(We) can do better

The term 'diversity' is being used as a euphemism for chaos and social disenfranchisement in mass people movements which are politically packaged as both positive and inevitable, much as slavery was in the 18th and 19th century. UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson has said that 'the refugee crisis in Europe has created fear and hatred among local residents, which should be combated by bringing to light the positive contributions of migrants to creating a diverse society'.[1]

See also: The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet and other articles about the European refugee crisis.

The Numbers

"The number of international migrants reached 244 million in 2015, an increase of 41 per cent compared with 2000, the United Nations says in a report. The report published on Tuesday, the latest biennial revision of migration trends, found that the number of people who had moved to another country - voluntarily for economic reasons or because of conflicts - had risen by 71 million since 2000."[1]

The influx into Germany and which is overflowing to the rest of Europe amounts to an invasion because permission was not sought from the ordinary people who bear the impact on jobs, housing, social and natural environment of these colossal numbers of people. At the same time the immigration flows are the result of wars that European leaders and global commerce are inflicting on the sending countries.

Imposed mass immigration compromises self-determination and democracy

Talk of 'diversity' as if different ethnicity/religion is the only feature of the problem of mass immigration to Europe is to ignore the sheer numbers of people seeking work and housing. Such huge changes in demand form the greater part of economic and social impact and the resultant hardship and inconvenience is an affront to citizens who were not consulted.

Talk of 'diversity' in the face of this huge and largely irrevocable change to numbers and composition of society has the effect of further reducing the scope of citizen input into self-government (which is a kind of cooperative population management). Self-government involves cooperative apportioning of work and housing as well as supporting infrastructure within a society defined by its membership (citizens). It is usually managed through long established civil legal and institutional processes only available to citizens or visaed immigrants.

How a population evolves is a traditional and anthropological prerogative of its members, not commercial 'stakeholders' or global political players. A sudden redefinition of membership without consultation is a fundamental problem.

War and mass migration: Criminal role of the press and governments

When external forces produce massive population changes, this is usually referred to as war. Whilst we do know that US-NATO members have a long history of and a current responsibility for the wars in the Middle East that are producing much of these mass migrations, it is difficult to pinpoint what organisations and people are really behind the manipulation of numbers in Europe through open-door policy. This is because they hide behind rhetoricians like the UN Deputy Secretary, national leaders such as Merkel, and a pro 'diversity' corporatised and syndicated global media that obviously has interests in labour market, weapons manufacture, international trade and the transmission of power through chaos. In fact, apart perhaps from Putin's Russia, most of us do not know who is in charge of nations anymore; policies seem to be influenced from many transient global hats.

The mainstream press have had a criminal role along with EU and European governments in suppressing discussion of the numbers involved and manufacturing an apparent consent to them against real citizen feelings. In tandem these actors have consistently talked up US-NATO roles in wars that have caused these population disruptions in the Middle East. These arrogant attitudes and manipulations of perception have caused chaos, suffering and death.

Diversity doesn't nail it

'Diversity' is a non-sequiteur in the face of western warmongering overseas and manipulation of European population numbers and institutions to reduce wages, inflate housing prices, and generally place pressure on established social gains and citizens rights.

Unfortunately many commercial ventures use the UN as a respectable umbrella for advancing their own selfish interests. Any organisation may register as a UN member on a variety of bases and the UN attracts government, property and banking lawyers, ideological entities with strong links to business and government, such as the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and a variety of businesses in various guises looking for opportunities. (See http://www.unaavictoria.org.au/our-partners/. Associated projects are often described as 'development' initiatives but they are about taking over land and resources, changing local laws, exploiting and disorganising workforces in the sending and receiving countries.

The people behind some of these trends are so craven that they do not seem to think twice about provoking and stoking protracted wars and genocides, except to justify them with flimsy excuses.

Left-right conflicts growing

Another aspect of these problems is a growing division between 'left' and 'right' in population politics as reported, endorsed and incited by the mass media. In a strange way it is reminiscent of the setting for the rise of fascism in Germany. In those days the right (the Nazis and the Italian fascists) were encouraged by big business and the mass media as a means of combating the 'left' or the rise of communism. The communists were for the uniting of workers against exploitation and war but the fascists were for exploitation and pro-war. Today we have a situation where groups identified by the mainstream press as 'left' and 'anti-fascist' are coming into conflict with groups identified as 'right-wing'. Counter-intuitively the left-wing, as presented by the mainstream press, seems to think it is okay to have disorganised mass immigration and has almost nothing to say against the wars producing these population movements. The right-wing seems to be the only voice criticising US-NATO involvement in wars in the Middle East, and they are definitely against uncontrolled mass immigration. At the same time, the center left and center right that control most governments and are aligned with the mass media encourage mass migration and encourage war. That leaves unrepresented people of a center left or center right disposition who are neither in favour of war or mass migration. This is a glaring omission and one senses that it is deliberate on the part of the mass media that claims to represent public opinion globally.

NOTES

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/nthamerica/2016/01/13/244-million-international-migrants-in-2015.html#sthash.xwREuHUA.dpuf

#otherArticles" id="otherArticles">Appendix: Other Articles about the European Refugee crisis

Why Illegal Migrants are Good for Turkish Business? (21/12/15) | New Eastern Outlook, Refugees as "Weapons" in a Propaganda War (21/11/15) by Eric Draitser | Global Research, The Flood of Refugees into Europe: "The New Slave Trade" (8/11/15) by Peter Koenig | Global Research, Merkel Overwhelmed: Chancellor Plunges Germany Into Chaos (4/11/15) | sputnik News, The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet, Refugees as Weapon – and Germany shifting Alliances? (17/7/15) | Global Research.

On 10 January 2016 SBS (Australian multicultural television) screened Martin Smith's Inside Assad’s Syria. Australia is blatantly aligned with US-NATO forces that seek to remove the Syrian Government and Australian media propaganda means that we don't usually hear from the other side. Surprisingly Smith interviewed many supporters of the Assad Government and the Syrian Arab Army. But it was as if, to get this other view onto SBS the [almost theatrically grim-faced, suspicious and disapproving] journalist had to use some standard anti-Assad techniques:

Standard anti-Syrian government techniques

These were:

Continuous use of the word 'regime' instead of government, although Bashar al Assad was legally reelected in June 2014 by an overwhelming majority, despite opposition alternatives. See /taxonomy/term/6173

Early mention of the 'notorious barrel bombs' (showed footage of bombs dropping from aircraft). No views or analysis countering these dubious claims were given. The President's own exhaustive responses to these explanations were not referred to. The video below is of an interview by Sixty Minutes with Bashar al Assad on accusations about the use of barrel bombs and of chlorine as a poisonous gas (although I don't think Martin Smith's doco mentioned chlorine.)

Although Smith interviewed people who had lost relatives to the 'rebels', the use of bloody footage seemed confined to illustrating the effects of bombing designated as carried out by the Government. There was no equivalent criticism of the 'rebels' techniques and casualties. Smith's allocated Syrian journalist, however, was killed by rebels a couple of days into the doco, which also meant that the journo was unable to complete his original itinerary. There was no sensible reflection on the killing of his journo by so-called 'rebels', although Smith did describe himself as shaken by the death.

The handling of an invitation by the government to a cultural event in Syria, a performance by the Syrian Symphony Orchestra, seemed insensitive and manipulative. Rather than appreciating that the people of Damascus are heroically maintaining cultural and state institutions, there seemed to be an implication that something else might be going on.

Visit to the famous coastal resort of Latakia, in Syria

Smith's film characterised this resort more or less as a rich Alawite stronghold. This is in line with the mainstream propaganda that Alawites in Syria are oppressing a Sunni majority. As Assad says himself, if this were true, then surely the armed forces would have got rid of him long ago, since they are 60 - 65% Sunni, and Sunnis form the majority of the population. Many Syrians will tell you, however, that they are not Sunnis or Alawites or Christians; they are Syrians. In this they are emphasising the non-sectarian nature of Syria. Smith did disclose that more than a million refugees are now living in Latakia resort.

This effect of presenting the resort as the exclusive preserve of Alawite hippocrites works to create cognitive dissonance against the information about the refugees that contradicts that first impression. A friend who is well informed on Syria told me that an acquaintance of hers seemed to derive from the Latakia part of this documentary that the Syrian wealthy, despite the war, were living high on the hog whilst the poor suffered, and entirely overlooked the part of the report that noted the presence of the refugees who now live in this 'exclusive' Alawite resort.

Sophie Shepnardze interview: Assad asks how, if most of Syria is against him, they have not got rid of him.

Despite Smith's biasing presentation, nonetheless, we did hear almost exclusively the pro-government side. We also heard the story of someone who defected from the Syrian Arab Army to the rebels then back again, although somehow the punchline escaped me. The journo's comment seemed gratuitous, that he suspected that the government had wanted him to hear about this.

Does SBS accept non-propaganda items?

Conclusion. Is it actually possible to get the other side onto SBS (or the ABC)? If you wanted to, would you have to present it within those trophes of barrel bombs and 'regime' and wear an exaggeratedly sceptical expression when interviewing pro syrian government people? In other words, should we give this journo, Martin Smith, credit for getting the other side onto SBS? Or might we assume, unfortunately, that many people would respond to Smith's propaganda techniques and his stagey suspicion by assuming that the many Syrians who openly prefer Assad leading Syria to the prospect of the country being divided up among a bunch of religious gangs, are poor brainwashed idiots in need of western intervention.This was a PBS funded documentary and they are leaders in western propaganda.

To paraphrase that old Pete Seeger song, "Where have all the ISIS gone? Gone to Turkey -- every one." (Except of course for the ones who tried to return to Saudi Arabia, foolishly thinking that just because the House of Saud paid their salaries, they would be welcomed back home.) "When will they ever learn?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KLNwPppKTM

American neo-colonialists has supposedly been bombing ISIS positions in Syria and Iraq for over a year now -- and during all that time ISIS has, coincidentally, been getting stronger and stronger. However, Russia bombs ISIS for only three months and suddenly ISIS is gone! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZ2R2zW2Yc

But where did ISIS go to?

According to journalist Finian Cunningham, "Also missing or downplayed in the Western media coverage of the truces across Syria is the question of where the surrendering mercenaries are being evacuated to. They are not being bussed to other places inside Syria. That shows that there is no popular support for these insurgents. Despite copious Western media coverage contriving that the Syrian conflict is some kind of 'civil war' between a despotic regime and a popular pro-democracy uprising, the fact that surrendering militants have nowhere to go inside Syria patently shows that these insurgents have no popular base....

"So where are the terrorist remnants being shipped to? According to several reports, the extremists are being given safe passage into Turkey, where they will receive repair and sanctuary from the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and no doubt subsidized by the European Union with its $3.5 billion in aid to Ankara to 'take care of refugees'". http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43837.htm

I mean seriously, President Erdogan, do the people of Turkey really want to have thousands of ISIS foreign fighters descending on them in mass -- men who have been raping, pillaging and beheading at will for the past four years? Once a brigand, always a brigand? Turkish citizens, sucks to be you. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34373-focus-the-misinformation-mess

But several of the rumors I've been hearing lately suggest that many of these foreign fighters are also being shipped off to Afghanistan to join the Taliban as well. Which brings up my next point. After Russia destroyed the weapons supply lines to ISIS in Syria, ISIS was dead in the water within just three months. So why are the Taliban still fighting on (and on) in Afghanistan after 14 long years? Who is running weapons supply lines to them? http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-air-force-us-airstrike-takes-out-battalion-of-iraqi-troops-who-were-battling-isis/5496826

The Taliban aren't exactly manufacturing weapons back in the caves of Tora Bora, now are they? Hardly. But those weapons have to come from somewhere. My guess is that the same weapons-manufacturers who have been supplying ISIS for the past four years have also been supplying the Taliban for the past 14 years. Now who could that be? It's definitely not Russia or Iran. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2015/11/yemen-syria-palestine-paris-gun-sales.html

And why has it taken 14 years to cut off weapons supplies to the Taliban when Russia was able to cut off weapons supplies to ISIS in just three months? Who the freak knows? Certainly not me. But if it were up to me, I would follow the money. And I would start by asking myself just two questions. "Which country is the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world today?" and "Why have heroin sales in Afghanistan increased forty-fold since America invaded it -- and what is that money being spent on?" http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-to-Blame-for-Spike-in-Opium-Production-in-Afghanistan-20150416-0028.html

Article originally published on Jane Stillwater's blogspot on January 10, 2016.

North Korea has apparently just tested an H-bomb - a shocking development, even though some doubt it actually was a hydrogen bomb. Already, Washington lawmakers are grabbing the moment to push through reinforcement of America’s presence in the Asia Pacific, already catalyzed by the “pivot to Asia” plan aimed against China. As Europe lines up to strike lucrative deals with Beijing, Washington is growing increasingly worried, even counter-attacking with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The world is already an uneasy place, with Jihad rampant and now we have potentially deadly armament at the hands of unpredictable Pyongyang. Will the US and China be able to co-operate? Why is the West is so afraid of Beijing? This program dives deep into the world of Asia Pacific political games with the president of the Shanghai Institute of International studies, Dongxiao Chen, on Sophie&co. This interview was first published at https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/328252-us-china-sea-war/ on 8 Jan, 2016 09:53

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Sophie Shevarnadze:  Dongxiao Chen, president of the Shanghai Institute of International studies, it’s great to have you on our show today, welcome.

Dongxiao Chen: Thank you.

SS: So London has given President Xi a royal welcome recently, and that’s after UK criticizing China on a number of issues for years and years. What’s going on? Is UK after some lucrative deals or is it something else right now?

CD: Well, you see that nowadays we are living in an economically globalized world, and I think that the leaders, if they are really concerned of national interests, they should be more concerned about those practical and benefit of their economic interests. This should be always on  their high agenda, and I think that to compare with the complementarity of both sides of the economic development and as well as this huge potential of this cooperation, not only on the economic side but on the other side - I think that that’s the main reason driving London more closer to Beijing.

SS: Lucrative deals, right?

CD: Yeah, to some extent.

SS: You know, this cozying up of UK and China towards each other has drawn criticism from Washington. Why is that two sovereign countries can’t have a relationship without irritating America?

CD: I think that some Washington people - I am not quite sure whether the President Obama or those officials publicly would criticize those economic relations between London and Beijing…

SS: But you know they’re annoyed, right? If I know, you should know…

CD: Yeah, of course, but there are some people, in Washington, they could not understand why: London used to be the closest ally and now seems to have shifted away from Washington and more closer to Beijing. I think that they could not adapt themselves to a more multi-polarized world in which China has much more important role, particularly in economic aspect, and that London, if it is to continue to maintain its status of financial center, then they should do something to strengthen its ties with Beijing, if they are going to try to maintain their status of financial center.

SS: You have also said that there’s need to rethink the regional security order in the Asia-Pacific region. That would actually mean challenging the existing American alliance system that is already in place. But would it still mean that it has to include the U.S. in the new order?

CD: Of course. I think that if we’re going to construct, or build up a regional order, sustainable. It should be an inclusive multilateral process, including those bilateral alliances. But how to make this inclusive multilateral process connected or aligned with those bilateral? Big question. This is not a problem on China’s side. This is the challenge for Washington, for the U.S., because they still believe that this regional architecture, this regional security order should be based upon the bilateral alliance excluding China. So, I think that this is the problem: obstacles that the U.S. should overcome.

SS: We’re going to talk about excluding China from this architecture a bit later, but first, I want to talk about America’s pivot to Asia - and I’m talking about America redeploying its military in the Asia-Pacific region. Is it a real threat to China or this move has little substance, actually?

CD: Well, conceptually speaking, it should not be perceived as an existing threat. Because, based upon our reading of so-called “pivoting” or rebalancing, it is multidimensional. Of course, Washington said that it is going to shift 60% of its military force to Asia-Pacific, but that’s only part of it. In addition to that the U.S. tried to reap the benefit of dynamic economic cooperation in Asia-Pacific. Washington tried to grasp this opportunity. So, that’s both the military dimension, as well as the economic dimension. U.S. said it also tries to be much more engaged with East Asia, Asia-Pacific, as a stabilizing force. So, we just have to look and see to what extent - because deeds speak louder than those words.

SS: Let’s, for now, let’s focus on the military aspect; we will get to the economic aspect and all of that. China has staked claims South China sea, and then its neighbors have turned to America to actually dispute these claims. Do you think claiming this territory is worth this diplomatic row?

CD: The tensions rising over the South China Sea are not by China, rather, because of some other countries, some of the Asian countries included. They have occupied these territories that have been long claimed by China, but for a long period of time China has showed its self-restraint, and we hope that we can shift those differences over those territories’ sovereignty, through this joint exploitation. This is our strategy which we have been carrying on for many-many years. We have never changed that. But nowadays it’s the U.S. who used to say that the U.S. has “no position”, “tries to maintain its neutrality”. Now it seems to me that the U.S. has its position and tries to stir up the tension. That makes problems.

SS: But you now see U.S. and its allies staging naval drills in the waters next to China, and you have the Chinese press that calls for the nation’s military to be ready for provocations. Can a real confrontation glare up here?

CD: So far, I think that we have given quite clear message to Washington that the South China Sea is most important area. If we can keep sealine communications safe, there will be for public good for all countries, including China and the U.S.. So, don’t try to stir up these tensions. Let’s manage these differences. If we can maintain the stability - because the so-called “freedom of navigation”, U.S. is very concerned. It’s not a matter here. So I think, why not we - Washington, Beijing - work together?

SS: Okay, but this was a very scholar-like answer that you just gave me. I’m asking, the way things stay now, with America and its allies staging drills in the waters next to China - do you think there’s a real chance of an actual confrontation or its overexaggerated?

CD: Of course. The possibilities always stay there. If we could not manage those differences, it is quite likely that those incidents may escalate or spin out of control, based upon a miscalculation. Both sides understand the differences there, but they try to avoid those confrontation, because it is in their common interest.

SS: Because, I mean, the confrontation between these two powerhouses would be insane to even really consider, right? To even start to consider, it’s crazy, that America and China could actually confront each other.

CD: Of course.

SS: But you have said that peace between China and America will end once their mutual interests exhaust each other. What exactly does that mean?

CD: I mean that for a sustainable workable big country-relationship, the common interest is important but not enough. Both sides should also cultivate the sense of mutual respect. If both sides could cultivate this sense of mutual respect and can build up this shared common understanding of what will the regional order look like, or what it should be, it is more likely for them to, you know, solve these differences, even if they could not see eye-to-eye on this specific issues, but they, at least, understand that these are specific issues, we shall not have these specific differences of interests to hijack overall relationship. So, this is what I mean that even if these common interests are exhausted, at least there’s common understanding of these important norms of interacting with each other.

SS: So, okay, let’s say common interests are exhausted, but other common issues aren’t worked on - then what comes instead of peace?

CD: If we have a static perspective, if there’s no agreement on the vision of order or what order will be in future, it is very likely that both sides would not try to expand the list of their cooperation. They will just focus on their differences.

SS: Okay, so they just end their cooperation but it doesn’t mean they become adversaries.

CD: If both sides do not see each other as adversaries, if they believe that they can be partners for building a new world order, than they can find, they can expand these cooperative areas. For instance, if both sides could not agree with how to counter terrorism, then the terrorism itself will be an issue diving each other rather uniting each other. But if both sides can share their common understanding of how to counter terrorism ,then the terrorism, the so-called “third party issues” bring them together. So, aside of those existing bilateral common interests, there’s a huge number of potential common interests going beyond their bilateral scope, but that depends upon whether both sides -Washington and China can share some basic norms and visions of the future.

SS: I want to know your honest answer, your subjective opinion in this matter, not a scholar’s opinion - right now, if you put your hand on your heart, would you say America and China are partners or adversaries?

CD: Well, you know, China-U.S. relationship is extremely complicated. The single terms like “partner”, “adversary”, “competitor” is not sufficient enough to generalize. So, I would say that yes, it is a “competitive partnership”.

SS:  So you’ve also said that when it comes to understanding Great Power relations, America has some blind spots. What do you mean?

CD: When I say that there’s a “blind spot”, I mean the U.S. strategic culture, their unique strategic culture, which, I would’ve called it a kind of “superpower autism”.

SS: Superpower autism?

CD: Egoism. You know, U.S., historically, because of its unique geographical location and also its culture of exceptionalism and in the past decades U.S. has enjoyed its superpower position and even a period of a unipolar moment. So, U.S. sometimes is too self-confident and always tries to reduce its own vulnerability to zero at the expense of other countries’ security. But, as a matter of fact, in real life, it’s impossible for a country to try  to reduce its vulnerability to zero, but the U.S. try to pursue such kind of policy, what I call an “absolute security” - that is a kind of a blind spot, because when the U.S., Washington tries to pursue this absolute security, actually, it just puts other countries at a different level of threat, imposed by Washington, because U.S. would always try to enjoy, because of its technology, try to, you know, information superiority, cyber-superiority, military superiority or even try to control some of the outer space. That will impose a lot of challenges and security threats to other countries.

SS: So when President Obama comes out and says that the U.S. will not let China write the rules of the global economy - do you think it’s fair, that China can’t but for some reason America is entitled to it?

CD:  Of course, it’s unfair. I think, we, Chinese, believe that we are living in a multipolar world and every country should have its own say in decision making of roles and norms.. It is impossible for a single country to try to set agenda. It’s not China, but of course, it’s not the U.S. We can compete. So, I think that all those countries should have their own voice. But nowadays there’s developing countries which are underrepresented…

SS: You’ve said that the voices of the developing countries aren’t heard enough - I wouldn’t call China a developing country, but I know that China ranks 6th in IMF voting share, as well as China is the second largest economy in the world. Is it fair that your country isn’t given a louder voice?

CD:  Of course, we don’t believe that nowadays IMF or World Bank, those Bretton Woods systems need to be reformed, unless, I think, it could be a threat for the new balance of power, of the global economy. So far, this kind of reforms was slow. Partially, some of those reform proposals have been blocked by the U.S. within the Congress. It is unfair.

SS: Is that why China is coming up with the China-led Asia Infrastructure and Investment bank?

CD:  It is partially a reason, because we believe that it will help, it will give some pressure on existing multinational institutions, including  IMF and the World Bank to accelerate their reform pace and so I think  it’s very good…

SS: So, it is about countering the Western influence after all?

CD:  There is some competition, but it is also complimentary, because by reforming those reforming those existing multilateral economic institutions, it will also be beneficial in the long term for those developing countries. Because, even those developing  countries, they believe that multilateral institutions - IMF or World Bank - they are too bureaucratic. It’s efficiency is so low, and they need to reform. But the Western interest there is to try and to block, to resist the reform. So we believe, we are rationally speaking, we think  that if we can make this structure, organisation, much more clear, much more efficient - that will be good for all countries, not only for developing countries. So, at least, I’ve heard a lot of scholars and experts from Great Britain, from the U.S., they think that yes, it’s wrong for these kinds of reform proposals to be blocked in Washington DC or by the Congress.

SS: But what about politicians? Why do you think America reacted so actually about China coming up with  the whole Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, especially urging their partners like GB, France, Australia, Germany, not to join their venture - which they did anyways. Why were they so panicky about western countries joining this new institution?

CD: Washington, including President Obama himself have recognized that it’s a mistake. They totally misunderstand the mission and the function of the AIB. They believe that it is kind of counter-Western institution, it is kind of a conspiracy plan, that China, Beijing tried to set up a new kitchen; but actually, as China said, it’s not going to set up a new kitchen, but we are going to try to add up a new facility, make this old kitchen much more efficient. So that’s the way.

SS: Do you think America should join this venture?

CD: Of course, if they are willing to do that. I think that it is quite open. Chinese always keep Washington posted on process of AIB, including, we always even kept Tokyo informed, we always inform them about the status of what is going on and Washington, you know, they are quite clear about the process, it’s not secret, it’s not a “black box” operation.

SS: So, the U.S. has an extensive system of alliance in Asia Pacific. They’re actually coming up with a Trans-Pacific-Partnership deal right now, and they’re not being secretive about it - for them it's all about excluding China from the process. Should China be doing something more to counter that?

CD: China felt the pressure of the TPP on multi-faceted aspects, because TPP, it’s negotiated in secret, we just do not know what it’s really about, particularly it is has a potential of an active impact on China’s interests. So, we always, you know, we were quite clear to Washington colleagues that they should let this process be much more transparent.

SS: So it’s about transparency, not about being included in the process?

CD: This is one thing - I said, multi-faceted aspects. It should be transparent so that we should know what is going on. Secondly, so far, a lot of these articles, particularly in regard to this state-owned enterprises reform, in regard to this information, digital economy, in regard to labor force standard - they are quite new.

SS: The more interesting question is, will they be able to isolate China? Will this bill somehow manage to isolate China?

CD: I think, it is impossible, because China’s trade volume, it’s market, is extremely important, so without China’s involvement into TPP, I think the influence of the TPP, well, would important, of course, but not that important. So, Washington has already said: “we welcome China, it all depends on China’s decision”. We still try to wait and see, because it all depends on China’s own economic reform, whether we are ready. But at the same time,  think, TPP is... sometimes we feel pressure, sometimes we think it will be a kind of leverage to be used pushing forward a reform at home.

SS: Funny you say that, because I was speaking to American Congressman, his name is Brad Sherman, and he’s against TPP, but he actually argues that TPP would be beneficial for China, meaning, you know, all these goods are mostly assembled in China and then they’re sent to the U.S. via TPP members like Vietnam. What do you think, could it actually be beneficial to China?

CD: No, I  think if China won’t join TPP, for a long period of time, based upon a lot of surveys, a lot of research, that this impact will obviously be felt on quite a number of industries in China, particularly given this trade transferring from China to other countries, like Vietnam, Mexico. So, the long-term here is quite clear that the impact is obvious. But in short term, I don't know. The short term is not so obvious.

SS: Dongxiao Chen, president of the Shanghai Institute of International studies, thank you very much for this interesting insight into China-U.S. relations. It’s been great talking to you.  

In a piece in The Australian[1] Dec 24, 2015, entitled "Honey, we shrank the backyard," population growth promoter for the property investment sector, Bernard Salt, observes that the block size of ordinary Australian houses has shrunk due to lifestyle changes such as after school organised sport and other after school activities and women working. The backyard, Salt acknowledges, was a “wondrous place” where children used to play in a relatively unstructured space, unobserved by parents, during an unsophisticated era devoid of today's patios and outdoor eating. The conclusion is that, after all, shrinking backyards come with bigger cities, and and a “leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living”.

Why has Bernard Salt written this article?

One must bear in mind that it is the 1950s brick veneer villa that Bernard Salt targets. It appears to be his job to do this and to "evict" the ordinary Australians who live in these houses. He does not target houses such as the luxurious older style mansion where he lives in the comfortable suburb of Camberwell.

I heard him in person, as an invited speaker at a public meeting in Hawthorn about 4 years ago, derisively referring to widows in these houses "rattling around" and that they should move out, or words to this effect. This latest piece specifically refers to the back yards of brick veneer houses.

A.V. Jennings brick veneers with backyards

Many of the Post WW2 brick veneer houses in Melbourne were built by A.V.Jennings when there was an acute housing shortage. According to Jennings, one of the key design features of them was that children could be observed through the kitchen window playing in the backyard. I know this because a friend of mine was related to Jennings by marriage and she reports this is what he used to say about his creations. (This contrasts with Salt's memory or description of children being unobserved.)

The apparent purpose of the middle paragraphs of Salt's article are to paint an unattractive, unsophisticated rather bogan picture of what is being snatched from us, so that we won't want to try to hang on or to grieve too much. In this, Salt appears to draw heavily on Barry Humphries' work so - easy money for him.

Why do families now need two incomes and still can't afford housing?

Regarding Salt's pronouncement that "Mum's at work" and kids are in after-school activities, I would have thought the first would be the cause of the second. They are not independent of each other. Why is Mum at work? Or should I ask, "Why are both parents working and paying others to look after their children after school?" (After school care is not a free service.) Did people suddenly realise what great fun it was to be at work, so much fun that they would deny themselves the ONLY, chance that they would ever get in their lives to spend time with their offspring in the brief period called childhood? I somehow doubt it.

I would suggest that the design of low maintenance outdoor living areas probably reflects time poverty in households where both parents go to work. The trend to smaller blocks for people raising children is not a reflection of lifestyle choice but of economic imperative as housing prices and rents have risen. Both parents working instead of one amounts to a loss to the home of about 10 hours per day, 5 days per week. That is time lost to such activities as maintaining a garden.

Faux evolutionary approach to normalising land confiscation

Salt makes the loss of the backyard sound like an evolutionary process as we find more enticing pursuits outside the home but he doesn't say what those pursuits are. In rubbishing the old back yard, he singles out the incinerator. The incinerator has recently acquired very unattractive connotations both aesthetically and in terms of air pollution and carbon emissions. People are now very sensitive to these issues and Salt's reference to incinerators provides a great example of a way to turn everyone off the notion of ordinary Australians having a bit of land for themselves. I don't think incinerators then were universal, anyway and now we have paper and cardboard recycling. But is this a fair exchange for losing "the back yard" ? Should we be thus punished for past incinerator follies?

Society's gain is expressed as a "leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living." This is, however, unconvincing, as there is nothing in this description that alludes to quality of life or to any actual purpose for our lives, apart from "work".

Who might this article convince? People who have very limited time for reading, the actual victims who are fast losing space and amenity as the population soars and for whom a no regrets article like this might be somewhat comforting.

NOTES

[1] Note that Murdoch's Australian is one face of Murdoch's property dot com, www.realestate.com.au, so it is not surprising that Mr Salt writes for the Australian and for the Herald Sun.

Zahran Alloush, the leader and founder of Jaish al Islam Alloush, an extremist Salafi group supported by Saudi Arabia, was killed by an airstrike whilst attending a meeting with other armed Syrian groups on Friday. The group's ideology is similar to that of ISIS, and they have planned to overthrow the secular Syrian government and replace it with an Islamic dictatorship. Bizarrely, SBS, an Australian television station has reported on Alloush as if he were a leader of one of the key opposition groups who ‘would negotiate with the Syrian government’ next month.

Following the UN negotiated settlement in Yarmouk yesterday, there was a report on Australia’s SBS World News which presented the whole situation from the opposition’s point of view.

The Australian
coroner makes a
bizarre ruling.
Why?

Amazingly, 17 months have passed since the crash, and the investigators still can't establish who shot down the plane. Our correspondent digs in to the latest developments

The Victorian (Australia) state coroner Iain West has concluded a 60-minute inquest into the deaths of Australians on board Malaysian Airlines MH17 by issuing a statement of findings contradicting the coroner's own statements, as well as the evidence of reports from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and courtroom testimony from the senior Australian police officer investigating the MH17 crash.

This article was originally published on 16 December on johnhelmer.net (aka 'Dances with Bears'). This article was republished on 17 December on Russian Insider. Other articles concerning the MH17 cover-up include The little Dutch boy, his finger, and the leak in the dyke story – make that the BUK story (22/12/15), Australian police, Dutch prosecutors break with Dutch Safety Board at first coroner's court inquest on MH17 crash (15/12/15), ...

Australian police examining the evidence
they aren't buying the Dutch government's
version of events

In an 11-page judgement issued on Wednesday morning at the Victorian Coroners Court in Melbourne, West ruled "it was not feasible to conduct a complete autopsy of all deceased", and "in the absence of autopsy there is no other evidence to establish individual causes of death. To attempt to do would be speculative and hence not a basis for making finds of fact."

He then proceeded to endorse the conclusion of the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) that the passengers and crew of MH17 had been killed by the detonation of a "9N314M model warhead carried on the 9M38 series of missiles, as installed on the Buk surface-to-air missile system.

Other scenarios that could have led to the disintegration of the aeroplane were considered, analysed and excluded on the available evidence…I accept and adopt the findings of the Dutch Safety Board."

For details of the DSB report of October 13, the evidence presented, and simulations of missile launches, warhead detonations, and shrapnel impact patterns, read this.

West's ruling contradicts testimony given in his court yesterday by Australian Federal Police Detective Superintendent Andrew Donoghoe. Donoghoe told the court that the DSB finding on the Buk missile was uncertain in the ongoing forensic and criminal investigation.

Donoghoe is the lead Australian investigator in the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) working on the MH17 evidence. "In order to obtain conclusive criminal evidence," he said, the Dutch Prosecution Service has made clear "it was also necessary that other scenarios - such as the possibility that MH17 was shot down by another type of missile, or that it was shot down from the air - must be ruled out convincingly."

Donoghoe repeated the point in an interview outside the courtroom, adding this "is a tougher standard than the DSB report." He acknowledged the DSB had used simulations of missile firings, not direct evidence.

According to the transcript of Donoghoe's court testimony, he implied the Australian Federal Police was not in a position to provide the forensic evidence it has gathered to the Victorian coroner because the Ukrainian government has not consented. "Official communication of the conclusions of the results of the MH17 investigation", Donoghoe said in court, "will only be released after agreement between the two JIT [Joint Investigation Team] countries."

The JIT comprises five countries – Australia, The Netherlands, Ukraine, Malaysia, and Belgium. The two to which Donoghoe referred were Australia and the Ukraine. For details of the JIT, and Malaysian government objections to the way it has been run, read this.

West's judgement is entitled "Finding into Death with Inquest – Inquest into the Deaths of the 17 Victorian residents who died on Flight MH17." The text does not refer to Donoghoe's written report to the court, nor to his courtroom testimony. During Donoghoe's appearance in court, West asked him no questions about the forensic evidence.

Dr David Ranson

West's ruling did go into some detail on the post-mortem and autopsy evidence on the victims' bodies reported yesterday by Dr David Ranson (left); West described Ranson as an associate professor of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, and the head of a team of anatomical, dental, and other pathology specialists who worked at the Dutch mortuary centre during July and part of August 2014.

Ranson has also delivered two reports of his findings to the Victorian coroner, one in August of 2014, and a second in December 2014.

Ranson said in an interview in the courtroom, before West announced his ruling, that CT scans were done twice over for the Australian victims, once at the Hilversum military base, and then at the Melbourne morgue after the bodies were flown home. "The CT scans were designed to detect metal", Ranson said. He acknowledges none has been found in the scans of the victims.

Without identifying his source, West ruled that "investigators believe that the total number of hits [on the aircraft] of high-energy objects was well over 800."

He also ruled that "perforation and ricochet damage caused by multiple high-energy objects enabled investigators to conclude that the implicated device was a surface-to-air missile carrying a fragmentation warhead…Forensic evidence determined that that the weapon was a 9N314M model warhead.

It was further determined that the Buk surface-to-air missile system is the only weapon system to carry one of the distinctive pre-formed fragments in its warhead and that such a missile system was present in the region at the time of the incident."

West's statement of finding doesn't reveal the "forensic evidence" he thinks is determinative. By the "presence" of the Buk missile, West appears to have been referring to missile batteries operated by Ukrainian government forces recorded by satellite photographs at locations on the ground at the time.

According to Donoghoe's evidence, if a Buk missile had been fired at MH17 it may have come from a Ukrainian government source. "The Buk missile," Donoghoe told West in court, "was of Russian manufacture, but of a type which had previously also been provided to the Ukraine.

The OVV [Dutch acronym for Dutch Safety Board] was not able to confirm the origin of the specific missile."

West did not report Ranson's evidence that no "distinctive pre-formed fragments" were found in any of the victim's bodies.

For analysis of the computer simulations and metal assay tests reported by DSB in October on the "distinctive pre-formed fragments" attributed to the Buk missile warhead, read this.

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) Shrapnel Photographs

Source: http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/en/onderzoek/2049/investigation-crash-mh17-17-july-2014   

The DSB report claims these were the only "distinctive pre-formed fragments" it  could find – three in the cockpit area, and one on one of the wings. The DSB conducted no metal analysis, and the Ukrainian government did not allow matching of the fragment metal to Buk missiles in its armed forces inventory. The Australian Federal Police and Ranson investigations found no traces of these "distinctive fragments" in any of the scans or tests reported to Coroner West. He asked no questions in court about the shrapnel evidence, and ignored it in his statement of finding.

Ranson, the coroner concluded, had described the cause of death without reporting munitions, explosive impact, or shrapnel wounds. 

According to West, Ranson's conclusion was that death had been caused by "injury sustained in high-altitude aircraft disruption…I accept the cause of death as stated by Dr Ranson as appropriate in the circumstances surrounding the loss of MH17 and in the absence of individual medical certainty."

Outside the court, after West closed the inquest, reporters who had listened to the proceedings acknowledged surprise that West's reference to unsourced and unnamed "forensic investigators" excluded both Donoghoe's and Ranson's reports.

West also claimed in his judgement that he was leaving to Donoghoe and other members of the forensic investigative team in The Netherlands the decision on what the evidence indicates for "criminal responsibility for the deaths".  

That process will run until "at least mid-2016", according to the coroner.  "The question of who is to blame for the destruction of the aircraft was not considered by the [Dutch Safety] Board as a criminal investigation is being undertaken in order to gather evidence." 

Tjibbe Joustra

The DSB report, and subsequent media statements by its chairman, Tjibbe Joustra (left), explicitly point blame at Russia for allegedly supplying Buk missiles and to Novorussian units fighting the Kiev regime for firing at least one  of them. For details, read this.  

West announced this disclaimer:  "it is not the role of this Court to attribute blame… the criminal responsibility for the deaths does not form part of the scope of this inquest."

In his sole reference to the political geography of the Ukraine conflict West hinted at the same blame for Russia as Joustra. "The location of the crash site," records West's ruling, "was, and remains, an area subjected to ongoing hostile military action between armed groups and Ukrainian forces."   

If West has decided the "armed groups" weren't Ukrainian, his innuendo is that they were Russian.

"How can the Australian coroner have it both ways," commented an international coronial law expert. "If he won't make findings about the detonation, he shouldn't endorse the DSB's claims about the Buk missile.

If he insists the Buk missile was the culprit, West is contradicting what he says are the limitations of his own inquiry,  and also the evidence of the only experts he called to testify."

By excluding the evidence of the Australian Federal Police and of his own pathologist, adds an Australian barrister, "West has taken sides in the politics of the case. If on top of that he is refusing to release the Donoghoe and Ranson reports, he is covering up. West has discredited his own court." 

Apendix: Other articles, continued

Is there a war crime in what Lord Heh-heh, Tjibbe Joustra of the Dutch Safety Board, is broadcasting? (19/10/15), Dutch reports on MH17 have mistaken BUK missile model, warhead type – the footnote which puts the boot to BUK (16/10/15), Is there a war crime in what Lord Heh-heh, Tjibbe Joustra of the Dutch Safety Board, is broadcasting? (19/10/15), Dutch reports on MH17 have mistaken BUK missile model, warhead type – the footnote which puts the boot to BUK (16/10/15), Autopsy of the MH17 crash – Dutch Safety Board reveals 3 possible pieces of BUK shrapnel in the bodies of the cockpit crew, and chemical evidence it cannot substantiate – Australian Federal Police issue public rejection of Australian government allegations (13/12/15).

Once upon a time, there was a terrible tyrant who lived in an ancient castle with his family in the land of Sham. They lived in decadent luxury, feasting it was said on the young and succulent progeny of the land they ruled over. The people living below slaved to scratch a living and keep some food for themselves, suffering constant fear of the tyrant's soldiers and their terrible weapons.

But one day the benevolent rulers of the neighbouring lands got together and agreed to help the poor peasants of the land of Sham fight for their rights, and even overthrow the wretched tyrant. The royal leaders of these lands, who followed a faith of tolerance and peace and love, opened their gold purses for the people of Sham, and bought them gleaming swords to protect themselves from the tyrant's raiders, as well as new tunics of black goat hair and supplies of grain and oil and incense for their homes. But they also gave them wonderful books full of sacred words and prayers that the people could recite, and shout out to curse the wicked tyrant and his dreadful men.

But the people of Sham still struggled, as the tyrant found new ways to steal their food and to terrorise them, so the kings got together again and hatched a plan. They would send some of their own honoured knights and courtiers to the land of Sham and lay siege to the castle, cutting the vital supplies of oil and of fuel and food to the tyrant and his family by kidnapping his men with their cargoes. The oil which came from the land of Sham was very valuable, so the benevolent kings of Krisis - which was the name of their lands, traded the special oil they had captured for tools and weapons for the peasants of Sham. Then the kings sent instructions to their knights and courtiers on how to strike at the castle when the tyrant had been so weakened by the siege that he could no longer resist the swords and curses of the knights of Krisis and the armies of 'Free Sham'...

This is an ancient story, and the ending we can only guess at now, because the land of Sham, which is now known as 'Syria', looks very different. In fact it is almost the mirror image of the old fable, as Syria's ruler is anything but an evil tyrant and lives in a small palace far from his family's home and lands. He doesn't need to protect himself from his people with walls and weapons, because they will protect him, while he keeps them safe from the evils of the world. And those evils are now all around, as the lands of Krisis are now occupied by kings and princes who know nothing of justice and humanity and occupy themselves in counting their gold and polishing their swords and guns, and plotting on how to attack their neighbours to steal their property and drive out their people....

- and thus begins the story of St George and the Dragon of Da'esh...

Santa, counting his orders and sorting them through
Said “ To me for some reason it’s not ringing true !
Some kids are getting extravagant toys
Whilst some gifts are mere tokens for girls and for boys”

"It’s not good enough to let this difference remain
I think it unfair and quite frankly, insane
The kids are all good, they’ve done nothing bad
And some of this stuff is only a fad"

"But I have a plan to sort out this mess
I don’t like unfairness with some getting less
Who are these children with jet skis assigned
Or dolls with real hair, who walk , talk and smile?"

"Why I know the answer, rich kids are the heirs
To fortunes amazing from property and shares
They don’t have to wait for some of it to be theirs
As they open their presents tucked under the stairs."

"I’m a socialist person at heart don’t you see?
But I know that nice presents cannot be free.
What I want is for some of these well catered-for kids
To to give a few boxes without opening lids."

"I see people in houses and others in sheds
Some sleeping in gutters and other in beds
Some countries are war -torn from June until June
with never a moment to look at the Moon."

"I know that the children who get all the nice toys
Would be really happy and not make a noise
Were all the poor children from here and from there
To wake up that morning to a soft teddy bear"

"I know that they want it , I know it for sure
They may not understand but will feel in their core
That all children should open one present, or more
And play with it happily, without fear of war."

"It’s my job I know to make all this transpire ,
I’ll redistribute the presents, that night, I won’t tire ,
The rich children are happy, they know that it’s fair
And their dreams all are peaceful. They’ve done their share."

The Reverend Andrew Ashdown has been visiting Syria since 2005 – several visits before the conflict, and three in the last two years. On this occasion he was a member of a diverse peace delegation which was allowed freedom of movement by the Syrian Government. Ashdown writes: During the visit we met with hundreds of people - local and national political leaders, both government and internal opposition figures; with local and national Muslim and Christian leaders and members of reconciliation committees; with internally displaced refugees; and with numerous people on the streets of towns and cities – Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Alawite; most of whom feel their voices are unheard, ignored and misrepresented.

Candobetter.net Editor: Emphasis and headings that are not place-names have been inserted by the editor.

Revd Andrew Ashdown is an Anglican Priest in the Diocese of Winchester, England. He has been visiting, leading groups to the Middle East, and engaging with faith leaders in the region for 30 years. He also works in the field of Inter-faith. Andrew visited Syria several times prior to the conflict, and has visited the country three times in the last 20 months. He is currently undertaking a PhD exploring Christian/Muslim relations in Syria in recent years. - Editor.

Delegation to Syria

I was in Syria as part of an international delegation in Syria, led by Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace laureate; at the invitation of the Greek Melkite Syrian Patriarch Gregorius Laham; and at our own expense. This was my third visit to Syria since April 2014, and I have visited Syria on several occasions prior to the conflict.

Voices of Syrians themselves are largely ignored in polarised narrative

In this report, I seek to convey the key messages from my latest visit to Syria. The context is highly complex. The country has long been a rich mosaic of cultures and faiths. It is a birthplace of civilisations and of the Abrahamic faiths, which have lived predominantly in harmony for hundreds of years. In the context of the war, there are many narratives, and the West’s tends to be skewed, biased and misleading. Of course there are truths in all narratives, but those that pretend that Syria’s problems are ‘black and white’ or a case of ‘good vs evil’ are profoundly misguided. In all of it, the voices of Syrians have been largely ignored. And as I have travelled in the country in the past couple of years, I have found a remarkable consistency to the cries and wishes of the people – cries and wishes that fly in the face of the violent prejudices and narratives of those outside the country.

Government provided delegation with armed guard but did not prevent our freedom of movement

For the visit, the Church arranged with the Government to provide us with armed security for protection for which we are very grateful, as the risk of attack or kidnap anywhere is real, but we had no government representative with us, and were free to move as we wish.

During the visit we met with hundreds of people - local and national political leaders, both government and internal opposition figures; with local and national Muslim and Christian leaders and members of reconciliation committees; with internally displaced refugees; and with numerous people on the streets of towns and cities – Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, Alawite; all of whom feel their voices are unheard, ignored and misrepresented.

Itinerary

We travelled to Damascus, Homs, Maaloula and Tartous, and stayed 3 nights in a 6th Century monastery just 8 km from ‘IS’ lines. Sadly we had to flee Maaloula when we were informed that terrorists in the surrounding area (belonging to a western-backed ‘moderate’ faction) had heard of our visit and intended to try to ambush us.

We had hoped to visit Aleppo, but our safety both on the route and in the city could not be guaranteed. In Lebanon we also met with General Michel Aoun, a leading Christian politician, and with the Vice-president of Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Qassem.

Damascus

The centre of Damascus – the historic and commercial areas of the city – remains beautiful, despite the ravages of frequent shelling from ‘rebel’ held suburbs. But the presence of numerous army checkpoints throughout the city, and the economic effects of the war – closed hotels and shops – are evident. Yet life goes on. People try to live with a degree of ‘normality’, but the economic situation is increasingly harsh.

Talking to friends and people on the street in Damascus and elsewhere is deeply moving. The economic crisis is biting deep. Vast numbers of people have no or little income and are struggling to survive. One friend told me he knew several friends who had had good jobs before the conflict, who are now reduced to begging on the streets. In some areas of Damascus, formerly a proud, dynamic, prosperous city, there are lines of impromptu stalls selling second hand clothes - not from charities as in Africa - but from ordinary citizens selling clothes and belongings in order to eat, or heat their houses in the winter. Again and again, we have been told this is the primary reason now for many emigrating - not (as Western politicians or media would have us believe) for fear of the government; but simply the need to survive. One person said: "We can survive the war, but we cannot survive without food". This is a heart-rending situation especially for those of us who knew Syria before the conflict. Certainly, I detect a change even since my last visit in April this year - a shift from fear (there is a sense that Russia has helped shift the balance in the war) - to a sense of real sadness and depression. Everyone is affected and exhausted by the war and longs for its end. The actions of the western allies are only prolonging it and deepening the suffering.

It was a joy to spend a few hours with Greek Melkite Patriarch of Syria, His Excellency Gregorius III Laham, and to be invited to lunch with him. It is often forgotten that Christianity in Syria dates from the time of St. Paul, and there have been Christians in the land ever since. Syria remains the only country in the world where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken.

The Patriarch’s message? : Syria is the cradle of civilisation and of faiths which have for centuries lived in harmony together. The world should cease arming and supporting people of violence, and bring all parties together in a shared political process. Outsiders have no right to dictate who is or isn't a part of that process. Who leads the country should be chosen by Syrians, not by external powers. For the sake of Christianity, and for Christian-Muslim relations worldwide, the Church should be listening to the people of faith from the lands of their birth. Sadly, that call is ignored.

In Damascus we also met with the Grand Mufti, His Excellency Dr. Ahmad Badr Al Din Hassoun. An impressive figure and a highly respected Muslim theologian in his own right, Dr. Hassoun is passionate about the plurality of Syrian society and the equal place that Muslims, Christians and Jews have always had, and should continue to have, within it. Dr. Hassoun must be one of the most ‘moderate’ and inclusive Muslim leaders in the world , and yet countries in the west, because he is a President’s appointee, refuse to meet him. There are indeed those of an Islamist persuasion in Syria who hate him because he represents an approach to Islam that some Islamist interpretations do not allow. Yet, he represents hope for the continuance of inter-religious respect and sectarian stability in Syrian society, and is certainly someone with whom our leaders should be speaking, but he is refused a visa to visit Britain.

Qara

Our Base for three nights was the remarkable Monastery of St. James the Mutilated, near the Sunni/Christian village of Qara, in the desert 60 miles north of Damascus. Here, we were surrounded by fighters of the so-called 'IS' about 25km to the east, and about 8 km to the west. The village was occupied by them briefly in November 2013, and the monastery was untouched due to the protection of the Muslim residents of the village who smuggled food to them.

The monastery was built in the 6th Century. Its Church was built on both a previous Roman one and a pagan temple before that, a symbol of the ancient rootedness of Christianity in the land of Syria. Its ruins were restored by the amazing indomitable Mother Agnes, who has worked untiringly with local Christian and Muslim leaders to undertake reconciliation processes in village communities; to rehabilitate fighters and negotiate truces. There is an inspiring community of nuns and monks here living out a Christian ministry and witness. Mother Agnes is much loved and respected here and the criticism she has received in the west I believe is grossly unfair. Nights were punctured with the regular sound of not so distant gunfire and shelling. And yet despite the proximity of terrorists, each service is preceded with the ringing of a loud bell that echoes across the valley. A profound symbol of witness, courage and presence.

Qara village is a majority Sunni village with a minority Christian population. The two communities have lived together with mutual respect for centuries. The Mosque is actually an ancient Christian Church, and the Churches in the town were badly vandalised by Daesh when they occupied the town in 2013, including ancient and rare frescos . Muslims and Christians protected each other during the occupation and both communities have helped to restore the local Churches. The mayor and faith leaders spoke with pride of the harmony in the town, but fear of what may be if the 'rebels' are allowed to win.

Homs

Homs is a poignant city. Half of it (that half that was occupied by the extremists) is completely destroyed, whilst the government-controlled side has a degree of normality. In 2014, I had visited the city when shelling and car-bombs from rebel positions in the city were a daily reoccurrence. In the town we spoke to citizens, who are delighted that the city has been liberated from the 'rebels'. A young Christian woman showed me a photograph of her bombed out home. I asked her who had bombed her home. She said that the Government had bombed her home after her family had fled the rebel occupation. Her words?

“If it takes the Government to bomb my house to get rid of the terrorists, I accept that.”

Meeting with the Governor of Homs Province, he told us that plans for the rebuilding of Homs have already been drawn up by wealthy Syrians in the Gulf. Over 1000 citizens who had fled have returned to the city and more are returning each month.

Christian and Muslim leaders in Homs worked together for liberation truce

Local Christian and Muslim leaders in the city had been instrumental in agreeing the reconciliation truce that led to the liberation of the city.

The government had declared an amnesty for fighters who chose to lay down their arms, and several hundred have been reintegrated into the community. Those who didn't were allowed to leave with one weapon – many of these are now fighting in Idlib province.

People in Homs asked why western government support terrorists

There are still tensions however and not everyone supports the government. Indeed, some armed fighters remain in one part of the city. But the city feels like one that is on a path towards healing. One evening, we went walking in the streets of the city. People were coming up spontaneously and welcoming us to Homs. They were all saying how glad they are that the city has been liberated, and asking why western governments are supporting ‘terrorists’ (the rebels). One young man came up to us and said he had been a tourist guide prior to the conflict and was moved to tears to see us as foreigners visiting the city. They urged us to tell our governments to work with the people of Syria to bring peace.

Fr Franz Van den Lugt said that foreign militants started the violence in the Homs uprising

It was deeply moving to visit the Jesuit Centre in Homs where Fr Franz Van den Lugt, a much loved Dutch priest who worked in Homs for 40 years, was shot through the head last year whilst sitting in the garden. The chair on which he was assassinated is still in place. He had declared that the violence in the uprising in Homs had been started by foreign militants, (he was there) but had refused to leave the monastery when militants took over the area. His school is still running and the children, in the heart of this devastated part of the city, are a sign of hope.

One evening was spent in the heart of the Old City of Homs to meet some of the most remarkable people of faith in the world - the Ministry for Reconciliation led by Fr Michel Naaman and the local Sheikh in the city. Throughout the occupation of the city by militants, the faith leaders have worked tirelessly to bring peace and reconciliation between communities, and their work has had some amazing success. They oversaw the evacuation of the rebels from the city, during which the priest told us, the Syrian army were distributing food and cigarettes to the rebels. Those rebels who laid down their arms have been reintegrated into the city. During their work, several of the Reconciliation Committee have been injured or killed by people they were trying to help. Their work continues to bring together the different factions in Homs, and they believe that only peace and love will transform situations of conflict.

Shock at Archbishop of Canterbury support for British bombing campaign

I told Fr Michel that the Archbishop of Canterbury had that day lent his support to the British Government’s desire to bomb 'IS'. Everyone in the room - Christian and Muslim -were visibly shocked. I asked what his message was....it is this:

"Syria was always a diverse people in unity with each other. People should unite to defeat terrorism, but should respect national sovereignty. The West says they want to destroy Daesh but Syrian people will be killed and towns will be destroyed... They really want to defeat Syria. It is likely there will be terrible consequences. Have the West not learnt from the past? Instead, stop fuelling 'IS' with weapons and support to people of violence, and help all Syrians to come together to find a political solution and have a national dialogue. Give the money that will be spent on destruction to Syria to help in reconstruction. And If not, leave us alone and let Syrians choose their own future... "

Internal opposition

In my three visits to Syria since April 2014, I have met most of the internal opposition figures in the country. There are some good people amongst them. Along with many eyewitnesses during the initial demonstrations in 2011, some of them have spoken of the presence of non-Syrian armed militants who helped stoke the flames of violence during those early months. The Opposition leaders speak openly and very critically of the political shortcomings of the regime, especially the issues of political imprisonment, disappearance, and corruption. But they maintain that Assad himself is the only leader capable of holding the sectarian balance. They admit that there are both good and bad people in the government, and that Assad has been held back in his desire for reform from members of the ‘old guard’.

Western ‘peace’ processes bar Syrian internal opposition politicians

We spent a remarkable three hour journey in the company of one of Syria's leading internal opposition leaders, Samir Hawash, an impressive man who has joined recent discussions in Moscow, Kazakhstan and Istanbul, but like all internal Syrian politicians, is refused inclusion in the western 'peace processes'. He was involved in early demonstrations, but early on was informed that militant groups were planning an armed uprising with assistance from outside. He begged the leaders of the militants not to take up weapons.

In 2010 he had been informed “there is going to be a war in Syria. It has all been planned.” He told us that when the demonstrations began, most people had wanted change, but he says now maybe 60-70% of Syrians in the country support Assad as the only person who can hold the country together. He has become a symbol of unity.
This has been the consistent impression from everyone whom we’ve met – Sunni, Shia, Alwaite, Christian.

Samir Hawash says armed militants fired first in demonstration

We asked him if the government had fired first on the demonstrators. He said that he was there. And no, it was armed militants who fired first.

Over 80 soldiers were killed in the early days of the ‘peaceful’ demonstrations – and the names and dates are documented. (I’ve heard the same from people who participated in the demonstrations in Homs, Latakkia, Damascus, and Aleppo.)

He said all militant opposition groups want to see a Muslim State and the division of the country (a position that all the Parliamentary and political meetings I have attended in Britain seem to approve); whilst the unarmed parties who seek a secular, pluralistic State are not given credence or a voice in the international arena.
He said that Turkey will support any opposition as long as regime change is the goal. The only goal on the part of the international community from the very beginning has been regime change, and they have been willing to allow the destruction of a country to achieve it.

Tartous

Our visit to Tartous was to receive a mobile medical centre that has been donated by a Dutch company for use amongst internally-displaced refugees in the coastal area, and also as a distribution centre for aid to refugees. It was deeply moving to meet those who had come to receive aid.

Some of the women told us (the monks who were with us translated for us) how their husbands and sons had been murdered by rebel groups (that the West is supporting and regards as 'moderate'). Notice the picture of Assad and Putin on the side of the distribution centre...everywhere we went, the Russians are regarded as heroes!

It is very hard to describe however the emotion of what we stumbled across by chance when we visited a local hospital. We could not have known that our visit would coincide with the return of the bodies of 22 soldiers killed in a battle in Aleppo, to their families.

Hundreds had gathered, and there was intense emotion as the coffins were loaded off a lorry, to the piercing cries of grieving relatives. We joined the crowds giving condolences to families who seemed to genuinely appreciate our presence.

Suddenly a young boy of about 10 whose fathers body was being returned, and was standing next to his crying mother and a sheikh, stood to attention in front of me, saluted and with tears flowing gave a deeply moving speech.
One of the monks with me told me that in what he said there was not one word of anger, hatred or violence, but that his words were roughly this:

"My father is a blessing to this country. He has given his life so that we may live in peace. But he is not dead. He is a martyr. And I honour him. He will live, and because of him syria will have peace."

I stood to attention looking straight at him with the crowds around looking on and letting him finish. I then saluted him before going to hold him and give e him a blessing. I could not stop the tears. The sheikh hugged me with tears in his eyes too. It is an experience I will remember as long as I Live… It was far too intense a moment to photograph.
The crowds dispersed with sirens and loud gunfire...

Maaloula

We had a fairly dramatic visit to Maaloula, the most famous Christian village in Syria, where the residents say they have lived for 5000 years, and where Aramaic, the language of Jesus is still spoken.

We were due to spend half the day there with the people of the town, but shortly after our arrival the Mayor received a message that terrorists in the surrounding hills had heard about our visit, and were going to attempt to ambush us. So with huge disappointment we had to make a high speed departure to Damascus.

I was therefore very pleased that I had visited Maaloula in April 2015, and visited both the ancient shrines of St. Thecla and of St. Sergius, both of which have been very badly damaged and defaced by the rebels. Most of the precious icons for which Maaloula is famous have also disappeared. The town was occupied by the rebels for three months, during which time there was huge tension between the Muslim and Christian residents of the town, though some of the Muslim residents had sheltered Christians. A number of Christian villagers were murdered by the rebels for refusing to convert to Islam. There is a concerted effort, with Government help, to restore the shrines and rebuild the town, and some of the residents who fled have returned.

Lebanon: Meeting with Sheikh Naim Qassem, Vice-President of Hezbollah.

Essential to finding paths to peace is talking to all parties. So it was interesting to meet with Hezbollah MPs and Sheikh Naim Qassem, Vice-president and a founder of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah are a deeply religious Shia group, and one which respects other faiths. (One of the monks in Syria told me he had learned more about the Virgin Mary from a Hezbollah young man, than anyone else!) And my encounters with Hezbollah individuals have been of a primarily dignified and respectful people. I certainly did not agree with everything Sheikh Qassem said, but there was wisdom and truth in much of what he said.

I asked him what he would say to the British Government if they were ever to listen to him. His reply was:

"The issue for the British Government is discernment between Truth and falseness. Who are they really against and what do they really stand for? We don't want you to be our supporters.. We want you to support truth..and you cannot be selective about international law."

(See picture in this article of the author with Sheikh Qassem, another Hezbollah MP (also a local doctor), the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Bekaa.

Lebanon. Bourj Al Burajneh

In Beirut we visited the site of the bombing in Burj Al Burajneh that killed over 40 people and injured over 100 the day before the Paris bombing. We laid flowers and placed candles there.

One young man had prevented further killings by tackling a suicide bomber and covering him with his own body before the vest exploded.

Our visit, in the heart of a Hezbollah district, was clearly appreciated by everyone around. We were then taken to the local hospital to meet some of the wounded. The little lad, aged about 10, pictured in hospital with his mother, was riding past on his father's motorbike. His father was killed. The doctor said he was very close to his father and is deeply psychologically scarred.

The families and victims (Shia Muslim) wanted to receive our prayers and blessings, and one little boy even asked for my cross. I told them at the location: every soul killed and family bereaved in Beirut is equally as important as each soul and bereaved family in Paris, Syria or Russia.

General Michel Aoun

We spent nearly two hours with General Michel Aoun, Chairman of one of Lebanon’s most important Christian parties. He spoke of the recent history of Christianity in the Levant, and suggested to us that with the Christian populations in Iraq and Palestine so severely depleted, Lebanon and Syria are now the most important Christian centres in the Levant. He said we have a responsibility in the West to protect the Christians of the east – in the birthplace of Christianity. He spoke of the danger to Christians in the region now, and that their presence as part of the fabric of society in the region is essential to the stability and p lurality of the fabric of the region as a whole.

Key points from the visit:

Despite enormous suffering and a devastating economic situation, there is enormous resilience. Those who live in or have fled to the comparative safety of the government-controlled areas (perhaps 60% of the population), whether Christian, Sunni, Shi’a, Alawite, Druze, and of different political persuasions, where life goes on with a degree of ‘normality’ amidst great hardship, and there is some small degree of rebuilding and State infrastructure, (the destruction is not total) have a remarkably consistent message:

• Stop supporting armed groups. There are very few so-called ‘moderate’ rebels and those that do exist are divided – they have become channels for weapons to the extremists who are by far the majority and whose sole goal is an Islamic State.

• Work together to defeat Daesh. Bombing is not the answer… civilians will be killed and towns and villages will be destroyed. The consequences of simply bombing Daesh could be disastrous in the long term… the creation of more jihadis and hatred. Cut them off at source – their funding and arms, and support those who fight them on the ground.

• Bring all parties together in a national dialogue. You cannot exclude the government that is managing the State institutions and structures.

People are very suspicious (and probably justifiably) of the motives the Western alliance. They believe they are political pawns in a much bigger political ‘game’.

• You cannot exclude the people of Syria from a political solution.

• Realities in Syria are profoundly misrepresented in the west.

• There are multiple narratives. It is not ‘black’ and ‘white’ (or ‘good’ vs ‘evil’) as appears to be the primary presentation in the media.

• An externally imposed solution is only like to lead to further sectarianism and chaos

• Follow international law in your dealings with Syria.

Listen to the faith communities. Much can be learned and foundations have been laid from the work of the reconciliation committees ‘on the ground’ in towns and cities across the country.

Come and visit Syria. Meet and listen to the people for yourselves.

We were met with enormous kindness and hospitality. The people are exhausted and emotionally traumatised. Christians and Muslims continue to work together to bring peace and reconciliation in local towns and cities with some remarkable successes. Those involved are absolutely opposed to violence. Everyone wants to see the war end.
Our government’s position and ignorance of the realities on the ground and the wishes of the people of Syria is profoundly disturbing.

Revd Andrew Ashdown
3 December 2015

Western media are reporting headline claims that “new evidence supports claims about Syrian state detention deaths”, saying that “a leading rights group has released new evidence that up to 7,000 Syrians who died in state detention centres were tortured, mistreated, or executed”, noting that this information is a moral wakeup call and demanding that officials being held to account should be “central to peace efforts.”

The Caesar Photos and Impunity in Syria

[Editor's comment: 'Caesar' is allegedly the code name of a forensic photographer who smuggled the pictures out.]

However, as is usually so, not everything is quite as it seems.  So let’s take a look at the
facts.

First the timing. 

As has been commonplace the timing of the reports like these have almost always coincided with important diplomatic meetings or just after important UN resolutions are passed.

For example, beginning in mid-March claims began to pour in that Assad had been using chlorine bombs against his opponents.  Media reports would cite the fact that only 2 months later the government had already been accused of using chlorine 35 times.  What they failed to mention however was that no claims were made for an
entire 7 months before this.  So what changed after these 7 months?

Well, a UN resolution was passed condemning the use of chlorine, that’s what.

The governments alleged chlorine campaign “began just over a week after the UN security council passed a resolution under chapter 7 of the UN charter condemning its use,” the Guardian would report. For more than half of a year no claims are made and then a week after a UN resolution is passed, all of a sudden a total of 35 are made in just under 2 months.

If Assad was really using chlorine, why would he wait a full 7 months only to use it at the exact time that it would prove to be the most disastrous for him? 

This, coupled with the fact that former OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) inspectors admit that there was insufficient
evidence to prove the use of chlorine, let alone assign blame for who did it. 

Notorious White Helmets civil defense group

And further troubling still is that the claims came from the “White Helmets” “civil defense group”, who have been notorious for producing false claims against the Syrian government.  In actuality the White Helmets are part of a slick propaganda campaign aimed at mobilizing
support for foreign intervention and calling for a “no-fly zone” to oust the president.  They have financial links to Western-backed NGOs who relentlessly work towards furthering the US agenda in the region, and are themselves embedded with al-Qaeda and ISIS.  Their primary function is to demonize the
Syrian government while acting as al-Qaeda’s clean-up crew, both literally and in terms of propaganda, as one video shows them waiting to clean up dead bodies moments after al-Qaeda commits summary executions against unarmed civilians.  They have produced numerous fake videos, fake photos, and fake narratives in order to manipulate public opinion towards their bias.[1]

Needless to say, their words aren’t credible.

Human Rights Watch admits only 27 of Caesar photos significantly documented; not 7000

In terms of the the Caesar photos, they too are published days before an important Syrian peace conference between the US and Russia, further raising questions as to whether the timing has anything to do with helping Syrian detainees or everything to do with political impact.

As noted by Human Rights Investigations, a previous report of the photos was done by
Carter-Ruck and Co. Solicitors of London and published through CNN and the Guardian in January of 2014.  The Carter-Ruck report claims that the 55,000 images available show 11,000 dead detainees.  However, according to the recent HRW report only 28,707 of the photos are ones that they have “understood to have died in government custody” while the remaining 24,568 are of dead soldiers killed in battle.  That is, half of the alleged “torture victims” are actually dead soldiers.

Of the remaining half (6,786), HRW maintains that they “understand” the photos are of dead detainees, this is where the media is getting the “7,000” figure from, yet they themselves admit later on that they were only “able to verify 27 cases of detainees whose family members’ statements regarding their arrest and physical characteristics matched the
photographic evidence.”

So, in other words, half of the original batch of photos aren’t torture victims, while of the other half only 27 can be verified by HRW.

Doubts about the 27 'documented' photos

There is also reason to doubt the reliability of these 27 cases.

Previous reports of the photos also coincided with important diplomatic events like the 2014 Geneva II conferences.  However, at that time, UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay admitted that the reports were unverified: “the report… if verified, is truly horrifying.”  While it was admitted by outlets like Reuters that they were unable “to determine the authenticity of Caesar’s photographs or to contact Caesar”
while Amnesty International notes that they too “cannot authenticate the images.”

One wonders what happened during this time that allowed HRW to do what these others could not just a year prior.

Leaving that aside however, let’s say that they are true, that they do prove that the Syrian government tortured 27
individuals, and that holding the officials “to account should be central to any peace efforts.”

It follows then that the major offenders should be held to account.  Namely the United
States.

United States contracts out torture program to foreign aid recipients

Of the top 10 recipients of US foreign aid programs in 2014, all of them practice torture while at least half of them are reportedly doing so on a massive scale, according to leading human rights organizations.

Afghanistan

For example, according to the UN torture in Afghanistan’s prisons continues to be widespread, while according to Human Rights Watch in Kenya police “tortured,
raped, and otherwise abused and arbitrarily detained at least 1,000 refugees between mid-November 2012 and late January 2013.”

Nigeria

The worst abuses
of torture in government detention centers however were in Nigeria, which received $693 million of US taxpayer money. . There, according to Amnesty, nearly 1,000 people died in military custody in only the first 6 months of 2013.  This means that “Nigeria’s military has killed more civilians than (Boko Haram) militants did” within the same timeframe.  Recently, the Nigerian army, instead of fighting Boko Haram has massacredupwards of 1,000 Muslims belonging to a peaceful movement opposed to extremism.

Israel

In terms of Israel, by far the leading recipient with $3.1 billion, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel accused the government of torturing and sexually assaulting Palestinian children suspected of minor crimes, while also keeping detainees in cages outside during winter.  “The majority of Palestinian child detainees are charged with throwing stones, and 74 per cent experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation.”

United States

Not to mention our own [meaning the US; The writer lives in the United States - Candobetter.net] widely publicized torture program.

According to the official narrative, the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programs [2] began under Bush after 9/11 and were considered “rogue elements” and “aberrations” to normal CIA practice, they were approved at the highest levels of government, but were eventually ended under Obama in 2009. 

Yet as leading international security scholar Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found in a recent and thorough investigation “Obama did not ban torture in 2009, and has not rescinded it now. He instead rehabilitated torture with a carefully crafted Executive Order that has received little scrutiny.” 

It demanded interrogation techniques be brought in line with the US Army Field Manual, which is in compliance with the Geneva Convention.  However, the manual was revised in 2006 to include 19 forms of interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition.  “A new UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) review of the manual shows that a wide-range of torture techniques continue to be deployed by the US government,” Ahmed notes, “including isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, chemically-induced psychosis, adjustments of environmental and dietary rules, among others.”

In his book “Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation” the highly renowned Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alfred McCoy shows that from the 1950s onward the CIA spent billions “improving” interrogation techniques. 

At the start, the emphasis was on electroshock, hypnosis, psychosurgery, and drugs, including the infamous use of LSD on unsuspecting soldiers, yet they proved ineffective.  It was later found that sensory disorientation and "self-inflicted pain", such as forcing a subject to stand for many hours with arms outstretched, were far more effective means of breaking individuals; the exact torture techniques it has been shown the US still
employs to this day.[3] 

The CIA found that by using only the deprivation of the senses, a state akin to psychosis can be induced in just 48 hours.

They found that the KGB’s most devastating torture technique of all was not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing victims to stand for days on end.  “The legs swelled, the skin erupted spreading lesions, the kidneys shut down, and hallucinations began” explains McCoy, “all incredibly painful.”

Refined through decades of practice, “the CIA’s use of sensory deprivation relies on seemingly banal procedures: heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine,” yet this combines to form “a systematic attack on the sensory pathways of the human mind” for devastating effect.

These are not “aberrations”, but instead the fruition of over half a century’s work in the experimentation of the science of cracking the code of the human mind, of the perfection of psychological torture into its most sophisticated forms.

“With the election and re-election of President Barak Obama, the problem of torture has not, as many of us have once hoped, simply disappeared, wiped away by sweeping executive orders,” McCoy explains, “Instead it is now well into a particularly sordid second phase, called impunity.”

Legalising torture

Simply put, impunity is the political process of legalizing illegal acts.

“In this case, torture.”[4])

Instead of ending, US torture “continues to be deployed by the US government” in its most destructive forms.

It has been re-packaged and rehabilitated, codifying into law, and vanished from the general public consciousness.

Furthermore, not only does the US engage in torture on a mass scale, it and its allies as well “outsource” their torture to various regimes, utilizing their intelligence and security services to do their dirty work for them.

UK and Libya

It was recently reported by numerous Libyan dissidents that the UK government had entangled itself in a deep and sordid relationship with Muammar Gaddafi that amounted to “a
criminal conspiracy”, as heard before the UK high court.

A conspiracy where the UK had become “enmeshed in illegality” and involved in “rendition, unlawful detention and torture.”

The victims claim that British intelligence routinely blackmailed them, threatened their families with unlawful
imprisonment and abuse if they did not cooperate.  Information was extracted through torture in
prisons in Tripoli and fed into the British court systems as secret evidence that could not be challenged.

Yet this merely represents a wider trend whereby Western governments commit horrendous crimes in collusion with foreign states, and then use those same acts as justification for aggression against them.

Iraq

The United States attempted to justify the invasion of Iraq on non-existent WMD’s after it had supplied the same weapons to the country decades prior to wage war on Iran.

As well it was Gaddafi's alleged brutality and use of torture that was invoked to justify the devastating attack on Libya that has left the country in shambles and overrun with suffering and terrorism.

And so too with Syria.

Not only is the United States by degrees of magnitude more culpable for the crime of torture, it also was intimately involved in offshoring its crimes to Syrian jails.

A key participant in the CIA’s covert rendition program, Syria was one of the “most common destinations for rendered subjects.”

So while torture in Syria was all too real, what is commonly left out is 3 little words: “with our support.”

First we utilize, exploit, and propagate the atrocities, and then proceed to bask in our own moral righteousness as we
denounce others for the crimes that we helped commit, utilizing them to justify further atrocities and aggressions for shortsighted geopolitical aims.

If “officials being held to account” are really “central to any peace effort” in regards to torture, we know exactly where to find them: right here at home in Washington and London.

            Notes:

[1]   
For more on this, see Vanessa Beeley’s great reports, “‘White Helmets’: New Breed of Mercenaries and Propagandists, Disguised as ‘Humanitarians’ in Syria”, 21^st
Century Wire, Pt. 1: http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/09/01/white-helmets-new-breed-of-mercenaries-and-propagandists-disguised-as-humanitarians-in-syria/, Pt. 2: http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/09/01/white-helmets-new-breed-of-mercenaries-and-propagandists-disguised-as-humanitarians-in-syria/, & overview with interview: http://www.mintpressnews.com/us-propaganda-war-in-syria-report-ties-white-helmets-to-foreign-intervention/209435/.
 

[2] See Editors' notes lower down.

[3]   Alfred McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation.

[4] Alfred McCoy giving a lecture on his book “Torture and Impunity” at Madison’s Overture Center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgazW9sRrW4.

This article was originally entitled, "The Caesar Photos and Impunity in Syria". Author Steven Chovanec is an independent geopolitical analyst and writer based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a student of International Studies and Sociology at Roosevelt University and conducts independent, open-source research into geopolitics and social issues.  His writings can be found at undergroundreports.blogspot.com. You may find him on Twitter @stevechovanec.

EDITOR'S NOTES

[2] What is 'extraordinary rendition'? From Wikipedia:
Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another.^{#cite_note-54_countries-1">[1]}

In the United States, the first well-known rendition case was that of an airline hijacker abducted in Italy and brought to the U.S. for trial, authorized by President Ronald Reagan.^{#cite_note-Naftali-2">[2]} President Bill Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.^{#cite_note-3">[3]} The administration of President George W. Bush "renditioned" hundreds of so-called "illegal combatants" (often never charged with any crime) for torture by proxy, and to US controlled sites for an extensive, advanced interrogation operation program under the euphemism enhanced interrogation.^{#cite_note-4">[4]} Extraordinary rendition continued with reduced frequency in the Obama administration: instead of subjecting them to advanced interrogation methods, most of those abducted have been conventionally interrogated and subsequently taken to the US for trial.^{#cite_note-5">[5]}

Extraordinary rendition remains a clear violation of international law.^{#cite_note-MyUser_The_Economist_February_24_2015c-6">[6]} The United Nations considers one nation abducting the citizens of another a crime against humanity.^{#cite_note-MyUser_The_Washington_Post_July_26_2015c-7">[7]} Abduction has also been a recognized casus belli (justification for war) in the Western tradition since Helen of Troy. In July 2014 the European Court of Human Rights condemned the government of Poland for participating in CIA extraordinary rendition, ordering Poland to pay restitution to men who had been abducted, taken to a CIA black site in Poland, and tortured.^{#cite_note-European_Court_of_Human_Rights-8">[8]#cite_note-9">[9]#cite_note-MyUser_Reuters.com_February_24_2015c-10">[10]} Overall, 54 countries are known to have been involved with US extraordinary renditions.^{#cite_note-54_countries-1">[1]}

See also this review of the film, Extraordinary Rendition. This film has never been released in big commercial venues.

One of the most critical emerging power struggles of the 21st Century is taking place – the battle to control the Internet. The Internet offers up the opportunity for exercising extraordinary political, economic, and military power. Already exploitation of this super-network has helped create the world’s most valuable company, toppled governments, led to the largest wealth transfer in history, and created the most extensive global surveillance system ever So who won the Internet Wars in 2015? E-diplomacy expert and author of the recently released Internet Wars Fergus Hanson has delivered the verdict.

Here are the winners and the losers for 2015 Internet Wars 2015 Winners Losers Monopoly Interests Civil Liberties Extremists Intellectual Property Citizen Power Security of Internet Communications Hanson said 2015 was the year a handful of tech titans consolidated their growing control of key economic chokepoints online, making Monopoly Interests the clear winner in 2015.

“In 2013, two tech titans made it into the Fortune 500 top 10 by market “In 2015, there were three in the top five and four in the top 10.

“Apple, the world’s most valuable company, was worth about twice as much as the next two largest companies combined.

“Companies like Apple, Google and Facebook are securing control over key economic chokepoints online.

“This is not to suggest smaller companies will disappear from the Internet, just that to do business, they’ll have to operate through these titans,’ he said.

Hanson said 2015 was also the year extremists ran roughshod over the West “The world’s most powerful militaries, their sophisticated intelligence services and vast financial resources were outmanoeuvred by a relatively tiny number of degenerate fanatics,” said Hanson.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Internet Wars of 2015 have seen the shake up of the Presidential election like never before, shining a light on the aggregating power of the Internet for ordinary citizens.

“Republican voters have flocked in droves to outsider candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson while, in the Democratic campaign, Hillary Clinton has faced surprisingly strong competition from Bernie Sanders,” said Hanson.

Civil liberties, intellectual property and security of Internet communications are all under siege online, with Hanson declaring them all losers in 2015.

Hanson said the Internet might have extended free speech to many, but in the big picture it has been a double-edged sword.

“Companies like Facebook, with one fifth of the world as users, has begun to exercise an important role as the new moral guardian.

“Its leaked censorship guidelines from 2012 revealed it forbade breastfeeding but gave the thumbs up to crushed heads,” he said.

So is peace possible online?

Hanson said, as a global commons, the Internet will always be open to abuse by individuals, companies, and governments.

“But if broad rules of the road can be agreed, breaches can become the exception rather than the norm, allowing the most important features of the Internet to be preserved.

“This is not an overnight fix. The first step is recognising the turning point we have reached, the critical importance of what’s at stake, and the need to act.

“As an advanced economy and open democracy Australia has a critical interest in securing the Internet’s immense promise into the future.

“Australia should develop a digital foreign policy that identifies our core economic, social and security interests and engage in leading global debates,” he said.

Video & transcript: Bruce Petty interviews Dr Jeremy Salt, Middle Eastern scholar. Bruce Petty is a highly regarded political satirist and cartoonist as well as an award-winning film maker.

"There always has to be a 'madman' in the Middle East," explains Jeremy Salt, when asked why we constantly hear that 'Bashar al-Assad has to go'? Of course Bashar al-Assad is not really mad. Jeremy explains how the west, in its long exploitation of the Middle East, has invented crises that it then pretends to help with, and these tend to feature a 'madman' whom the people have to be saved from. In reaction Middle Eastern governments tend to be defensive and authoritarian, in order to survive constant foreign interference. Even if Bashar went, the Syrian state would remain the same. Salt gives a fluent history of how the west has used the Middle East, and how western politicians expected to knock Syria over easily, but underestimated it. All they have done is weaken it and assorted armed and dangerous groups including ISIS have risen up through the cracks they have created. But many Syrians really like Bashar al-Assad and think he is their best chance for reform. (See the third part in this series, "Has the Syrian president killed more than ISIS and other questions," to hear about how al-Assad is actually legally elected and had brought in reforms prior to the current crisis.) Petty asks about beheading and the role of religion and Islam in today's crisis. Salt agrees that Islam has been taken over by conservatives and extremists, but precises that this is a political ideological take-over that has little to do with Islamic religious base.

Dr Jeremy Salt is a former journalist, turned academic and is the author of The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, (University of California Press, 2008). Until recently, Dr Salt was based in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he ran courses in the history of the modern Middle East, in politics and in politics, propaganda and the media.

The story behind these dialogues: On 16 November 2015 a small group of concerned Australian citizens got together to talk about the problems of getting real information out to Australians and other US-NATO allies about war in Syria, in spite of mainstream press efforts to confuse the public. Bruce Petty and Jeremy Salt were part of that group. Inside is the transcript of the embedded video. (There are two other videos in this series. The first is: "Cartoonist Bruce Petty asks Dr Jeremy Salt: Has Bashar al-Assad killed more people than ISIS? and similar questions". The second is: "Cartoonist Bruce Petty and Dr Jeremy Salt: Where news comes from: reporting on the Middle East."). The third is "Does Bashar al-Assad really have to go? Cartoonist Bruce Petty talks to Dr Jeremy Salt.")

INTRODUCTION BY EDITING TRANSCRIBER: This is the third of three dialogues. In these dialogues, Bruce Petty often agrees with a nod or a murmur, but I have not recorded these comments unless they have been part of a significant change in the dialogue. Petty’s eyes and face are worth watching as he considers what he is hearing. The transcriptions are as accurate as the transcriber could make them, but could contain small errors. Hopefully no errors that would affect the points that Dr Salt and Mr Petty seek to raise and explain.

BRUCE PETTY: The issue is the Middle East and the issue is Syria. And we’re given the idea that Assad has to go. Now, I want to know why he ‘has to go’? And I hear he tortures and he’s got too many people in prison and … now he’s bombing… and there’s gas involved … the whole scenario is there. And, I don’t know the origins of these stories.

JEREMY SALT: Well, you know this thing – if there is an objective truth about it - the Syrian government.

There always has to be a madman in the Middle East

JEREMY SALT: This is such a complex subject to go into. In any case, one point to make is that there always has to be a madman in the Middle East. Or a dictator. There always has been. You go all the way back to the 19th century. Like in [the] 1890s there was a gentleman they called ‘The Mad Mullah’ of Somaliland. Well, Somaliland didn’t have any mullahs. But it was a nice kind of alliterative title that went well with the British media.
And in fact the ‘mad mullah of Somaliland’ was a sheik. He belonged to an Islamic order and what you might call – you might call him a ‘proto-nationalist’. And then, you looked at Sudan in the same period of time - a bit earlier, actually – same period of time – when you had the dervishes, ‘savages’, ‘barbarians’ and so forth and so on.

And you ask, what was the problem there? Well the problem was that their territory, their land, had been invaded by the British. And naturally they were resisting.

And you can follow this all the way back, all the way back to the 19th century.

In the 20th century they portrayed Nasser as a dictator. In fact Nasser was actually a moderate person who wanted to get on with Americans. In particular. And the problem was that Israel - he had problems with Israel. And, you know, that was the reason why he had to be brought down. So he was a ‘dictator’.

You look at Musaddiq in Iran. They couldn’t pretend he was a dictator, because he wasn’t. But they had to find out some other kind of reason for making him look either nasty or stupid. And the fact is, he used to wear for interviews thing that, clothes that the British media laughed at and said, ‘Wearing pyjamas.” And he tended to cry. Because he was an emotional man. So you had many good reasons to laugh at Musaddiq. And get him out of the way.

So, this process, whenever there is a situation, which offends them and they want to sort out, they like to personalise. They like to pick out one person, “Oh, here’s the madman, here’s the dictator.” And that’s the key to the whole situation. Once we establish that in the public mind, well, we can go ahead and destroy them.

And, you know, this whole business about Syria… I mean if you actually look at the Middle East and North Africa, go back to the first time in modern history that a western army …[ inaudible] in 1798, when Napoleon landed in Egypt and tried to conquer Egypt. And the British got wind of it and sent a fleet out and destroyed the French fleet. And that was the end of Napoleon’s mission. But from that time onwards, if you look at the whole of North Africa, all the way across the Middle East to the Gulf, you will hardly find a country that has not been attacked. You’d be hard pressed to find one that has not been attacked. Many of them [have been] attacked many, many times. And, in many cases those attacks served many purposes. Like, for example, Egypt, when the British occupied Egypt in 1882 to get their hands on Egyptian cotton, tobacco, sugar. Also their hands on the canal. And also, it was a testing ground for new weaponry.

Now here’s the relevance of this when we think back to the attack on Iraq in 1991. Or that kind of hushed talk on the news broadcasts. You know, we’ve got these smart missiles, they don’t need telling what to do, they can turn corners and do all kinds of things. Well, in the 1880s, it was the warships: reinforced steel plating, hydraulic gun platforms. I mean, they’d never had them before. If you wanted to change targets before that, the whole ship had to turn around. So they had hydraulic platforms; it meant you only had to just turn the gun. And they had massive kind of cannons and they had shells that could go almost 2000 yards.

So, in London, all the military people were kind of like really excited about this. How’s this all going to work? Because what the Egyptians had on shore were like popguns. They couldn’t even reach these ships. So it was kind of like a done deal. They were going to win there. They were going to win. But so you follow that all the way through from the 19th century and there are always reasons for attacking these countries. Always justified. In the 19th century called them ‘civilisation’. ‘We’ll bring civilisation to these people.’

BRUCE PETTY: And Christianising.

JEREMY SALT: Well, I wouldn’t use that so much. Not really. Muslims might try that, but generally it was what we were doing ‘for’ these people, not what we were doing strong>to them. And always there would be a lot of violence. Like the British –

BRUCE PETTY: The religious factor didn’t come into it? Their religion, I mean?

JEREMY SALT: Well, always the missionaries followed the flag. You know, they went in there and they would do their bit. But if you look at Egypt, for example, when the British bombarded Alexandria. You know, blew it to bits. Before the army landed. Well then, of course, the moment they did that, well the local people reacted. They were very upset. And then Britain said, ‘Well, we have to restore order!’ Gangs were out and destroying things and setting fire to our property and so forth and so on.

That’s what goes back to the print media. It’s what the public believes. ‘Our people are being attacked in Egypt by these savages.’

And that tends to be what happens. It’s been repeated time after time. Down to the present day.

And, if you look at Syria, well, right, people say, ‘Well it’s an authoritarian, oppressive regime.’

I can accept that. It is. But you look at Syria’s history. Going back to the First World War, there was this piece of land on the map, called Syria. So, when they got their hands on it, they cut it up. That’s the first thing they did. They butchered it. The British got – the British took – southern Syria, which is Palestine. The French cut one part off – the coastal region – called Lebanon. In the 1930s, the French gave Iskanderun to Turkey. Now that’s the province of Hattay, with more than a 50 per cent Alawi population. And people who still actually believe in Bashar al-Assad. And then we move forward to the modern period, the post war period when Syria became independent, finally, independent in 1946.

1949 they had their first coup. Who organised the coup? The Americans. Why? Because the elected Syrian government won’t grant rights to the Tapline to Aramco, the Arabian-American oil company, to build a pipeline from Saudi Arabia across to the Mediterranean across Syrian territory. The government says, ‘No, we don’t want this.’

So the Americans intervene with a bit of help from the CIA . They put a colonel in power. And then, in 1956, the same time that the British planned to attack Egypt, the Americans are planning to overthrow the government of Syria. Again! And you move that through – all the way through to the modern period.

So Syria has continuously been under attack, under threat. Targeted assassinations, coups, dirty work of some kind or another. So what do you get out of this? You’re not going to get a democracy. You’re going to get a state that’s permanently on its guard; that’s watchful. Alright? And then people turn around and say, ‘Look at this, this system.’ And the fact is, you know, people point the finger at Bashar? Well Bashar could go tomorrow and the system wouldn’t change. But Bashar, many Syrians believe, is popular – one thing that the people in Washington or Britain don’t want to believe. Bashar is liked by the Syrian people. They might be critical of the system, but they like Bashar. And many of them believe that he is the best hope they have of actually changing the system.

Mass migration from Syria

BRUCE PETTY: Okay. Now the explanation for this: There’s a couple of million on the move; don’t want to be in Syria. And we see pictures of them. They look middle class and young kids. What’s a parallel to that? What’s it like? Is that like –

JEREMY SALT: I’ve never been in that situation. I don’t want to be in that situation. It’s been going on in the Middle East since 1948. And the big exodus of 1948 of the Palestinians from their land –

BRUCE PETTY: The Palestinians, yes.

JEREMY SALT: Eight hundred thousand people. Iraq –

BRUCE PETTY: They’re still there on the borders, wanting to go back.

JEREMY SALT: Of course. Well, it’s their land –

BRUCE PETTY: Are these people going to go back? Or do they want to go to Germany? Do you think [Inaudible].

JEREMY SALT: Well I couldn’t speak for them, Bruce, but I think many of them want to go back to their homeland.

BRUCE PETTY: I would think so, yes.

JEREMY SALT: Of course they do. But they can’t because it’s in complete turmoil.

BRUCE PETTY: Yeah. Well, they’re the issues that puzzle people and –

How the mass media presents what is happening

JEREMY SALT: But things also Bruce, I think, you know, people, what the media, doesn’t really want to show is that we were told from the beginning that all this was about repression of the protests by the Syrian government.

BRUCE PETTY: Yes. That’s right.

JEREMY SALT: And alternative evidence which the media - the mainstream media - will not present, is that the attack on Syria was actually well-prepared.

BRUCE PETTY: Yes.

JEREMY SALT: Right? And they wanted to hit Syria and they waited for the moment and this, once again, there’s a template for this in Latin America.

BRUCE PETTY: Yes.

JEREMY SALT: I mean, how did the United States carry out [inaudible ]coups in Guatamala? What you do, you wait for this, for people to kind of demonstrate over some economic issue, then you move in behind them. And that’s more or less what happened in Syria.

And people say, ‘Oh, no, no. It started as a peaceful protest and only much, much later did it become violent. Which is not true. Because they were violent from the beginning. And that’s what the media would not tell its readers [inaudible].

What do we know of the groups fighting the Syrian Government?

BRUCE PETTY: And do we know much about the fragmentation of what was called ‘the rebellion’, you know. Like there are apparently there are tribal elements, there are militias – independent militias – under various autocrats. And there’s ISIS, and there’s a bit of Al Qaeda left, I imagine. All these elements, I mean, are they… Do we know who – Do we know the quantities and the passions? Is it just passion?

JEREMY SALT: Well, the tribal … the tribes are part of it because [inaudible] in Iraq we know there are terrible kinds of conflicts between Islamic State and the tribes. And the Islamic State [? butchered] lots of [? tribesmen] in Iraq. But the position is that those countries, all of them – that is Libya, or Syria, or Iraq, who didn’t have these Takfiri jihadi elements before.

Destruction of countries has created cracks from which jihadi elements have come out

So, it’s the destruction of those countries that has created the cracks in the landscapes from which these people have managed to come out. I mean, if you look at what they did to Syria. Okay, they wanted to destroy the Syrian central government. They didn’t succeed in doing it. Now, it was very clear from the start that Syria was not Yemen; Syria was not Libya; Syria was not Tunisia or Egypt. Syria was Syria. And what would happen in Syria was very different from what would happen elsewhere.

Now, those people: the Americans, the British, the French, Turks, the Qataris, the Saudis – they all thought, ‘Oh look, we’re going to push very hard, and we will bring the government down.’

They didn’t succeed in doing it. All they succeeded in doing was weakening it. Now, we know that – and what they therefore created was – in northern Syria in particular, but also in other parts – was a kind of a vacuum . Now, in some respects, that vacuum was filled by people they were supporting. The armed groups. In some cases it was filled by people they didn’t want to be there. Like the Kurds in northern Syria. Erdogan, the Turkish president, is very angry because the Kurds took their opportunity and kind of established some kind of autonomy over the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, just over the Kurdish border.

So, in some ways, it’s the law of unintended consequences.

BRUCE PETTY: The other element that is different, I think, is things like beheadings. We haven’t sort of seen that before. Is that connected somehow to these generations of frustration? I mean, can you explain that from anything we did?

JEREMY SALT: They would. No. They would go back to Islamic history to justify beheading people. Alright? But, I mean, this doesn’t - what the Islamic state is doing cannot be called Islamic.

JEREMY SALT: It cannot be called Islamic, not just because of the absolute brutality and sadism of what they’re doing, but they’re destroying Christian churches. Now this doesn’t fit with Islam at all –

BRUCE PETTY: And antiquities.

JEREMY SALT: But the antiquities have been there for 2000 years without one Muslim government touching them. But, when it comes to Christian churches being destroyed, there’s no place for this in Islam. This is actually against Islam. This is a violation of Islamic principles, to destroy churches. Because Christians, Jews, are protected.

BRUCE PETTY: So you’d have to go back –

JEREMY SALT: No, you wouldn’t have to go back at all. There’s no place for [it].

BRUCE PETTY: But it has happened though, hasn’t it?

JEREMY SALT: No. At the beginning –

BRUCE PETTY: Way back [inaudible]-

JEREMY SALT: Oh, right at the beginning, right at the beginning –

BRUCE PETTY: Four hundred –

JEREMY SALT: No, right at the beginning, right at the beginning of the 7th century.

BRUCE PETTY: And the religious, even the religious purges and crusades, for one. We did it.

JEREMY SALT: We did it. Yeah, we did it. But when, in terms of minority, religious minorities, like within Islam right at the beginning when the Jews of what we now call Saudi Arabia would not accept the Islamic message, they were attacked and many of them were killed. But, once Islam was consolidated, as a state religion, you go back and there’s nothing, there’s nothing there. You’re hard pressed to find any kind of way in which religious communities were touched.

BRUCE PETTY: Well, that is one that made you think. And you still wonder, is there a Martin Luther Muslim?

JEREMY SALT: [Indecipherable] I didn‘t like Martin Luther.

BRUCE PETTY: - start something a bit different.

JEREMY SALT: Martin Luther was a terrible person.

BRUCE PETTY: Was he? Oh well, somebody –

JEREMY SALT: He was anti-semetic –

BRUCE PETTY: Oh, that’s right, he was –

JEREMY SALT: Who was the Nuremburg [inaudible]. I can’t remember whether it was Goering or Goebels – someone – stood up and said, ‘Well, actually, don’t blame us, blame Luther.’ That’s where it came from. And also, he was on the side of the princes. ‘Go out and slay the peasants!’

BRUCE PETTY: Oh okay. Well, whatever he did –

JEREMY SALT: Whatever it is, right –

BRUCE PETTY: He did nail a few things on the door and it would be nice if they nailed a few things on -.

JEREMY SALT: I agree.

BRUCE PETTY: But –

JEREMY SALT: I agree. I agree. I totally agree that Islam has been taken over by arch conservatives, reactionaries, and these are people who interpret their own religion in a very selective way. And, if you actually go back to the earliest stages of Islam: You take up women’s rights, for example, women’s rights, the greatest scholars of the age, back in the western 13th or 12th century, took up these questions and what they had to say about women’s rights was extraordinary.

BRUCE PETTY: Really. That’s interesting.

JEREMY SALT: You know, they allowed contraception. One of the schools of law would allow abortion if the family was too big and they couldn’t deal with another child. They regarded the woman as a sexual creature, not just a chattel of man. Entitled to sexual satisfaction. And where do you get this in today’s Islam?

BRUCE PETTY: Exactly.

JEREMY SALT: Now these were the greatest figures of the age. The greatest thinkers of the age – the philosophers. That’s all kind of been whitewashed from their history.

BRUCE PETTY: [Inaudible]

JEREMY SALT: If you were going to draw a cartoon of the Caliph, sitting in Mosul – have you seen him?

BRUCE PETTY: No, I haven’t. I’ve seen a few.

JEREMY SALT: He was photographed kind of hectoring the crowds, wearing a very flash watch

BRUCE PETTY: Okay. Oh yeah, I remember that bit, yeah.

JEREMY SALT: I think it’s what I’d home in on, if I were a cartoonist.

BRUCE PETTY: Well, we’ve got a bit of a problem there about… because then you suddenly… got to be careful you’re not putting a case for the beheaders.

JEREMY SALT: Right.

BRUCE PETTY: You know.

JEREMY SALT: Mocking them is –

BRUCE PETTY: Mocking them if you can. But then, you have to watch your own head a little bit. Hebdo and all that stuff.

JEREMY SALT: Yeah.

BRUCE PETTY: But basically, I don’t know how you treat religion. I mean you sort of hope it would all modify a bit.

JEREMY SALT: Would you? I mean, I’ve got funny things – I’m not religious in the slightest bit – but I would not, myself, choose to insult Mohammed or Christ.

BRUCE PETTY: No.

JEREMY SALT: I wouldn’t see any point.

BRUCE PETTY: No.

JEREMY SALT: I’d go for the priests. I’d go for the Imams.

BRUCE PETTY: Yes.

JEREMY SALT: I’d go for the ayatollahs. They’re all fair game. Why would you want to go back to a foundational figure? And dump on that person? I mean that’s just a personal view of mine.

BRUCE PETTY: No, I agree with that one. I’d go along with it.

JEREMY SALT: I don’t quite get it.

BRUCE PETTY: No.

JEREMY SALT: They’re too far back in history.

BRUCE PETTY: And I quite like the hymns too, and the music.

JEREMY SALT: Ah, right.

BRUCE PETTY: The old cantatas.

JEREMY SALT: This must go back to your school days.

BRUCE PETTY: Probably does, yeah.

Tanya Plibersek's article is Australia deserves a seat at the table in Syria negotiations, (15/12/15) | the Guardian

We must ask whether the Turnbull government acknowledges Turkey’s support for the Islamic State, and what action it intends to take against the Erdogan regime’s aggressive and destabilising behaviour. We must also ask whether the Australian airforce will continue to conduct bombing runs in coordination with the US coalition. Not only have Turkish actions put us in conflict with that coalition, operating out of Incirlik, but there is another danger. Russia has stated that there no further threats to Russian servicemen and assets will be tolerated, from unauthorised foreign parties.

Dear Ms Plibersek,

This is a follow up email to a brief conversation I had with a staffer in your office, and is a response to the article you had published in the Guardian yesterday.

I have previously made representations to you on the question of Australia’s policy on Syria and that of the Federal Labor Party, in particular through a media release on behalf of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS), for which I am a spokesman.

I have also presented ‘my case’ – which is Syria’s case – to the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, in correspondence over the last two years. My main concerns expressed in that correspondence have been regarding the false allegations over the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons, the improper recognition of external Opposition groups known as the ‘Syrian National Council’ as the ‘legitimate representatives of the Syrian people’, and Australia’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy and sovereign rights of the current Syrian government and its President Bashar al Assad, freely elected by a majority of the whole Syrian population in June 2014.

These concerns remain unchanged, as the position of the government and the Australian Labor Party remains the same, and lie at the heart of the current crisis.

There is however a reason why this problematic position must be challenged again, resulting from recent developments, and in particular Turkey’s provocation of shooting down the Russian bomber on November 24th, which Russia rightly regards as an act of war.
I would draw your attention here to a very detailed analysis by an aviation expert which proves to any sensible person that Turkey’s act was preplanned.(*1)

Following this strike, Russia responded in several ways, all of which must now be considered in relation to Australian involvement in the campaign ‘against Da’esh/IS’.

Firstly it deployed S400 missile systems in Syria, which enables Russia to shoot down any foreign aircraft which operate in Syrian airspace without authorisation from the Syrian government. Secondly Russia took immediate action over trade and relations with Turkey, including over the vital issue of gas supply contracts. And thirdly, President Putin very publicly revealed to an international audience in Paris the extent of the Turkish government’s involvement with the Islamic State, both in the export and marketing of Syrian and Iraqi oil with a tanker pipeline through Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, and with the purchasing and supply of shipments of arms over the border into Syria.

These startling revelations from Moscow, which were backed up with multiple sources of evidence of the illegal Oil trade, were vigorously denied by President Erdogan, who also refused to apologise for the downing of the Russian plane and killing of Russian servicemen by Turkish insurgents in Syria. While this was unsurprising given that Russia’s allegations were directly against Erdogan’s son Bilal, as well as against the Turkish intelligence service MIT, which has been exposed assisting with arms shipments as well as chemical weapons into Syria, the failure of Western leaders or Western media to react and respond appropriately to Turkey’s blatant support for IS and other terrorist armies in Syria was shocking.

It is however also bemusing, to find that the position of Western governments, particularly those of the US, UK and Australia, has become so contradictory, and still essentially unchanged. While we call for a global campaign against Islamic State, and prepare to send more military resources into Syria and Iraq to destroy it, we are effectively allied with Turkey, who has been supporting Da’esh and other terrorist groups – Jabhat al Nusra and Ahrar al Sham, for the last four years in Turkey’s campaign against the Syrian state. Meanwhile Russia, which operates legitimately in Syria at the invitation of the government, and in coordination with the Syrian army, has made huge gains in pushing back both the Turkish/Saudi backed ‘Army of Conquest’, and in destroying the Oil refineries and tanker pipelines of Da’esh.

The effectiveness of Russia’s bombing and cruise missile strikes on the Islamic State’s dirty trade not only raised the ire of its benefactor – Erdogan’s family business – but raises questions about the US ‘campaign against IS’ of which we are nominally a part.

There has however been another significant development, which raises particular questions about Australia’s current military deployment in Iraq. Apparently in cooperation with the Iraqi Kurdistan ‘regional government’, and its leader Barzani, Turkey moved 1200 troops and tanks and other assets into Mosul. This drew an immediate demand from the Baghdad government’s Haidar al Abadi that Turkey withdraw its forces, or face military action. Shiite militias who are operating in coordination with the Iraqi Army out of Baghdad, were particularly vocal in their protests against Turkey, as well as against the US. The Iraqi government was vigorously supported with mass public protests in the south of the country, and calls for direct action against Turkey’s invasion. Erdogan however not only refuses to withdraw his troops, which he claims are there to ‘train peshmerga forces to fight IS’, but has threatened to cut Iraq’s water supply through the Euphrates and Tigris rivers unless Iraq changes its position on support for Syria and Russia.

The Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has repeatedly made clear that our commitment in Iraq and in Syria is strictly ‘in defence of Iraq’ but is also operating with the consent and at the behest of the Baghdad government. As the development outlined above now effectively puts Australia at odds with the ‘US coalition against Da’esh’ there is an urgent need for a clarification of Australia’s position, both on Turkey and on the Russian campaign supporting the Syrian army against ALL the terrorist groups fighting the Syrian government.

We must ask whether the Turnbull government acknowledges Turkey’s support for the Islamic State, and what action it intends to take against the Erdogan regime’s aggressive and destabilising behaviour. We must also ask whether the Australian airforce will continue to conduct bombing runs in coordination with the US coalition. Not only have Turkish actions put us in conflict with that coalition, operating out of Incirlik, but there is another danger. Russia has stated that there no further threats to Russian servicemen and assets will be tolerated, from unauthorised foreign parties.

Even if Australia limits its activities to strikes on Islamic State targets in Eastern Syria, this may bring us into the line of legitimate Russian fire. Other unidentified coalition partners last week struck a Syrian army base near Deir al Zour, in an act which enabled IS forces to overrun a long-protected village. As with Turkey’s illegal incursions, this attack on the SAA , which killed three men and injured a dozen, drew an immediate protest to the UN, but no action has been taken to identify the country or countries responsible. Neither has there been any explanation of why a member of the US coalition launched a strike on the SAA base which facilitated the operations of the IS terrorist group in the area where its Oil assets are located.

I trust that you will consider the case that I have made, and in the light of it perhaps reconsider the apparent support of the Labor party for the US led campaign, which quite evidently aims to replace Syria’s legitimately elected government with some group of Sunni officials approved by the very countries supporting the terrorist groups in Syria – Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

I also urge you to give this matter urgent attention, despite the imminent Christmas break.

I have copied Julie Bishop into this letter, and would welcome a further response from her.

kind regards,

David Macilwain,

Sandy Creek, Victoria

*1 http://harpers.org/blog/2015/12/mountain-ambush/

I also recommend this article from Mike Whitney on today’s meeting between Kerry and Putin in Moscow, stating it as it is:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/15/putin-gives-kerry-a-chance-to-pull-back-from-the-brink/

When I visited Syria a year and a half ago, the Syrian city of Homs was largely under government control. A few days ago the government began evacuating the last of the militants from their enclave in Homs under a truce agreement brokered by the United Nations and Red Cross.   The victory parade of the Syrian Arab Army was in distinct contrast to any victory parade of ISIS.

Article written by Judith Bello. Initially published at http://deconstructedglobe.com/wordpress/celebration-in-homs/

A Victory Parade

Here is the response of the people of Homs to their liberation by the Syria Arab Army. More will soon be able to return to their homes and begin the long journey of rebuilding.

ISIS

This is the victory parade of ISIS occupiers returning from Mosul, Iraq to their headquarters in Raqqa on June 25, 2014.

Homs

Homs was one of the early centers of the uprising in Syria.  At the moment I won’t go into all the misinformation that has been presented in the Western media, but here is a quote from IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), an NGO that reports on humanitarian crises about Homs in December 2011

Homs, a major transportation node that forms a crossroads between the main regions of the country, used to be a microcosm of the national mosaic – made up of a mix of ethnic and religious groups, including Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Alawis, members of a minority offshoot of Shia Islam to which al-Assad belongs.

But activists say neighbours of different sects who used to live side by side peacefully have increasingly turned against one another.

Initially, the LCC accused government-allied militia of kidnapping protesters, with the number of kidnappings rising in November, it said.

But increasingly, residents say, civilians have been behind sectarian-coloured counter-kidnappings of government forces, but also of Alawi and Christian civilians, as well as Sunnis considered to be spies for the government. The LCC maintains that some counter-kidnappings are conducted only to secure the release of captured civilians.

“There should not be any doubt of the regime’s entire responsibility for the sectarian turn of events in Homs,” opposition figure and author Yassin Haj Saleh said in the LCC statement. The regime “starved [the people] and incited hate between the people of different neighbourhoods,” he said.

But other well-placed sources said they had received reports that opposition groups were behind much of the violence in Homs. The resident quoted earlier said the kidnappings seemed to be conducted mostly by Sunnis, and said he knew of three Christians who had been kidnapped in two days this week.

The Gradual, Hard Won, Recovery of Syria

The western press often denigrates victories of the Syrian Arab Army in recovering control of their country.   This is not the first victory in Homs, but a significant step on the road to restoration.  The Syrian government largely controlled the area in June 2014 when I was there as an election observer.   Surprisingly (to me), people walked out of the rebel held areas to vote.  Men danced in the street in Homs when the high tally for Bashar Assad was announced.  In 2012, enough of the city was liberated for President Assad to walk down the street with his entourage and greet the people.

This month a truce was negotiated allowing the last of the militants in Homs and their families to be resettled outside the area.   According to NBC:

Talal Barazi, governor of Homs, told Syria’s Sana news agency that some 720 people would be allowed to leave Waer district — 300 of them militants — during the first stage of the agreement brokered by the U.N. and the Red Cross.

During a second stage, some 2,000 militants who wished to lay down their weapons and go back to their “normal lives” would be resettled, Sana reported. Some 70,000 civilians are believed to still live in Waer, which has been under siege since 2013.

Amnesty and a Celebration of Peaceful Futures

The Syrian government has made a number of truces with indigenous militants, either relocating them to areas still in conflict or allowing them amnesty if they will join the government forces. This truce, arranged between provincial officials and representatives of Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria) requires the fighters to hand over their weapons to the Syrian Arab Army. However, the will be resettled in Idlib where the SAA and the Al Nusra Front remain in conflict. 

But, that is a problem for tomorrow. Today, the city of Homs is will be free of weapons and war. People are already returning to their homes.

Video inside:Syrian students and teachers of one of the country's biggest universities gathered in the centre of Homs, Wednesday, to thank Russia for its role in the Syrian conflict. You can hear them chanting Bashar al-Assad and they are carrying banners featuring Assad and Putin's faces. The Australian and US press mislead us all into endorsing a war that Syrians do not want. The latest is Tanya Plibersek's pathetic complaint that Australian should be included in the NATO war-party on Syria. " Tanya Plibersek: Australia deserves a seat at the table in Syria negotiations." As aufinm remarked in the discussion under the Guardian article, "'Deserve' is a very weird word to use. This is a war, not a bloody christmas party planning committee." Check out the comments under Plibersek's ignorant article. They are unusually perceptive and well-informed on Syria.

East Gippsland: VicForests is being very cooperative in giving Environment East Gippsland (EEG) new grounds for legal action. Not only had they just commenced logging in an area which EEG believes is a rich stand of forest for rare wildlife, but bold as brass, their contractors yet again cleared right to the edge of a patch of rainforest leaving no buffer. This, after all the bad media they received when found to have destroyed rainforest near Hensleigh Creek earlier this year.

While EEG pulls out the legal artillery, GECO held up logging today by a tree-sitter cabled down to 5 machines – immobilising operations.

This is what some call a nicely timed ‘one-two’.

Below is EEG's media release regarding the legal details. Just 24 hours after the legal letter was sent from EJA who are representing EEG, VicForests lawyers replied saying they were pulling out!

VicForests stops logging after legal action

Just one day after lawyers presented a ‘please explain’ letter to the CEO of VicForests, logging has been stopped and machinery will be pulled out of a high habitat value stand of forest where tree felling had commenced, north east of Orbost.

“We believe the logging that took place was unlawful but appreciate VicForests now suspending operations,” said Jill Redwood, of Environment East Gippsland.

“Although VicForests deny there were any breaches of the law, they have decided not to continue logging here in order to assist the State Government’s Forest Industry Taskforce. This is currently considering deferral of logging in controversial areas of high conservation value. The Taskforce is considering future issues facing the industry and protection of the State’s flora and fauna”.

“While we are heartened to see VicForests cooperation in this instance, we have also made them aware of a number of other areas of high quality habitat planned for imminent logging where we believe the law requires a survey. We are waiting to hear back and will be keeping our eye on VicForests operations in these areas.”

The photograph to the left is of a young Syrian boy at his father's funeral. He saluted those present and gave a defiant and hope-filled speech in memory of his father, a soldier in the Syrian Arab Army. This article is composed of reports from two members of an international peace delegation led by Mairead McGuire, and hosted by Mother Agnes Mariam. This article is written by Shrikant Ramdas, one of the members of the delegation.

Andrew Ashdown, an Anglican priest who was also on the delegation to Syria, wrote about a soldier's funeral he attended in Tartous.

It is hard to describe the emotion of what happened in Tartous. We had planned to visit a hospital. We learned that 22 bodies of soldiers were being returned home. The corpses were those of [Syrian Arab Army] soldiers that died in the siege of the Kuwairis Airport, Eastern Aleppo, and were buried there because of the siege. Some volunteers were able to finally bring the bodies back to their families, which coincided with the time of our visit. Hundreds had gathered. There was intense emotion as the coffins were loaded off a lorry, to the piercing cries of grieving relatives. We joined the crowds giving condolences to families who seemed to genuinely appreciate our presence.

Suddenly a young boy of about 10, whose father's body was being returned, and was standing next to his crying mother and a Sheikh, stood to attention in front of us, saluted and with tears flowing, gave a deeply moving speech.

One of the monks with me told us that in what he said there was not one word of anger, hatred or violence. His words :

"My father is a blessing to this country. He has given his life so that we may live in peace. But he is not dead. He is a martyr. And I honour him. Mabrouk! Mabrouk! ! [1] He will live, and because of him Syria will have peace."

I stood to attention looking straight at him with the crowds around looking on and letting him finish. I then saluted him before giving him a short blessing, and a few moments later, a hug. The Sheikh next to him hugged me also. None of us could hold back our tears. It was an experience we shall never forget. The sheer courage, determination, hope and cry for peace in the midst of grief puts all those who bang the drums of war to shame…

Shrikant Ramdas's report of his visit to Syria last month (November 2015)

It was by chance that I joined the international peace delegation led by Mairead McGuire, and hosted by Mother Agnes, to go to Syria in November 2015 during a most testing period for its people. As someone who is neither a journalist nor an activist, but rather an 'observer' with a deep desire for peace, it was saddening to see another country plunged into war by outside forces. We have seen this pattern repeatedly: Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen even now, and countless other places, and I often felt helpless as a concerned and proud citizen of another country as to why this happens and what anyone can do. One option, a difficult one for most, is to see for oneself, and what I observed during my visit was too many emotions to adequately and justly describe what the people of Syria have been and are going through.

The people we met were across different faiths and walks of life. Few were under the illusion that their popularly elected and, indeed, generally popular leader, was perfect, yet most admired him. But even a smaller section of society who at one time may have opposed with genuine concerns had understood - this was a time to unite and defend their land and for this, they did come together to defend their little towns and cities, guarding their churches, their mosques, their schools, their children, their heritage. I developed a deep respect for them very quickly; I was sure if there was a Hindu or Buddhist or Jain temple or a Sikh Gurudwara, they would guard that too with their lives, such is their respect for humanity, such is their character.

During our visit, one of the many striking things even in their hardship and grief was how appreciative the average Syrian man, woman and child were for our presence. As a Hindu from India, I was touched by the sheer hospitality and the kind words they had for my land, even in these most trying of times. I too conveyed my deep appreciation and told them the world was awakening slowly, and hopefully more will, to their plight, their bravery, and this injustice. It is hard to pick a story among many worthy stories, but certainly "The Boy who said Mabrouk" [See at the beginning of this article] to his martyred father upon receipt of his remains, a father who may have prepared his child for this sad outcome, will never leave any of us.

I remember meeting young men and women not yet out of their teens, and telling them that I will return soon, just to check if they are ok, and that I expect they will have fulfilling lives and that they must keep the faith. The people of Syria are proud and beautiful representatives of the forces of good, and I will pray that they overcome the dark forces from outside and the few misled within who have turned yet another proud nation and people into a war-ground in the geo-political landscape controlled by the western global elite and their allies in the Middle East. To be overrun and to valiantly fight back, one can only salute not just the bravery but the resilience of the Syrian people. My biggest hope is that this ends soon, that the people of Syria survive and live in a way that many of us take for granted: a life of family, of love, of cooperation, in a society and land that had and hopefully will go back to what it was, a beautiful nation of many cultures living together in happiness and mutual respect. In my language, Syria or Sooriya as it is pronounced in Arabic, sounds similar to Surya, which means the sun, and my hope is this land will shine brightly, soon.

Shrikant Ramdas, Bangalore, India

14 Dec 2015

NOTES

[1] "Mabrouk" is an arab term meaning, "Congratulations" or "Blessed".

Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that Bashar al-Assad has more support than the Western-backed opposition. Would that not be major news? Here are results of surveys that tried to find out what Syrians actually want in terms of government, rather than what foreign forces wish to impose on them.

Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that Bashar al-Assad has more support than the Western-backed opposition. Would that not be major news?

(Article by Steven Gowans first published on December 11, 2015 at https://gowans.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/suppose-a-respectable-opinion-poll-found-that-bashar-al-assad-has-more-support-than-the-western-backed-opposition-would-that-not-be-major-news/)

In the view of Syrians, the country’s president, Bashar al Assad, and his ally, Iran, have more support than do the forces arrayed against him, according to a public opinion poll taken last summer by a research firm that is working with the US and British governments. [1]

The poll’s findings challenge the idea that Assad has lost legitimacy and that the opposition has broad support.

The survey, conducted by ORB International, a company which specializes in public opinion research in fragile and conflict environments, [2] found that 47 percent of Syrians believe that Assad has a positive influence in Syria, compared to only 35 percent for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and 26 percent for the Syrian Opposition Coalition.

At the same time, more see Assad’s ally, Iran, as having a favorable influence (43%) than view the Arab Gulf States—which back the external opposition, including Al Nusra and ISIS—as affecting Syria favorably (37%).

The two Arab Gulf State-backed Al-Qaeda linked organizations command some degree of support in Syria, according to the poll. One-third believe Al-Nusra is having a positive influence, compared to one-fifth for ISIS, lower than the proportion of Syrians who see Assad’s influence in a positive light.

According to the poll, Assad has majority support in seven of 14 Syrian regions, and has approximately as much support in one, Aleppo, as do Al-Nusra and the FSA. ISIS has majority support in only one region, Al Raqua, the capital of its caliphate. Al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, has majority support in Idlip and Al Quneitra as well as in Al Raqua. Support for the FSA is strong in Idlip, Al Quneitra and Daraa.

An in-country face-to-face ORB poll conducted in May 2014 arrived at similar conclusions. That poll found that more Syrians believe the Assad government best represents their interests and aspirations than believe the same about any of the opposition groups. [3]

The poll found that 35 percent of Syrians saw the Assad government as best representing them (20% chose the current government and 15% chose Bashar al-Assad). By comparison, the level of the support for the opposition forces was substantially weaker:

• Al-Nusra, 9%
• FSA, 9%
• “Genuine” rebels, 6%
• ISIS, 4%
• National Coalition/transitional government, 3%

The sum of support for the opposition forces, 31 percent, was less than the total support for Assad and his government.

Of significance is the weak support for the FSA and the “genuine” rebels, the alleged “moderates” of which British prime minister David Cameron has improbably claimed number as many 70,000 militants. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has pointed out that if the ranks of the moderates were this large, the Syrian Arab Army, which has lost 60,000 soldiers, mainly to ISIS and Al-Nusra, could hardly survive. Fisk estimates generously that “there are 700 active ‘moderate’ foot soldiers in Syria,” and concludes that “the figure may be nearer 70,” closer to their low level of popular support. [4]

Sixteen percent of Syrians polled said that Moaz Al Khateeb best represented their aspirations and interests, a level of support on par with that for Assad. Khateeb, a former president of the National Coalition for Syrian and Revolutionary Forces—which some Western powers unilaterally designated as the legitimate government of Syria—called on Western powers to arm the FSA and opposed the designation of Al-Nusra as a terrorist group. The so-called “moderate” Islamist, who favors the replacement of secular rule with Sharia law, is no longer active in the Coalition or a force in Syrian politics.

Neither is the FSA a significant force in the country’s politics, despite its inclusion in the ORB survey. According to veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn, the FSA “largely collapsed at the end of 2013.” [5] Fisk says that the FSA is “virtually non-existent.” [6]

Assad has repeatedly challenged the notion that he lacks popular support, pointing to the fact that his government has survived nearly five years of war against forces backed by the most powerful states on the planet. It’s impossible to realistically conceive of the government’s survival under these challenging circumstances, he argues, without its having the support of a sizeable part of its population.

In a 11 December 2015 interview with Spanish media, Assad observed:

[I]f…the majority of…Syrians (oppose me) and you have…national and regional countries…against me, and the West, most of the West, the United States, their allies, the strongest countries and the richest countries in the world against me, and…the Syrian people (are opposed to me) how can I be president? It’s not logical. I’m…here after five years—nearly five years—of war, because I have the support of the majority of Syrians. [7]

Assad’s view of his level of support appears to be largely corroborated by the ORB poll.

The persistence of the myth that Assad lacks support calls to mind an article written by Jonathan Steele in the British newspaper the Guardian on 17 January 2012, less than one year into the war. Under a lead titled, “Most Syrians back President Assad, but you’d never know it from western media,” Steele wrote:

Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favor of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news? Especially as the finding would go against the dominant narrative about the Syrian crisis, and the media consider the unexpected more newsworthy than the obvious.

Alas, not in every case. When coverage of an unfolding drama ceases to be fair and turns into a propaganda weapon, inconvenient facts get suppressed. So it is with the results of a recent YouGov Siraj poll…ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go.

Steele reminds us that Assad has had substantial popular support from the beginning of the war, but that this truth, being politically inconvenient, is brushed aside, indeed, suppressed, in favor of falsehoods from US, British and French officials about Assad lacking legitimacy.

Steele’s observation that inconvenient facts about Assad’s level of support have been “ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go,” raises obvious questions about the independence of the Western media. Private broadcasters and newspapers are, to be sure, formally independent of Western governments, but they embrace the same ideology as espoused by key figures in Western governments, a state of affairs that arises from the domination of both media and governments by significant corporate and financial interests. Major media themselves are major corporations, with a big business point of view, and Western governments are made up of, if not always “in-and-outers” from the corporate world, by those who are sympathetic to big business.

Wall Street and the corporate world manifestly have substantial interests in the Middle East, from securing investment opportunities in the region’s vast energy resources sector, the construction of pipelines to carry natural gas to European markets (cutting out Russia), access to the region’s markets, and the sale of military hardware to its governments. Saudi Arabia, for example, a country of only 31 million, has the world’s third largest military budget, ahead of Russia [8], much of its spent buying expensive military equipment from Western arms manufacturers. Is it any wonder that Western governments indulge the Riyadh regime, despite its fondness for beheadings and amputations, official misogyny, intolerance of democracy, propagation of the violently sectarian Islamist Wahhabi ideology that inspires Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra and ISIS, military intervention in Bahrain to crush a pro-democracy uprising, and a war of aggression on Yemen?

The research firm also conducted a broadly similar poll in Iraq in July [9]. Of particular interest were the survey’s findings regarding the view of Iraqis on the possible partitioning of their country into ethno-sectarian autonomous regions. A number of US politicians, including in 2006 then US senator and now US vice-president Joseph Biden, have floated the idea of carving Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states. Indeed, US foreign policy has long fostered the deepening of ethno-sectarian cleavages in Iraq, and US government officials have long labored to shape public opinion in the West to the view that Iraqis self-identify on tribal, sectarian, and ethnic grounds, to a far greater degree than they identify as Iraqis. If US government officials are to be believed, Iraqis themselves are eager to see their country split into ethno-sectarian mini-states.

But the ORB poll strongly rejects this view. According to the survey, three of four Iraqis oppose the partition of their country into autonomous regions, including majorities in both Sunni and Shiite communities. Only in the north of Iraq, where the Kurds already have an autonomous regional government, is there any degree of support for the proposal, and even there, only a slim majority (54%) is in favor.

Robert F. Worth, in a 26 June 2014 New York Times article [10], pointed to earlier public opinion polling that anticipated these findings. Worth wrote, “For the most part, Iraqis (with the exception of the Kurds) reject the idea of partition, according to recent interviews and opinion polls taken several years ago.”

US foreign policy favors the promotion of centrifugal forces in the Middle East, to split the Arab world into ever smaller—and squabbling—mini-states, as a method of preventing its coalescence into a single powerful Arab union strong enough to take control of its own resources, markets and destiny. It is in this goal that the origin of US hostility to the Syrian government, which is Arab nationalist, and to Iraqi unity, can be found. US support for Israel—a settler outpost dividing the Asian and African sections of the Arab nation—is also related to the same US foreign policy objective of fostering divisions in the Middle East to facilitate US economic domination of the region.

1. http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/syriadata.pdf

2. http://www.opinion.co.uk/whoweare.php

3. http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/syriadatatablesjuly2014.pdf

4. Robert Fisk, “David Cameron, there aren’t 70,000 moderate fighters in Syria—and whosever heard of a moderate with a Kalashnikov anyway?”, The Independent, November 29, 2015

5. Patrick Cockburn, “Syria and Iraq: Why US policy is fraught with danger ,“ The Independent, September 9, 2014

6. Robert Fisk, “Saudi Arabia’s unity summit will only highlight Arab disunity,” The Independent, December 4, 2015

7. “President al-Assad: Russia’s policy towards Syria is based on values and interests, the West is not serious in fighting terrorists,” Syrian Arab News Agency, December 11, 2015, http://sana.sy/en/?p=63857

8. Source is The Military Balance, cited in The Globe and Mail, Report on Business, November 25, 2015

9. http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/iraqdata.pdf

10. Robert F. Worth, “Redrawn lines seen as no cure in Iraq conflict,” The New York Times, June 26, 2014

Developments in the current French elections, with Left and Right exchanging preferences in order to defeat the National Front have become a case of life imitating art, specifically Houellebecq’s art in his latest novel, Soumission, which has just been translated into English.

Book Review of Soumission by Michel Houellebecq
Published by Flammarion, January 2015, English version October 20, 2015, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Michel Houllebecq's most recent novel, Soumission (Submission in English), a satire about France under a Muslim president, came out on the eve of the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

Publicity for the book ceased almost immediately for fear of setting off more violence. I decided not to go forward with a review for the same reason.

Months later, developments in the current French elections, with Left and Right exchanging preferences in order to defeat the National Front have become such a case of life imitating art, specifically Houellebecq’s art, however, that even a late review has relevance.

In Houellebecq's tale, Submission, which takes place in 2022, the traditional center left and center right parties are becoming irrelevant whilst the National Front is gaining relevance and its leader, Marine Le Pen is likely to win the presidency. What makes this particularly probable is the expected exchange of preferences between the Muslim Brotherhood Party and the National Front. Although the National Front is anti-high immigration, they share with the Muslim Brotherhood Party a nationalistic dislike of the European Union and big business.

Horrified at the prospect of being made completely irrelevant, the center right and center left make a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood Party and Marine Le Pen (National Front) is left out in the cold.

The French wake up the next day to an Islamic President. Women stop wearing skirts and instead wear trousers and long tops and cover their faces. The unemployment rate drops precipitously because women stay home. Very generous family benefits make it much easier for them to do this.

The protagonist of the novel, François, a literature professor, is even more misogynist than previous Houellebecq protagonists. He has the same antecedents though: estranged from unloving parents, unable to keep a girl, devoured by self-loathing. He is a serial recipient of ‘dear john’ letters, and only comfortable with prostitutes. Although he has no religion himself, he specialises in the conversion to Catholicism of an obscure 19th century writer, Huysmans. Huysmans was troubled by his sexuality and wrote that Catholicism helped him deal with it.

François is out of Paris as the new government takes over, traveling in a kind of existential fugue laced with mid-life crisis.

When he returns, he finds that his branch of the Sorbonne has been privatised and sold to a Saudi Prince. He suddenly realises at an academic meeting that there are no longer any female academics. The politically astute but academically bland new dean takes an interest in François, possibly because of Huysmans. François is intrigued to see that the dean has taken a very young wife in addition to his first. The dean urges Francois to do the same.

The advent of a French Islamic state has normalised arranged marriages and the novel closes as the professor contemplates polygamous marriage as a possible solution to his personal loss of direction.

Michel Houellebecq had previously been taken to court for racial vilification but had won because the French constitution permits criticism of religion as an essential political freedom and Houellebecq had criticised Islam, not Muslims.

In La Carte et le Territoire, published after that case, one of the characters, a novelist with a strong ressemblence to Houellebecq himself, is brutally murdered. We do not know why or who murdered him, only that he expected something like that to happen.

At the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacres, when asked how he felt about Islam these days, Houelbecq said he had completely changed his mind, having since read the Koran. He said that he now thought that Islam was a religion of peace and that he would not be particularly fussed if France were to become Islamic.

In Australia we have seen the similar collusion between political ‘enemies’ against nationalist parties as is transpiring now in France. Neither Left nor Right alone can defeat the National Front. The Left's performance is pitiful, but, if they pull out of the second rounds, it is hoped that the Right will get enough of their votes to win. Marine Le Pen has called this undemocratic, a sign that the political Left and Right have become the same thing: servants to other masters than the public, offended at the idea that citizens might choose candidates who they think will represent them.

Soumission has hovered at the top of sales lists in three European countries since it came out.
Soumission was published in English as Submission on the 20th of October 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Thanks for the invitation to be involved in your recent Water leadership workshop. I enjoyed the experience.

Regarding my point about population in the notes you took and have reproduced below, I think your notes play down the problem and don’t reflect the entirely of what I said.

On the current trajectory Melbourne would be 8+ million by 2050- just 34 years away. And it is irresponsible to represent the issue as having any chance of stopping there.

The current growth rate means population would double every 38 years approximately. So by 2088 Melbourne would be 16+ million, and heading for 20 million by end of this century. Should or could we still be using your suggested 100 litres pp by then?

Clearly there is no logical end point on the business as usual model we are on. It is those people that continue to promote BAU who are the dangerous radicals in my opinion. They are prepared to threaten humanity, society and community in order to pursue their ideology. Sound familiar?

We need a campaign to change Australians' view on this issue. Great campaigns have been run in the past to change Australians' views on many important public health and safety issues like smoking, drink driving, safer workplaces, asbestos regulation etc., We’ve successfully changed how we all think about people who behave in ways that threaten our health and safety. Time to use those strategies on the business and climate dinosaurs who pose threats to our very existence.

We need to dismantle the economic model that these dinosaurs have created for themselves, not just re-arrange it. Time for a steady state economy and stable population – see http://www.steadystate.org

This is what I think EV should be working towards- everything else is just tinkering with a fundamentally flawed and dangerous model. And, as I said at the workshop, we are all going to get dispirited and exhausted running endless campaigns trying to push back against every outrage that the current system will continue to produce. Where's the sense - or indeed pleasure- in that?

Cheers,

Jenny Warfe

From: Adele Neale [...]
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2015 5:09 PM
To: warfej [...]
Subject: Thanks - Six Steps to Water Leadership workshop

Dear friends

Thanks so much for coming to our ‘Six Steps to Water Leadership’ workshop in Frankston last week. We had a great discussion and you raised many useful and interesting points. These are summarised in the workshop notes included below.

We will be using your feedback to strengthen the Six Steps report. We can already see key areas around education (maybe a new step!) and more on capturing and using stormwater. We will use the revised report as our submission to the State Water Plan Discussion Paper which is due out in February 2016. More on that in the New Year!

If you have any more thoughts or feedback please get in touch – Juliet, 9341 8106, [email protected].
The report is available here.

And we would love to see you at Environment Victoria's End-of-Year party on Tuesday! It will be a fun and casual event to celebrate Environment Victoria volunteers' efforts, at the rooftop garden at our office building, 60 Leicester St, Carlton, from 5.30pm. Please RSVP here so that we can provide food and drinks for everyone.

Thanks again for your great input, conversation and care for protecting our waterways,

Juliet and Adele

6 Steps to Water Leadership

Frankston workshop notes

General questions and discussion

Water grid? Pipeline, Desalination plant – how are these to be used?
Filling Victoria’s coal mines? Hydro?
Planting trees to hold water in the landscape and create more rain?
Send snail mail to politicians, ministers – they must respond.
Education - How do we get people to care about rivers?
Should be the first Step. Engage in community broadly
In schools. Currently only basic concepts in young years.
Tread lightly, care for your ecological footprint, e.g. reduce meat consumption

Large population, and growing - 8 million people to share the water. Our society is reliant on the number of houses increasing, growth model.
Reducing consumption is also important.

Focusing on Step 1 – A Murray-Darling Basin Plan that restores our rivers, wetlands and national parks

Farmers – move to growing types of food that don’t need much water
In food costs we don’t pay for environmental damage
Cover dams to prevent evaporation
Globalisation of agriculture. E.g. High Chinese demand for baby formula

Focusing on Step 2 – A statewide plan for towns and cities

Education
Water restrictions
Indoor as well as outdoor
Meter monitoring
A personal water use target e.g. 100 litre/person/day to be used
Encourage water tanks
Reduce added bill cost so that water use makes up bigger proportion – there are pros and cons for taking this approach
Green star ratings for buildings
Retrofit
Businesses and residential
Kingston City Council and schools are doing well on this (and this helps with education)
Indigenous plants – they have low water needs
Art exhibition and fundraiser
Cow on Yarra float during Moomba Festival
Culture – use Man From Snowy River
Raingardens. Slow the passage of water moving through the environment.

Focussing on Step 3 – A VEAC inquiry into freshwater ecosystems

What is VEAC? Its purpose is to provide advice to the government. It is a statutory authority. The minister decides what VEAC does work on. You can see VEAC reports are on the website. There has been nothing done on water for 20 years.

Focusing on Step 4 – Reform the Water Act

What determines entitlement to water shares?
Sustainable caps – people use 1/3, rivers get 2/3
Change the Act – no ministerial discretion in decision making

Andrew McNamara is former Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation in Queensland. He argues here that the Sustainable Population Party (soon to become the Sustainable Party) was the real winner of the North Sydney by-election; that all other participants showed diminishing or one-off results.

The Liberals have claimed victory in the North Sydney by-election, but at a cost of around $1 million and with a 13% swing against them, there is not much to celebrate. Too many wins like this will send the Liberals bankrupt.

The independent Dr Stephen Ruff finished second with over 18%. It is a commendable result that will turn into a 60:40 two party preferred vote, but given there is no second prize and the good doctor will now return to doing hip replacements, his result will only be referred to ever again under the heading “Dr Who?” at future political trivia nights. Article first published at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17888 on Friday, 11 December 2015.

The Greens scored under16%, a minute increase of .35% on their 2013 result. With no Labor candidate in the field this time, a third place finish is a serious failure. The 20% of punters who voted Labor at the last general election went everywhere but to the Greens.

The other independent in the field, two term North Sydney Councillor Maryann Beregi finished a creditable fourth, with 3.45%. But now what? The personable Councillor needs to run again, in order to avoid the perception that voting for an independent is a WOFTAM.

The biggest loser is easy to pick. The by-election marks the death knell of the Palmer United Party, who finished dead, motherless last, with a derisory .45% of the vote. They were trounced by all the micro parties: the Arts Party, Voluntary Euthanasia Party, Australian Cyclists Party and Bullet Train for Australia, all of whom received more than double the PUP’s vote. Even the Future Party beat Palmer’s candidate home. RIP, PUP.

The Liberal Democrats scored 2.%, which given the high profile and big spend of their candidate, local storage company owner Sam Kennard, would be well below expectations. Seventh place and just a handful of votes in front of the Arts Party is a decidedly sub-prime result.

The Christian Democrats threw everything at it including the kitchen sink, and did pick up a swing of 1.5% from 2013. But sixth place on 2.5% would be a bitter disappointment for a party that has been around for so long and promoted themselves in the by-election as “the only true conservative party”. It suggests that their appeal in too narrow and they will struggle ever to break out of the minor party band of 2 to 3%.

Which leaves the big mover in the field as William Bourke, from the Sustainable Population Party. A 3% result is more than triple the Sustainables’ previous best ever result, at the Griffith by-election in 2013. They finish fifth on primaries, not only as “King of the Kids” by moving out of the micro parties grouping, but also beat home the far more established minor parties of PUP, LDP and CDP. They may even sneak into outright fourth, when preferences are distributed after all postal votes are received by the cut-off on 18 December.

With the endorsement of Australian icon Dick Smith and the financial support of rich-listers Graham Turner and Geoff Harris, the soon to be re-named Sustainable Australia has a bright future. Positioned in the centre of the Australian political spectrum, with a leftish social agenda and a rightish economic outlook, they will be well placed to draw support from across the political field.

The Liberals won the North Sydney by-election, but the only candidate still smiling after the cameras went off on election night was William Bourke of Sustainable Australia.

Australian freedom fighter and political refugee, Julian Assange, will take part in a discussion dedicated to information privacy and security in the digital age, organized as part of an RT conference on media and politics. Watch conference live.The WikiLeaks founder will tune in from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has been shamefully abandoned by the Australian government. (Introduction to this article which was republished from the RT site was by a candobetter.net editor).

This article first published at http://www.rt.com/news/325220-assange-rt-panel-conference/ on 9 Dec, 2015 13:06.

Image: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. © Luke MacGregor / Reuters

Julian Assange will take part in a discussion dedicated to information privacy and security in the digital age, organized as part of an RT conference on media and politics. The WikiLeaks founder will tune in on Thursday from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The session, titled 'Security or Surveillance: Can the right to privacy and effective anti-terror security coexist in the digital age?' will also be attended by former counter-terrorism specialist and CIA military intelligence officer Philip Giraldi, whistleblower and former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Machon, noted CIA whistleblower Raymond McGovern, and historian, author, and strategic analyst Gregory Copley.

The discussion will be moderated by Thom Hartmann, host of RT America's political discussion program 'The Big Picture.'

Assange will be speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been holed up for over three years after being granted asylum in order to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault allegations. From Sweden, the WikiLeaks founder fears he would be extradited to the US for publishing classified US military and diplomat documents in 2010 – a move which amounted to the largest information leak in United States history.

The panel discussion is part of an RT conference titled 'Information, messages, politics: The shape-shifting powers of today's world.' The meeting aims to bring together politicians, foreign policy experts, and media executives from across the globe.

Discussions on a wide variety of international issues will take place, including Middle East security, Russia's role on the world stage, and the role of the media in today's world.

The conference will be held at Moscow's historic Metropol Hotel on Thursday, the 10th anniversary of RT's first news broadcast. To find out more, visit the official website of the conference.

“Avoid culling roos for development by planning wildlife corridors,” says Craig Thomson, AWPC’s new Wildlife Planning Officer. In the face of state planning avoidance of obligation towards wildlife, Mr Thomson and AWPC want to crowdfund the purchase of private land to preserve wildlife corridors from being fenced off by farmers or built over by suburbia. The situation is increasingly dire for kangaroos and koalas particularly. Please consider helping this initiative. Contact details at end of article.

On Monday 7 December 2015, the Australian Wildlife Protection Council (AWPC) announced its appointment of Mr Craig Thomson, of Wildlife Ecosystems Retention and Restoration, as their Wildlife Planning Officer.

"It's a great privilege to work with AWPC," said Mr Thomson. "Currently with land clearing for development, councils require ‘offsets’. But offsets very rarely consider what happens to displaced wildlife, except for 'managing' it, which is a euphemism for conducting 'cull' or 'fertility' programs.

Maryland Wilson, AWPC President, said she was shocked to read of Ian Temby's recent call to cull kangaroos ahead of development as the only option for roos displaced by Melbourne's expansion. ("Call for kangaroos to be culled along Melbourne's urban fringe,”by Simon Lauder, ABC, 30 Nov 2015).

"There is another non-violent solution," she said. "It is a scandal that we have suffered through a succession of planning documents for Melbourne, without any allocating land for habitat with interconnecting continuous wildlife corridors that would enable safe passage for native animals. They have also failed to provide more than a tiny handful of animal bridges and underpasses at significant points on roads where wildlife often cross. Kangaroos, koalas, and other wildlife are increasingly road accident victims. As Melbourne expands to accommodate its human population growth program, suburban development pushes them out onto roads. This is planning negligence. "

AWPC says it has repeatedly engaged with councils in devising detailed plans for wildlife corridors. To date, however, no state government has cooperated with these plans, despite obligations to protect wildlife under the Fauna and Flora Guarantee Act.

"Instead, we have been repeatedly stone-walled. The result is the carnage Mr Temby suggests can only be avoided through culls. AWPC will be seeking a meeting with the Andrews State Government to negotiate for wildlife corridors instead of culling," said President Maryland Wilson.

Mr Thomson spoke of an imminent campaign to buy land on the Mornington Peninsula through crowd-funding. The aim is to create a private land reserve system for a wildlife corridor between national parks to sustain wildlife in the future. He says the matter is urgent as suburban development and a recent spate of farm-fencing are blocking the kangaroos' natural behaviour on the Peninsula.

Mr Thomson added, "It is ironic that some farmers are paying a lot of money for services that kangaroos would provide for free. For instance, vineyards spend much time and money keeping grass and weeds down between the vines. But, if they took down the fences and let the kangaroos in, the roos would not eat the vines, but they would keep the grass short."

CONTACT: Mr Craig Thomson, Wildlife Planning Officer, AWPC: 0474651292; Maryland Wilson, President, AWPC: 61359788570

Video and transcript inside. Second in series. First one, on Bashar al-Assad, is here. The third one is here. Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty, & Dr Jeremy Salt, Middle East scholar and former journalist discuss news reporting on the Middle-East: Do we live with false assumptions? Bruce Petty and Dr Salt knew each other when they both worked for Australian newspapers and Bruce asks Jeremy for his recollections about mistakes in reporting on the Middle East. Jeremy Salt is the author of The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, (University of California Press, 2008). Until recently, Dr Salt was based in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he ran courses in the history of the modern Middle East, in politics and in politics, propaganda and the media.

The story behind these dialogues: On 16 November 2015 a small group of concerned Australian citizens got together to talk about the problems of getting real information out to Australians and other US-NATO allies about war in Syria, in spite of mainstream press efforts to confuse the public. Bruce Petty and Jeremy Salt were part of that group. Inside is the transcript of the embedded video. (There are two other videos in this series. The first is: "Cartoonist Bruce Petty asks Dr Jeremy Salt: Has Bashar al-Assad killed more people than ISIS? and similar questions". The second is: "Cartoonist Bruce Petty and Dr Jeremy Salt: Where news comes from: reporting on the Middle East."). The third is "Does Bashar al-Assad really have to go? Cartoonist Bruce Petty talks to Dr Jeremy Salt.")

Dialogue transcript

BRUCE PETTY: Ah well, Jeremy we should talk about where news comes from, whether it ever gets corrected, do we live with false assumptions? We both worked for The Age, we probably contributed to some … I certainly did as a cartoonist, contributed to some misunderstanding, or very sloppy history and analysis, because that’s what cartoonists do, fine tricks in the thing. You wrote about important subjects [JS: and edited], and edited. Do you recall some terrible errors we made in reporting the Middle-East?

JEREMY SALT: Well, I’ll tell you what, well, just apart from the Middle-East, I mean, I think cartoonists in a way it’s direct – you do the cartoon, you draw it, you give it to the picture editor or whatever, it goes to the newspaper. But news is an artefact, it’s fashioned, shaped, honed, it passes from one hand to the other, like the first step is: Who selects the news? The second step is: Who edits the news? The third step is: What they leave in, what they take out, OK? And so forth and so on – that’s a process. So what the person reads in the newspapers or sees on television is quite different from the raw material. And we both know the quantity of news that comes here to the daily newspaper or to a television station is enormous. The pictures as well, you know, so what they actually pick from that is a fraction of the total, you know, and that depends on the inclination, the temperament of the person who’s doing the choosing, alright? So the whole process is very contingent on a whole lot of things so when people look at a newspaper they don’t actually see what is behind it this immense three-dimensional world, alright. It really is like a beehive with lots of people labouring to produce this object called ‘news’.

BP: So it’s a sort of space problem in a way because you could analyse the moment, the moment that we’re discussing, which has come through from a correspondent or a consulate [Yes] but then somebody’s got to say, What are the origins of this puzzle that we’re looking at?

JS: Yeah, and someone’s got to make choices about, particularly on the editorial desk or subs’ desks, what you’re actually going to write, what you’re going to include. And I can remember I worked on The Age foreign desk and we’d get bundles of stuff in, we’d get a breaking story, you’d get a kind of a series of updates, leads, from morning to afternoon, OK? And you’d go through the file and you’d pick up what you thought were most important, and then you’d go through what you were getting from your own correspondent and often there’d be huge gaps, alright? Now if you tacked on what you’d got from the agency file to what the correspondent’s writing, you mightn’t like it, alright? It doesn’t fit into what he thinks the new situation is and you know, the editor might not like that. I mean I’ve been in that situation where Graham Perkin picked me up and said, I’ve had this message from so-and-so – I won’t tell you who it is – he went through this long letter, single spaced typed from one of our esteemed correspondents, single-spaced typing on three pages, and he says this and he says this, and he says this, and he says this, and he says, here I think we’ve got a left-wing saboteur on the subs’ desk.

BP: So, we’re going to lose readers if your piece goes in without …

JS: Well no, you, you’re going to get into trouble. [Oh OK, yeah.] If you tamper with the news like that, if you’re trying to present what you think – and of course your own judgement is just as suspect as anyone else’s – but if you try to present what … a balanced view, it might go against policy, it might go against the view of the correspondent, it can go against a whole lot of things. And you can get into trouble. You can get into strife over it.

BP: So obviously, a small magazine, not looking for great circulation will give you a better version of an incident or a situation than a big broadsheet with [inaudible] circulation.

JS: Probably, probably a small magazine has hundreds of people to write for it. They’re not going to pay. You know, if you don’t get your money, that’s fine. You’ve got to accept what you … [BP: Just write for a few people …] Yeah, but the newspapers have a line. Generally speaking they’ve got a line and there’s a whole lot of things that I’ve written for newspapers that have never seen the light of day, and this goes back many, many, many decades. And I think the reason would be that my view of the Middle-East, which is the area I do, is radical – in their view – or extreme. I had this experience with, actually, The Australian. I had a friend there and I wrote a piece on the peace process, so-called, all process, no peace. And this is about 1995, two years after it started, and I wrote a piece and sent it to The Australian. And occasionally I did, even though I don’t like The Australian. I’m sorry Bruce, I know it was your home for a while … and um, the person I sent it to, was on the Foreign Desk. He rang me and said, ‘We’re not going to run this’. He said, ‘I ran it past so-and-so’ and I said, ‘What did he say?’ ’Well, so-and-so said …’ and he stopped and I said ‘Said what, that I’m an extremist?’ and he said, ‘Yes, not to put too fine a point on it’. And so-and-so told me to tell you, that they will never run you on the Middle-East. Right? Right?

BP: So the Cold War was still operating.

JS: Well, we know The Australian’s editorial line is rightwing, OK? Sure, but even you know, mainstream papers like The Age or the SMH on certain issues are very conservative, on the Middle-East, most definitely.

JS: What I was writing in 1995 was that the so-called peace process between Israel and Palestine was finished, two years after [it began]. For me obviously, it was a waste of time, and that’s what they were not prepared to run. Of course, ten years later everyone’s saying it’s a joke, you know. But you know, extremists from their point of view.

JS: Bruce, did you ever have a cartoon rejected?

BP: Oh, not on political grounds and not international grounds, but ones that they didn’t like were anything corporate [OK, right] because they do our advertising [of course], we can’t live without them. So you don’t name anybody, you know you can do it in a general sense that they’re all, you know, pretty devious, but you can’t say, ‘Thisguy is a crook’.

Sustainable Population Party finishes ahead of every other minor party in North Sydney by-election.

The North Sydney by-election count has delivered the Sustainable Population Party's best result yet, although Trent Zimmerman has already claimed the seat for the Liberal Party.

The Sustainable vote stands at around 3 per cent (over 2000 votes), with around 70 per cent of the vote counted. It will therefore stay near this level, which is roughly three times their previous best of 1 per cent in the 2014 Griffith by-election.

They finished ahead of every other minor party, including parliamentary parties like the Liberal Democrats, Christian Democrats and Palmer United.

The full count is displayed in the AEC Virtual Tally Room: CLICK HERE

Sustainable Population Party faced a number of significant challenges in the campaign, including the inability to run with their new Sustainable Australia name.

Extraordinary media apathy

There was also the assumption that the by-election was a foregone conclusion for the Liberals, resulting in extraordinary media apathy towards the campaign. For example, not once did the print edition of the Sydney Morning Herald list all of the candidates prior to polling day. This mainstream media apathy made it very difficult for any minor party to cut-through.

Fortunately SPP had over 100 volunteers that took their campaign to the people. They campaigned at local shopping centres, train stations and community hubs, as well as polling places on election day. Despite this, their volunteer effort was dwarfed by the Liberal and Greens parties, as well as the main independent Dr Stephen Ruff who has a huge local community network in and around the Royal North Shore Hospital.

In addition to SPP's volunteers, the contribution of Dick Smith in generating several major mainstream media promotions for the party was invaluable.

They have certainly raised the bar in the North Sydney by-election, but still have several key areas to greatly improve on.

Bruce Petty is a highly regarded political satirist and cartoonist as well as an award-winning film maker. He went to Syria in 2009 (before the war) on a project to interview Syrian intellectuals and university students about their political views. Dr Jeremy Salt is a former journalist, turned academic and is the author of The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, (University of California Press, 2008). Until recently, Dr Salt was based in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, where he ran courses in the history of the modern Middle East, in politics and in politics, propaganda and the media. The story behind this series: On 16 November 2015 a small group of concerned Australian citizens got together to talk about the problems of getting real information out to Australians and other US-NATO allies about war in Syria, in spite of mainstream press efforts to confuse the public. Bruce Petty and Jeremy Salt were part of that group. Inside is the transcript of the embedded video. (There are two other videos in this series: "Cartoonist Bruce Petty and Dr Jeremy Salt: Where news comes from: reporting on the Middle East." and "Does Bashar al-Assad really have to go? Cartoonist Bruce Petty talks to Dr Jeremy Salt")

Transcript below with headings inserted by candobetter.net editor

JEREMY SALT: One of the claims is that Bashar al-Assad has killed in his political position more people than have been killed by Islamic state.

Well, who's saying these things? Bashar al-Assad hasn't killed anyone in his life as far as I know. He himself. But that's the way the media loves to do this.

BRUCE PETTY: He's representing the army.

JEREMY SALT: But how do they actually work out their calculus? Who is killing who and the numbers that are being killed by each person involved in this. There's no way they can do it. And so it becomes just a simple propaganda statement.

And the fact is that Syria has been targeted in what is the most extraordinary attempt in modern history to destroy an Arab state. That's it. It's worse than Iraq, worse than Lebanon, worse than anything that's happened before. Go all the way back to Algeria and 1830 with the French. It is the most relentless, remorse[less] attack on an Arab country in modern history.

And the fact is that Bashar, is the president - right - and he has a functioning government. I don't know what these people who use these expressions like 'dictator' are thinking. He has a foreign minister, he has an interior minister, he has a defence minister. He listens to them. He takes their advice. They're the ones who know. And they formulate strategies to try to fight off this attack. And they've been doing this for four years.

Civilian casualties

Now, of course, of course people are going to be killed. And civilians are going to be killed too. If you've got armed men who've infiltrated towns and cities, how can you get them out without civilians being killed? And there's a big difference between killing civilians, when you're trying to drive these people out, than what ISIS does, which is to pick them all up, round them up, and kill them by the hundreds. Because they don't like them - because they're Alawis, or because they're Christians, or whatever ... So, this is a war.

Is Syria an Alawite state?

Proportion of Sunni muslims in army and government

One point to make, first, is the Gulf Arabs, Saudi Arabia in particular, and Sheikh Qaradawi and his cell mates or soul mates, perpetually say that this [Syria] is an Alawite state.

Well, excuse me, the Syrian government is multi-ethnic; it includes Christians, Sunni Muslims, Alawis, across the range. Who's got the talent gets into the ministry.

The Syrian army is more than 80 per cent Sunni Muslim. More than 80 per cent of foot soldiers are Sunni Muslim. The Alawis constitute about 10 per cent of the population of the country. So, what are these Sunni Muslims doing holding together? Because the army has held together. The media tried to drum up defections in the early stages - 'Oh, all these people are defecting!' There were hardly any. The army has just been rock-solid through this whole attack.
So, what are the Sunni Muslims doing? Well, they're not acting as Sunni Muslims, of course, they're acting as Syrians. And they're defending their country. And large numbers of them have died. Roughly about 60,000. Probably more. Out of the 200,000 or so we are told - who have been killed. So, that's one of the things that the media doesn't like to talk about.

Unelected, hated dictator?

Bashar al-Assad is popular and elected.

The second thing is that Bashar is popular. People like him. They might be critical of the system. They might not like the system. They might think the system should be replaced. They like Bashar. And this has been the case from the very very beginning. Something else that the media very rarely acknowledges.

Electoral reforms under Bashar al-Assad

Bashar al-Assad is popular and legally elected.

Third thing is that Bashar, over the last few years, has made very important steps in reforming Syria's constitution. Okay? They had a constitutional referendum. They changed the constitution. They took the Ba'ath party, removed it as a central pillar of state, they introduced a multi-party system, they had multi-party elections, they had observers from ... thirty countries observing those elections. They all said they were perfectly fair, perfectly free, and an overwhelming majority - this is for the presidential elections (they had parliamentary plus presidential) - voted for Bashar.

Mainstream media facilitates war by hiding the facts from the public

Now, all these things Syria has done, are completely ignored or dismissed out of hand in the western media. Because it doesn't suit them. It doesn't suit them. The main point here, of course, this whole rhetoric about, you know,' we have to give the Syrians democracy, and we have to kind of give Syrians a transition to democracy' - was all nonsense. Because it was not the point at all. The whole point was to destroy Syria, and to divide destroyed Syria up, in particular. And to destroy Syria, that's what you have to do.

So, you know, the readers of the media, the print media, the viewers of television, are gulled and being played upon. And this is what happens in every war. This is what governments do, you know. They dehumanise, they invalidate; they set people up as worthy of being destroyed.

BRUCE PETTY: We don't want complicated issues. We don't want complicated events.

JEREMY SALT: Of course, if Australia ever got to the point where they were going to send troops to Syria, it's all set up. 'Oh, we have to - our boys have to go and fight and get rid of the dictator. And give the Syrian people democracy. They just fall into it.

What about the chemical weapons?

’Red lines’.

BRUCE PETTY: The other claim is he had used chemical weapons on his own people. Is that true?

JEREMY SALT: Well, as far as I'm concerned, no. [inaudible] And before the big chemical weapons attack, apparently, round Damascus in 2013, there had been many many smaller episodes of chemical weapons being used. And one - where was it? In northern Syria - and I forget the person who it was - UN person - who concluded that, no, this wasn't the Syrian government.

VOICE OFF-SCENE: "Carlo Ponti."

JEREMY SALT: Was it Carlo Ponti? Right. And, when you come to the big one, round Damascus, well, we know what was behind that. Barack Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons - implicitly by the Syrian government - is a 'red line'.

Now, if chemical weapons had been used by someone else, probably there wouldn't have been a red line, but, implicitly, the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government is a red line; [if] that red line's crossed, we'll be in there. That is a signal to outside elements. All we have to do is set it up to get him across the red line. So some of these earlier attacks had been set up for that reason.

And they didn't work. 'Okay, we have to try harder.'

So you get the big chemical weapons attack around Damascus - apparently - in August 2013, where sarin gas was used and there have been many many allegations that this came from Turkey and a large number of people killed - 1300 we were told by the media. Are those figures correct? We don't know what the truth is behind these chemical weapons attacks. We don't know much about it at all, because the media picked it up, used it - 'Look what he's done! This beast, this monster, this tyrant, is now using chemical weapons against his own people.' And they used it as propaganda, then they dropped the whole thing.

Then we saw pictures of children who had been killed. Who were those children? They were just kind of 'faces'. In a photograph. On television or in the media. And they were used for a few days and then dismissed. We never heard about them again.

Mainstream media did not try to identify the children in the photos, but a Syrian nun did

So ... and... a lot of people go into this, like Mother Agnes, the Syrian nun. I mean, she did the work the journalists should have done. She looked at the photographs and said, "Hang on, wait a moment, that photograph's taken here; and that photograph is taken there: and they've got the same people in it. And allegations that some of those children we saw actually come from Latakia, which is a heavily Alawi population. And the Takfiri [...inaudible] would have no hesitation in killing Alawi children. It might seem a terribly harsh thing to say, but that's them. That's what they're like. So, there are all kinds of questions to be asked about that chemical weapons attack which the media didn't even look at.

MIT scientific study of purported gas attack

And then we had more thoughtful studies, like scientists in America at MIT. They studied the trajectory of the rocket - where they would have had to have come from. No way, they couldn't have come from Syrian military positions. We had one person who came on television, a victim of a sarin gas attack, and whose report was that - I forget who got involved in all of this, but there was no sarin anywhere else in the environment. There was nothing on the grass, nothing on the [inaudible]; just this man saying, 'I've been a victim of a sarin gas attack.' And so the whole thing unraveled.

Mainstream media refused to publish contrary evidence

And Seymour Hirsh, the gun American reporter since Vietnam, he weighed in with his report, which the New Yorker would not publish, London Review of Books published. And he pulled a lot of this together.

And the conclusion that he came to was that Obama nearly fell into this trap and retreated just at the last moment because he'd been told by his own people, 'Actually, there's something about this that is not right. We're being set up. don't get involved here.'

Gas attack – if real - came from outside, not from Syrian military

And what Seymour Hirsch - the only conclusion in his article was that this had nothing to do with the Syrian military or the Syrian government. It was an attack by armed groups - if it was a real attack - with the support of outside governments.

This Queensland Survey demonstrates how superficial questioning about population growth as an abstract good or ill gives a completely different response from deeper, prompted questioning on the matter of experienced impact of population growth. Deeper questioning elicits a profound rejection of population growth and the colourful graphs reflect the real trends. We publish this analysis because of the counterintuitive results of two much publicised recent Victorian polls, by Roy Morgan and by the Australian Institute of Progress. Those poll results and methods are analysed in another article, "Evaluating Surveys that find Australians want higher immigration and a bigger population.". The author would like to thank M.R. for drawing her attention to the subject of this article and for some valuable discussions.

Prompted perception of impacts of population growth in South East Queensland, 2010 survey by Queensland Government

(For a larger image of the graphs, click here. Use return arrow to go back to this article.)

QUEENSLAND SURVEY ON POPULATION.
For the purposes of comparison, this Queensland Survey demonstrates how superficial questioning about population growth as an abstract good or ill gives a completely different response from deeper, prompted questioning on the matter of experienced impact of population growth. Deeper questioning elicits a profound rejection of population growth.

The name of the survey was "Queensland Growth Management Summit 2010, Social Research on Population Growth and Liveability in South East Queensland", published March 2010 [1]. This survey had 801 respondents.

The report did not make it clear to respondents that 50 per cent of Queensland’s population growth was due to overseas immigrants and thus relatively discretionary. (See graph in endnotes). [2] Although immigration (overseas and interstate) were acknowledged as components of population growth, most respondents were probably not aware of how large this discretionary component was, especially the overseas part. [3]

This report never assessed the respondents for whether they had a job or position that benefited directly from population growth – such as in development, housing finance, conveyancing, real-estate, construction, building materials supply etc. It did, however, sub-categorise people according to whether they were inner-city or retired, for instance, providing some useful nuances to the opinions elicited.

What is the difference between abstract and personally relevant (prompted) questions?

An abstract question is one that has no context or direct relationship to the person, such as, ‘Is cheesecake delicious?’ A probed question about the impact of cheese cake on respondent such as, ‘Do you benefit from eating cheesecake?” might elicit a quite different and more relevant response.

Population growth in the abstract

At the beginning the report presented responses to abstract questions on population growth and evaluated the total responses as only slightly more against population growth than for it, but close to 50:50. [3] This was misleading.
On page 24 of the report there is a presentation of how people perceive benefits to population growth. The first lines are about ‘economic benefits’. This was one of few questions that permitted the surveyors to present the responses as fairly evenly divided, [5] although they exaggerated this division on page 24 as “Opinion about population growth in South East Queensland is polarised.” Although 27% said that there was nothing positive about population growth and didn’t want a higher population in SEQ, the report led with the less well represented idea that 25% of residents cited economic benefits, “particularly in terms of increased work opportunities/ a wider skills base and stimulation of the local economy as a result of competitive businesses and property prices (23%). In fact, of retirees who responded, there was a higher negative response of 37%.

(How to read the graphs: The information presented below is pictured as a levered graphic representing a bar graph on its side. Each ‘box’ is like the top of a bar graph and indicates one group of response.)

Prompted questions reveal most people actually hate population growth

The next series of graphs (2- 5) gives a dramatically different picture because it asks people to actually think about the effect that population growth would have on specific parts of their lives. It calls for thinking based on experience, rather than a guess at whether population growth [which the media promote as a natural and inevitable thing) might represent some abstract good or bad out there in government policy and economics-land.

The graphs are coloured with red as a profound protest or “No”. We can see that as the respondents consider the effects of population growth on their own ‘livability’ they are gripped by horror.

The first in the series of “prompted” responses to “liveability statements” is the least dramatic, but as the questions get ‘closer to home’ the reds and yellows predominate. By adding up all the red-orange-yellow boxes and the first grey one, which are all ‘negative’, the responses indicate that 84% of people actually realise that population growth is bad for housing availability. When you go through this in detail, just adding things up, you get a more forcefully telling result of what peoples’ attitudes to population growth are. You have 100% answering the question of which 84% realise it’s bad for housing. The 2010 Queensland government wanted to find out how much population growth it could cram in, and, in its presentation of the report, failed to adequately acknowledge the very strong, actually overwhelming rejection of population growth on specific issues. By reporting a mean score the report obfuscated the extent of rejection, which any professional could not possibly have failed to notice. This choice not to give due weight in presenting the obvious and important cannot be accidental from professional pollsters and would fail a first year statistics report.

We are making the difference that when this report started off, 43% of responses suggested that population growth was good for the economy (a very abstract notion and a response typically preached in the mass media). But prompted questions later on revealed that 90% of respondents were against population growth and contradicted their initial superficial responses in rating population growth as an abstract value. When people were asked about effects on themselves you obtained more thoughtful responses, which concluded negative impact.

Some highlights of the Queensland report

Graph 4: In graph 4, ‘housing affordability’ runs at 90% ‘change for the worse’. Traffic congestion runs even higher!
Graph 5: In graph 5, ‘availability of jobs’: 60% think that pop growth is bad for job availability. ‘My own personal standard of living’ gets a 64% negative response. When asked about ‘cost of living’, 78%, when prompted, say that population growth is bad for cost of living.
Graph 6: For this graph, the total negatives are:
Our electricity supply 78%
Waste management 80%
Native plants and wildlife 76%
Our water supply 85%
Air quality 91%
Marine & waterway health 89%

Suitability for high density living graph: The NIMBY principle may be reflected here, giving an initial appearance of consent to high density. (See the green responses to high density in Brisbane inner city and around transport hubs.) People are less concerned if others have to suffer high density, but it that density is to happen in ‘My suburb or area’, 42% of people are saying ‘absolutely not!’ in bold red, and a total of 78% are negative to high density. The response is similarly negative towards high density for “Other Suburban areas”.

This initial misleading appearance of consent has been exploited elsewhere, where a survey might use forced choice questions to provoke most people to choose densification in other suburbs rather than their own. You could either present this as most people approve of densification in all suburbs or as most people don't approve of densification in their own suburb. To decide the truth of the matter you would need to see whether people were given a choice of selecting no new densification anywhere vs densification anywhere or everywhere. Has this Queensland Survey been similarly abused? We don’t know.

NOTES

[1] Accessible at http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/TableOffice/TabledPapers/2010/5310T1926.pdf

[2] Queensland Population Growth Components Graph:

[3] This is how the matter was put to the respondents: “Queensland has the second fastest growing population in Australia and around 2000 people move to Queensland every week. Current forecasts predict Queensland’s population of 4 million could double to 8 million in less than 50 years. Much of this growth is projected to occur in South East Queensland. Growth in the population comes through overseas and interstate migraiton as well as natural increase.” (p.22.)

[4] The report described the total responses to abstract questions on population growth as “slightly more against population growth than for it, but close to 50:50.” There was an attempt to put a decent gloss on things: “Overall, the weight of opinion about population growth effect on SEQ (South East Queensland) is slightly unfavourable.” (Mean rating of 47.4 out of 100, where zero is ‘terrible for SEQ’ and 100 is ‘great for SEQ’.”) (p.21) However subsequent questioning showed most people strongly disliked population growth.

[5] Responses to unprompted questions on negative and positive aspects of population growth:

[6]The publisher of On Line Opinion recently changed its name to The Australian Institute for Progress, as "part of a major change in direction for the organisation". Although they intend to "continue to publish On Line Opinion", they have announced that their "major work will be policy development." (Source: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/display.asp?page=membership)

What gives with surveys that tell us that most of us want more immigrants and a bigger population when, all around us, we suffer the effects of faster and faster population growth in groaning infrastructure, costly housing, road congestion, and rising costs for power and water? If we examine such studies, we will find that they pose their questions in the abstract and do not prompt people to make concrete associations about the effects of immigration and population growth. This is a bit like asking people how they feel about war compared to asking how they feel about war in their suburb. These polls also focus on ethnicity of immigrants rather than environment and planning impacts of mass migration. This article looks at recent polls by the Australian Institute of Progress, Roy Morgan Research, the Australian Election Study and Queensland Growth Management Summit 2010, Social Research on Population Growth and Liveability in South East Queensland". The Queensland survey is the most detailed and valid and has been discussed in its own article, "Poll shows most hate population growth: Lessons from Queensland in polling reliability and interpretation."

In 2013 the Australian Election Study found that only 24% of Australians supported higher levels of immigration. It received 3,955 valid responses from an initial sample of 12,200 people. The survey is conducted on paper via snail-mail or online. There are prizes to motivate timely responses. [1] This survey is known as Australia's biggest and most reliable, but, as the table below shows, its response rate has been falling every year.

Responses to telephone polls, however, are an order of magnitude dimmer, at 9-17%. This is the method that the Roy Morgan institute uses. The Australian Institute of Progress uses on-line surveys of a particular population it has gathered over the years, but that population cannot be said to represent the average Australian's point of view.

On October 15, 2015 the Australian Institute of Progress (AIP)came out with [usable] poll results from 1349 people which it claimed showed that 69% of those polled supported higher immigration. The poll received inordinate publicity from a mass media eager to promote rapid population growth in Australia, [2] with The Australian interpreting the result to mean that "69 per cent of Australians support high rates of immigration."

On October 20, 2015, Roy Morgan also came out with poll results from 650 people: A majority of Australians support higher immigration and an Australian population over 30 million. This predictably also received huge publicity in the mass media.

Claims that most Australians suddenly support higher immigration [3] and an Australian population of over 30 million are hard to take on face value, especially in the light of the results of the Queensland survey: "Queensland Growth Management Summit 2010, Social Research on Population Growth and Liveability in South East Queensland", March 2010 [4], a probed survey with 801 respondents which showed that about 90% experienced population growth as having a negative impact on their lives. My experience between 1994 and 2015 (the period I have been studying attitudes to population growth) is that more and more people are speaking out against the many effects of high immigration and rapid population growth. That's not surprising, since the effects have been more and more noticeable as the population has grown more and more rapidly.

So I took a look at the questions, the numbers and the method in the AIP and the Roy Morgan polls.

Why would most Australians tick a box for a population over 30 m but less than 35m in the Roy Morgan poll?

"A majority of Australians support higher immigration and an Australian population over 30 million."

I find it interesting that the respondents in this poll apparently endorsed 'under 35 million' but did not endorse '35 million or more', and did not choose 'Under 30 million'. How did they make such a distinct choice? How were the population number choices proposed?

This is how the Roy Morgan poll posed the question of population size:

“Australia’s population has increased by 6 million from 18 million to 24 million over the last 20 years. What population do you think we should aim to have in Australia in 30 years – that is, by 2045?”

Under 25 million 9%
25 - Under 30 million 23%
30 – Under 35 million 27%
35 – Under 40 million 16%
40 – Under 50 million 10%
50 million or more 4%
Can’t say 11%

There are a number of things I find odd about these responses and the interpretations made.

Why, for instance, did more people not select the last three options, if they want a bigger population? The choice of 30m or no more than 35m does not signal enthusiasm for a big population; rather a desire to remain at the lower end of the scale they were presented with as the choices. How, I wonder, did they make these choices? Were they under the impression that what they were selecting was either mathematically reasonable or appeared more 'generous'? Or, given the historic growth described as going from 18 m to 24m in 20 years, did they assume some arithmetical trend of six million every 20 years, and therefore a sequence of 18:24:30? Which would mean that they stopped at the lowest possible logical number sequence?

My own experience of talking to people about population numbers, including conducting polls at the Sustainable Living Festival, is that many have only the faintest idea of what Australia's population is now, or the world's. They seem to be unable to quantify or imagine these numbers. 24m might mean little to them. The rates of population growth that the Roy Morgan poll gave them as historical examples are abnormally high, due to mass immigration, and atypical of normal (naturally established) populations. Few Australians, however, would realise how unusual Australia’s population growth rates have been.

Social desirability bias

Also, given how wanting lower immigration is stigmatised by the mass media and the government, which tend to conflate invited economic immigration with refugee or asylum-seeker migration, and protests about Muslim immigration as racist, it is likely that responses may have been affected by social desirability bias. Which would mean that this Roy Morgan poll would have been measuring what people have been taught is acceptable opinion rather than what they really think.

In an era of electronic surveillance, increased identity theft, phone scams and home invasion, how many people are likely to freely give an honest personal or political profile to some anonymous inquirer on the phone?

Although I also asked the Roy Morgan polsters a question about the use of randomized phone numbers, phone polls, the size of the group, and whether they used this same group size for their election polls, Roy Morgan did not get back to me.

My understanding is that Roy Morgan polled a group of 650 people. This size group has a relatively high standard error.[5] The responses could be quite misleading.

The Roy Morgan polls were conducted by phone. A huge proportion of people select out of answering phone polls these days. As mentioned above, the response rate is something between 17 and 9 %. Although professional polling groups do studies on the huge and increasing refusal rate in phone polling, they usually conclude that this doesn’t make much difference. They base this conclusion on finding that small phone respondent groups have similar characteristics to larger groups of respondents to other methods, however the characteristics explored are not deep.

If survey groups revealed that their survey methods were very unreliable, they would go out of business. Think of your own reactions to phone surveys. In an era of electronic surveillance, increased identity theft, phone scams and home invasion, how many people are likely to freely give an honest personal or political profile to some anonymous inquirer on the phone?

Social desirability bias risks:

The responses the Morgan poll obtained were in accord with mainstream media propaganda which manufactures consent, rather than informs. The Australian mass-media and government consistently endorse high immigration and stigmatise as racist or ungenerous people who do not want high immigration. In polling there is a strong problem of social desirability bias, where people do not like to reveal to the polster that they hold views that vary from what perceived authorities deem desirable. This is particularly so on sensitised issues and the issue of immigration is strongly sensitised in Australia. In the Roy Morgan poll, the population growth question came after the survey group had been softened up by the immigration questions.

Misleading and vague

Although the survey informed people of approximately the numbers of [planned invited economic] permanent immigrants in 2014-2015, it did not mention the rate of temporary immigration nor the rate of conversion to permanent whilst in Australia, which comes to a much higher number. Nor did it mention that over 60 per cent of Australia's population growth comes from overseas immigration. There was no information about the recent high annual rate of growth of Australia’s population compared to that of other comparable OECD countries. Most people would not be able to tell you what that would mean in terms of doubling time anyway. Basically, there was no way for people to judge whether Australia’s population growth rate was normal or extreme. The survey questions lacked context and personal relevance.

What was the poll actually measuring?

The Roy Morgan poll did not establish that those surveyed actually knew the facts on what they were agreeing or disagreeing with. How valid were the responses in regards to population size and immigration? What did the poll actually measure? Impressions that immigration and population were 'under control' could be based on erroneous beliefs, such as that most immigrants are refugees, 'boat people' or asylum seekers; that the government has reduced this inflow, leading to the erroneous conclusion that Australia is getting hardly any immigrants and that the population may not be growing much at all from overseas immigration. Although you would think that people could work the situation out by looking at the growing traffic congestion, the fact is that, if asked a question about population or immigration without any prompting about congestion or housing shortages, for instance, most people do not make that connection.

Australian Institute of Progress Survey into Australian Community Attitudes to Immigration

The Australian Institute of Progress Australian Attitudes to Immigration reported that 69 per cent of its respondents were in favour of current or higher levels of immigration versus 27% who wanted less than current levels. (Table 1). But the institute admitted that

"Our percentages are not necessarily representative of the wider community with the same question in a poll commissioned by the Q Society finding 40.8 per cent thought that it was good. This is a significant discrepancy that we cannot explain." AIS, p. 6.

The Australian Institute for Progress's poll of 1349 respondents, from a non-random survey, gave similar results to the randomized Roy Morgan one, but it also asked questions which showed that a large proportion of those surveyed who agreed with higher immigration intake probably thought that most immigrants were refugees or asylum seekers, and may well have believed their numbers were less than 20,000 per annum, unaware of the far greater numbers of planned invited economic permanent immigrants, numbering around 250-300,000 per annum, or of short term immigrants.

The AIP Australian Attitudes to Immigration poll asked people for comments about the reasoning behind some of their answers and threw up plenty of misunderstandings indicating poor information about numbers and kinds of immigration to Australia. Few people seemed to understand that immigration increased population numbers and that this would affect their lives:

"The refugee issue affects what comes to mind when people talk about immigration. They often seem unaware that Australia is running a substantial non-refugee immigration program amounting to hundreds of thousands a year." (p.8.) "Many of those favouring an increase in immigration think that Australia takes far fewer immigrants than most other countries. (This is objectively wrong as can be seen in a comparison of net migration for all countries complied in the CIA factbook and available at "https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2112rank.html). (p.8.) [...] "Many of the respondents conflate immigration with the refugee issue." (p.12).

People opposed to immigration seemed to understand more about its role in population growth and how this would affect their lives:

"Those who are opposed to immigration are most likely to cite stress on infrastructure, housing, or the employment market." Australian Attitudes to Immigration, (p.10).

The Australian Institute of Progress does not claim that its results were for an average of Australians. Graham Young, Executive Director of the Australian Institute of Progress Poll told me in an email,

"[...] the survey sample has grown organically over the years. We picked-up a lot of respondents from the Australian newspaper at one stage. The ABC audience has also been a heavy contributor, and various parties have probably tried stacking it over the years. When I’ve done surveys of their media usage most don’t appear to use OLO. The largest single group of respondents seem to be Greens [...] [...] We did use other quantitative surveys as controls to ensure we weren’t too far out of whack." [6]

Mr Young sent me a report about the Morgan poll, suggesting that its similar results bore out the reliability of the Australian Institute of Progress poll. I would have thought the opposite, however, because, if the Morgan poll was adequately randomized and numerous as it claims, it should not agree with the Australian Institute of Progress poll, which surveyed a population probably dominated by refugee-focused Greens, with a dash of right-wingers from The Australian, some ABC viewers and lacking working class people.

Young compared the Australian Institute of Progress Poll to the much wider based 2013 Australian Electoral Study (mentioned near beginning of this article) which does include the ‘working class’ which last year showed very different results from the AIP ones. (See graph at beginning of this article.) The Electoral Study results were that only 24% favoured an increase in immigration, while 41% favoured a decrease and 35% favoured no change.[7] The 2013 Australian Electoral Study also posed its questions as abstract concepts.

For a quite different picture from those provided by Roy Morgan and the AIP, read about the prompted perception of impacts of population growth in South East Queensland, 2010 survey by Queensland Government. There are many reasons to argue that the Queensland survey method was an order of magnitude more valid than the other polls discussed above.

NOTES

[1] From the 2013 survey at http://ada.edu.au/ADAData/questionnaires/ADA.QUESTIONNAIRE.01259.pdf
"Completing the survey
This survey should take around half an hour to complete and your participation is entirely voluntary. If
you choose to participate, you can complete online by going to www.srcentre.com.au/aes and follow the
links. To access this survey you will need the username and password located in the panel in the top
right hand corner of this page. Alternatively, you can complete and return this questionnaire in the reply-
paid envelope provided. Respondents who complete the Australian Election Study early and return the
questionnaire by 26 September 2013 will be entered into a prize draw to win $500 cash. In total 3 x $500
will be drawn. For those who complete and return the questionnaire by 25 October 2013 you will also be
entered into a prize draw to win $500 cash (refer to prize draw terms and conditions of entry at
www.srcentre.com.au/aes). To assist you there are some instructions before the beginning of the
questionnaire about how to fill it out. Remember, it is important that we get your personal views on the
issues outlined in the questionnaire as well as some general information about yourself.
Confidentiality
Your views will remain strictly confidential and will be reported only as part of the general findings from
the survey. The only identifying feature on the questionnaire is a barcode which is used to avoid sending
you reminders after you have returned the completed questionnaire. The link between this barcode and
your name and address is securely stored and is destroyed once the survey is completed."

[2] Saskia Edwards, "Australians deeply divided on immigration policy," 13 October 2015 and "Australia divided on migration issues", The Australian, 13 October 2015.
[3] “Today 57% (up 22% since July 2010) of Australians support an Australian population of over 30 million in 30 years’ time – a stunning increase from only five years ago. Only 9% (down 15%) support a population of under 25 million, a further 23% (down 9%) support a population of 25-30 million and 11% (up 2%) can’t say.

A clear majority of Australians 69% (up 11%) support immigration (of 210,000 in 2013/14) remaining the same 37% (down 10%) or increasing 32% (up 21%) while 26% (down 14%) want immigration levels reduced and 5% (up 3%) can’t say.

Importantly, more Australians believe immigration has a positive effect on Australia 37% (up 4%) than a negative effect 31% (up 1%) while 19% (down 2%) believe immigration has little effect and 13% (down 3%) can’t say according to a special Morgan Poll conducted over three nights last week with a cross-section of 647 Australians aged 14+.

Not surprisingly, a vast majority of Australians support both Skilled migrant immigration (89% cf. 8% oppose) and Family reunion migration (79% cf. 16% oppose).

In addition, the negative debate about Muslims and Asylum seekers has had little impact on how Australians consider these types of migration – 65% of Australians support Muslim immigration up from 54% support in July 2010, while 28% of Australians oppose Muslim immigration.

A large majority of Australians support Asylum seeker immigration (71% up from 52% support in July 2010) while 21% of Australians oppose Asylum immigration.”

[4] For a sample size of 650 people, one standard error would be 2.0; two standard errors would be 3.9 and three standard errors would be 5.9.

To calculate the standard error take the square root of the following sum: the proportion you are interested in multiplied by the proportion of all the rest divided by the sample size.

The smaller the 'standard error', the more reliable the measure. Multiplying by 2 and 3 to get two and three etc standard errors is based on a theoretical second and third sample, and applies some kind of standard deviation norm which gives you the reliability.

Reference: D. A. de Vaus, Surveys in Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1995, pp. 151-2.

[5]

"[...] the survey sample has grown organically over the years. We picked-up a lot of respondents from the Australian newspaper at one stage. The ABC audience has also been a heavy contributor, and various parties have probably tried stacking it over the years. When I’ve done surveys of their media usage most don’t appear to use OLO. The largest single group of respondents seem to be Greens [...] [...] We did use other quantitative surveys as controls to ensure we weren’t too far out of whack." (Source: Email from Graham Young dated Sat, Oct 17, 2015 at 11:56 AM.)

[6] “Our respondents are likely to be more strongly in favour of continued migration than the bulk of the population, as the 2013 Australian Electoral Study shows 59% favouring current levels or higher, and 42% favouring lower levels. This probably reflects the fact that our surveys miss working class Australians. (Table 1).” Source: http://aip.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/151013-AIP-Australian-Attitudes-to-Immigration-Report-FINAL.pdf, p.5.

[7] Here are the questions from the 2013 Australian Electoral Study that contain some relevance to population polls. You can download a copy of the study from: http://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/research/projects/electoral-surveys/australian-election-study/aes-2013

- Here is a list of important issues that were discussed during the election campaign. When you were deciding about how to vote, how important was each of these issues to you personally?

Issues Extremely important Quite important Not very important

1. Taxation ............................................ 1 2 3
2. Immigration ....................................... 1 2 3
3. Education .......................................... 1 2 3
4. The environment ............................... 1 2 3
5. Industrial relations ............................. 1 2 3
6. Health and Medicare ......................... 1 2 3
7. Refugees and asylum seekers .......... 1 2 3
8. Global warming ................................. 1 2 3
9. The carbon tax .................................. 1 2 3
10. Management of the economy ........... 1 2 3

- Still thinking about these same issues, whose policies—the Labor Party’s or the Liberal–National Coalition’s—would you say come closer to your own views on each of these issues?
- Still thinking about the same 10 issues, which of these issues was most important to you and your family during the election campaign? And which next?
Please put the number of the issue in the appropriate box below

Issue of most concern .............. Second issue of concern .............
- What do you think is the best way to handle the processing and resettlement of asylum seekers who come by boat and manage to reach Australian waters?
Process and resettle offshore .................................................................... 1
Process offshore but resettle in Australia .................................................. 2
Process and resettle onshore in Australia ................................................. 3
None of these options ................................................................................ 4

- Here are some statements about general social concerns. Please say whether you strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with each of these statements.

The death penalty should be reintroduced for murder .....
The smoking of marijuana should NOT be a criminal offence
People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences
Women should be given preferential treatment when applying for jobs and promotions
All boats carrying asylum seekers should be turned back
Same-sex marriages should be prohibited by law
White Australians are advantaged over others in applying for jobs
It’s a problem if people think of themselves mostly as members of ethnic groups rather than as individuals.
The government should increase opportunities for women in business and industry

- Do you think the number of immigrants allowed into Australia nowadays should be reduced or increased?

Increased a lot ........................................................................................... 1
Increased a little ......................................................................................... 2
Remain about the same as it is ................................................................. 3
Reduced a little .......................................................................................... 4
Reduced a lot ............................................................................................. 5

- There are different opinions about the effects that immigrants have on Australia. How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?

Strongly agree Agree Neither agree nor disagree Disagree Strongly disagree

Immigrants increase the crime rate ..... 1 2 3 4 5
Immigrants are generally good for Australia's economy ............................ 1 2 3 4 5
Immigrants take jobs away from people who are born in Australia ........ 1 2 3 4 5
Immigrants make Australia more open to new ideas and cultures .......... 1 2 3 4 5