50 Senators Want to Make It a Crime to Boycott Israel

by Aniqa Raihan

http://fpif.org/nearly-50-senators-want-to-make-it-a-felony-to-boycott-israel/

In 1966, the NAACP of Claiborne County, Mississippi launched a boycott of several white-owned local businesses on the basis of racial discrimination.

It was so impactful that the local hardware store filed a lawsuit against the individuals and organizations who coordinated the boycott. After 10 long years of litigation, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in favor of the white businesses and ordered the NAACP to pay for all their lost earnings.

Years later, in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 to overturn the lower court’s decision on the basis that nonviolent boycotts are a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. In announcing the unanimous decision, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “One of the foundations of our society is the right of individuals to combine with other persons in pursuit of a common goal by lawful means.”

That should have been the end of it. But now, Americans’ right to boycott is under attack once again — thanks to a vicious anti-boycott bill making its way through the Senate.

In particular, it appears to target the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS is an international movement calling on individuals, institutions, and governments to boycott Israeli products until it ends its occupation of Palestinian lands.

The boycott is explicitly nonviolent and is supported by activists, celebrities, faith-based groups, and political and social justice organizations around the world.

The proposed Israel Anti-Boycott Act would make it a felony for Americans to support BDS, with a penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison.

Unfortunately, the bill enjoys bipartisan support: 32 Republicans and 15 Democrats are currently signed on as cosponsors, including party leaders like Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In response, the ACLU issued a letter urging members of the Senate to oppose the bill based on its “direct violation of the First Amendment.” (Following the publication of the ACLU’s letter, several members of Congress have agreed to review their sponsorship, but so far none have removed their names.)

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act would function by amending an earlier law from 1979, which prohibits American citizens and corporations from complying with boycotts called for by foreign nations against U.S. allies. The new law would include boycotts “fostered and imposed by international governmental organizations” like the United Nations. In this, it’s a direct response to the 2016 UN Human Rights Council resolution discouraging businesses from operating in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In one way, it’s genius. By claiming a connection between BDS and the UN — a connection the UN has never embraced, in that resolution or any other — the bill attempts to work around NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.

But the BDS movement is not a product of the UN — it has nothing to do with it at all, except to the degree that it’s based on international law. The BDS call to action was issued in 2005 by a coalition of 170 Palestinian political parties, professional associations, refugee networks, and civil society organizations. BDS is a tactic, not an organization, and the boycott has always been grassroots and decentralized, meaning anyone anywhere can partake in BDS by making the simple decision to do so.

Whether the congressional supporters of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act misunderstand or are intentionally misrepresenting BDS is uncertain, but the Supreme Court decision of 1982 is clear as crystal: Americans’ right to peaceful boycott with the aim to “bring about political, social, and economic change” is protected by the First Amendment. That means this bill is more than egregiously immoral — it’s unconstitutional.

The bill’s language also lumps Israel’s settlements in with the country’s internationally recognized borders.

Significantly, it declares the UN Human Rights Council’s 2016 position on Israeli settlements an “action to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel.” Yet that resolution took no position on the boycotting of goods produced in Israel proper — it only took aim at Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, which are illegal under international law.

U.S. policy since 1979 has recognized that the Israeli settlements are “inconsistent with international law.” By contrast, the new bill effectively erases any distinction between Israel and its settlements in the West Bank. If it’s passed, anyone who chooses not to do business with or buy items manufactured in illegal Israeli settlements can be convicted, fined, and even jailed.

Efforts to curb this kind of activism are often touted as efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Yet polls show that only 17 percent of American Jews support the continued construction of settlements. The bill is so controversial, in fact, that the liberal pro-Israel organization J Street, which has long opposed BDS, recently announced its opposition to the proposed law on the basis that it “divides [opponents of the global BDS movement] by making the issue about the settlements.”

It’s difficult to know exactly how broadly the law, if passed, will be enforced. Its intentionally vague language leaves a lot to the imagination, and perhaps that’s exactly what’s intended. The real goal may be to frighten people from engaging in the completely legal act of living out their values in their economic choices.

But we can’t let fear prevent us from exercising our rights and fulfilling our moral obligations. The silver lining is that every effort to quell the BDS movement has served to strengthen it. Each attempt at criminalizing the boycott, whether on the state or federal level, has been met with a spike in Google searches for BDS and related terms.

And with the uproar caused by this new bill, the right-wing pro-Israel lobby just may prove to be the BDS movement’s best ally.

Did Trump Really End the CIA’s Secret War in Syria?

by Jeff Mackler

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/03/did-trump-really-end-the-cias-secret-war-in-syria/

“Trump Ends Covert Aid to Syrian Rebels Trying to Topple Assad,” read a July 19 New York Times headline. Citing The Washington Post as its source, the article noted that the official termination of the “secret” U.S. program “was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of the program four years ago were officially a secret, authorized by President Barack Obama through a ‘finding’ that permitted the C.I.A. to conduct a deniable program.”

“Mr. Trump’s decisions,” said The Times,  “amounted to an acknowledgment that no escalation of the program, which began in 2013 in concert with the C.I.A.’s counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan, was likely to yield a different result.”

The CIA and its “counterparts” were intervening in Syria even before 2013, if not congruent with the brief Arab Spring mobilizations of 2011, when poor peasants, democratically minded youth, and others protested against the Bashar Assad government’s neo-liberal and repressive policies. The New York Times revealed on June 21, 2012, that the CIA had been ferrying arms, recruiting, and training anti-Assad groups based in Turkey.

The U.S. was simultaneously the major power behind the Syrian National Council (SNC), which it established to be the new Syrian “government in waiting.” The SNC consisted of an exile-based 270-member leadership core that was overseen by the U.S. State Department and funded by most of the Gulf State monarchies. Within a year the SNC exploded as it became clear that it was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose on-the-ground forces in Syria regularly collaborated with the al-Qaeda offshoot, the Nusra Front, and related jihadist groups.

This collaboration, together with the poor coordination and fighting ability of many local Free Syrian Army units, led the CIA to seek out more “reliable” troops that would fight under its direct control. Over the past five-plus years the C.I.A. and other U.S. government agencies have overseen various and re-named reincarnations of the SNC and FSA, all aimed at publicly presenting these as secular and democratic forces as opposed to their jihadist and otherwise reactionary and pro-imperialist nature. (See Stephen Gowans, “Washington’s Long War on Syria,” Chapter 4, “The Myth of the Moderate Rebel,” pp. 141-160.)

With Libya’s pulverizing defeat under their belts, via the U.S. and NATO’s “humanitarian war” in that country, the original imperialist expectation was that Assad’s army would crumble and his government would fall in a matter of weeks or months. When this proved illusory, the now-admitted “covert” operations began in earnest, soon to include an estimated 50,000 jihadist fighters from 100 countries, but mostly from the Middle East, supported by untold billions of dollars in U.S., NATO, and other “coalition” nations’ arms, organized to accomplish in Syria what U.S. imperialism had facilitated, in one form or another, in Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, and Iraq.

Assad’s repression of the protests in March 2011 provided the required U.S. pretext for his instant demonization and the subsequent demand of the Obama administration and its spokespersons, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, that “Assad must go.”

General Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, provided, according to The New York Times, “the first public confirmation by an American official that the Trump administration had ended a secret C.I.A. program to arm Syrian rebels.” While the program remains “classified,” when asked if it was aimed at currying favor with Russia, Thomas responded, “At least from what I know about that program and the decision to end it, it was absolutely not a sop to the Russians … it was a “tough, tough decision.” The CIA, upstaged by Trump, said The Times, “declined to comment.”

In point of fact, yesterday’s “covert” operations in Syria have at least in part been replaced by the Trump administration’s overt “no fly zone” war over Syria today.

Utilizing their massive air-power superiority in the region, U.S. fighter jets now routinely attack Syrian government troops and those of its allies from Iran and Hezbollah from Lebanon whenever they move to challenge U.S.-backed and still existing “rebel” positions in areas where the U.S. contemplates a long-term, if not permanent presence. (See “President Trump’s ‘no fly zone’ escalates U.S. war on Syria” by this writer in the July issue of Socialist Action.)

Having lost most of the territory that the reactionary U.S.-allied forces had previously occupied, today’s bipartisan imperialist war strategy revolves around establishing control over key border areas in the north as well as in southern Syria for future use, the latter likely as a future pipeline route across the Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea. U.S. wars there, including in Iraq, buttressed U.S. corporate control of vast oil and natural gas resources that in time will require more competitive or advantageous routes than those planned by Russia. “To the victor, goes the spoils of war!” as President Trump is fond of proclaiming.

That the U.S. was conducting a covert war against Syria was no secret. Its basic outlines were frequently reported by The New York Times, with its Middle East Bureau Chief Anne Barnard periodically citing the details, albeit usually buried deep in her articles that aped the imperialist line justifying every U.S. war in the region.

Largely based on Barnard’s revelations, the bulleted selections below, taken from my Jan. 18, 2016 article entitled “U.S. imperialism’s Syria strategy,” provided an accurate summary of at least some of the key U.S. “covert” war efforts.

* “U.S. Major General Michael Nagata was unceremoniously removed some two months ago after his $500 million Syrian assignment to train by the end of the year a projected 5400 Syrian infantrymen to supposedly fight ISIS (Islamic State of Syria and Iraq) “languished in complications,” according to U.S. News and World Report. This project ‘ultimately yielded a force of fewer than 60, most of whom were immediately captured or voluntarily surrendered their U.S.-provided military equipment to extremist groups. Nagata’s program, aimed at training 15,000 such fighters over the next three years, was similarly abandoned.’”

* “The Oct. 9, 2015, New York Times article entitled, ‘Obama Administration Ends Effort to Train Syrians to Combat ISIS,’ states, ‘Obama’s reversal of policy underscored a harsh reality: tens of billions of dollars spent in recent years to train security forces across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia have rarely succeeded in transforming local fighters into effective, long-term armies.’”

* “Today, after four and half years of U.S. ‘training of security forces,’ supposedly to defeat ISIS, some two-thirds of Syria, mostly thinly-populated areas, is under the control of one or another jihadist group—either the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front, the Islamic State (ISIS) itself, or other Islamist groups. Virtually all are directly, indirectly, or covertly armed and financed by U.S. imperialism, its NATO allies, the Saudi government (and “private” Saudi billionaires), Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or other Gulf State monarchies.

* “In place of this failed program the Obama administration recently announced a ‘new program’ where, ‘for the first time the Pentagon is providing lethal aid directly to Syrian rebels, though the C.I.A. has for some time been covertly training and arming groups fighting Mr. Assad’ (emphasis added). (The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2015).”

In the same article, I wrote, “The U.S.-allied Saudis and the Turks today account for the lion’s share of ISIS’s finances and weapons—undoubtedly with the full knowledge of the U.S. government. The reactionary Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a U.S. NATO ally, still controls important portions of its southern border with Syria and utilizes these as central corridors for the entrance of thousands of international ISIS fighters to Syria to depose the Assad government. In the same manner over 1000 trucks from ISIS-controlled oil fields in northern Syria serve as the main conduit for ISIS-smuggled oil into Turkey.”

Today, with the covert cat out of the bag, The Times asserts that this allegedly now defunct CIA program “joins similar failed efforts to deliver arms and money to groups seeking to overthrow governments that Washington found noxious, most famously the Kennedy administration’s disastrous effort to do away with the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba.”

Russia’s “targeting and badly weakening the C.I.A.-backed rebels, who were the most capable of the opposition fighters [against Assad]” was seen by The Times as decisive to the Assad government’s winning back Syrian territory. In this regard the Syrian government’s request for Russian assistance was wholly within its right to self-determination, that is, to defend itself against U.S. imperialist intervention, war, and the organization of a “rebel” army aimed at the removal of the Syrian government itself.

As it turned out, U.S. aid to these same “rebels” was not enough to allow them to achieve key U.S. objectives. That is, according to The Times of July 19, it was “not sufficient to clear the way for their takeover of major cities or [to] approach the capital, Damascus.” These issues, along with the now undisputed fact that the vast array of U.S. arms supplied to these same rebels ended up in the hands of forces that the U.S. deemed terrorist, essentially convinced Trump, if not his generals, that a total U.S. victory in Syria was not possible—unless, that is, the U.S. was prepared to engage in yet another land war akin to the present imperialist catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After six years of U.S.-orchestrated war in Syria, at a cost of 500,000 dead and nearly half the population displaced or in exile, U.S. imperialism continues its effort to dominate a poor nation in order to advanced the corporate interests of the one percent, with Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former chief executive officer of one of the world’s leading fossil fuel multi-national corporations, Exxon-Mobile, perhaps being the visible symbol of all that is rotten and corrupt in the imperialist U.S. body politic.

The demand for the immediate and total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Syria and the Middle East must stand at the center of the U.S. antiwar movement’s efforts today. Self-determination for Syria! U.S. Out Now!

The only way to defeat Trump— and to redeem what is worth saving in liberal democracy—is to detach ourselves from liberal democracy’s corpse and establish a new Left.

Elements of the program for this new Left are easy to imagine.

Trump promises the cancellation of the big free trade agreements supported by Clinton, and the left alternative to both should be a project of new and different international agreements.

Such agreements would establish public control of the banks, ecological standards, workers rights, universal healthcare, protections of sexual and ethnic minorities, etc.

The big lesson of global capitalism is that nation states alone cannot do the job—only a new political international has a chance of bridling global capital.

Excerpt from:

“We Must Rise from the Ashes of Liberal Democracy”

BY Slavoj Žižek

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19918/slavoj-zizek-from-the-ashes-of-liberal-democracy