Articles

Have you ever stepped back and looked at the crumbling regimes in the Arab East? If you did, have you realized they are republics and not monarchies; not that there is much of a difference between the two but the hype in the corporate media is about freedom, rights, dignity, democracy, and the rest of this political litany that is well-known.

The West never had any problem with Bashar al-Asad as long as he did their bidding. Following the “Arab Spring”, the West thought Asad was a low hanging fruit ripe for picking. Three years later, they are waking up to reality.

Two competing narratives continue to dominate discussion about events in Syria. The first and most-often repeated narrative, eagerly projected by the Western corporate media as well as al-Jazeera, is that the people of Syria have risen up for their rights and will settle for nothing less than the ouster of President Bashar al-Asad.

Khader Adnan, a 33-year-old Palestinian baker detained without charge by Israel since December 2011, ended his 66-day hunger strike on February 21, which had taken him to the verge of death. Adnan ended his strike only after Israel agreed to release him after serving another two months of “administrative detention”, under which a suspect can be held without charge for six-month periods, renewable indefinitely.

Haniyeh was planning to visit Cairo on February 26 (after Crescent goes to press) to request Egypt to supply diesel directly to Gaza instead of sending it through the Israeli pumping station. Israel routinely shuts down supplies to punish the Palestinians. The Zionists have also threatened to cut off water to Gaza. That would be catastrophic.

The Qatari-based tribal-owned network, al-Jazeera’s news broadcast on February 16 about Libya was revealing. It started with a report on the mayhem that has gripped Libya since the capture and brutal murder of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on October 20, 2011. Without showing any footage of the brutality perpetrated by various militias against civilians, the network switched to an episode of 16 years ago to tell viewers how terrible Qaddafi’s rule was.

The self-proclaimed superpower is clutching at straws about “peace talks” following the Taliban’s convincing defeat of US-NATO armies in Afghanistan. While talk about talks has gone on for years with American officials — civilian and military — making bold pronouncements about commencement of “secret talks”, only to discover that some goat herder or a petty bicycle shop owner had taken the “smart” Americans for a long ride, the latter have not given up.

Merely a year ago Turkey enjoyed much respect among neighbors and established warm and cordial relations with them, helping to catapult Ankara’s political, economic and cultural objectives. Frequent visits to neighboring countries by Turkish delegations, usually accompanied by senior government officials including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, signing memorandums of understanding and agreements, increasing trade and political as well as military cooperation, heralded a new era for the conflict-torn region.

After the Age of Reaganomics and the decline of participatory democracy in the United States, presidential elections have become a TV sport rather than a mass political practice. In hotly contested elections such as George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, the turnout is a mere 50% of eligible voters. As the US officially transitions to a corporatocracy, though, it appears that even an apathetic voter population is far too dangerous to entrust with the country’s political decision-making.

The enterprise of US perpetual war is confronted with a persistent problem. Spiraling rates of psychological and social problems in returning war veterans is placing enormous stress on the narratives that the US government has constructed around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.