Dear President Ahtisaari,
I had the pleasure of meeting you on a number of occasions over the years, including when I was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and I recall your genuine concern for democracy and human rights in a region where they are sadly neglected.
Like a great many people in Scotland I was shocked that CMI is employing Jim Murphy. Of course, in a democracy there are always losers as well as winners in elections, and both are genuine and valid participants in public life. It is not the fact that CMI employs a politician who has been so recently, comprehensively and humiliatingly rejected by his national electorate that will do any damage to CMI. In a sense I think it does you credit.
What shocks many people here is that Mr Murphy is by any standards a dedicated warmonger. He was a major and important proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and is the strongest of supporters of the massive increase of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, in breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty.
Mr Murphy is a member of the Henry Jackson Society, which as you know is a body which exists to promote United States neo-conservative foreign policy in its most aggressive sense, and openly and actively supports and condones extraordinary rendition and the use of torture by the CIA. It has supported every single military action by the USA since its formation, and defends United States exceptionalism in international law, including US non-membership of the International Criminal Court.
Mr Murphy’s belief set is therefore fundamentally at odds with the stated aims of CMI. Indeed, his employment by you can only lead to the suspicion that CMI’s stated objectives are not its real objectives, and that like Mr Murphy and the Henry Jackson Society your overriding goal in the regions where you operate is to promote the interests of the United States.
As you are funded by charitable donations and by governments, I think some explanation of your employment of Mr Murphy is in order, particularly when you have employed him as a conflict resolution expert in the Caucasus and Central Asia when he has no relevant experience of conflict resolution at all, virtually none of the Caucasus, and absolutely none of Central Asia.
I was the Head of the UK Delegation that negotiated the Sierra Leone Peace Treaty, and certainly under no circumstances would I let Jim Murphy anywhere near that kind of negotiation.
With All Best Wishes,
Amb (rtd.) Craig Murray
“Overwhelming evidence that civilians were targeted in Gaza”.
Shall we begin obsessing about innocent children blown to bits by peaceful Israeli citizens?
Let’s not get too upset about it.
Article 42§7 is the EU’s CFSP/Defence Policy equivalent to NATO’s Article 5
(which of course also explains the references to NATO contained therein).
Nothing to get excited about!
“It has already been demonstrated to you why it makes sense for a terrorist to carry ID”
All that’s happened is you have spouted a lot of nonsense on the matter.
“Re CCTV, it regularly fails due to having not been set properly”
It hardly ever fails. It is maintained most assiduously.
“Terror drills are a regular occurrence in major cities”
They would have to occur everywhere, in all forms and all the time to account statistically for the synchronicites.
I take it you are a coincidence theorist.
All roads lead to Tel Aviv; the locus of oppressing the weak and defenseless.
When I hear of the disrespect for the value of human life shown by ISIS, I think of Israel.
http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=50118&s2=30
After so many troll comments above look at this powerful video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80PY9OK305Q
And some good news: can’t we do this here?
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/11/17/spanish-judge-issues-arrest-warrant-for-netanyahu-other-top-israeli-officials/
Arrest warrant for Netanyahoo? Symbolic shallowness without any teeth. Now when the UN takes this by the horns and is willing to risk some political capital to achieve it’s putative aims, then it will have some gravitas.
As long as Obama continues to enable the Semitic Horde, it’s an empty gesture.
Reagan, Thatcher, Bush pere, and Major continued to support South African apartheid almost until the end, but nevertheless, during the years of their support, the legitimacy of apartheid was gradually being undermined.
When the end finally came, it came quickly.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2015/nov/17/steve-bells-if-the-austerity-of-george-darth-vader-osborne
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2015/nov/17/steve-bell-on-the-latest-airstrikes-in-syria-cartoon
When people lose the will to oppress, it comes to a quick end. But if by ‘quick’ you mean eventually, then yes. But that’s not my definition of quick.
Of course my motive in pointing out the quick end is precisely to cause people to lose the will to oppress.
If they’re bound to lose in the end, surely the rational thing to do is to strike the best deal they can, while they can. Because the longer they wait, the worse the deal will be.
Today they might face the fate of the whites in South Africa. Wait too long, and it will be the fate of the pieds noirs in French Algeria.
The only short-cut is when conscience-driven types throw in the towel. I don’t see a critical mass emerging in Israel.
Lo Zuccone 9.04pm
Thanks for confirmation of my post at 8.50 pm .
Thanks for the mutual-defense propaganda, Lysias. The CIA wurlitzer played the same tune for the illegal US war in Afghanistan and it worked quite well.
What the propaganda leaves out: NATO Charter Article 5 explicitly invokes UN Charter Article 51 (Article 51 is the secretest top-secret State secret of all, more hush-hush than ECI or RD or Q or the young girl Prince Andrew raped at Epstein’s pedo harem under CIA surveillance.) Article 51 makes it clear that individual or collective self-defense is subject to UNSC authorization and planning, and that self-defense forces are at the disposal of the UNSC. The NATO Charter reaffirms that with another thing you never hear about, Article 7: “This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.”
There’s a very simple reason why the US won’t use Article 5 to end-run the UN Charter. Russia and China won’t let them. Remember, the US is a scarecrow. When they finally got up the nerve to invade Iraq, after a decade of softening-up with genocidal sanctions, Saddam annihilated the 3/7 cavalry and fought the 3rd Infantry division to a standstill. The US had to roll out nationwide OPSEC to conceal the mass casualties. Imagine if they tried to pick on somebody their own size. The US will do nothing without unanimous P-5 permission.
Syria/France — Ken OKeefe Press TV Commentary – Paris False Flag –
image: http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/attention.gif
Part of channel(s): Iraq (current event), Syria (current event)
Published on Nov 17, 2015Ken O’Keefe discusses “who is ISIS” and the absurdity of what the mainstream media is telling us in this latest false flag manipulation broght to you by the powers that be.
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=123_1447792110#tOxpgmogGDtw5JVS.99
Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk 11/16/15: Paris and What Should Be Done
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaZSupoRTYY
Putin Claims ISIS is Financed by 40 Countries Including G20 Members
When asked if measures were discussed at the G20 Leaders summit to prevent the financing of terrorism, Russian President Vladimir Putin said they were, and also claimed that the terrorist group ISIS was being funded by 40 countries including G20 members.
http://truthinmedia.com/putin-claims-isis-financed-40-countries-g20-members/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=nl
What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters
No sooner am I settled in an interviewing room in the police station of Kirkuk, Iraq, than the first prisoner I am there to see is brought in, flanked by two policemen and in handcuffs. I awkwardly rise, unsure of the etiquette involved in interviewing an ISIS fighter who is facing the death penalty. He is small, much smaller than I, on first appearances just a boy in trouble with the police, his eyes fixed on the floor, his face a mask. We all sit on armchairs lined up against facing walls, in a room cloudy with cigarette smoke and lit by fluorescent strip lighting, a room so small that my knees almost touch the prisoner’s—but he still doesn’t look up. I have interviewed plenty of soldiers on the other side of this fight, mostly from the Kurdish forces (known as pesh merga) but also fighters in the Iraqi army (known as the Iraqi Security Forces or ISF), both Arab and Kurdish. ISIS fighters, of course, are far more elusive, unless you are traveling to the Islamic State itself, but I prefer to keep my head on my shoulders.
http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-isis-prisoners/
Watch me make the rabbit disappear. Drop the rabbit into the hat….Presto….no rabbit.
Now wasn’t that easier than trying to talk to trolls?
Another point in relation to “your either with us against terrorism, or you support terrorism and ipso facto your a terrorist”. I don’t know v much about Israel, but clearly the government treats Palestinian armed resistance as terrorists, which of course is true (suicide bombers are terrorists)and of course to some Palestinians they are freedom fighters. Some might say as someone quoted above that terrorism is a poor man’s tool and war a rich man’s tool (and some might that terrorists have also become a rich man’s tool)
Anyway my point is that Israel appears remarkably tolerant of internal Israeli dissent ( I don’t mean tolerant of Palestinian dissent. Is that right or naive.
I wouldn’t want this country to be less tolerant of its own internal dissent than Israel.
If anyone has any thoughts I would be interested to hear ideas about which country has allowed the most mainstream dissent. Oddly notwithstanding Berlusconi’s media empire and its traditions of secrecy and conspiracy Italy comes to mind as a country where the lid often comes off the pot.
From Fred’s link;
“They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate. But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.
“I didn’t like Saddam, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
In fact, Erin Saltman, senior counter-extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says that there is now less emphasis on knowledge of Islam in the recruitment phase. “We are seeing a movement away from strict religious ideological training as a requirement for recruitment,” she told me. “If we were looking at foreign fighter recruits to Afghanistan 10 or 20 years ago, there was intensive religious and theological training attached to recruitment. Nowadays, we see that recruitment strategy has branched out to a much broader audience with many different pull factors.”
There is no question that these prisoners I am interviewing are committed to Islam; it is just their own brand of Islam…..”
Just like the US with the fundamental ‘christians’ focused more on the behavior of others than their own behavior. ‘Natch.
The law may not have been used that much against left-wing dissenters in Israel, but there has been a lot of social pressure, which has sometimes mounted to mob violence. Max Blumenthal describes this in his recent books Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.
Thugs, bullies and cowards contd.
Video: Israeli forces detain 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Bethlehem
Nov. 17, 2015 8:04P.M
http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768877
‘The young boy told Ma’an that Israeli soldiers began firing tear gas into a children’s playground in the refugee camp, forcing him and his friends to flee the area.
Israeli soldiers who had entered the camp then detained him as he was running away, and interrogated him for several hours before the Palestinian liaison office intervened to have him released.
A video of the incident posted by a local activist shows Amireh attempting to intervene in the young boy’s arrest before being assaulted by an Israeli soldier.’
That took place in the Aida refugee camp, densely populated in a small area with the wall right up against homes. A few weeks back it was ‘we will gas you’ from another one of the thugs.
Israeli officer: ‘We will gas you until you die’
Israeli border patrol officer threatens to kill all residents of Aida refugee camp if Palestinians keep throwing stones.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/israeli-forces-gas-die-151031140951304.html
Mary – My prophet tells me that bribery, coercion, compulsion and protection as well as real threats will force British MP’s to vote for RAF jets on the tarmac in Cyprus to load their missiles and bombs and strike Syria. The stark blackmail is Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the US will be ‘damaged’ if our ‘passage of death’ is blocked, this from the mouths of a majority Conservative Party merchants of death;
-with closed heart we, the British ‘lost emperors’ will kill thousands of Syrian refugees returning to their war-ravaged homeland from Jordan, [Fox] to fix their homes and rebuild their lives for Cameron kudos, British eminence and the treasure of triumph.
To the security services:
This message will be sent to every school, every university, every institution in Britain with exception.
Mark Golding
Children of Iraq Association
http://www.coia.org.uk
Thanks Lysias, I will follow those up. Schlomo Sands book on Israel and generally on how nations construct national myths and identity was brave. I think he may have received some sort of a social backlash, but if you keep your house family and job, if the law and tax man leave you alone, and if people become aware of your ideas then that’s not too bad.
Ilan Pappe felt obliged to leave Israel because of the social pressure he was under.
Ha’aretz had to hire bodyguards for Gideon Levy.
“Thanks Lysias, I will follow those up.”
While at it, stop enabling the trolls fer Christ’s sake….
Richie Allen On The Techniques Used By The MSM To Sell The Paris Attacks To A Gullible Public!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNTCSTGtyTk#t=150