatzung.

Die NFSL war treibende Kraft hinter den Demonstrationen vom 17. Februar, zu der sie über Facebook und ähnliche Netzwerke mobilisierte. Haftar reiste unmittelbar danach nach Bengasi, um die militärische Führung des Aufstands zu übernehmen.

Die NFSL nutzte sofort ihre guten Kontakte zu den westlichen Politikern und Medien und prägte so maßgeblich die Berichterstattung im Westen über die Auseinandersetzung. Ihr Generalsekretär Ibrahim Sahad zieht seither weiterhin von Washington aus die Fäden, während andere führende Mitglieder eine maßgebliche Rolle im sogenannten ›Nationalen Übergangsrat‹ spielen. Dieser Rat wird, ohne daß nach seiner Legitimation gefragt wird, vom Westen als Repräsentant der gesamten Opposition im Land angesehen und von der Kriegsallianz sogar offiziell als neue libysche Regierung anerkannt.

Auch Frankreich und Großbritannien hatten ihre Vorbereitungen offensichtlich schon lange vor dem 17. Februar begonnen. So trafen sich Vertreter der französischen Regierung im Herbst letzten Jahres in Paris mit abtrünnigen libyschen Politikern, darunter der ehemalige Protokollchef und enge Vertraute Ghaddafis, Nouri Mesmari. Vermutlich nahmen die Franzosen auch Kontakt zu libyschen Offizieren in Bengasi, wie dem Luftwaffenoberst Abdallah Gehani, auf, die mit Mesmari konspirierten und einen Aufstand vorbereiteten. All diese Dissidenten gehören seit Februar zur Führung der Aufständischen.

Im November 2010 verabredeten Paris und London auch das gemeinsame Manöver »Südlicher Mistral«, bei dem die Luftwaffen beider Länder die Bekämpfung einer »südländischen« Diktatur üben sollten. Die Vorbereitungen zu der für den 21. März 2011 angesetzten Übung gingen dann nahtlos in die »Operation Morgendämmerung« über – dem am 19. März von französischen Kampfjets eingeleiteten Luftkrieg gegen Libyen. Bereits einen Monat zuvor waren nach Informationen der britischen Zeitung Daily Mail bereits 250 britische Elitesoldaten nach Libyen eingedrungen – d.h. gleich nach Beginn des Aufstands oder sogar schon davor.

Wirtschaftsliberale und Exilpolitiker

Aus welchen Kräften sich im einzelnen die Anti-Ghaddafi-Koalition zusammensetzt, an deren Seite die NATO bombt, ist – wie auch westliche Politiker und Medien häufig beklagen – nicht zu überblicken. Die Personen, die im Zusammenspiel mit der westlichen Kriegsallianz die Führung des Aufstandes übernommen haben und nach deren Willen die Macht im Land übernehmen sollen, sind jedoch sehr gut bekannt. Es sind Exilpolitiker und ehemalige Regierungsmitglieder, die alle seit langem engen Kontakt mit Washington, London und Paris halten.

An der Spitze steht, als Chef der »Exekutive« des Übergangsrats, Mahmoud Dschibril, der sich bis dahin in der libyschen Regierung als Leiter des Ausschusses für wirtschaftliche Entwicklung um einen radikalen Privatisierungskurs bemüht hatte. Zuvor hatte er lange Zeit an US-amerikanischen Universitäten wirtschaftspolitische Planung gelehrt und war erst 2005 nach Libyen zurückgekehrt. Seinen vertrauten Kontakt zur US-Regierung hatte er, wie die von Wikileaks veröffentlichten Botschaftsdepeschen enthüllten, nie aufgegeben. Darüber hinaus gilt er auch als enger Freund des französischen Präsidenten Nicolas Sarkozy, der den Rat als erster anerkannte.

Neben Dschibril sorgt der frühere libysche Wirtschaftsminister Ali Al-Issawi für die enge Abstimmung der Rebellenführung mit der Kriegsallianz. Al-Issawi verlor das für die Privatisierung zuständige Ressort im Streit um den Umfang der wirtschaftsliberalen Reformen, die er, wie Dschibril, gerne radikaler gestaltet hätte. Ebenso eng verbunden mit Washington und ausgewiesen neoliberal ist der »Finanzminister« in der Gegenregierung, Ali Tarhouni. Er ist langjähriger US-Bürger und lehrte bis zum Beginn des Aufstands an der University of Washington Wirtschaft und Finanzwesen. Seine Frau arbeitet als Anwältin im US-Justizministerium.

Eine wichtige Rolle spielt als Vorsitzender des unter der alten Flagge der Monarchie agierenden Übergangsrates auch der ehemalige Justizminister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Dschalil. Zum Militärchef avancierte, in Abstimmung mit der Westallianz, Abdulfattah Junis, bis dahin Innenminister und Kommandeur der libyschen Sondereinheiten. Er soll vor allem enge Verbindungen zur britischen Regierung haben. Als »Generalstabschef« ist er nun zuständig für die enge militärische Koordination zwischen den Rebellenmilizen und den Kommandeuren der NATO.[5]

Zum Kreis der Abtrünnigen gehört auch Generalstaatsanwalt Abdul-Rahman Al-Abbar, der kurz nach Junis zu den Rebellen überlief. Somit stehen nun die drei wichtigsten bisherigen Verantwortlichen für die staatliche Repression an der Spitze dessen, was im Westen als demokratische Opposition angesehen wird.

Die drei, die schon beruflich eng verbunden waren, traf die Entwicklung offenbar nicht unvorbereitet. Sie standen vermutlich, wie der ehemalige Protokollchef auch, seit langem mit jenen Kreisen in Verbindung, die den Aufstand planten. Junis hat den Ausbruch der Unruhen vermutlich in seiner Funktion als Innenminister auch direkt gefördert. Nach Angaben eines hochrangigen Polizisten hatten die Sicherheitskräfte bereits am 17. Februar den Befehl vom Hauptquartier in Tripolis erhalten, die Polizeistationen zu verlassen. »Wir wurden aufgefordert, unsere Uniformen auszuziehen und nach Hause zu gehen.«[6]

Schließlich spielt im Hintergrund noch der frühere Chef der Zentralbank Farhat Omar Beng­dara eine entscheidende Rolle. Auch er kommt aus Bengasi und war offensichtlich in die Umsturzpläne eingeweiht. Der wirtschaftsliberale Banker, der wegen seines »Nebenjobs« als Vizepräsident der italienischen Großbank UniCredit sehr oft in Mailand weilte, hatte sich zu Beginn des Aufstands ins Ausland abgesetzt und seine Position genutzt, um den Abzug libyscher Kapitalanlagen aus Europa und den USA solange zu blockieren, bis UN-Sanktionen deren Einfrieren ermöglichten. Er hatte auch engen Kontakt zu Berlusconis Regierung und dürfte dazu beigetragen haben, sie zu überzeugen, trotz der umfangreichen italienischen Geschäfte in Libyen an der Seite der Aufständischen in den Krieg zu ziehen. Auch nach seinem Abgang von der Zentralbank behielt Bengdara seinen Posten bei UniCredit und arbeitet nun an den Plänen zum Aufbau eines neuen Banksystems in der Rebellenhauptstadt Bengasi.

Die militärisch erfahrensten Kämpfer in den Reihen der libyschen Opposition scheinen radikal-islamische Veteranen zu sein, die in Afghanistan und im Irak gegen US- und NATO-Truppen kämpften. Ein Teil von ihnen ist in der Libyschen Islamischen Kampfgruppe organisiert, die bereits in den 1990er Jahren Anschläge in Libyen durchführte. Ihre Hochburg ist die östlich von Bengasi liegende Stadt Derna.

Obskures Gremium

Wohl noch nie haben sich aufständische Kräfte trotz ideologischer Vielfalt und differierenden Interessen derart schnell auf eine Führung geeinigt. Der am 27. Februar gegründete »Nationale Übergangsrat« (NTC: National Transitional Council) sei, so heißt es, von Ad-hoc-Räten der »befreiten Städte« im Osten im Schnellverfahren bestimmt worden. Wahrscheinlicher ist es, daß er schon lange zuvor in enger Abstimmung mit den Regierungen in Washington, Paris und London konzipiert wurde. Allein aus dem engen Kontakt mit diesen bezieht er bis heute seine Autorität.

Das obskure Gremium, von dessen nominell 31 Mitgliedern bisher nur 13 in Erscheinung traten, repräsentiert – wenn überhaupt – nur einen kleinen Teil der Opposition und keineswegs die des gesamten Landes oder gar – wie die NATO-Staaten glauben machen wollen – des »libyschen Volkes«. Der Rat ist zudem zwischen den verschiedenen politischen und militärischen Befehlshabern gespalten, sein Einfluß auf das lokale Geschehen geht kaum über Bengasi hinaus.

Die anderen aufständischen Städte haben ihre eigene Führung, und auch viele bewaffnete Verbände kämpfen auf eigene Faust. Die Rebellen von Brega z.B., die bisher vergeblich versuchten, die Kontrolle über die Stadt zu erlangen, erkennen seine Autorität nicht an. Er würde in keiner Weise Brega repräsentieren, so ihr Sprecher Mohammed Musa Al-Maghrabi. »Uns erscheint der NTC wie eine ausländische Regierung, voller Nepotismus und Korruption.« Er sei wesentlich geschickter dabei, sich Legitimation unter europäischen Regierungen zu verschaffen als in der libyschen Bevölkerung.

Die größte Rebellenmiliz, die »Märtyrerbrigade des 17. Februar«, steht in direkter Opposition zum Übergangsrat wie auch zu den diversen anderen Milizen. Mehrfach kam es, wie die kanadische Zeitung Globe and Mail berichtete, zwischen diesen zu bewaffneten Auseinandersetzungen.

Die libysche Gesellschaft ist stark stammesbezogen und schon daher wenig geneigt, ferne Autoritäten anzuerkennen. Auch das politische System der »Dschamahirija«, der »Herrschaft der Massen« durch eine direkte Demokratie über die lokalen »Basisvolkskongresse«, hat eher eine dezentrale Selbstverwaltung als eine echte nationale Administration gefördert, so der private texanische Informationsdienst Stratfor. »Ironischerweise war es dieses Erbe von Ghaddafis Regime, das den einzelnen östlichen Städten half, rasch lokale Komitees zu bilden und die Verwaltung ihres jeweiligen Gebietes zu übernehmen. Aber es wird Schwierigkeiten schaffen, sollten sie versuchen, wirklich zusammenzukommen. Die Rhetorik ist weit entfernt von einer handfesten Demonstration der Einheit.«[7]

Im Westen hat es, mit Ausnahme von Misrata, nie sonderlich große Demonstrationen gegeben. Seit die NATO bombt, dürften auch viele Gegner Ghaddafis wieder hinter ihrer Regierung stehen. »In Libyen gibt es vielleicht Millionen Menschen«, so der norwegische Friedensforscher Johan Galtung, »die Ghaddafi nicht mögen, aber sehr wohl seine Errungenschaften schätzen.«[8]

Teil II: Kampf um die Reichtümer des Landes und die Dominanz über den gesamten Kontinent
Der neue Krieg der NATO wird von der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Staaten in der Welt abgelehnt. Die meisten Menschen in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika sind überzeugt, daß er nicht zum Schutz der Zivilbevölkerung geführt wird, sondern für den unmittelbaren Zugriff auf die libyschen Öl- und Gasvorräte. In Europa herrscht jedoch bei der Einschätzung der Ziele des neuen NATO-Krieges auch bei Linken häufig Konfusion. Viele bezweifeln, daß hinter der Intervention ökonomische und strategische Motive stehen könnten.

Die Tatsache, »daß Ghaddafi Libyen in den Weltmarkt und den neoliberalen Kapitalismus integriert« habe und »von einem Feind des Westens zu einem der verläßlichsten Partner in der Region geworden« sei, schreibt z.B. Ingar Solty in der Zeitschrift Sozialismus, schließe »die Möglichkeit aus, daß es beim Krieg gegen Libyen um dessen »Einreihung in den globalen Kapitalismus« gehe.[9]

Hinter dieser Einschätzung steht ein sehr oberflächlicher Blick auf die Entwicklungen in Libyen. Er ignoriert zum einen die massiven Zwänge, denen Libyen durch die UN-Sanktionen und die Kriegsdrohungen aus Washington ausgesetzt war, und überschätzt die Zugeständnisse an den Westen. Zwar sind alle großen Ölfirmen wieder im Land, doch zu sehr restriktiven Bedingungen. Das libysche Engagement für die afrikanische Einheit und Unabhängigkeit steht den Bemühungen der USA und der alten Kolonialmächte diametral entgegen, ihren Einfluß auszuweiten.

Riesige Ölvorkommen

Mit 46,6 Milliarden Barrel (ein Barrel sind 159 Liter) verfügt Libyen über die größten nachgewiesenen Ölreserven Afrikas und steht weltweit auf Platz acht. Da bisher nur ein Viertel der weiten Flächen des Landes auf Kohlenwasserstoffvorkommen untersucht wurden, sind die Vorkommen vermutlich noch wesentlich größer.

Nur ein Fünftel der bekannten Vorkommen wurde bisher erschlossen, Libyen liegt daher mit einer Fördermenge von etwa 1,7 Millionen Barrel Rohöl am Tag (bpd) hinter Angola und Nigeria. Um seine Reserven nicht zu verschleudern, fördert das Land nur halb so viel wie bis 1969 unter der Monarchie, als die großen westlichen Konzerne die Ölpolitik des Landes bestimmten. Nur in zwei Ländern sieht die Ölbranche das Potential, die Produktion in absehbarer Zeit verdoppeln zu können – in Libyen und im Irak. Libyen plant jedoch lediglich eine Steigerung auf 2,3 Million bpd. Aus Sicht der Ölmultis liegt allein hier schon ein erhebliches, brachliegendes Potential.

Nach dem Sturz des von den USA und den Briten eingesetzten Königs Idris im Jahr 1969 waren nach und nach die meisten ausländischen Unternehmen verdrängt und die Ölproduktion in die Hände der staatlichen Libyschen Nationalen Ölgesellschaft LNOC überführt worden. Dies war besonders für US-amerikanische Konzerne, die bis dahin 87,5 Prozent der Ölproduktion in ihren Händen hielten, ein herber Verlust. Libyen entwickelte sich bald zum Vorreiter der OPEC-Staaten und setzte als erstes Land höhere Preise für sein Öl durch. Innerhalb von zehn Jahren verfünffachten sich nun die Staatseinnahmen. Mit diesen Einnahmen konnte der Staat seinen Bürgern einen relativ hohen Lebensstandard verschaffen, den höchsten Afrikas. Sozialistische Ideen spielten bei allen damaligen Revolutionen eine wichtige Rolle. Libyen setzte sie jedoch wesentlich gründlicher um als andere Länder der Region. Gesundheit und Bildung sind seitdem kostenlos, wichtige Güter und Dienstleistungen werden subventioniert, Alte, Witwen und Waisen erhalten eine Rente, Arbeitslose finanzielle Unterstützung u.v.m.

Es gelang jedoch nicht, Libyens Abhängigkeit vom Erdölexport zu verringern. Niedrige Rohölpreise und die gegen das Land verhängten Sanktionen brachten die Wirtschaft in den 1990er Jahren an den Rand des Ruins. Das Bruttoinlandsprodukt hatte sich am Ende fast halbiert, jegliche Modernisierung der Infrastruktur war blockiert. Die libysche Führung suchte daher nun einen Ausgleich mit dem Westen und machte dabei erhebliche Konzessionen. U.a. lieferte sie 1999 zwei Offiziere an Großbritannien aus, die für den Bombenanschlag auf ein Verkehrsflugzeug über dem schottischen Lockerbie verantwortlich gemacht wurden, obwohl die Beweise dafür äußerst zweifelhaft waren.

Die UN-Sanktionen wurden daraufhin ab 1999 sukzessive gelockert und 2004 vollständig aufgehoben. Im Gegenzug öffnete Libyen seine Öl- und Gasindustrie für ausländische Unternehmen. Mittlerweile sind wieder alle großen US-amerikanischen und europäischen Konzerne der Branche im Land aktiv.

»Knebelverträge« für Konzerne

Die Bedingungen im nordafrikanischen Land sind für ausländische Firmen jedoch sehr rauh. Seit August 2004 werden die Öl- und Gasgeschäfte nach dem neuen sogenannten EPSA-4-System abgeschlossen (EPSA: Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement). Das Vergabeverfahren für die neuen Beteiligungsabkommen wird zwar als sehr transparent gelobt – den Zuschlag erhält derjenige, der sich mit dem geringsten Anteil am geförderten Öl bzw. Gas zufriedengibt –, für westliche Manager wie Bob Fryklund vom US-Multi ConocoPhillips enthalten die Abkommen jedoch die strengsten Konditionen der Welt. Westliche Medien sprechen sogar von »Knebelverträgen«.[10]

Geschäfte sind nach diesem System grundsätzlich nur in Partnerschaft mit LNOC oder anderen staatlichen Unternehmen möglich, die dabei stets die Mehrheitsanteile (meist 60 Prozent und mehr) und somit die Kontrolle behalten. Schon für den Abschluß eines Vertrages sind hohe Zeichnungsgebühren zu entrichten. Bei der zweiten, 2005 durchgeführten Bieterrunde mußten die Interessenten z.B. jeweils 133 Millionen Dollar allein für den Vertragsabschluß hinblättern und Investitionen in Höhe mehrerer hundert Millionen Dollar für Explorationen zusichern. Die Konzerne, die den Zuschlag erhalten, tragen anschließend den größten Teil der Entwicklungskosten eines Ölfelds, die LNOC bleibt jedoch alleinige Eigentümerin.

Generell ist der Anteil der Produktion, den ausländische Firmen für sich behalten können, mit durchschnittlich elf Prozent recht bescheiden. Doch dafür ist das Öl von bester Qualität und liegt sehr nahe bei den europäischen Abnehmern, an die rund 70 Prozent der libyschen Exporte gehen. Der Anteil libyschen Erdöls am Verbrauch der EU-Staaten liegt mittlerweile bei zehn Prozent, in Deutschland sind es sechs Prozent.

Innerhalb von drei Jahren führte die LNOC vier Bieterrunden durch und vergab dabei 52 Verträge an knapp drei Dutzend Gesellschaften aus 20 Ländern. Nicht nur die großen US-Konzerne zogen wieder in Libyen ein, sondern weit mehr noch russische, chinesische und andere asiatische Firmen. Die ergiebigsten Ölfelder blieben zum großen Ärger der Multis weiterhin ausschließlich der LNOC und ihren Töchtern vorbehalten.

Die Hoffnungen, daß Ausländern auch noch diese Filetstücke zugänglich gemacht werden, erfüllten sich nicht. Nach der vierten Vergaberunde entschied die LNOC, vorerst keine neue durchzuführen, sondern statt dessen die bestehenden Verträge nachzuverhandeln und dabei die älteren dem strengeren EPSA-4-Standard anzupassen – für die Ölfirmen waren dies schwere finanzielle Rückschläge.

Petro-Canada mußte z.B. für die Umstellung aller Verträge eine Abschlußgebühr von einer Milliarde Dollar bezahlen sowie Investitionen in Höhe von knapp vier Milliarden Dollar für die Erneuerung alter und die Erforschung neuer Öl- und Gasvorkommen bereitstellen. Gleichzeitig mußten die Kanadier die Reduktion ihres Anteils am Output auf zwölf Prozent akzeptieren. Anderen Firmen erging es nicht besser.

Die großen Konzerne versuchten sich natürlich dagegen zu wehren. Letztlich hatten sie jedoch wenig in der Hand. Da sie bereits erhebliche Summen in die Erkundung gesteckt hatten, kam ein Ausstieg nicht mehr in Frage. Die LNOC drohte zudem damit, die weitere Entwicklung der Ölförderung zukünftig auch allein durchzuführen.

Für weiteren Unmut sorgten vor zwei Jahren öffentliche Überlegungen Ghaddafis, angesichts sinkender Mineralölpreise einige Einrichtungen internationaler Ölkonzerne wieder zu verstaatlichen. Auch die Mitteilung der LNOC an die im Land aktiven US-Konzerne im März letzten Jahres, Washingtons erneut unfreundliche Politik könne negative Auswirkungen auf ihre Geschäfte im Lande haben, verunsicherte die Branche, deren Investitionsvolumen in Libyen mittlerweile auf über 50 Milliarden Dollar geschätzt wird.

Liberalisierung vs. Libyenisierung

Zur gleichen Zeit kamen aus Tripolis aber auch andere Töne. Führende Kader aus dem »Ausschuß für Privatisierung und Investitionen« kündigten z.B. gleichfalls im März 2010 an, bis 2020 die Hälfte aller Staatsbetriebe in die Hände privater Investoren übergeben zu wollen.

In der libyschen Führung herrschen offensichtlich zwei Tendenzen vor: Die eine setzte auf eine stärkere Privatisierung und wollte mit besseren Konditionen für westliche Konzerne und Banken mehr ausländisches Kapital anlocken. Die andere wollte die Kontrolle über die Ressourcen des Landes behalten und propagierte eine stärkere »Libyenisierung« der Ölproduk­tion.[11] Letztere behielt, gestützt auf die Stimmung in der Bevölkerung, meist die Oberhand.

Trotz vollmundiger Ankündigungen umfassender Privatisierungspläne, mit denen große Erwartungen in der westlichen Geschäftswelt geweckt wurden, ist außerhalb des Öl- und Gassektors nicht viel passiert. 2000 hatte die libysche Führung zwar angekündigt, daß der Staat sich aus der Industrieproduktion zurückziehen wolle und im November 2003 auch eine Liste der ersten 360 Privatisierungskandidaten veröffentlicht. Die sich infolge steigender Ölpreise rasch entspannende Finanzlage des Landes nahm dem Verkauf von Staatsbetrieben jedoch jegliche Dringlichkeit. Bis 2010 waren erst 110 Staatsbetriebe tatsächlich privatisiert worden.[12] Zum größten Teil waren es kleinere Firmen, die an libysche Unternehmen oder Tascharukiayyas (Genossenschaften) verkauft wurden.

Selbstverständlich machten ausländische Konzerne blendende Geschäfte im Land, das nach langen Embargojahren einen großen Nachholbedarf hatte und in großem Stil Infrastrukturprojekte vorantrieb. Siemens z.B. setzte in den letzten Jahren mehrere hundert Millionen Euro mit Schaltanlagen und Gasturbinen sowie Steuerungssystemen, Pumpen, Motoren und Antrieben für das Wasserversorgungsprojekt »Great-Man-Made-River« um. Allein im Geschäftsjahr 2010 betrug der Umsatz mit libyschen Kunden 159 Millionen Euro. Ein Einstieg in libysche Firmen und Banken blieb ausländischem Kapital jedoch weitgehend verwehrt.

Wirksamer Widerstand gegen die Privatisierungspläne kam jedoch nicht allein von alten Kadern in der Regierung und Verwaltung, sondern aus der gesamten Gesellschaft. Bereits im September 2000 erschien in Al-Zahf Al-Akhdar, einer Zeitschrift, die als Sprachrohr der Basisvolkskongresse angesehen wird, ein Bericht, in dem die wachsende Geschäftstätigkeit ausländischer Firmen im Land scharf kritisiert und als Gefahr für die libysche Gesellschaft dargestellt wurde. Die öffentliche Kritik an der Liberalisierungspolitik verschärfte sich 2005, als einige Subventionen abgebaut und Importzölle abgeschafft wurden. Der reformorientierte Ministerpräsident Schukri Ghanem wurde daraufhin abgesetzt und mußte sich mit dem Chefposten der LNOC begnügen. Die Ölmultis wurden nun angewiesen, alle Jobs, für die keine speziellen Kenntnisse nötig sind, an Libyer zu vergeben, und zwar zu denselben Bedingungen wie für ausländische Angestellten. Zusätzlich wurden sie gesetzlich zu deren Weiterbildung verpflichtet.

Eine klare Absage erhielten die Pläne einer Liberalisierung der Wirtschaft und des Abbaus von Subventionen schließlich auch, wie FAZ-Korrespondent Christoph Ehrhardt aus Tripolis berichtete, von den Basisvolkskongressen bei deren Sitzungen im Februar 2009.[13]

Die Befürworter neoliberaler Reformen waren zunehmend frustriert. Ihre entschiedensten Verfechter, wie Mahmud Dschibril und Ali Al-Issawi, sitzen nun in den führenden Positionen der Gegenregierung. Die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung repräsentieren sie jedoch offensichtlich nicht. Ähnlich wie 1999 gegen Serbien dienen der Krieg, die Sanktionen und die immer umfassendere Zerstörung der Infrastruktur daher auch dazu, deren Widerstand zu brechen.

Lukrativ: Banken und Wasser

Im Visier westlicher Banken und Konzerne liegt dabei nicht nur die Petrolindustrie. Aufgrund seiner außerordentlich hohen Liquidität streben sie z.B. auch schon lange einen Einstieg in den libyschen Banksektor an. Während führende Ökonomien der Welt mit riesigen Defiziten zu kämpfen haben, die ihre Währung schwächen und ihnen die Neuaufnahme von Krediten erschweren, monierte der Internationale Währungsfonds (IWF) in seinem Jahresbericht 2010 zu Libyen, das Land sitze auf einem Überschuß von 150 Milliarden Dollar.

Hier ist Abhilfe schon in Sicht. Gleich nach Verabschiedung der UN-Resolution 1973 gründete der Übergangsrat in Bengasi parallel zu einer neuen »Libyschen Ölgesellschaft« auch die neue »Zentrale Bank von Libyen«. So wie die neue Ölgesellschaft dazu bestimmt ist, der staatlichen LNOC die Geschäfte in den vom Übergangsrat kontrollierten Gebieten zu entreißen, soll die neue Finanzinstitution offenbar, wie Äußerungen westlicher Politiker nahelegen, das eingefrorene Auslandsvermögen des Landes übernehmen.

Während die libysche Zentralbank zum Ärger der westlichen Finanzwelt völlig unabhängig von ausländischen Banken und dem Internationalen Währungsfonds ist, wird die neue von Anfang an unter den Fittichen europäischer Großbanken stehen. Vertreter des britischen Bankgiganten HSBC, der den größten Anteil am libyschen Auslandsvermögen verwaltet, eilten als erste nach Bengasi, um den Aufbau der Rebellenbank zu betreuen. Die italienische Großbank UniCredit, die Nummer zwei in Europa, folgte auf dem Fuße. Ihr Vizepräsident ist der bisherige Chef der libyschen Zentralbank, Farhat Omar Bengdara, der sich gleichzeitig auch um den Zugriff der selbsternannten Gegenregierung in Bengasi auf das eingefrorene libysche Auslandsvermögen bemüht.

Schließlich weckt sicherlich auch das gewaltige Wasserprojekt »Great Man-Made River«, durch das die Küstenstädte mit den unter der Sahara liegenden Grundwasservorräten versorgt werden, schon lang Begehrlichkeiten. 4000 Kilometer Pipelines mit dem Durchmesser von Straßentunneln bringen heute bereits 6,5 Millionen Kubikmeter pro Tag zu den Verbrauchern. Aktuellen Schätzungen zufolge reichen die gigantischen Wassermengen, mit denen man das Territorium Deutschlands 1000 Meter unter Wasser setzen könnte, noch mehrere tausend Jahre lang.

Libyen hat das Projekt, in das bereits über 25 Milliarden Dollar flossen, bisher vollständig in Eigenregie betrieben und ohne ausländisches Geld finanziert – schon das, so der brasilianische Journalist Pepe Escobar, war aus Sicht westlicher Banken und Konzerne »ein sehr schlechtes Beispiel« für Entwicklungsländer.[14] Weltweit wird die Wasserversorgung zunehmend zum lukrativen Geschäft. Beherrscht wird es von französischen Konzernen, den »drei Schwestern« Veolia, Suez-Ondeo und SAUR, die sich zusammen bereits 40 Prozent des Weltwassermarktes teilen. Angesichts der geringen Förderkosten könnte man schon heute bei den aktuellen Wasserpreisen von zwei Euro und mehr pro Kubikmeter problemlos Einnahmen von über vier Milliarden Euro erzielen – und das jahrhundertelang.

Afrikas Rohstoffe

Es geht jedoch nicht nur um die libyschen Ressourcen. Die gleichzeitige französische Intervention in der Elfenbeinküste wie die forcierte Ausweitung der militärischen Präsenz der USA in Afrika deuten auf weitere, über Libyen hinausgehende Ziele hin: die Sicherung und Ausweitung westlicher Dominanz auf dem gesamten Kontinent, um dessen Rohstoffressourcen ein erbitterter Wettkampf stattfindet.

Die Konkurrenz wirtschaftlich aufstrebender Nationen auf dem schwarzen Kontinent, allen voran China, wird von Washington als große Bedrohung wahrgenommen. Eine Reaktion auf diese Entwicklung war die Gründung von ­AFRICOM als eigenständiges Oberkommando der US-Streitkräfte für Afrika. Ein entscheidender Anstoß dafür war ein Report der »Afrikanischen Öl-Politik-Initiativen-Gruppe« AOPIG von 2002 gewesen, der hervorhob, daß die USA bis 2015 über 25 Prozent ihres Erdöls aus Afrika beziehen werden, und auf die zunehmend engeren Beziehungen zwischen afrikanischen Ländern und China hinwies.

»Es geht nicht nur um das libysche Öl, sondern um die afrikanischen Ölreserven und die Rohstoffe des ganzen Kontinents«, befürchtet daher auch Molefi Asante, Professor für Afrikanisch-Amerikanische Studien an der Temple University in Philadelphia.[15]

China unterhält im Unterschied zu den USA und Frankreich keine Militärstützpunkte in Afrika, hatte aber, wie eine Karte im »Atlas der Globalisierung 2009« von Le Monde diplomatique zeigt, 2008 zu ebenso vielen Ländern wie diese militärische Beziehungen in Form von Ausbildung, Ausrüstung, logistischer und technischer Unterstützung. In den drei Jahren, die AFRICOM existiert, haben die USA Boden gutgemacht. Fast alle afrikanischen Länder ließen sich seither in militärische Partnerschaften einbinden. Manche nahmen nur Militärhilfe in Form von Ausrüstung und Ausbildung an, viele beteiligten sich aber auch bereits an gemeinsamen Manövern. Nur fünf Staaten verweigerten sich bzw. wurden nicht gefragt: Libyen, Sudan, die Elfenbeinküste, Eritrea und Simbabwe.

In der Elfenbeinküste hat das französische Militär nach den umstrittenen Wahlen mit Alassane Ouattara einen stellvertretenden Direktor des Internationalen Währungsfonds ins Präsidentenamt gehievt, der das Land jetzt in das von den USA und der NATO geformte Militärbündnis »West African Standby Force« führen wird. Der Sudan wurde geteilt, Libyen liegt unter Feuer, und Simbabwe gilt neben Syrien als wahrscheinlichster Kandidat für den nächsten Angriff der NATO-Staaten.

Die libysche Regierung boykottierte zudem die von der EU gegründete »Mittelmeerunion«, die zusammen mit dem »Mittelmeerdialog« der NATO darauf zielt, die arabische Welt und Nordafrika – analog zu Osteuropa – in den Herrschaftsbereich der USA und der EU einzubinden. Ghaddafi nannte sie jedoch einen »neokolonialen Trick« zur Zerstörung der arabischen und afrikanischen Einheit und blieb den Treffen fern.

Störfaktor Libyen

Mit seinem Engagement für die wirtschaftliche Unabhängigkeit und die Einheit der afrikanischen Länder steht Libyen dem Bemühen der USA und der alten Kolonialmächte, ihren Einfluß in Afrika wieder auszuweiten, diametral entgegen. »Es war Ghaddafis Libyen, das Afrika die erste Revolution in neuester Zeit ermöglichte«, schrieb der Kameruner Experte für Geostrategie Jean-Paul Pougala, »die den ganzen Kontinent durch Telefon, Fernsehen, Radio und verschiedene andere Anwendungen wie Telemedizin und Fernstudium verband«. Denn es war libysches Kapital, das entscheidend zur Realisierung des ersten afrikanischen Telekommunikationssatelliten beitrug. Über zehn Jahre lang hatten die 45 afrikanischen Staaten, die sich 1992 in der RASCOM (Regional African Satellite ­Comunication Organization) zusammengeschlossen hatten, vergeblich versucht, genügend Kapital für einen eigenen Satelliten aufzutreiben, um sich von den horrenden Telefongebühren europäischer und amerikanischer Firmen befreien zu können. Doch Weltbank, IWF, USA und EU hielten die Afrikaner nur hin. 2006 beendete Libyen das unwürdige Spiel und stellte 300 Millionen Dollar für das Projekt zur Verfügung. Die Afrikanische Entwicklungsbank steuerte weitere 50 Millionen bei. Nachdem der erste Satellit im Dezember 2007 seinen Dienst aufgenommen hatte, stiegen auch China und Rußland ins Geschäft ein, weitere Satelliten wurden in den Orbit geschossen und machten die Afrikaner Schritt für Schritt von den westlichen Systemen unabhängig, denen dadurch nun Hunderte Millionen Dollar jedes Jahr an Einnahmen verlorengehen.

Eine direkte Bedrohung des westlichen Einflusses ist der Aufbau dreier unabhängiger afrikanischer Finanzinstitute, mit dem die Afrikanische Union begonnen hat und für deren Gründung libysche Gelder die Basis bilden: die Afrikanische Investmentbank, der Afrikanische Währungsfonds und die Afrikanische Zentralbank. Die Entwicklung dieser Institute würde es den afrikanischen Ländern ermöglichen, sich der Kontrolle von Weltbank und Internationalem Währungsfonds (IWF), die bisher als Instrumente der neokolonialen Herrschaft fungieren, zu entziehen. Der Afrikanische Währungsfonds soll zukünftig die gesamten afrikanischen Aktivitäten des IWF übernehmen, die, so Pougala, mit einem Umfang von nur 25 Milliarden Dollar einen ganzen Kontinent in die Knie zwangen. Mit Hilfe der Afrikanischen Zentralbank könnten sich die 14 ehemaligen französischen Kolonien eine neue Währung schaffen, die den CFA-Franc endlich ablöst, der nach wie vor Frankreichs wirtschaftliche Dominanz in diesen Ländern sichert. Diese wird ohnedies bereits durch Libyens wachsenden Einfluß in diesen Ländern, der massive Auswirkungen auf deren Rohstoffexportkonditionen hat, in Frage gestellt.

Siegt die Kriegsallianz, so würde das all diesen afrikanischen Unternehmungen einen schweren Schlag versetzen. Bereits jetzt sind viele Projekte, die von libyschen Unternehmen wie der Libysch-Arabisch-Afrikanischen Investment-Gesellschaft südlich der Sahara betrieben werden, durch das Einfrieren der libyschen Fonds blockiert.

Es ist daher nicht übertrieben, wenn der nigerianische Poet und Journalist Obi Nwakanma schreibt, der Einsatz westlicher – insbesondere französischer – Truppen in Afrika stelle »eine neue strategische Kriegserklärung gegen Afrika, die afrikanischen Interessen und den afrikanischen Kontinent« dar.

Anmerkungen:

Reinhard Mutz, Libyen: »Lizenz zum Töten?« Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Juni 2011
Joachim Guilliard, »Zerstörung eines Landes – Droht Libyen der gleiche Absturz wie dem Irak?« junge Welt, 5.5.2011
»Den Demonstranten geht es nicht um Demokratie«, Interview mit Gabriele Riedle, Redakteurin des Magazins Geo, Berliner Zeitung, 21.2.2011
Gunnar Heinsohn, »Da schweigt Ghaddafi – Wer sind die Aufständischen«, FAZ 22.3.2011. Siehe auch »African migrants targeted in Libya«, Al Jazeera, 28.2.2011 und Wolfgang Weber, »Libysche Rebellen massakrieren Schwarzafrikaner«, WSWS, 31.3.2011
Knut Mellenthin, »Offen und kooperativ – Die ›Revolutionäre‹, denen der Westen vertraut«, jW, 1.4.2011; Prof. Peter Dale Scott, »Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?« The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 13 No 3, 28.3.2011.
Amira El Ahl, »Sie feiern schon ihr neues Libyen«, Welt am Sonntag, 27.2.2011
»Libya’s Opposition Leadership Comes into Focus«, Stratfor, 20.3.2011
Johan Galtung, »Libya: The War Is On«, TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 3.2011
Ingar Solty, Öl, Kontrolle und Ideologie, Sozialismus 25.4.2011
Alle wollen Libyens Öl, Zeit online, 6.5.2009, siehe auch Energy profile of Libya, Encyclopedia of Earth , 25.8.2008
Jan Köstner, Ölstaat mit Potential – Libyen verfügt über die größten Petroleumreserven Afrikas, junge Welt, 1.4.2011
New Head Of Libyan Privatization Board Welcomes U.S. Firms, US-Botschaft in Tripolis, 16.2.2010, Wikileaks ­Cables
Christoph Ehrhardt, Öl in Libyen – Alle Milliarden dem Volke – »Basisvolkskongresse« beschäftigen sich in Libyen mit der Frage, wer wie viel aus dem Ölreichtum bekommen soll., FAZ, 27.2.2009
Pepe Escobar, There’s no business like war business, Asia Times, 30.3.2011
Colin Benjamin, Libya, AFRICOM, And US Scramble For Africa, Black Star News, 8.4.2011

* Dieser Beitrag erschien in zwei Teilen in: junge Welt vom 27. und 28. Juli 2011

QUELLE:

http://www.ag-friedensforschung.de/regionen/Libyen/afrika2-neu.html

Jasiri X – Bushes (Bomb the Throne)

LYRICS:

George H.W. Bush -I invented crack
the highest hit with them scientists in the lab
proof
not hard to find it
read Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance
Truth
New terror alert Qaddafi
We tried to kill him in the 80s but were sloppy
Bombs hit his compound every wall was knock down
his infant daughter got found dead under a rock pile

George W. Bush -Damn W bush where the hell you been
Obama’s getting blamed for all of ya failures kid
Left trillions in debt they acting like I never did
Kanye even apologized now we’re hella friends
They say I’m stupid but I was dumb before
but they so crazy they forgot about my other war
and they don’t even mention my other other war
Almost destroyed America they still love me more

George H.W. Bush -Skull and Bones fresh
bomb you with the stealth
I’m bout to call the CIA on my self
I was the first ta
go after Saddam Hussein I tried to murk ya
bombed Iraq with those missiles air to surface
so we would have cheap oil for us to purchase
Iran contra no need for bail
I pardoned everybody they never going to jail

George W. Bush -A born again christian I’m never going to hell
my book about decisions is never going to sale
300 pages of crap it’s better in the shredder
I made history the worst president ever
I’m in Crawford with the golfers
cause of my cuts there’s just no job offers
now everybody in they house getting foreclosed
I’m done I’ll hit you ya tomorrow

George H.W. Bush -Welcome to Panama
Sent troops to get Noriega I am the law
he had pedico in kilos
we bought it from him that’s how come that we know
4000 dead it makes no difference
nobody cares cause it’s just less immigrants
no coincidence my son went from governor
to president leaving a debt so big we can’t get under from

George W. Bush -Can’t you see commercial jets flying over you
for seven minutes I froze like what the hell Imma do
put my Arab friends on planes with no kinda proof
even though they said the highjackers were Saudi too
Then I let Osama escape like the hell with it
so I could invade Iraq with fake intelligence
and over 6,000 troops died
but hey keep being mad at the new guy

___________________________________________________

Louis Farrakhan’s speech at Millions March in Harlem on Libya & Africa + transcript

You can watch the full speech here:

http://noi.org/webcast/millionsinharlem/

Transcript by Daniele Puccio & Kashif Iqbal :

In the name of Allah, the benificent, the merciful we give him praise and thanks for his mercy and his goodness to the members of the human family. That whenever any member of the human family strays from the straight path and loses his divine favor – before he punishes, he always out of his mercy raises from among the people a prophet or a messenger through whom he gives divine revelation, by which he can guide that people back to his straight path and back to his divine favor. We thank him for Moses and the israelite prophets that gave us the Torah and the Old Testament. We thank him for Jesus and the apostles that gave us the ??? gospel and the New Testament and we thank him for prophet Muhammad-ibn Abdullah through whom he gave to the world the last revelation to come – the Holy Qu’ran. Peace be upon these, worthy servants of Allah. I am a student of the most honorable Elijah Muhammad and i could never thank Allah enough for his intervention in the affairs of black people in America in the person of Master Fard Muhammad, the Great Mahdi who came from among us and raised from among us, one from among us who he would place ??? mission to resurrect us from the mental death and ignorance. I thank him for The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, his messenger messaiah to us and i am honored beyond words to greet all of you with the greeting words of peace. As-Salamu Alaykum.

First to all of the believers in Mosque Number 7 of Malcolm Shabazz, Mosque Number 7 and all of the muslims, i greet everyone of you with the greeting words of peace and wish to all of us: Ramadan Mubarak.

To all of my nationalist family and all of my christian family and my non-committed family, i greet all of you with the greeting words of peace again. As-Salamu Alaykum.

To sister Viola Plummer and the December 12 movement, words are inadequate to say thank you to you for the vision that you had for this day. Thanks to every speaker who spoke. Who spoke from your hearts concerning the suffering of our people not only in Africa, but wherever our people are suffering particularly in the United States of America. We thank all of the peace activists who may be present and those who just wanted to come out of curiousity to hear what we have to say. I’m honored beyond words to be back home in Harlem. We spent 10 years from Moqsue Number 7 on 116th street and this New York, my first love. I’m living in Chicago, as my second love has become my first love. I thank you all and i hope that the words that Allah may guide me to speak will be beneficial to us all. The greatest gift that we could have at a time like this is guidance and warning. Guidance is more precious than money because if you have money and no guidance you don’t know what to do with what you have. And if you have guidance and no money, good guidance will help you to get what you need to get through. So the most precious gift to any government and people today is right guidance. When people are conflicted, where their own personal fears, their personal needs cause them to mix truth with falsehood or not speak straight words to those in power and even to their own people then those kinds of persons who think more for their own personal security than for the good of a people, and a nation and a world, these are enemies maskerading as friends. It’s gonna take strenght today in leadership to not hide truth nor mix truth up with falsehood. Don’t seek positions in a government that’s coming down and then butter up truth to advance yourself among a people whose time has come to an end. We must speak truth to power or die. We must not be afraid to tell the truth even if it means we lose our lives because there is nothing more precious in this universe than truth. The Qu’ran says ??? created the world and the universe with truth. The bible says he created the heavens and the earth with wisdom so our lives are based in truth. And if we live for the truth and die for the truth we never die because you can never kill the truth. So today i’m gonna speak some harsh truth. Today i wanna talk to your hearts, to your minds, to your spirit because we are in great trouble as we speak. And if our leaders will not tell us and guide is properly then they’re going down and they’ll take us down with them. This is why the bible says “If the blind lead the blind both fall in the ditch” and The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said “the ditch represents hell, destruction” and right now as a people we’re in hell and we are being destroyed and there are forces that are planning our destruction so i wanna lay it out today as clearly as i can so you will see tomorrows headlines today because tomorrows headlines are known. Tomorrows headline have been written before we were born and ??? prophetic ???? of God’s prophets and messengers. Now this world in which we live is called in the Qu’ran a transitory life in a world of sport and play. This is a contrary world to the nature of God and the nature in which he created the universe and it is a contrary world to our nature. We have been living among those who have used falsehood and deceit and murder and death and destruction as a principle of governance. They have exploited the wealth of the world and killed the indigenous peoples of the earth, never thinking that as Jesus said God is not mocked as you have done so shall it be done to you and whatsoever a man soweth the same shall he also reap. Well it’s reaping time now and in order for the wicked to take the righteous down with them they must deceive you into thinking that you have it made here under this system. I wanna say to all of you, because you have a black president, does not mean that you are in the home of the brave, the land of the free and everything is alright now because a black man is taking care of the affairs of white people. In fact The Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us that no one man could rise above the condition of his people so if our people are going backwards and our brother is going upwards then his upward mobility is to deceive the masses into thinking that his going up is a way up for us when in reality its deceiving you into holding onto a system that never was designed to give black people freedom, justice and equality. We are going to have to carve out a destiny for ourselves. No white or black man in the White House can give us what our unity can give us for ourselves.

Now, I’m here this afternoon to talk about what is going on from the United Nations and NATO against Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan people and really it’s an attack on Africa. Our sister, Viola Plummer and the December 12 movement and all of the wonderful speakers that are here are here because we see a move to re-colonize Africa. There is a force or forces that want to destroy the future of Africa, that our future will also be destroyed in the destruction of the future of Africa. If you were chinese, when you see the rise of China, mainland China or Taiwan China, China is becoming a world power that America and others are fearing. Well if you’re chinese in America the rise of China mainland gives chinese americans feelings of strenght, feeling of courage and pride. When Africa rises, when Africa shows the world what she can do and contribute to the onward movement of world civilization. When Africa takes her rightful place, all africans in the diaspora, nearly 500 million of us will rise in every society where we are so the threat to Africa is a threat to every single son and daughter of Africa wherever we may be found on this planet. Before i go any further most of you here, all of us in Harlem have been taught and helped and guided by the voice of a man from television station ABC, a program called Like It Is and a brother that we all know and love – called Gil Noble. When we got off the plane yesterday… i want to thank the members of the New York Police Force who met me at the airport and escorted me to Montclair, New Jersey to the hospital where Gil Nobel is trying and fighting for his life. The family told me that the doctors had ??? them twice in the halls of the hospital telling them that Gil Noble was going to die, he was braindead and that they should go on and pull the plug because he was on life support. A few days ago the family came together around Gil and they pulled the plug. I imagine they were expecting the worst but he started breathing on his own. One hour passed, two hours passed, three hours passed and he was still breathing on his own. His beloved wife, Jean, put her hand in his hand and he squeezed it and we talked to his daughter Lisa and i said: “Lisa, although when we get to New York, the first thing i’m gonna do is to go see my brother.” Yesterday i went to see Gil Noble and when i entered the room i kissed him on his forhead and we began to talk around him. It didn’t appear right then that he was conscious of what was going on around him but in a few minutes his eyes started to open and then i went over and sat by him and i hit the bed i was talking and i did this “knocking on the lectern” and then he hit the bed three times, then he reached for my hand and he squeezed my hand and he took his hand up to my face and did this to my chin, opened his eyes real wide and tried to talk tho i didn’t understand his words. Our brother is fighting for his life, his children i believe today, he is in rehab and hopefully Gil Noble will be back with us again by the grace of Allah soon. His son is here, Chris, his daughter Lisa, all of the family, will you just stand and let the people see the fruit. I wish you would just come up quickly. They just wanna thank you for your prayers for their dad. Here comes, i think this is Lisa Noble, this is Chris Noble, this is Alice, his niece and they wanna say Thank You, Thank You, Thank You for your prayers for their father and their uncle. Now let’s get back to business.

What is it in our government, the government of the United States of America that makes them hate Muammar Gaddafi so much that on two occasions they have organised the most expensive assassination attempts in the history of the world. I want you to think now. Who is Muammar Gaddafi that under the administration of president Ronald Reagan on the pretext that Libyans bombed a german discotheque and two americans lost their lives that he , Reagan would order planes out of England to fly – and the frecn government would not let those planes fly over France, so they had to go down the Atlantic Ocean into the mediterranean, be re-fueled, then bomb Benghazi, Tripoli and other places in Libya to kill brother leader Muammar Gaddafi and they failed. That’s one attempt.

Now the second attempt. Very expensive. Very expensive. They used the United Nations – and this is why we really have to consider wheter Africa should stay in it or wheter Syria’s government that seeks justice and peace should stay in the United Nations. Now America had tremendous influence in the Security Council and so a resolution was passed that legitimized a No-Fly-Zone over Libya but they didnt just want a No-Fly-Zone, they wanted to kill brother leader Muammar Gaddafi so they bombed where he lived, where they thought he might be and they kept bombing and they kept bombing, then they would see Muammar Gaddafi in the streets of Tripoli to the cheers of his people, they had failed and they’ve spent millions and millions and millions of dollars. Tell me something brothers and sisters, why would America want him dead so bad that they would use the power of their military and the military of NATO and destroy this man’s country. Now listen, bombing his infrastructure, destroying his communications, destroying the Man-Made-River project, doing everything they can to destroy the infrastructure of the country, then robbed him, took advantage of their power to strip 30 billion and offer it to an illegitimate government that they set up. A puppet regime to do the bidding of America and the west and not the true service to the Libyan people. What is it about Gaddafi thatthey are conspiring to do this to him? Now he’s a very unusual brother, let me tell you why i believe they want him dead. But we dont need to just look over there cause you’ll soon see if they can’t shut my mouth which they can’t and if it appears that you are awakening from the sound of the truth from our lips then they will want to silence us aswell but i say to the government of the United states as the prophets of all said to the wicked of their day. Come against me with all you got. I want you to hear what I’m saying. Come against me with all that you have and give me no recipe and in the end I will be standing because I’m standing with Allah and Allah is standing with me. I’m calling them out, see if God is real and we believe and know he is then who are they in their wicked planning against the power and wisdom of God? But if you don’t believe or have belief than you will fear what they have – the visible power to do. But i know that they dont have what you think they have and what they’ve deceived themselved into thinking that they have. Allah is sufficient for the believer so those of you who wanna lead our people – if you say you believe in God or Christ – then demonstrate that by fearless uncompromising, unwavering steadfastness in the pursuit of justice, freedom and equality. Otherwise, you should sit down and get out of the way for those of us who know God will lead this struggle and we are the overcomers, believe it or let it alone. What had Gaddafi done? Did you know that in March of this year the UN was getting ready to give Gaddafi and the Libyan Jamahiriya a humanitarian award? A UN report said, listen to this, that the Gaddafi regime protected “not only political rights but also economic, social & cultural rights” and they praised it for the treatment of religious minorities and the human rights training by the security forces. it was approved and to be voted on later in the month of March but the attacks started in February and what was the propaganda? That Gaddafi threatened to kill his own people … Let’s stop for a minute. You know, you should always be suspicious when America, England, France, Italy, Germany, Europe are concerned for the lives of Black People. You really should stop a moment and  humanitarian suffering inside America and say if the suffering in America hasn’t touched the hearts and Congress or the US government to make laws that protect the weak and the poor – black brown and white – of this nation, how in the world could you believe that they are so concerned about the humanitarian needs of the Libyan people? Now look. When they didnt kill him at first they put very harsh sanctions on Libya. You know they sanctioned the nation. We were protecting project houses where our women and men and children could not play in the projects because of the drug traffic going on. When the muslims came even the drug dealers respected our presence and after a while the children could play in the streets and the mothers felt secure because WE were protecting the innercity project dwellings. But your congressman Peter King went to the congress because those brothers were being supported under the housing and urban development of the US government. They pulled back all funding because they thought Farrakhan was getting the money. Farrakhan never got anything. I’m not looking for nothing but the justice, the freedom, the peace and the security of our people. I’m here today, i did not ask for a nickel, i did not ask for a dime, I paid my way here. Tens of thousands of dollars and brought those who love me here at our expense to support the December 12 movement ??? to liberate Africa. It’s not about money, it’s about the liberation of our people. Money will come but you must never alle yourself to be a whore and fight for money rather than fighting on righteous principles.

During ten years of sanctions Muammar Gaddafi continued to build. He had a Man-Made-River project. 33 billion dollars of Libyan oil money bringing water from the Sahara desert up to the surface so that the people of Benghazi (that are fighting him now) and Tobruk all the way to near the border of Tunisia could have water and you could see green now in the desert that was brown and sandy because Gaddafi wanted his people to be agriculturally free from the domination of Europe and their food products. So now, he also built houses during the ten year period for all his people. Nobody in Libya is homeless. Let me say it again. Nobody in Libya is homeless. Nobody in Libya is living under bridges. Nobody in Libya has to fight for health insurance, every Libyan has free medical attention in the hospitals and clinics of Libya that has the finest healthcare facilities in the Third World. Now, is this a man that just for himself, i don’t mean to discredit my beloved brothers ans sisters in Saudi Arabia ad the Gulf States cause i have been in their palaces and in one palace i was in, the ??? inside the palace was so wide you could ride sixteen wheelers going in opposite directions, just in the corridor of the palace. I’ve seen palaces that are so magnificent, some of them cost over a billion dollars. Go to Libya and see if you can find Gaddafi in palaces from the wealth of the people. Gaddafi loves tents. He lives in tents. And when he came to New York a few years ago to the UN General Assembly he wanted to set up a tent, i think it was in ?? park. They didn’t want him to be there. ??? in Long Island under Mr. Trump. Trump took his money and never allowed him to pitch a tent. He owned property in New Jersey, he wanted to set up a tent there but they wouldnt let him set up a tent. Here’s a man that’s very simple. I have met him in his tent several times and i have visited with him in ??? the new intervention center he set up but never have i visited him in a palace. This is the kind of man they wanna kill. So all of the people in Libya have a home. Either a flat, as you call it or an apartment or an actual house, all Libyans have automibiles, yeah they ride their own cars that the government gives them, and the very people that revolted in Benghazi, if you listened to the news, they said they were lawyers, they were doctors, thy were engineers … Who educated them? It was Muammar Gaddafi who educated his people. They have free education in Libya and anywhere that they want to study in the world. They go to America, to Europe, they get their courses paid for and they get a stipend from their government. He educates his people to bring them home to serve Libya, to serve Africa, to serve the world. This is the Gaddafi they want to kill. He has raised the standard of living of the people as their standard is the highest on the African continent and when he came to power the life expectancy of the average Libyan was 44 years of age and now the life expectancy of the Libyan people is 75 years of age, which many of you in this audience the way you live your life, you may never see, 75.

This is the man they wanna kill:

When he came to power the illiteracy rate in Libya was 20 per cent. Now, 83 percent of the libyan people are educated. Everybody has free medical care and medicine and guess what? They’re saying in America that our brother Barack may lose because it’s jobs, jobs, jobs and he’s not creating jobs. But in Libya all the libyans who wanna work have a job and not only do they have a job, tens of thousands of non-libyans were in Libya working when the trouble started.From China, from the Philippines, from other African nations, yes, he provided employment for tens of thousands of others other than his own people. Well let’s look at his oil wealth. Did you know that every Libyan benefits in the shared profits from the sale of sweet crude oil? Every Libyan gets a stipent from oil. How many of you have gotten anything from Shell, from Amoco, Conoco, from any of the conglomerate robbers, thieves, cutthroats of the poor? How many of you have gotten anything from your government that equals what brother Gaddafi gives to his own people? Well, lets look at his governing style. They call him a dictator. Now, i’m a fortunate brother because after the million man march when he saw nearly two million black men show up in Washington, brother Akhbar can attest to this – he treated Farrakhan as a head of state and when i went to Libya he would have African presidents and he would invite me in to sit in the discourse with 10, 15, 20, African presidents and let me tell you what he said to them in private. He said “You cannot run your country on the style of ‘American Democracy’. he said “You are a president for four years and if they don’t like the way you’re guiding your people they upset your government and all the good things that you did in four years, in eight years can be wiped out in another eight when they get a new president. You are revolutionaries and if you are revolutionaries you let others be the president and you guide the revolution”. I heard him say that to president ??? and others and naturally i am listening and im learning because people ask me “Farrakhan you should run for some senate office or some political office”. I said, i don’t want that crap. You pardon me. I don’t ever wanna be in a condition or position where i have to compromise principle and truth for political progress. To hell with that. You are gonna be the politician but i’m gonna be the prophetic voice that will always tell you what God wants and to hell with what man wants. YOu either gonna do the will of God or you get the hell out of the way. We have to make examples of our politicians. He was neither a dictator or a president. I flew on airplanes with the president of Libya, never with Muammar Gaddafi, he is the revolutionary leader. Some stupid people say “He’s been there for 41 years, he’s been there too long”. Stupid! And some of you say you believe in Christ, some of you say you believe in Moses, some of you say you believe in prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Well, check this out. Moses lived 120 years with nobody trying to overthrow him because he’d been there too long. He was guiding a people who was subjected to the mind of pharaoe and you cannot release people from that kind of cruel bondage in 8 years, or ten years, or 20 years or 40 years, you got to be able to guide the revolution to its conclusion. Now some of you know that Jesus didn’t live a long time but what he set down in his 36 years of life is guiding millions and millions of Christians today. It’s not the time, it’s the quality of that leadership and your guiders. He set up a third universal theory. What does that mean? It’s really a participatory democracy where the power is really in the hands of the people. He has popular committees deciding the fate and the future of Libya and he as the supreme guy just sends down guidance, that’s all and lets the people make their future. Now there arrogant westeners want to feel that the world wants their brand of democracy. Do you think that they are rising in the Arab World cause they want this style of government? Talk to me. Do you think you have democracy? All of you who believe that you are really in a real democracy raise your hands! … I didn’t see one. Not even government people raised their hands because you know damn well that this is not a government of the people, by the people and for the people, this is a government of the rich, for the rich, by the rich and to hell with the little legitimate needs, rights and interests of the common man. Tell me im a liar. So why you want Gaddafi dead? He’s the only arab that has ever apologized for the arab role in the transatlantic slave trade. Did you hear what i just said? Now people think that i’m hard on jews for their role in the transatlantic slave trade, which i am but i have never ever relinquished my point that arabs were involved, africans were involved, europeans were involved in the horror of the transatlantic slave trade. So i was a guest of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and i mention that the arabs were involved in the slave trade. One of his staff people ran out of the hall and ran back to brother Gaddafi to tell him what Farrakhan had said. And guess what brother leader said as i heard. He said: “Well at least you know he’s not a politician”. See, if i was trying to curry favor to get libyan money i would say the thing that i thought they would like to hear but i have never been a whore and can’t nobody buy me. Allah is sufficient. And for any of you stupid reporters who are the enemies of the american people to say that Farrakhan supports Gaddafi because Gaddafi loaned millions of dollars, let me tell you something. What Gaddafi loaned the nation is like somebody spitting on fertile ground expecting a tree to grow. And for you to malign my character that you think that i speak for him because i need money, i say the hell with all the money which he or anybody else has. I am not supported by that. Im supported by Allah and the love of the people for me, they support me and they have given me more than Gaddafi has ever promised to give me. Look, Gaddafi, now this is the real hatred for this man, he set 70 billion dollars in an African Development Bank in the city of Sert is where the bank was gonna be. Listen to me now, so that Africa would never have to go to the international MF’s, i mean IMF or the World Bank to borrow money at high interest rates but being a muslim we do not believe in usury, so he had 70 billion dollars set aside for african development at no interest. When you see a leader doing that for his own people and for Africa, when they are sucking the blood of every nation including your blood – let me tell you about your blood. You think the Federal Reserve Bank is government owned? The Federal Reserve Bank is a group of international bankers who in 1913 near the Christmas holiday set up the Federal Reserve Bank and a legislation where the international where the international bankers now print US money. Now listen to me good now, when they was set up in 1913 America’s debt was a little over a billion dollars, not even a hundred years later America is in debt over 14 trillion dollars and when you add the promise of social security, medicate and entitlements it goes up to 63 or 64 trillion dollars. When the congress began to audit the Federal Reserve which they fought against they found out that the FED had loaned over 16 trillion dollars to European and American banks without the government of the United States knowing anything about it. I don’t know what they loaned it if they loaned it in dollars, they’re printing money that has nothing behind it and everywhere that dollar goes with nothing behind it, not even the gross domestic product of the US government, it depletes the value of the dollar that you got in your pocket.

When i lived in Harlem and in New York, pardon me i bought a Caddilac from my brother ???  and it was one of these cadillacs, nice thing, an Eldorado and i payed 12 thousand dollars for in the 70′s. Now try that. You can hardly get a scooter for ten thousand or 12 thousand dollars. Look at the value of the dollar and how it has deteriarated over the last 30 years and look at the debt of America to the Federal Reserve and right now the payment on the debt if almost equal to what the government brings in in taxation. So they’re sucking your blood and guess what, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said “soon you would see men lighting their cigars with 1000 dollar bills that have no more value. What will you do when the dollars falls? What will you do when they start cutting back on your unemployment benefitsß What will you do when they cut out food stamps and things that we have depended upon? How will you react? Will you come out in the street like you see in Great Britain? When they’re closing down schools and setting up more policemen in New York, in Chicago, teachers out of job, police increasing in job. What do they expect? The police have weapons now like the soldiers have in Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the way they’re dressed when they come out to quell a riot or disturbance. They look just like the soldiers overseas. They have armor piercing bullets now, they have stun bombs that they just throw in, coming in on you, they’re ready. So when you decide to break out in the street and act a fool they have been trained by Blackwater, in all the major cities in America the police are trained by mercenaries and you have a group that will serve and protect but you have another group that is just there to kill.

So Gaddafi, as i come to a conclusion, has championed the idea of building railroads and infrastructure in Africa, he set up a sattelite, payed 400 million dollars and the other African nations put up 100 million. He put a satellite up. That’s an african sattelite. Whenever we would call to Africa we would have to go by Europe to get to Africa. That gave Europe 500 million dollars a year of your money when you wanna call Africa. That satellite when it went up, we talked direct to Africa, cutting out Europe. Listen to me now, Europe lost 500 million dollars last year when out sattelite went up. Gaddafi is dangerous to the western hegemony, he is dangerous to imperialists, he’s dangerous to monopolists, he’s dangerous to the western oligarchy that wants to suck the resources of the world to a small group of international bankers and thieves. Let me tell you what else he did. When The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was among us he saw that Africa produced tremendous iron ore. The iron ore would be shipped out of Africa to Europe. Europe would take the iron ore, turn it into steel, send products back to Africa at exorbitant prices. Now Muammar Gaddafi says “Africa, you gotta stop sending your raw materials to Europe. Take your raw materials and make the product that you desire, then put the product on the world market and keep the profit for Africa. This is a dangerous man and he is so dangerous that they feel he must be destroyed. So now the killing of his son, his grandchildren, the constant bombing, what’s that all about? You notice how they keep on talking about rape? That the libyan soldiers were raping libyan people. You should go to Libya. The peace that’s in the streets of Libya, you dont find robbery, thievery, people beating you up. You have more peace in the streets of Libya than you have in the projects with what little you have. I got a few more minutes. I have to stop and i will be respectful of the police and what they have asked. I have to stop at 4 o’ clock, that’s 20 more minutes from now unless they give me five or ten more minutes but i ain’t asking, i’ll just stop but i need to wrap this up.

Did you know that according to NPR a 2004 study found that 71 percent of the women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while serving in the United States armed forces? A 1995 study of female veterans of the gulf and earlier wars found that 90 percent had been sexually harrassed and these are american soldiers sexually harrassing and raping women, american women who are soldiers. Now you tell me something. If an american soldier will rape an american soldier female, when they become the occupying army in Iraq, in Afghanistan what are they doing to muslim women? What are they doing to muslim men? So much so. Sodomozing men in Abu Ghraib prison, raping iraqi women dressed like our muslim sisters but raping them and then killing their families, listen, listen, listen, you don’t join the armed forces to be nation builders. You join the armed forces and they train you to kill. You are killers. And when you go into a foreign country they have to make you see that people as the enemy so you will delight in killing them. So, why did Army major Nedal Malik Hassan, a muslim psychiatrist, at Fort Hood go on a shooting spree after being assigned to debfrief soldiers who came back from the theatre of war and they’ll telling him of the things that they did that was against their conscience now and a muslim psychiatrist is hearing them talking about the rape of muslim women, the killing and sodomizing of families. He couldn’t take it anymore so he just shot up the soldiers. They want you to think that he’s a terrorist but he was debfriefing the terrorists and unfortunately it took his balance.

So now, in closing, Resolution 1973 did not call for regime change. It did not call for the assassination of a leader. It did not call for bombings, killing and maiming of men women and children. It did not call for the robbery of the nation’s economy and subsistance and it did not call for the destruction of the infrastructure of Libya. They set up puppet governments and they legitimized factions or groups of rebels that would serve the objectives of the attacking nations under the noble cause of protecting the people – all this while bombing and wasting the land and the lives of the people that America claims to be so concerned about. I wanna ask you a question, as i said in the press conference five or six weeks ago the the United Nations hotel. I said “Suppose he survives”. What will you do then? Now he’s surviving right? They gon’ have to deal with brother. Now dig this. If he has to rebuild his own infrastructure with what money he got left, that means he will have no money to further the cause of African productivity. And if Gaddafi wins who will bring NATO before the International Criminal Court and make them pay for the destruction that they have caused in Libya? Hillary Clinton (… oh the inspector said i could go on a few more minutes. Thank you, inspector i appreciate it. I’m not gonna take to much time, thank you).

Look, now that they’ve lost in killing him they’re sending representatives to African governments, petitioning them to close down Libyan embassies in their country, throw out legitimite representation of Libya and put into those places some of the rebels who do not have the support of the Libyan people. Now look Africa, i got to talk to you cause some of you are strong and some of you are very weak. I thank president Zuma of South Africa for your strong stand, I thank president Mugabe and others and i can’t close without saying something about him. Look, family, the African governments must not accept the false promise of America that if you put the legitimate ambassadors of the legitimate government of Libya out that they’ll give you this, they’ll give you that. This man promises only to deceive. Ask us about that.

After we built the country he promised us 40 acres and a mule. We never got the 40 acres. We never got the mule. He promised us civil rights and then moved to take it away. He promised us voting rights and when we put a strong black man in power, they use skill and deception to destroy strong black political leadership. What have they promised you, that they delivered on their promise?? So if you trust their empty promises, you deserve the hell that you get, because they are liars and deceivers.  As the holy Quran says, when the matter is decided the devil will say, Allah promised you a promise of truth and I promise you, then failed you and I had no authority over you except that I called you and you obeyed me, so blame me not but blame yourselves. I deny your associating me with Allah before. When Allah promises, he fulfills his promises. When the enemy promises, he promises only to deceive.

So Africa tell Hillary Clinton and all her representatives that come to you, tell them go to hell and drive them out of Africa. They think you’re the same lackey, the same flunky, the same uncle-tom that some of your predecessors were. Show them that you found testicular fortitude and you didn’t find it in the Bargain Basement at Walmart. Tell them! Not today. Now what has Robert Mugabe done that he is called by Peter King the other day ‘one of the worst leaders in the world’. What did he do? See brothers and sisters you’ve got to stop being guided by the controlled media that is owned by Zionist forces that want to make you pawns in the struggle of Israel and Zionism. You always have to have another source of information other than Fox, other than CNN. Did you know that they are rising up in Israel now?? Two, Three Hundred Thousand Israelis marching. You didn’t hear that much on the news did you?? See these are Zionists protecting the image of Israel. You should be as strong in protecting the image of yourself and your people and your real true leadership. Now listen, when I was flying on world tours and President Mugabe was then the ‘darling of the commonwealth nations’, my plane couldn’t even land in Zimbabwe. I think we tried on two occasions. We landed on the third one. But when we landed on the third one, Mugabe was no longer darling, sweetheart, he was the enemy now. Funny how we can find each other when we’re in trouble. As long as the white man puts his arms around you and wants to love you up, you can’t walk with Farrakhan, He’s Persona non-grata. That’s why you come around me like Nicodemus came around Jesus. Don’t go through the front door. Lead him round the back in the corner in the dark. And let’s sit down and talk to Farrakhan. And let’s go to his house, but don’t let nobody know we visited him. Let’s take council with him but for god’s sake don’t tell anybody he’s counseling us. That’s the way y’all treat me, because you’re afraid of your position with your slave master. When in a few days I’m gone tell you to hell with you and your slave master. If you can’t meet me around the front door like a man and like a woman, stay the hell away from me.

It was Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe who led the revolutionaries against the racist government of Ian Smith, which at that time ZImbabwe was called ‘Rhodesia’, but when it became clear that Nkomo and Mugabe were about to take the Capital city of Harare, a plot was concocted, and both Mugabe and Nkomo were called to the Lancaster House in England and told that England and America would buy back the land from the white farmers, who owned millions of hectares of the best land, the most productive land, but that land would be returned to the indigenous peoples. They even wanted Mugabe to buy the land from white folk that stole the land. Can you imagine the nerve of these people? See and if you don’t have any testicles .. Damn. I just say it straight, you ain’t got no balls! You’re not fit to stand in front of our people, a ball-less person, speaking in a high register “Hello .. Is everything gone be alright”. You might as well go and proclaim that you’ve gone over to the other side and we’ll give you some laced draws, but damn it if you gonna be a man, then stand up like a man for your people or get the hell outta the way or we will remove you. So guess what?? They called brother to Lancaster House in England and look at the proposition. Jimmy Conner was involved in it. He said “alright alright, alright you give money and you buy back the land from the white farmers. They started off pretty good, we got a little of the land back, but then America reneged, England reneged, but by that time, see you know ..  listen, you gotta understand Satan, you gotta see how he works baby. He tell you I’m gone do something ,right? and while he’s telling you he’s doing something, he’s romancing you and he’s bringing you in. See this is what they did to Brother Qaddafi. They turned off all of the sanctions. But now they’re coming in the country now, to romance Brother. They came, I mean some of them like Richard Pearl, the prince of darkness and his group going in to Libya, gonna clean up the image of Muammar Qaddafi. Let me tell you what they said to me in a private conversation. I had dinner at the home of some Jewish Rabbis in Chicago. One of them was the former dean of Rabbis and Irv Kupcinet, the great reporter from the newspaper and others were there. Some of my family was there. And we had a great dinner together, and I tell you how, you negroes, you know when white folk invite you into their homes and lay it out for you, you really feel special, i know. See Sam you don’t change much, you know. And when you feel special, you know, you wanna keep that special feeling. And after the dinner was just about over, one of the Rabbis reached in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. That was the end of the special dinner. He said Farrakhan this is love, but it’s gone be tough love. And listen to the terms that they gave me for bridging the gap between me and the Nation and the Jewish people.

Number one Farrakhan we’re gonna have to watch you for a protracted period of time, and if during that period of watch, you say and do the things that show that you wanna be our friend, then we’ll reconsider. Second, y’all put out that book “the secret relationship between Blacks and Jews”. It’s a great calumny against the Jewish people, so what we want you to do is stand up and denounce that book. Third, they said now “you’re a very intelligent man”, you know how they love to buddy you. “You’re not like the others .. You’re so different”, and you suck that up, “Ha ha ha, im different”, and you end up being the same old flunky that your predecessors were.
Man, then they said “if you wanna be our friend , anybody that has been seen as an enemy of the Jewish people were never written of well in history ” Think about that. “But, if you do ..” Listen to these words “.. what we ask of you, we will clean up your image”. Now they’re telling me ‘we dirtied it’ but if you do what we want, we’ll clean up your image. They said “Now, we can go upstairs and have coffee and you can give us your answer”. I said “I can give it to you right now”. I said, but I’ll wait till we go up and have coffee. So during the Coffee hour, he opened his talk by saying “You have your truth, we have our truth”. I said “Sir, the Torah says, Justice stands afar off when equity can not enter, because truth has fallen in the streets”. I said “It’s not your truth or my truth, it is that we gone have to agree on THE truth in order for the wounds to be healed. Now you may have your perception of the truth, and I have mine and they may differ, but in dialogue that’s how you reconcile differences to come to the truth”. I said “Now, you say you need to watch me for a long period of time”. I said “Your people have done more evil to mine, than we have ever done to you, so maybe we need to watch you, for a protracted period of time, before we allow you to even consider yourself our friend”. I said now “This book, ‘Secret relationship between Blacks and Jews’, I’ll denounce it in the morning .. ” listen, “.. if it is a lie, because I do not wish my name to be attached to falsehood”. I said “But everyone we quoted was one of your Rabbis and your scholars and your historians. So I’ll denounce it tomorrow if you get up before me and say that everyone I quoted was a liar”
and lastly “I wanna be your friend, that’s why I’m here,. But if being your friend means I have to compromise truth, then yours is a friendship i don’t need and yours is a friendship I don’t want” Now listen wait, I ain’t finished, I ain’t finished. I’m not finished.
I said “Now, you can come against me with all you’ve got and get your influence over the government to join you”. I said, “but in the end, as long as I stand on truth and stand with God, I’m gonna be the winner living or dead”.
Now that ended the conversation and it’s been like war ever since. That’s why every time my name is mentioned “this is the man that called Judaism a gutter-religion, this is the man that said Hitler was great”. I never made no movie on Hitler. You can’t turn on your television without somebody glorifying the Third Reich, and most of it is being glorified by the same people who hate him. So we don’t need you to write my history. You won’t even be alive when my history is told. Hell, you do yours right now baby, but when my history is written down in the generations, you won’t even be here to smell the heat from the pen.

Now a man that talk like me is either crazy or he knows God, and you can choose whatever one you want. I don’t sound like a mad man except to the weak and cowardly among us. I have God with me and when I speak from my mouth, he answers. When I told you at the UN, listen, that nature,the God of nature will come after you, using wind and rain and hurricane, tornado, drought, famine, it’s all coming. I said China, you should have vetoed this, you and Russia, but since you didn’t, you join in the pain of your brothers. The next day a million eight hundred thousand Chinese in a flood. You check it out, I told them soon you will see your governments in ruin, and some of you on the back of pick-up trucks in chains, driving through the streets and the people throwing stones and raw garbage at you. I hardly got the words out of my mouth, Britain in trouble, damn, France in trouble, Berlusconi in Italy in trouble. Now look at your president locked in a fight. You think it’s just the red states and the blue states, this is a civil war between crackers and those that legitimately want you to have a better quality of life. I warned president Obama, he’s my brother and I love my brother and I’m proud of my brother, but my brother was a better man campaigning, than he is right now. It’s not altogether his fault. See when you surround yourself with criminals and the criminals start poisoning you, you can become an enemy to your own self and the aspirations of your people. He’s not an economist, but he surrounded himself with Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs man. He took advice from Larry Summers, Goldman Sachs man. He took advice from Paul Volcker, Federal Reserve man. See these are the robber barons that surrounded our brother. He’s not an economist so what they did, they told him that we need a second stimulus, they don’t even talk about the first stimulus that they got Bush to sign on to. That nobody knows where the hell the money went. Now Mr. Obama, now Brother Obama, if you don’t sign this, we all gonna be in serious trouble, we’ll have a worse depression than we had in the 30′s. So he signs a law, eight hundred Billion dollars come out. How much of it did you get?? How much of it did Main Street get?? But Wall street got it. Now they’re beating him up, because of what they influenced him to do. He came in, a war was raging in Iraq and in Afghanistan. He chose to make Afghanistan his war. I said to him Brother President find a way to get out of there, as quickly as you can with honor. Because it’s a war you can’t win. Now he’s sending drones into Pakistan, into Yemen, into Somalia. That’s a rogue government, underneath all the goodness on the surface. Robbers and thieves in suits and ties, and our brother is the front man. Like they made Colin Powell the front man at the United Nations, telling the United Nations, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Do you remember that?? They skewed the intelligence. So imagine you the president and you get a briefing book every morning. You have to be able to trust the people that are informing you of world affairs. Sorry Brother Barrack you trusted Satan, and he’s never gone give you the right information. You need to come sit with your brother. I will not lie to you. But of course that’s not gone happen. So in my conclusion, Robert Mugabe was told by the people that fought with him and for him, we fought for land and we don’t have the land. Robert Mugabe being a principled man and a man who recognized, yes I have not fulfilled my pledge. Then he started taking back land from the white land owners and that’s when the media swung into action and made him an evil, no good man. And I’m saying when you work for your people and you will not compromise, you become an evil man to Satan and their forces.

So I conclude with some council for Benghazi. Now Muammar Qaddafi and you in Benghazi know that the Holy Prophet Muhammad said that every Hundred Years God would raise up a ‘Mujahidin’, somebody to reform the faith. You know that the faith is in need of reform. I’m a Muslim, but i know that this will not make it in the future unless it is reformed. Listen to me good now. You cannot mistreat women in the name of the prophet and think that you’re not gonna pay a price for that. There’s no way in Hell or in Heaven that you can deprive women of rights and education and equal membership in the society and expect that you represent Prophet Muhammad Ibn Abdullah. You’re a liar and a deceiver. When I was in Mecca, women and men prayed together in the Masjid, in Al-Hurra, yes. But when I go other places, women off somewhere, men off somewhere else and women treated like they’re not equal citizens of Islam. Men in the mosques, air conditioned, women making prostration with their face in the mud, you tell me. That’s why the young Muslims when they come to America, they don’t want your Islam, they start partying, but when they look at the African American Muslims, they see people sincere and committed. We do not disrespect our women, even though they may wear the Hijab or Burka or what not. It’s not to diminish them. But look sisters, you can’t dress like a whore and be respected as a lady. Who is styling your clothes?? You can, as an African Woman, you can style yourself in a decent way. You don’t have to let the freaks of France and America, keep your crotch in a man’s face and your breasts hanging out. See, I didn’t come here to get milk.
Don’t you know you have to protect men from themselves? Men are naturally aggressive. And when you disrobe and show us what you got. How in the hell we gone think sane?? We don’t think revolutionary thoughts when you half naked. Only revolution we want is the turning in the bed. That’s not what we need. Cover yourself like the decent African woman that you are and make men respect and honor you.

So as I have to go now, I am so happy to be back in Harlem to see such a beautiful group of people. I want us to let Brother Muammar Qaddafi know that we’re proud of him and that we stand with him and we stand with the Libyan Jamahiriya. I wanna send a shout out to Comandante Fidel Castro and wish him a happy birth anniversary, to Harry Belafonte and to all the strong brothers and sisters. But to Benghazi I say this. Muammar Qaddafi is trying to be a reformer, whether you like the things that he’s doing or not, he’s a Muslim and all the times that I have gone recently, he has led the prayers. I don’t know that you know this, but he took us all to Mali,to Timbuktu, where African Muslim civilization was. There used to be a river that ran through Timbuktu and the wicked dried the river up so your cars can get stuck in Timbuktu in sand. He brought all of us that visited Libya to Timbuktu and we lived in the sand and we ate .. I mean, I tell you it was rough, but he promised to put the river back and that river now is back in Timbuktu for commercial activity. This is our Qaddafi, this is our brother, this is the man that wants to see the United States of Africa as a reality in the twenty-first century. This is a man that wants one African army and one African language that all Africa would agree would be the national language of Africa. He wants to unite the tribes into a great Nation of African People and he’s encouraging us to produce our own goods and put them on the open market. This is why they must destroy him to keep Africa in a subservient position. You remember when we were in slavery and any of us would rebel, they would make an example of us to the other slaves to put fear in the other slaves, that they would be submissive and subservient. They are bombing Libya because Libya is the strongest African Nation with the strongest African leader. So if they can make an example of Libya then the other nations will cower down to western ideas and thoughts. But I say to Africa this is your moment in the sun. When you said you would not bring Qaddafi before the International Criminal Court that he could go anywhere in Africa and you would not arrest him and turn him over to his enemy and your enemy, that’s step one. But step two must be that the African Union goes before the UN and says ‘either you stop the bombing or we stop trade, either you stop the bombing or we won’t give you our raw materials’. “But Africa you will suffer”. To hell with that, we been suffering. But if you stand up, Africa, and let Europe know “to hell with you and your so-called power”, you will find that your unity will put you in the driver’s seat. Try what Farrakhan is saying and watch them back down.

Benghazi. You are Muslim. This is Ramadan. Fighting in the sacred month is forbidden. You want advantage, here’s how you can get it. If you believe that you are right and Qaddafi is wrong, put down the guns, stop the killing and campaign and let Libya decide if they want you as their government or Muammar Qaddafi to continue, and if the Libyan people vote for you, Qaddafi will bow down to the will of the Libyan people. But if the Libyan people vote for him, then there’s an invitation to you Benghazi to come and sit down and I announce your grievances in the spirit of Islamic brotherhood and dialogue and tell NATO, go on back to Europe. Tell the rest of them, go on back to America. Get the special-ops forces out of your country and let a Libyan problem be solved by the Libyan people. And if you do that, the world will applaud you, the world will rejoice that no more killing is going on, and let the Libyan people speak for who they desire to be their legitimate leader.

Thank all of you for listening. Thank you December 12th and Viola Plummer.

Thank all you, my brothers and sister.
May Allah bless you all, as I greet you in peace
AsSalaam A’laykum

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