By Dr. Mahmud Madi
Translated By Nicolas Dagher from Arabic
February 14, 2012
Egypt - Amal Al Ommah - Original Article (Arabic)
The shouts of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square - and all of Egypt is for all intents and purposes Tahrir Square - were heard around the world, north, south, east and west, and everyone knew that an earthquake had happened in Egypt.
As Ahmed Shawqi once said: “We were separated from the world by mail, but joined at the horizons by broadcasting." [Writing at the beginning of the last century], the poet was referring to radio - which transformed the world into a small village.
But somehow, news of the revolution failed to reach the administrations in America and Germany, which insisted on taking the same approach they followed with the previous regime, when submission and unquestioned approval was the norm. As Georgetown University Professor John Esposito has said: “The administration only sees what it wants to see, and only hears what it wants to hear.”
With many others, I watched the press conference of the Egyptian investigative judges on the involvement of some American non-governmental organizations in political activity. Under the guise of charity work and spreading democracy, they and their money entered the country illegally - the cash going to Egyptian organizations in an effort to create strife and chaos in an attempt to influence the outcome of the revolution.
The American reaction was tense and angry. In the face of the Egyptian people, Washington then drew its sharpest weapon: it threatened to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
Some American papers described the Egyptian position as reflecting a “lack of moral principle.” So is reclaiming our dignity, which was lost during the previous regime, considered a lack of moral principle? Then what should we call your arrogance toward us? Shall we call it a “lack of civility”?
Few of us have forgotten your $1.3 billion. But while Egyptians have not forgotten that, they have also not forgotten the story of the Aswan Dam and how you refused to finance it unless certain humiliating conditions were met. So the Egyptian people built it themselves with their daily bread. The people are more than willing to do without your aid.
The people will never forget your biased siding with Israel in 1967, and will not forget your threats to our military in 1973 and your airlift to Israel to save it from certain defeat at the hands of the heroic Egyptian Army. We will not forget the way you suborned President Sadat at Camp David until you stripped our victory of all substance. This is why large sectors of Egypt's population doesn't trust you. You kept the oppressive “Mubarak” regime safe and warm and you aspired to allow the regime to survive without Mubarak, so you could continue to guarantee Israel's security with the help of Egyptians.
We ask: Would the United States of America accept what these NGOs were doing here - undermining the nation's sovereignty - on U.S. soil? It would absolutely refuse. So why should we have to accept it? Why does the U.S. want revolutionary Egypt to become a breeding ground for conspiracies against Egypt's national and societal security, its territorial integrity and the unity of its people? Should Egypt accept such a situation in return for aid which is given in return for favors the previous regime performed for the U.S. in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan, all at the expense of our Arab nation?
If the Americans were sincere about their calls to spread democracy, they would have waited a bit until the end of the investigation into their agents and their leader, International Republican Institute chief Sam LaHood. But all we see is the arrogance of "Dulles," "Albright," "Kissinger" and Condoleezza Rice.
We have a right to ask: What does charity work and spreading democracy have to do with taking photographs of churches, noting their locations and numbers? How is this related to identifying the bases of the Egyptian Armed Forces in cities along the Nile canal? Isn’t this an act of espionage against our national security for the benefit of foreign parties? Or does this qualify as charitable work in your lexicon?
And how can we explain the existence of maps that divide a unified nation into four distinct states?
Another question: It has been said that the total amount of money these American NGOs poured into Egyptian organizations from 2006 to 2010 amounted to $60 million - and that in the year since the dawn of the revolution, the amount jumped to $400 million. Is such generosity out of a love for the revolution and support for the revolutionaries, or something else, perhaps?!
I want to say that the U.S. administration only reluctantly accepted the revolution and had to bite its collective tongue by removing Mubarak - but then supported the counter-revolution in order to keep the Mubarak regime without Mubarak. How else can we explain what these organizations have done to our country?
The Egyptian revolution has stood against them. It has deviated from the path sought by Tony Blair - who feels hatred and vindictiveness for everything Muslim, Arabic and Palestinian - and who said as our revolution began that any change the revolution may bring must be controlled and consistent with the economic and strategic interests of the West. Could it be that Egypt's change in course has led to attempts to seek revenge, drive the Egyptian people back onto the American reservation, and operations by American and German organizations to spy and cause chaos in support of counter revolution?
A series of moves to pressure and warn Egypt came from the U.S. administration and European Union. But so far, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, expressing itself on behalf of the revolution, has rejected these threats and announced that they would not give in - and would not be the instrument for bringing the Egyptian people to their knees again - even if Washington cuts its aid. Boosting the Army’s position were the results of NGO investigation and the discovery of the maps dividing Egypt into four entities!
The message of the revolution hasn't reached them yet. They have yet to absorb the lessons and the defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. This is the era of the people. A tiny and poor country south of Egypt, Eritrea, has refused U.S. aid and its so-called non-governmental organization and is relying on its own resources, which cannot be compared to the tremendous resources and potential of Egypt - despite its great upheavals and hard times.
Final words: If America wants to ensure its interests in our Arab East, and balanced and respectful relations with Egypt, then it has to recognize revolutionary Egypt is different from the Egypt of “Mubarak” or his heir “Gamal.”
Oh Allah, save our country of Egypt from all evil, and link our hearts to the people of the cave.
________________
Egypt Leads Fight Against NGO Agitators
A real revolution may be about to follow.
by Tony Cartalucci
February 20, 2012 - Neo-Conservative Max Boot is a certified warmonger, an elitist policy wonk sitting on the Fortune 500-funded Council on Foreign Relations, has signed his name to letters that called for sidestepping both national and international law to militarily intervene further in Libya, as well as call for troops on the ground even after Tripoli fell last year. He is a man you would least expect to champion NGOs and their liberal-progressive agendas.
However NGOs are not "liberal-progressive." They are the system administrators of modern empire, an empire being forged by the wars and covert operations Boot is a chief proponent of. The absence of NGOs in any given nation, means a nation free from the influence of Wall Street & London's networks and meddling. That is why Boot feverishly penned, "Obama’s Egyptian Hostage Crisis," in an attempt to spur a more vigorous response to what would seem like a very minor event in the context of greater global conflicts. Egypt's arrest and trying of 19 Americans, all of whom are directly involved in Wall Street's network of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded NGOs, including the head of the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Egypt, signifies a potential turning point not just in Egypt, but around the world.
Image: The Serbian Otpor fist... in Egypt? The same US organizations that trained & funded Serbians to overthrow their government in 2000, were behind the April 6 Movement and the Egyptian "Arab Spring." Sun Tzu in the Art of War said, "all warfare is deception." In fourth generation warfare, no deceit is greater than convincing people they are "liberating" themselves when in reality they are dividing and destroying their nation so that Wall Street & London's network of already in place NGOs can take over, while a suitable proxy is put in office as PM or president. In Egypt, these NGOs would already have a new constitution drafted and ready before the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
....
While Tunisia celebrates it's 1 year anniversary of Wall Street domination with a US NED-funded president in office, and Libya celebrates their February 17th uprising with militants carrying out nation-wide murder sprees, the Egyptians seems to have ground the foreign-funded destabilization effort to a halt and are finishing it off with a "revolution" of their own.
As Max Boot says:
"If any of these NGO workers wind up in prison, it will be a permanent blot not only on the Egyptian government but also on the Obama administration for letting it happen. Put simply, nations do not act like this if they fear American power. Clearly we are not inducing enough respect even in a country such as Egypt which is dependent on over $1.5 billion in annual U.S. aid.
President Obama must intervene personally if necessary to resolve this crisis and get the authorities in Cairo to let our people go. Anything less would make us a laughingstock and a certain target of more affronts."
Indeed, Egypt standing up to the US and its global network of meddlers would encourage other nations to follow suit. It would help expose the "Arab Spring" as the foreign-plot it really was and balk currently ongoing efforts by Wall Street & London to overthrow governments in Belarus, Myanmar, Malaysia, the old guard in Thailand, and even Russia and China. People in the streets may want change, but they do not want it at the expense of procuring a foreign dictator reinstating its old colonial role.
For those that doubt US-funded NGOs were meddling in Egypt...
In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," it was stated (emphasis added):
"A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington."
The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):
"The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. "
It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous organizations including NED, NDI, LaHood's IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the "Arab Spring" began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.
In 2008, Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM's various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.
Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO "Otpor" who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a "well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States." After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.
The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the "Arab Spring," along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei's arrival at Cairo's airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his "National Front for Change" and began preparing for the coming "Arab Spring."
An April 2011 AFP report would confirm that the US government had trained armies of "activists" to return to their respective countries and enact political "change," when US State Department's Michael Posner stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect."
Video: The Revolution Business. The revolutions are fake, the people behind them illegitimate.
That ripple effect of course, was the "Arab Spring" and the subsequent destabilization, violence, and even US armed and backed warfare that followed. While nations like Libya and Tunisia are now run by a BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman and a US NED-funded "activist" respectively, Egypt has managed to ward off and expose the US proxy of choice, Mohammed ElBaradei, who's own movement was forced to denounce him as a Western agent.
By striking at the meddling, seditious NGOs, Egypt seeks to undermine the source of destabilization, the conduit through which US money and support is funneled through to "activists," and expose the true foreign-funded nature of the political division that has gripped the nation for now over a year.
Message to all who seek national sovereignty...
Join in solidarity with Egypt, and after a brief amnesty period, go to the offices of each and every US National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society, USAID-funded NGO and propaganda outlet, round up their staff, and put them on trial for sedition and treason. For too long have nations tolerated the incessant meddling of foreign powers in their internal affairs. For too long have they faced ridicule and accusations by warmongers like Max Boot who has endorsed conflicts that have destroyed millions of lives. It is only a matter of time before the US, if left to its own devices, reaches a critical mass in any given nation with its networks of NGOs, its system administrators, where they begin running the nation on Wall Street & London's behalf while the sovereign institutions of the targeted state whither and die.
Video: Fourth generation warfare explained. US-enabled "Leviathan" force destroys nations, another army of "system administrators" including civil society, NGOs, and "international institutions" of the West replace it. It is modern empire in motion.
This is 4th generation warfare, not British imperial gunboats anchored off the coast and occupying armies, but sloppy, unkempt civil society workers taking millions of dollars from Wall Street's George Soros through his Open Society Institute, and the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy, and ceaselessly eroding the sovereignty of a nation, poisoning the will of people against one another, and laying the ground work for a suitable proxy of choice to enter into office and "mislead" the nation down the path to neo-colonialism. There is nothing progressive about it, and there is nothing wrong with defending against it.
Should Egypt jail these agents of sedition, and embolden other nations to follow suit, the model of 4th generation warfare that the US has spent so much time and money perfecting will collapse. Perhaps global empire may find another way to succeed, perhaps another nation will rise and take the Anglo-American's ignominious role as global tormenter, but for a brief time, nations may be able to enjoy a constructive, multi-polar world, and this real revolution of national sovereignty will have ironically started approximately one year on from the beginning of another, disingenuous, insidious "revolution."
Showing posts with label fake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fake. Show all posts
Friday, March 09, 2012
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
The West is hijacking Arab revolutions to the benefit of Islamists
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Raghida Dergham
Al arabya
While the West speaks of the necessity of accepting the results of the democratic process, in terms of Islamists coming to power in the Arab region, there are increased suspicions regarding the goals pursued by the West in its new policy of rapprochement with the Islamist movement, in what is a striking effort at undermining modern, secular and liberal movements. The three North African countries in which revolutions of change have taken place, are witnessing a transitional process that is noteworthy, not just in domestic and local terms, but also in terms of the roles played by foreign forces, both regional and international.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is trying to hijack the youth’s revolution with the help of the West. This is while bearing in mind that Egypt is considered to be the “command center” for the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in different Arab countries. The followers of the Ennahda in Tunisia are wrapping their message with moderation as they prepare to hijack the democracy that Tunisia’s youth dream of, while being met by applause and encouragement from the West in the name of the “fairness” of the electoral process. Libya, where the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) is in a “marriage of convenience” with Islamist rebels, has become a hub of extremism and lawlessness, with a plethora of military aid being collected by an assortment of armed Islamists who aim to exclude others from power. In Yemen, where a struggle for power rages on, a war is taking place between extremism and a harsher and more violent brand of extremism, with so-called “moderate Islam” in the middle as a means of salvation, even as the latter’s ideology remains neither modern nor liberal, and is rather lacking when it comes to the fundamentals of democracy and equality. In Syria, where the battle for freedom is at its most difficult phase, the youths of the revolution fear what could very much be under discussion behind the scenes between the West and the Islamist movements, in terms of collaboration and of strengthening the Islamists’ hold on power, in a clear bid to hijack the revolution of a youth that aspires to freedom in its every sense, not to yet another brand of tyranny and authoritarianism.
Yet despite increasing talk and concern over the unnatural relationship between the West and Islamist movements in the Arab region, there is growing insistence among the region’s enlightened and modern youths that they will not allow this relationship to direct their lives and dictate their course. It would thus be more logical for the West to listen carefully to what is happening at the youths’ scene, as well as on the traditional secularist and modernist scenes, and to realize the danger of what it is doing for these elements and the road to change brought about by the Arab Spring.
The obsession of some Westerners with the so-called “Turkish model” of “moderate Islam,” able to rule with discipline and democracy, seems naïve, essentially because of its assumption that such a model can automatically be applied on the Arab scene, without carefully considering the different background and conditions that exist in Turkey and the Arab countries. There is also some naivety in assuming than the “Iranian model” of religious autocratic rule that oppresses people, forbids pluralism and turns power into tyranny, can be excluded as a possibility.
What the movements of modernity, freedom and democracy in the Arab region fear is the replication of the Iranian experience and its revival on the Arab scene. What took place in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution is that the Mullahs hijacked it, excluded the youths from it and monopolized power in the “Islamic Republic” of Iran for more than 30 years.
Perhaps the West purposely encouraged what happened to Iran and its exceptional civilization by taking it back to the Dark Ages, to live in seclusion and isolation as a result of the tyranny of the Mullahs. Perhaps taking Iran more than 50 years back in time was a Western goal, which would explain their encouragement for the peaceful nature of this revolution to be hijacked. It should be stressed here that it was Iran’s 1979 revolution that sparked, throughout the Arab region, the movement of reverting to social rigidity instead of modernity and advancement. The environment created by the rule of the Mullahs in Iran led to restricting efforts in neighboring Arab Gulf region, which became unable to embrace modernity for fear of its repercussions and consequences.
In fact, hawkishness gained more ground in the Arab Gulf as a means of containing religious extremism. Thus sectarianism increased hand in hand with extremism, and the whole region became thoroughly consumed by the struggle of religions, away from the social development necessary to accompany the structural development represented by buildings, installations and other basic infrastructure.
The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) play numerous roles, sometimes in concordance, and sometimes in contradiction and mutual opposition. The common denominator among them is preserving the monarchy and keeping the Arab Spring far from the Gulf region with a certain extent of reform, which could either be costly for the regimes or for their relationship with Islamists – be they moderates or extremists. What is even more noteworthy is what is being said about the Islamic Republic of Iran, in terms of its occasional support of groups allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it sees as a means to weaken the influence of Saudi Arabia in the region.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the United Arab Emirates is supporting the movement closest to modernism in Libya, by providing support in the form of training the police force and strengthening it with equipment. This is while Qatar supports Islamist movements with training and weapons, which undermines the ability of “non-Islamists” to compete for power, and in fact leads to excluding them from power. Regarding Syria, on the other hand, the UAE is worried about what regional interference could lead to, and fears what reaches the extent of preparing for after the revolution. This is why it hesitates to support the Syrian opposition despite its desire – which it has in fact sometimes acted on – to provide some support to non-Islamist forces.
GCC countries always have Iran on their mind, as it does them, especially through the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the many dimensions of the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites. Examining how the West’s policies have evolved regarding this aspect in particular, would require greater space and a more in-depth study. Yet it is noteworthy that former US President George W. Bush strengthened the standing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its influence and its regional ambitions of hegemony, through his war in Iraq. As for the current President, Barack Obama, he seems to be in the process of strengthening “moderate Islam,” specifically among Sunnis, for it to be the means to confront both Sunni and Shiite extremism, in a policy of attracting “moderate Islam” even at the cost of undermining the forces of modernity, advancement and secularism, and pulling the rug from under their feet. This policy of Obama’s is no less dangerous than that of Bush. They both played the sectarian card at the expense of secularism, and they both adopted policies that lead to weakening the forces of moderation and strengthening the forces of extremism, regardless of whether it is “moderate extremism”, as it at the end of the day is based on the ideology of monopolizing power and not separating religion and state.
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian judge, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, addressed the women of the Arab awakening at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, and said: Do not repeat our mistake. She said that the separation of religion and state is the only guarantee of democracy, not because the flaw lies in the Sharia itself, but because it can be interpreted by men who want more domination, and who view democracy as an enemy of their monopoly, one that takes away powers they have hijacked and purposely kept women away from.
At the same conference, the Yemeni participant, a friend of Tawakel Karman, the first Arab woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said that Tawakel is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that, compared to the “Salafists,” this group represents moderation itself, as well as salvation. This is an opinion which seems to have been embraced by the West, strengthened and driven forward amid the applause of Islamist movements that present themselves as the alternative moderation, blocking the way for movements of modernity by mounting the steed of democracy, most likely on a single path from which there is no return. They are inflating themselves and their size, and entering into a temporary marriage with the West – which in their opinion is naïve – a marriage of convenience that is to their benefit as long as it breaks the back of secularists and modernists. In truth, the Democratic US Administration is not the only one encouraging Islamist movements to take such a course, as there are also some Republicans like Senator John McCain. McCain made sure to address Islamists from the rostrum of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea during a seminar on the American-Arab relationship, calling for respecting their rights to power, and thereby sending two messages: one to Islamists under the headline “we are with you,” and the other to the modernists under the headline “we do not care about you.”
There are two schools of thought that do not agree with the opinion that there is no escape from accepting the movements of “moderate Islam” because they have been victorious in the revolutions and base themselves on the change brought by the Arab Spring. Those two schools do not agree that the Arab Spring is the spring of Islamists, and they do not agree to the claim that they are the makers of the Arab awakening or spring. These two schools want to stop the Islamists from hijacking the Arab Awakening and climbing to power with the help of the West, whether the latter is naïve or ill-intentioned.
One school says: let the Islamists rule the Arab region, as this is an opportunity to prove their failure at controlling a people that does not want them. Those affiliated with this school point to Hamas and the Palestinian people’s reactions to it, in not accepting it and Islamist rule. They believe that the Arab people will defeat Islamist movements, and that they will fail. Then the modernists will return nearly victorious and welcomed by the people, and things will move forward. This then is an opportunity to prove the sure failure of Islamists, so let them fail.
The other school says: the greatest mistake is for the modernists to dwindle and withdraw from the battle now, because the Islamists reaching power will consolidate their rule for decades, not years. We must therefore immediately demand a transitional phase that would give these movements the opportunity to organize into political parties and enter the elections.
This is while bearing in mind that the only organized party is that of the Islamists, having been the only opposition movement under the former rulers. Those who are of this opinion insist on yielding neither to the cunning of the Islamists nor to the naivety of the West, and on launching an awareness campaign for world public opinion about Islamists and Western governments hijacking the Arab Spring in order to exclude the modernists, young and old equally.
It would be more logical for Western capitals to hear and to listen closely, because their partnership in hijacking the Arab youth’s ambitions of freedom, pluralism, democracy and modernity will come at high cost for them – not just for the path of change that has emerged from the soul of the youths of the Arab Spring.
How convieneint: Clinton says U.S. ready to work with Islamist groups
Raghida Dergham
Al arabya
While the West speaks of the necessity of accepting the results of the democratic process, in terms of Islamists coming to power in the Arab region, there are increased suspicions regarding the goals pursued by the West in its new policy of rapprochement with the Islamist movement, in what is a striking effort at undermining modern, secular and liberal movements. The three North African countries in which revolutions of change have taken place, are witnessing a transitional process that is noteworthy, not just in domestic and local terms, but also in terms of the roles played by foreign forces, both regional and international.
The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is trying to hijack the youth’s revolution with the help of the West. This is while bearing in mind that Egypt is considered to be the “command center” for the Muslim Brotherhood’s network in different Arab countries. The followers of the Ennahda in Tunisia are wrapping their message with moderation as they prepare to hijack the democracy that Tunisia’s youth dream of, while being met by applause and encouragement from the West in the name of the “fairness” of the electoral process. Libya, where the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) is in a “marriage of convenience” with Islamist rebels, has become a hub of extremism and lawlessness, with a plethora of military aid being collected by an assortment of armed Islamists who aim to exclude others from power. In Yemen, where a struggle for power rages on, a war is taking place between extremism and a harsher and more violent brand of extremism, with so-called “moderate Islam” in the middle as a means of salvation, even as the latter’s ideology remains neither modern nor liberal, and is rather lacking when it comes to the fundamentals of democracy and equality. In Syria, where the battle for freedom is at its most difficult phase, the youths of the revolution fear what could very much be under discussion behind the scenes between the West and the Islamist movements, in terms of collaboration and of strengthening the Islamists’ hold on power, in a clear bid to hijack the revolution of a youth that aspires to freedom in its every sense, not to yet another brand of tyranny and authoritarianism.
Yet despite increasing talk and concern over the unnatural relationship between the West and Islamist movements in the Arab region, there is growing insistence among the region’s enlightened and modern youths that they will not allow this relationship to direct their lives and dictate their course. It would thus be more logical for the West to listen carefully to what is happening at the youths’ scene, as well as on the traditional secularist and modernist scenes, and to realize the danger of what it is doing for these elements and the road to change brought about by the Arab Spring.
The obsession of some Westerners with the so-called “Turkish model” of “moderate Islam,” able to rule with discipline and democracy, seems naïve, essentially because of its assumption that such a model can automatically be applied on the Arab scene, without carefully considering the different background and conditions that exist in Turkey and the Arab countries. There is also some naivety in assuming than the “Iranian model” of religious autocratic rule that oppresses people, forbids pluralism and turns power into tyranny, can be excluded as a possibility.
What the movements of modernity, freedom and democracy in the Arab region fear is the replication of the Iranian experience and its revival on the Arab scene. What took place in 1979 after the Iranian Revolution is that the Mullahs hijacked it, excluded the youths from it and monopolized power in the “Islamic Republic” of Iran for more than 30 years.
Perhaps the West purposely encouraged what happened to Iran and its exceptional civilization by taking it back to the Dark Ages, to live in seclusion and isolation as a result of the tyranny of the Mullahs. Perhaps taking Iran more than 50 years back in time was a Western goal, which would explain their encouragement for the peaceful nature of this revolution to be hijacked. It should be stressed here that it was Iran’s 1979 revolution that sparked, throughout the Arab region, the movement of reverting to social rigidity instead of modernity and advancement. The environment created by the rule of the Mullahs in Iran led to restricting efforts in neighboring Arab Gulf region, which became unable to embrace modernity for fear of its repercussions and consequences.
In fact, hawkishness gained more ground in the Arab Gulf as a means of containing religious extremism. Thus sectarianism increased hand in hand with extremism, and the whole region became thoroughly consumed by the struggle of religions, away from the social development necessary to accompany the structural development represented by buildings, installations and other basic infrastructure.
The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) play numerous roles, sometimes in concordance, and sometimes in contradiction and mutual opposition. The common denominator among them is preserving the monarchy and keeping the Arab Spring far from the Gulf region with a certain extent of reform, which could either be costly for the regimes or for their relationship with Islamists – be they moderates or extremists. What is even more noteworthy is what is being said about the Islamic Republic of Iran, in terms of its occasional support of groups allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it sees as a means to weaken the influence of Saudi Arabia in the region.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the United Arab Emirates is supporting the movement closest to modernism in Libya, by providing support in the form of training the police force and strengthening it with equipment. This is while Qatar supports Islamist movements with training and weapons, which undermines the ability of “non-Islamists” to compete for power, and in fact leads to excluding them from power. Regarding Syria, on the other hand, the UAE is worried about what regional interference could lead to, and fears what reaches the extent of preparing for after the revolution. This is why it hesitates to support the Syrian opposition despite its desire – which it has in fact sometimes acted on – to provide some support to non-Islamist forces.
GCC countries always have Iran on their mind, as it does them, especially through the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the many dimensions of the relationship between Sunnis and Shiites. Examining how the West’s policies have evolved regarding this aspect in particular, would require greater space and a more in-depth study. Yet it is noteworthy that former US President George W. Bush strengthened the standing of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its influence and its regional ambitions of hegemony, through his war in Iraq. As for the current President, Barack Obama, he seems to be in the process of strengthening “moderate Islam,” specifically among Sunnis, for it to be the means to confront both Sunni and Shiite extremism, in a policy of attracting “moderate Islam” even at the cost of undermining the forces of modernity, advancement and secularism, and pulling the rug from under their feet. This policy of Obama’s is no less dangerous than that of Bush. They both played the sectarian card at the expense of secularism, and they both adopted policies that lead to weakening the forces of moderation and strengthening the forces of extremism, regardless of whether it is “moderate extremism”, as it at the end of the day is based on the ideology of monopolizing power and not separating religion and state.
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian judge, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, addressed the women of the Arab awakening at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France, and said: Do not repeat our mistake. She said that the separation of religion and state is the only guarantee of democracy, not because the flaw lies in the Sharia itself, but because it can be interpreted by men who want more domination, and who view democracy as an enemy of their monopoly, one that takes away powers they have hijacked and purposely kept women away from.
At the same conference, the Yemeni participant, a friend of Tawakel Karman, the first Arab woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said that Tawakel is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, and that, compared to the “Salafists,” this group represents moderation itself, as well as salvation. This is an opinion which seems to have been embraced by the West, strengthened and driven forward amid the applause of Islamist movements that present themselves as the alternative moderation, blocking the way for movements of modernity by mounting the steed of democracy, most likely on a single path from which there is no return. They are inflating themselves and their size, and entering into a temporary marriage with the West – which in their opinion is naïve – a marriage of convenience that is to their benefit as long as it breaks the back of secularists and modernists. In truth, the Democratic US Administration is not the only one encouraging Islamist movements to take such a course, as there are also some Republicans like Senator John McCain. McCain made sure to address Islamists from the rostrum of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea during a seminar on the American-Arab relationship, calling for respecting their rights to power, and thereby sending two messages: one to Islamists under the headline “we are with you,” and the other to the modernists under the headline “we do not care about you.”
There are two schools of thought that do not agree with the opinion that there is no escape from accepting the movements of “moderate Islam” because they have been victorious in the revolutions and base themselves on the change brought by the Arab Spring. Those two schools do not agree that the Arab Spring is the spring of Islamists, and they do not agree to the claim that they are the makers of the Arab awakening or spring. These two schools want to stop the Islamists from hijacking the Arab Awakening and climbing to power with the help of the West, whether the latter is naïve or ill-intentioned.
One school says: let the Islamists rule the Arab region, as this is an opportunity to prove their failure at controlling a people that does not want them. Those affiliated with this school point to Hamas and the Palestinian people’s reactions to it, in not accepting it and Islamist rule. They believe that the Arab people will defeat Islamist movements, and that they will fail. Then the modernists will return nearly victorious and welcomed by the people, and things will move forward. This then is an opportunity to prove the sure failure of Islamists, so let them fail.
The other school says: the greatest mistake is for the modernists to dwindle and withdraw from the battle now, because the Islamists reaching power will consolidate their rule for decades, not years. We must therefore immediately demand a transitional phase that would give these movements the opportunity to organize into political parties and enter the elections.
This is while bearing in mind that the only organized party is that of the Islamists, having been the only opposition movement under the former rulers. Those who are of this opinion insist on yielding neither to the cunning of the Islamists nor to the naivety of the West, and on launching an awareness campaign for world public opinion about Islamists and Western governments hijacking the Arab Spring in order to exclude the modernists, young and old equally.
It would be more logical for Western capitals to hear and to listen closely, because their partnership in hijacking the Arab youth’s ambitions of freedom, pluralism, democracy and modernity will come at high cost for them – not just for the path of change that has emerged from the soul of the youths of the Arab Spring.
How convieneint: Clinton says U.S. ready to work with Islamist groups
Thursday, August 25, 2011
EXPOSED: Indy “Newspaper” Funded by US Government
Deep network uncovered as fake “indy” rag is forced to disclose funding.
August 11, 2011
landdestroyer
by Tony Cartalucci
Bangkok, Thailand August 11, 2011 – After initially trying to downplay, obfuscate, and deny accusations that the Thai “independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper” Prachatai was in fact a US-funded propaganda front, a series of reports from Land Destroyer provided irrefutable evidence taken directly from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy website. Additional backpedaling, lying, and obfuscating prompted a follow-up report on Prachatai featuring several unlisted funding sources the duplicitous organization most likely thought were well buried.
Perhaps fearing a third onslaught, or in a desperate attempt to salvage its sagging legitimacy, just this week Prachatai has made a seemingly complete disclosure of their US government and US corporate foundation funding laying to rest its own supporter’s erroneous assumptions and defense that the organization was “just barely getting by.” In fact, they are doing quite well and receive millions of baht consistently year to year from the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and more recently USAID. In fact, an overwhelming 77% of Prachatai’s nearly 8 million baht in funding during 2011 has come directly from Uncle Sam – overt funding that would cut the legs of legitimacy out from under any alleged “news organization.”
Still, Prachatai’s utter contempt for both journalism and their readerships’ intelligence is best encapsulated in a cautionary reminder posted directly before their full financial disclosure which claims, “it is important to state here that none of our foreign donors has ever put up any demands connected to the funds they provided, nor did they ever interfere with our reporting.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such overt duplicity from an organization that has just spent the last 2 months trying to laugh-off, ignore, or otherwise belittle very legitimate concerns regarding its lack of transparency.
The nature of Prachatai’s political narrative is confrontational, directed at Thailand’s establishment, especially Thailand’s traditional institutions which exist independently of the Soros-funded networks of which Prachatai is now irrefutably exposed to be a part. Prachatai’s goal is to undermine the Thai establishment’s legitimacy while concurrently building up the legitimacy of the “international community,” global “civil society,” and to promote globalist talking points. A visit to Prachatai’s homepage reveals links running off to Soros-funded “Open Democracy,” Soros and Ford Foundation funded “Global Voices,” the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand’s globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand’s foreign-funded “civil society” movement both in and out of the country.
This is analogous to other US-funded organizations, opposition groups, and NGOs around the world including those of the recent US-funded “Arab Spring” which were all admittedly organized, trained, funded, and equipped (in some cases armed) years in advance by the United States government for the expressed purpose of initiating regime change throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. In fact, the New York Times itself would confirm this, stating that, “a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”
The New York Times would go on to explain that “the Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.”
The Funding
Digging into Prachatai’s globalist funding exposes further the inner workings of the Wall Street-London global corporatocracy and how they disingenuously promote their agenda through NGOs, “civil society,” and by perverting the noble ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Prachatai, like its counterparts throughout the world, is a disingenuous and complicit helping hand, pleading ignorance and literally saying “so what?” when the subject of just who funds them is brought up.
Image: Taken from Heinrich Böll Foundation’s 2009 Annual Report, globalist criminal bankster George Soros’ ubiquity within socially engineered movements is confirmed once again. Here he is listed under “Prominent Guests and Partners of the Foundation.” (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai, in their latest disclosure, breaks their funding down year-to-year. One name that is ubiquitous is George Soros and his Open Society Institute which has funded Prachatai millions of baht over the years, beginning in 2005 and continuing until today under the Soros-connected Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). HBF is a shameless promoter of supranational governance, pushing the verified fraud that is the “climate change agenda,” and even helped Soros’ Global Voices in networking and training Arab bloggers in 2009 to prepare them for the upcoming “Arab Spring.” HBF’s 32 page 2009 annual report is a globalist progress report that includes funding and supporting fake progressive-liberal projects and outright worldwide sedition.
Image: From IMS’s 2010 Annual Report, Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange pops in on a George Soros, ICFJ, IMS orgy of disinformation. Soros’ various funded revolutions have used Assange’s handy work as a rhetorical springboard to get into motion, therefore it is only right that Assange be given yet another stage upon which to promote the ongoing hoax that is Wikileaks. Anti-establishment, Julian Assange is not. (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai’s 2009-2010 funding included 1.79 million baht from the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), yet another Soros-funded globalist organization which also includes the US State Department and Soros-infested International Media Support (IMS) as donors. IMS literally trains foreigners to report the news according to Western standards & values, or in other words, according to the Western narrative. It is not surprising to see IMS active in every nation the US State Department is feverishly attempting to create unrest via its National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House organizations, including Belarus, China, Iran, Ukraine, and across the Middle East. In one truly surreal scene taken from IMS’s 2010 annual report, Wikileaks fraud Julian Assange appears via video link on a stage littered with the logos of IMS, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the Fortune 500 corporate-fascist infested “International Center for Journalists” which suspiciously includes Bank of America’s marketing officer and PR firm representatives from McKinsey & Co. and Edelman (a proud corporate sponsor of the Egyptian revolutions) on its board of directors.
Another name that seems quite active throughout Prachatai’s 8 year existence is the Rockefeller Foundation which initially bought the organization its computers and whose partner, the “Community Organization Development Institute (CODI),” funded Prachatai 1.89 million baht in 2004. CODI also boasts UN support as well as a partnership with the eugenicists at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There is also the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) which has funded Prachatai over half a million baht over the course of two consecutive years. FGHR is nothing more than a funding arm for the Sigrid Trust who also funds the International Crisis Group, an unelected US think-tank that meddles directly in the internal affairs of other nations. In fact, ICG member Mohammed ElBaradei literally led the US-funded Egyptian revolution, a true testament to the disingenuous nature of both these “democratic awakenings” and the dubious personalities attempting to wrestle control away from embattled regimes around the world.
We finally make our way to by far Prachatai’s number one patron, certainly not its own readership – not by a long shot – but rather the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most notorious, duplicitous organization in America, on par with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as it literally works in tandem with the CIA’s activities (along with USAID who is also funding Prachatai via their SAPAN project) in subverting governments and overthrowing entire nations for US corporate-financier interests.
NED has funded Prachatai 1.5 million baht 3 years consecutively, including this year, along with USAID who has funded Prachatai an additional 2 million baht under the guise of the SAPAN Project which presumes to teach Thais how to conduct local government.
Image: NED-funded Freedom House nominates Thailand’s NED-funded Prachatai for the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards earlier this year, thus illustrating the contrived circus that is the collective propaganda outfit’s legitimacy. (click on image to enlarge)
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And while Freedom House is not listed by Prachatai as a contributing, as it itself is also funded by NED, it is surely worthy of honorable mention. Freedom House contributes a steady stream of rhetorical support and nominations for various contrived awards like this years’ “Deutsche Welle Blog Award” while Prachatai reciprocates by loyally copying and pasting any “helpful” Freedom House reports targeting Thailand or neighboring Asian nations.
NED & Freedom House are run by Warmongering Imperialists
Despite Prachatai’s own “who cares?” attitude regarding especially their NED funding, in reality there exists an immense disparity between the stated goal of NED, that is, “supporting freedom around the world,” and the backgrounds and stated agendas of those populating NED’s board of directors. The same could easily be said of Freedom House and its board of directors.
Upon that board of directors, who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” we should find Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Conclusion
Organizations like Prachatai that take money from these confessed, ill-intentioned, meddling, neo-imperialist dens of degeneracy, are either knowing accomplices or remiss beyond explanation. In either case, their legitimacy was not compromised the moment they decided to hide their funding, nor after they fully admitted the compromised nature of their paid-for “journalism” when pressured with persistent irrefutable evidence. Instead, Prachtai’s legitimacy was entirely lost the monument they decided to accept foreign funding in the first place – which as their own disclosure accounts for, was on day-one of their operations.
Image: While immature minds succumb to a Pavlovian giggle at the mere mention of the “New World Order,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, formally of the US State Department, has written an entire book about the inevitable global governance she has dedicated her life to ushering in.
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It is undeniable that a global oligarchy of incredibly wealthy and powerful corporate-financier interests are moving to consolidate power on a global scale, as imperialists have done throughout human history. They are destabilizing and destroying the old world, nation by nation, and replacing it with a new world of their own design, their “civil society.” However, we see the means and ends to which these megalomaniacs gravitate toward. These are means and ends that are entirely abhorrent, self-serving and encapsulated in horrifying dystopian nomenclatures such as “planetary regimes” (current White House Science Adviser John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 1977), or as recent US State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it, the “New World Order.”
Image: A graphical representation of the global corporate-financiers’ emerging “international order.” From the left policy is created by unelected corporate-funded think tanks, where funding arms, contrived international NGOs, and local street fronts like Prachatai carry it out. What is produced is a global, homogenous “civil society” that answers directly to the corporate-financiers that created it. (click image to enlarge)
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The nefarious, sycophantic helping-hands making this nightmare possible are foreign-funded traitors like Prachatai helping destabilize the old world and eagerly promoting the corporate-fascist funded, globally homogeneous “civil society.” They are traitors not just to the Thai people and the Thai nation, but traitors to humanity, traitors willfully helping usher in global governance under the dominion of autocrats who openly plot a global scientific dictatorship. Prachatai most certainly looked at NED’s board of directors during the last two months the Land Destroyer Report has been pressuring them to disclose their full funding and they most certainly know who the absolute degenerate scum is that funds them and what their warmongering agenda is. Yet they press on, indifferent, even elated over rubbing their duplicity in the face of their own readership.
Their financial disclosure begins with a brief history of Prachatai which includes sniveling accounts of police raiding their office, their director being arrested, and their foreign-funded propaganda website being systematically blocked by the Thai government, as if they are the victims of some gross injustice. They act as if anyone should be allowed to take foreign money, masquerade as journalists, intentionally mislead people, and undermine their own nation on behalf of a foreign government. As mentioned before, Prachatai, according to their own financial disclosure, year-to-year is anywhere between 77% and 100% funded by the US government and/or US corporate-funded foundations. This behavior here in Thailand, and around the world, by the helping hands of the globalist corporate-financier agenda is unacceptable.
Stand up to these paid-for liars. Expose their treachery and their disingenuous abuse of liberal and progressive ideals. Stand up against their horrific exploitation of human rights and representative governance to promote their paymasters’ agenda. The world does face tyranny and its name is globalization. Globalization can be seen in full effect across the deserts of Iraq, throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, and now along the shores of Libya and in the streets of Syria’s border cities. That is the globalist future fake-progressives like Prachatai are the harbingers of.
There will be no liberal singing tomorrows in Prachatai’s Thailand, just as there are no singing tomorrows in Egypt where the paymasters, like John McCain of the International Republican Institute, instrumental in funding and training the Egyptian protesters, now squat upon the Egyptian economy with Fortune 500 corporate-fascists prepared to sink their parasitic probosces into their “newly liberated” markets. That is the future of globalization. That is the future Prachatai is trying to sell Thailand, and just like with their funding, they will deny the truth until the very bitter end.
Notes: 1 US Dollar is equal to approximately 30 Thai Baht/baht. Prachatai also has done a “project” for the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” another NED-funded NGO front that most recently took part in a Bangkok demonstration for Malaysia’s NED-funded Bersih movement.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Anatomy of Globalist-Funded Sedition
And the true path to freedom.
by Tony Cartalucci
Editor's Addition: James Woolsey, formally of the Freedom House, is now on the "leadership council" of the Neo-Con warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracies along with fellow Freedom House members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, and Paula Dobriansky. Woolsey recently signed off on the Neo-Con war propaganda film Iranium - propaganda so absurd it calls into question the sanity of those that created it. This represents further evidence illustrating how disingenuous "democracy advocates" like Freedom House are and why those receiving their funding & support are cause for alarm.
Bangkok, Thailand July 12, 2011 - While we are told by the self-proclaimed arbiters of humanity the merits of "human rights," "transparency," and "open society," these arbiters themselves are the poorest examples of such values. People indeed do have the right to know who is behind their government, the organizations that support it, and the corporations that fund them, not just in the nations and governments targeted by these nefarious arbiters, but the arbiters themselves. To this end, we hack off one tentacle of the growing Anglo-American planetary regime and dissect it - because indeed, people have a right to know the truth.
Thailand's Prachatai, as described by their US government granters at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), allegedly provides the Thai public with "a credible and respected source of independent news reporting and editorial commentary." It is also supposed to "foster a higher level of public participation and community involvement in Thai political affairs."
However a quick visit to Prachatai's website reveals links running off to Soros-funded "Open Democracy," Soros and Ford Foundation funded "Global Voices," the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand's globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand's foreign-funded "civil society" movement both in and out of the country. These include Bangkok Pundit, New Mandala of the Australian National University, and Asia Sentinel which frequently features the writings of Giles Ungpakorn, Marxist color revolution leader, author of the "Red Siam Manifesto," and brother of Prachatai founder Jon Ungpakorn. In all, Prachatai is yet another propaganda outlet serving the globalist agenda.
A 2007 cached version of Prachatai's "About Us" page did in fact mention some of their funding - however, they have since taken this down and now entirely obfuscate their finances, year to year from their own readership in a display of grotesque hypocrisy even as they demand "transparency" and "openness" from the Thai government. The 2007 cached version is as follows:
Prachatai (www.prachatai.com or www.prachathai.com ) is an independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper established in June 2004 to provide reliable and relevant news and information to the Thai public during an era of serious curbs on the freedom and independence of Thai news media.
Prachathai was established by a group of concerned Thais who include a senior member of the Press Council of Thailand, a well-known lecturer in Journalism, two members of the Thai Senate, a number of senior journalists, and a number of Thai NGO leaders.
Prachatai has a 19-member Board and a 7-member Management Committee which consists of 4 Board representatives and 3 senior staff. Since January 2006 Prachatai also been registered as a Thai non-profit foundation, named The Foundation for Community educational Media.
On September 6th 2004, Prachatai began its daily publication on the web with a staff of one editor and five reporters. At present Prachathai has a staff of 14: a Manager, Editor, Network Co-ordinator, 6 central office reporters, 3 regional reporters, a web manager, and a finance officer.
Prachatai run the program by received funding support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (www.thaihealth.or.th/en), the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) (www.codi.or.th), the Open Society Institution (www.soros.org/initiatives/bpsai/about) and The Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org/iandr/SouthEastAsia) Regional Office in Bangkok supported the purchase of US$ 5,000 worth of computer equipment.
Prachatai Objectives
1. To provide the Thai public with access to reliable news and information relevant to developing and strengthening the democratic functions of Thai civil society.
2. To focus news coverage on the problems, concerns, activities and accomplishments of local communities and civil society movements and organisations.
3. To strive for freedom and independence of Thai news media.
4. To promote active public participation in Thai news media.
Prachatai Policies
1. To present news and information as professionally as possible with strict adherence to high ethical standards of journalism.
2. To establish mutual co-operation with civil society networks and organisations and particularly with community media such as community radio stations.
3. To recruit civil society leaders in various fields of work and experience as writers for Prachatai.
4. To promote active reader participation in Prachatai as volunteer news sources, writers, commentators, contributors to the Prachatai Community Section etc.
5. Not to accept paid advertising.
Contact to Prachatai:
Mr.Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Editor
E-mail: chuwat@prachatai.com
Send e-mail to Editorial Team at editor@prachatai.com
Ms.Supapan Palangsak, Network Co-ordinator
E-mail: netcord@prachatai.com
Ms.Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Manager
E-mail: chiranuch@prachatai.com
Mr. Jon Ungphakorn General Secretary of Prachatai and the Foundation for Community educational Media
E-mail: ungjon@prachatai.com
Mailing Address: 3/16 Soi Kerdsap, Bangkhunnon, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700 Thailand Telephone: 66-2-8860427 to 8
Facsimile: 66-2-4340906
E-mail: fcem@prachatai.com
....
Interestingly enough, Rockefeller Foundation's regional office, who Prachatai cites as donating to them $5,000 for computer equipment, works in tandem with another globalist Fortune 500-funded NGO called "Ashoka" who features vulgar degenerate Sombat Boonngamanong as yet another key figure within Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" color revolution movement. These are foreign corporations and governments facilitating protests, even violence on the streets of a foreign nation - an act of war as pointed out by US Representative Ron Paul.
Photo: Thailand's "progressive hero" Sombat Boonngamanong thrives on negative attention. While foreign-funded, corporate-serving organizations like "Youth Leader" expound the virtues of Sombat and his contributions to Thailand via the UN and Fortune 500-funded organizations like Ashoka, his recent support of globalist-stooge billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front appears more opportunistic than virtuous.
....
To illustrate the depth these contrived organizations go through to lend themselves badly needed, otherwise non-existent legitimacy, yet another contrived, globalist corporate-financier funded organization, "Youth Leader" wrote a reality-defying biography of degenerate foreign-subsidized meddler Sombat Boonngamanong calling him "one of the most respected leaders’ and cultural activist in Thailand." Of course, "Youth Leader" makes no mention of how the Thai "red shirt" movement is a street-front for globalist-backed Thaksin Shinawatra. Such convenient omissions allows statements like "most respected" to go unchallenged by a readership overwhelmed by slanted, biased, flowery depictions they emotionally want to be true.
Other organizations not listed by Prachatai that have funded their activities over the years include the Sigrid Rausing Trust (who also funds the International Crisis Group) via the Global Human Rights Fund (2008) and the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prachatai receives rhetorical support from these organizations as well as from Freedom House and a myriad of contrived, corporate-funded organizations that shower the seditious website with various "awards" year to year in yet another example of how the global elite lend themselves otherwise nonexistent legitimacy.
While some may claim receiving such funds from organizations with names like "Freedom House" and "National Endowment for Democracy" is entirely innocuous and that these foreign interests are truly dedicated to worthwhile causes, any thorough examination of these organizations reveals otherwise.
NED & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists
We begin with the board of directors of NED, who, judging by their supposed mission to support "freedom around the world," should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their "entry into the complex China market easy." Surely Bohn's ability to manipulate China's political landscape through NED's various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears "conflict of interests" is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as "Vice President of Congressional Relations" as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil's ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED's board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this "think tank" are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses." As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The "Statement of Principles," signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Of course by "international order" they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House's Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC "Statment on Post-War Iraq" regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House's Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring "Which Path to Persia?" report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC's latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America "hostage" and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to "help the Libyan opposition."
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses' Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause. It is also safe to say that the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Globalist "Freedom" vs. Real Freedom
Organizations like Prachatai are knowingly or unknowingly carrying along the agenda of modern day imperialists. While they propose they are there to keep the Thai government "in check" for the Thai people, in reality they are doing so for the global corportocracy to which they clearly owe their existence to. When Thaksin Shinawatra was in office, Prachatai's US funding was meant to keep him from becoming a nationalist autocratic strongman. With him removed and fully in the service of the global corporatocracy, Prachatai's job has now become undermining the current government and making way for an indebted Thaksin to return to power and pay back his Western patrons. While Thailand will be free of any Thai autocrat, they will be subservant to the various unelected authors and signatories within PNAC calling for American global hegemony. Ironically, the "freedom" Prachatai believes it is bringing to Thailand through the nihilistic destruction of Thailand's traditional institutions will usher in the very colonialism those institutions had warded off for centuries - Thailand being the only Southeast Asian nation to escape European colonization.
Image: Illustrating how large the actual globalist machine is and how small both Thaksin Shinawatra and Prachatai are in comparison. Either is entirely replaceable at any given moment. And while Prachatai was initially receiving money to keep Thaksin in order and now being used to undermine the current Thai establishment, it is being done so not for the Thai people's benefit, but for a globalist empire attempting to prevent any strong nationalist entity from controlling land, resources, and people they presume dominion over. (click image to enlarge)
....
Reading the "Rebuilding of America's Defenses" and the various documents promoted by PNAC and now FPI and even throughout the CFR, Brookings Institution and others, we can see clearly the proposal and pursuit of an international order presumably led by Anglo-American interests with their system of "liberal democracy" imposed upon the collective population of the world. They are building a global homogeneous network they refer to as "civil society" to slowly take over the roles various national governments carry out today. When these networks reach critical mass, or when an opportunity to remove a nationalist government presents itself, governments are toppled, stooges installed, and "civil society" groomed until it reaches full maturity. In turn this "civil society" then interfaces with the myriad of contrived "international institutions" like the UN, IMF, World Bank, the fraudulent International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization.
Image: Illustrated are the policy think-tanks funded by the largest, most powerful corporations on earth and representing their collective interests. They are the unelected authors of human destiny. Their funding arms channel money into propaganda, contrived international arbiters, illegitimate "international institutions" like the International Criminal Court, and of course the various armies of dupes, propagandists, and street fronts that operate within any given nation. (click image to enlarge)
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In the United States we can see the total pervasion of the global corporatocracy in everyday life. Laws and regulations are dictated by unelected policy wonks within organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which are then rubber-stamped by feckless, corporate-serving politicians and enforced by an omnipresent, ever growing national security force. We are then expected to believe, somehow, that these very same organizations are "exporting" freedom, democracy, and human rights abroad. Indeed they are not. What is being built in Thailand, as is being built in Malaysia, across the US-backed destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, and along Russia's western border with Belarus, is the modern day equivalent of Britain's or even Rome's imperial networks.
Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by "integrating" them into their own Roman "international order."
From HistoryWorld.net:
'His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.'
Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72
Indeed the alleged freedom proposed to us by the likes of NED and Freedom House and the myriad of foreign-funded dupes carrying out their agenda, is nothing more than features of our own enslavement. As Egyptians rallied to "free" themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and let in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group. Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the "Arab Spring," took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly "freed" Cairo. Their agenda is "economic liberalization" and the total integration of Egypt's once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy.
Conclusion
True freedom comes from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and economic and political independence as a community, as a state or province, and as a sovereign nation. Those peddling the allure of regional integration and global community are nothing more than the very same agents that peddled Roman culture to young British tribesmen. For all the promise the Roman Empire proclaimed, it festered into a despotic global regime which eventually collapsed in on itself leaving much of the world in a feudal dark age for centuries. The promise of globalization is no different, with cracks already beginning to show, it is disingenuous in both its intentions and its final outcome. We will not be one world living harmoniously, we will be one world under the thumb of a degenerate self-anointed elite.
If you are not self-sufficient and truly independent, you are not free, no matter how many paper ballots you stuff in a box, no matter how many marches you attend, and no matter how many Freedom House wires you cut & paste onto your foreign-funded "independent media" website. As long as you depend on these corporations, you belong to them, just as you did as a child dependent on your parents. The real revolution, and the real political awakening will occur when the people realize they do not need politicians or their contrived systems to lead and manage them, and begin using their own two hands to work from the land beneath them their own existence.
August 11, 2011
landdestroyer
by Tony Cartalucci
Bangkok, Thailand August 11, 2011 – After initially trying to downplay, obfuscate, and deny accusations that the Thai “independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper” Prachatai was in fact a US-funded propaganda front, a series of reports from Land Destroyer provided irrefutable evidence taken directly from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy website. Additional backpedaling, lying, and obfuscating prompted a follow-up report on Prachatai featuring several unlisted funding sources the duplicitous organization most likely thought were well buried.
Perhaps fearing a third onslaught, or in a desperate attempt to salvage its sagging legitimacy, just this week Prachatai has made a seemingly complete disclosure of their US government and US corporate foundation funding laying to rest its own supporter’s erroneous assumptions and defense that the organization was “just barely getting by.” In fact, they are doing quite well and receive millions of baht consistently year to year from the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and more recently USAID. In fact, an overwhelming 77% of Prachatai’s nearly 8 million baht in funding during 2011 has come directly from Uncle Sam – overt funding that would cut the legs of legitimacy out from under any alleged “news organization.”
Still, Prachatai’s utter contempt for both journalism and their readerships’ intelligence is best encapsulated in a cautionary reminder posted directly before their full financial disclosure which claims, “it is important to state here that none of our foreign donors has ever put up any demands connected to the funds they provided, nor did they ever interfere with our reporting.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such overt duplicity from an organization that has just spent the last 2 months trying to laugh-off, ignore, or otherwise belittle very legitimate concerns regarding its lack of transparency.
The nature of Prachatai’s political narrative is confrontational, directed at Thailand’s establishment, especially Thailand’s traditional institutions which exist independently of the Soros-funded networks of which Prachatai is now irrefutably exposed to be a part. Prachatai’s goal is to undermine the Thai establishment’s legitimacy while concurrently building up the legitimacy of the “international community,” global “civil society,” and to promote globalist talking points. A visit to Prachatai’s homepage reveals links running off to Soros-funded “Open Democracy,” Soros and Ford Foundation funded “Global Voices,” the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand’s globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand’s foreign-funded “civil society” movement both in and out of the country.
This is analogous to other US-funded organizations, opposition groups, and NGOs around the world including those of the recent US-funded “Arab Spring” which were all admittedly organized, trained, funded, and equipped (in some cases armed) years in advance by the United States government for the expressed purpose of initiating regime change throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. In fact, the New York Times itself would confirm this, stating that, “a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”
The New York Times would go on to explain that “the Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.”
The Funding
Digging into Prachatai’s globalist funding exposes further the inner workings of the Wall Street-London global corporatocracy and how they disingenuously promote their agenda through NGOs, “civil society,” and by perverting the noble ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Prachatai, like its counterparts throughout the world, is a disingenuous and complicit helping hand, pleading ignorance and literally saying “so what?” when the subject of just who funds them is brought up.
Image: Taken from Heinrich Böll Foundation’s 2009 Annual Report, globalist criminal bankster George Soros’ ubiquity within socially engineered movements is confirmed once again. Here he is listed under “Prominent Guests and Partners of the Foundation.” (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai, in their latest disclosure, breaks their funding down year-to-year. One name that is ubiquitous is George Soros and his Open Society Institute which has funded Prachatai millions of baht over the years, beginning in 2005 and continuing until today under the Soros-connected Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). HBF is a shameless promoter of supranational governance, pushing the verified fraud that is the “climate change agenda,” and even helped Soros’ Global Voices in networking and training Arab bloggers in 2009 to prepare them for the upcoming “Arab Spring.” HBF’s 32 page 2009 annual report is a globalist progress report that includes funding and supporting fake progressive-liberal projects and outright worldwide sedition.
Image: From IMS’s 2010 Annual Report, Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange pops in on a George Soros, ICFJ, IMS orgy of disinformation. Soros’ various funded revolutions have used Assange’s handy work as a rhetorical springboard to get into motion, therefore it is only right that Assange be given yet another stage upon which to promote the ongoing hoax that is Wikileaks. Anti-establishment, Julian Assange is not. (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai’s 2009-2010 funding included 1.79 million baht from the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), yet another Soros-funded globalist organization which also includes the US State Department and Soros-infested International Media Support (IMS) as donors. IMS literally trains foreigners to report the news according to Western standards & values, or in other words, according to the Western narrative. It is not surprising to see IMS active in every nation the US State Department is feverishly attempting to create unrest via its National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House organizations, including Belarus, China, Iran, Ukraine, and across the Middle East. In one truly surreal scene taken from IMS’s 2010 annual report, Wikileaks fraud Julian Assange appears via video link on a stage littered with the logos of IMS, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the Fortune 500 corporate-fascist infested “International Center for Journalists” which suspiciously includes Bank of America’s marketing officer and PR firm representatives from McKinsey & Co. and Edelman (a proud corporate sponsor of the Egyptian revolutions) on its board of directors.
Another name that seems quite active throughout Prachatai’s 8 year existence is the Rockefeller Foundation which initially bought the organization its computers and whose partner, the “Community Organization Development Institute (CODI),” funded Prachatai 1.89 million baht in 2004. CODI also boasts UN support as well as a partnership with the eugenicists at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There is also the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) which has funded Prachatai over half a million baht over the course of two consecutive years. FGHR is nothing more than a funding arm for the Sigrid Trust who also funds the International Crisis Group, an unelected US think-tank that meddles directly in the internal affairs of other nations. In fact, ICG member Mohammed ElBaradei literally led the US-funded Egyptian revolution, a true testament to the disingenuous nature of both these “democratic awakenings” and the dubious personalities attempting to wrestle control away from embattled regimes around the world.
We finally make our way to by far Prachatai’s number one patron, certainly not its own readership – not by a long shot – but rather the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most notorious, duplicitous organization in America, on par with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as it literally works in tandem with the CIA’s activities (along with USAID who is also funding Prachatai via their SAPAN project) in subverting governments and overthrowing entire nations for US corporate-financier interests.
NED has funded Prachatai 1.5 million baht 3 years consecutively, including this year, along with USAID who has funded Prachatai an additional 2 million baht under the guise of the SAPAN Project which presumes to teach Thais how to conduct local government.
Image: NED-funded Freedom House nominates Thailand’s NED-funded Prachatai for the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards earlier this year, thus illustrating the contrived circus that is the collective propaganda outfit’s legitimacy. (click on image to enlarge)
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And while Freedom House is not listed by Prachatai as a contributing, as it itself is also funded by NED, it is surely worthy of honorable mention. Freedom House contributes a steady stream of rhetorical support and nominations for various contrived awards like this years’ “Deutsche Welle Blog Award” while Prachatai reciprocates by loyally copying and pasting any “helpful” Freedom House reports targeting Thailand or neighboring Asian nations.
NED & Freedom House are run by Warmongering Imperialists
Despite Prachatai’s own “who cares?” attitude regarding especially their NED funding, in reality there exists an immense disparity between the stated goal of NED, that is, “supporting freedom around the world,” and the backgrounds and stated agendas of those populating NED’s board of directors. The same could easily be said of Freedom House and its board of directors.
Upon that board of directors, who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” we should find Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Conclusion
Organizations like Prachatai that take money from these confessed, ill-intentioned, meddling, neo-imperialist dens of degeneracy, are either knowing accomplices or remiss beyond explanation. In either case, their legitimacy was not compromised the moment they decided to hide their funding, nor after they fully admitted the compromised nature of their paid-for “journalism” when pressured with persistent irrefutable evidence. Instead, Prachtai’s legitimacy was entirely lost the monument they decided to accept foreign funding in the first place – which as their own disclosure accounts for, was on day-one of their operations.
Image: While immature minds succumb to a Pavlovian giggle at the mere mention of the “New World Order,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, formally of the US State Department, has written an entire book about the inevitable global governance she has dedicated her life to ushering in.
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It is undeniable that a global oligarchy of incredibly wealthy and powerful corporate-financier interests are moving to consolidate power on a global scale, as imperialists have done throughout human history. They are destabilizing and destroying the old world, nation by nation, and replacing it with a new world of their own design, their “civil society.” However, we see the means and ends to which these megalomaniacs gravitate toward. These are means and ends that are entirely abhorrent, self-serving and encapsulated in horrifying dystopian nomenclatures such as “planetary regimes” (current White House Science Adviser John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 1977), or as recent US State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it, the “New World Order.”
Image: A graphical representation of the global corporate-financiers’ emerging “international order.” From the left policy is created by unelected corporate-funded think tanks, where funding arms, contrived international NGOs, and local street fronts like Prachatai carry it out. What is produced is a global, homogenous “civil society” that answers directly to the corporate-financiers that created it. (click image to enlarge)
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The nefarious, sycophantic helping-hands making this nightmare possible are foreign-funded traitors like Prachatai helping destabilize the old world and eagerly promoting the corporate-fascist funded, globally homogeneous “civil society.” They are traitors not just to the Thai people and the Thai nation, but traitors to humanity, traitors willfully helping usher in global governance under the dominion of autocrats who openly plot a global scientific dictatorship. Prachatai most certainly looked at NED’s board of directors during the last two months the Land Destroyer Report has been pressuring them to disclose their full funding and they most certainly know who the absolute degenerate scum is that funds them and what their warmongering agenda is. Yet they press on, indifferent, even elated over rubbing their duplicity in the face of their own readership.
Their financial disclosure begins with a brief history of Prachatai which includes sniveling accounts of police raiding their office, their director being arrested, and their foreign-funded propaganda website being systematically blocked by the Thai government, as if they are the victims of some gross injustice. They act as if anyone should be allowed to take foreign money, masquerade as journalists, intentionally mislead people, and undermine their own nation on behalf of a foreign government. As mentioned before, Prachatai, according to their own financial disclosure, year-to-year is anywhere between 77% and 100% funded by the US government and/or US corporate-funded foundations. This behavior here in Thailand, and around the world, by the helping hands of the globalist corporate-financier agenda is unacceptable.
Stand up to these paid-for liars. Expose their treachery and their disingenuous abuse of liberal and progressive ideals. Stand up against their horrific exploitation of human rights and representative governance to promote their paymasters’ agenda. The world does face tyranny and its name is globalization. Globalization can be seen in full effect across the deserts of Iraq, throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, and now along the shores of Libya and in the streets of Syria’s border cities. That is the globalist future fake-progressives like Prachatai are the harbingers of.
There will be no liberal singing tomorrows in Prachatai’s Thailand, just as there are no singing tomorrows in Egypt where the paymasters, like John McCain of the International Republican Institute, instrumental in funding and training the Egyptian protesters, now squat upon the Egyptian economy with Fortune 500 corporate-fascists prepared to sink their parasitic probosces into their “newly liberated” markets. That is the future of globalization. That is the future Prachatai is trying to sell Thailand, and just like with their funding, they will deny the truth until the very bitter end.
Notes: 1 US Dollar is equal to approximately 30 Thai Baht/baht. Prachatai also has done a “project” for the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” another NED-funded NGO front that most recently took part in a Bangkok demonstration for Malaysia’s NED-funded Bersih movement.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Anatomy of Globalist-Funded Sedition
And the true path to freedom.
by Tony Cartalucci
Editor's Addition: James Woolsey, formally of the Freedom House, is now on the "leadership council" of the Neo-Con warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracies along with fellow Freedom House members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, and Paula Dobriansky. Woolsey recently signed off on the Neo-Con war propaganda film Iranium - propaganda so absurd it calls into question the sanity of those that created it. This represents further evidence illustrating how disingenuous "democracy advocates" like Freedom House are and why those receiving their funding & support are cause for alarm.
Bangkok, Thailand July 12, 2011 - While we are told by the self-proclaimed arbiters of humanity the merits of "human rights," "transparency," and "open society," these arbiters themselves are the poorest examples of such values. People indeed do have the right to know who is behind their government, the organizations that support it, and the corporations that fund them, not just in the nations and governments targeted by these nefarious arbiters, but the arbiters themselves. To this end, we hack off one tentacle of the growing Anglo-American planetary regime and dissect it - because indeed, people have a right to know the truth.
Thailand's Prachatai, as described by their US government granters at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), allegedly provides the Thai public with "a credible and respected source of independent news reporting and editorial commentary." It is also supposed to "foster a higher level of public participation and community involvement in Thai political affairs."
However a quick visit to Prachatai's website reveals links running off to Soros-funded "Open Democracy," Soros and Ford Foundation funded "Global Voices," the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand's globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand's foreign-funded "civil society" movement both in and out of the country. These include Bangkok Pundit, New Mandala of the Australian National University, and Asia Sentinel which frequently features the writings of Giles Ungpakorn, Marxist color revolution leader, author of the "Red Siam Manifesto," and brother of Prachatai founder Jon Ungpakorn. In all, Prachatai is yet another propaganda outlet serving the globalist agenda.
A 2007 cached version of Prachatai's "About Us" page did in fact mention some of their funding - however, they have since taken this down and now entirely obfuscate their finances, year to year from their own readership in a display of grotesque hypocrisy even as they demand "transparency" and "openness" from the Thai government. The 2007 cached version is as follows:
Prachatai (www.prachatai.com or www.prachathai.com ) is an independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper established in June 2004 to provide reliable and relevant news and information to the Thai public during an era of serious curbs on the freedom and independence of Thai news media.
Prachathai was established by a group of concerned Thais who include a senior member of the Press Council of Thailand, a well-known lecturer in Journalism, two members of the Thai Senate, a number of senior journalists, and a number of Thai NGO leaders.
Prachatai has a 19-member Board and a 7-member Management Committee which consists of 4 Board representatives and 3 senior staff. Since January 2006 Prachatai also been registered as a Thai non-profit foundation, named The Foundation for Community educational Media.
On September 6th 2004, Prachatai began its daily publication on the web with a staff of one editor and five reporters. At present Prachathai has a staff of 14: a Manager, Editor, Network Co-ordinator, 6 central office reporters, 3 regional reporters, a web manager, and a finance officer.
Prachatai run the program by received funding support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (www.thaihealth.or.th/en), the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) (www.codi.or.th), the Open Society Institution (www.soros.org/initiatives/bpsai/about) and The Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org/iandr/SouthEastAsia) Regional Office in Bangkok supported the purchase of US$ 5,000 worth of computer equipment.
Prachatai Objectives
1. To provide the Thai public with access to reliable news and information relevant to developing and strengthening the democratic functions of Thai civil society.
2. To focus news coverage on the problems, concerns, activities and accomplishments of local communities and civil society movements and organisations.
3. To strive for freedom and independence of Thai news media.
4. To promote active public participation in Thai news media.
Prachatai Policies
1. To present news and information as professionally as possible with strict adherence to high ethical standards of journalism.
2. To establish mutual co-operation with civil society networks and organisations and particularly with community media such as community radio stations.
3. To recruit civil society leaders in various fields of work and experience as writers for Prachatai.
4. To promote active reader participation in Prachatai as volunteer news sources, writers, commentators, contributors to the Prachatai Community Section etc.
5. Not to accept paid advertising.
Contact to Prachatai:
Mr.Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Editor
E-mail: chuwat@prachatai.com
Send e-mail to Editorial Team at editor@prachatai.com
Ms.Supapan Palangsak, Network Co-ordinator
E-mail: netcord@prachatai.com
Ms.Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Manager
E-mail: chiranuch@prachatai.com
Mr. Jon Ungphakorn General Secretary of Prachatai and the Foundation for Community educational Media
E-mail: ungjon@prachatai.com
Mailing Address: 3/16 Soi Kerdsap, Bangkhunnon, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700 Thailand Telephone: 66-2-8860427 to 8
Facsimile: 66-2-4340906
E-mail: fcem@prachatai.com
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Interestingly enough, Rockefeller Foundation's regional office, who Prachatai cites as donating to them $5,000 for computer equipment, works in tandem with another globalist Fortune 500-funded NGO called "Ashoka" who features vulgar degenerate Sombat Boonngamanong as yet another key figure within Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" color revolution movement. These are foreign corporations and governments facilitating protests, even violence on the streets of a foreign nation - an act of war as pointed out by US Representative Ron Paul.
Photo: Thailand's "progressive hero" Sombat Boonngamanong thrives on negative attention. While foreign-funded, corporate-serving organizations like "Youth Leader" expound the virtues of Sombat and his contributions to Thailand via the UN and Fortune 500-funded organizations like Ashoka, his recent support of globalist-stooge billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front appears more opportunistic than virtuous.
....
To illustrate the depth these contrived organizations go through to lend themselves badly needed, otherwise non-existent legitimacy, yet another contrived, globalist corporate-financier funded organization, "Youth Leader" wrote a reality-defying biography of degenerate foreign-subsidized meddler Sombat Boonngamanong calling him "one of the most respected leaders’ and cultural activist in Thailand." Of course, "Youth Leader" makes no mention of how the Thai "red shirt" movement is a street-front for globalist-backed Thaksin Shinawatra. Such convenient omissions allows statements like "most respected" to go unchallenged by a readership overwhelmed by slanted, biased, flowery depictions they emotionally want to be true.
Other organizations not listed by Prachatai that have funded their activities over the years include the Sigrid Rausing Trust (who also funds the International Crisis Group) via the Global Human Rights Fund (2008) and the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prachatai receives rhetorical support from these organizations as well as from Freedom House and a myriad of contrived, corporate-funded organizations that shower the seditious website with various "awards" year to year in yet another example of how the global elite lend themselves otherwise nonexistent legitimacy.
While some may claim receiving such funds from organizations with names like "Freedom House" and "National Endowment for Democracy" is entirely innocuous and that these foreign interests are truly dedicated to worthwhile causes, any thorough examination of these organizations reveals otherwise.
NED & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists
We begin with the board of directors of NED, who, judging by their supposed mission to support "freedom around the world," should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their "entry into the complex China market easy." Surely Bohn's ability to manipulate China's political landscape through NED's various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears "conflict of interests" is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as "Vice President of Congressional Relations" as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil's ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED's board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this "think tank" are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses." As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The "Statement of Principles," signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Of course by "international order" they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House's Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC "Statment on Post-War Iraq" regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House's Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring "Which Path to Persia?" report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC's latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America "hostage" and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to "help the Libyan opposition."
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses' Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause. It is also safe to say that the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Globalist "Freedom" vs. Real Freedom
Organizations like Prachatai are knowingly or unknowingly carrying along the agenda of modern day imperialists. While they propose they are there to keep the Thai government "in check" for the Thai people, in reality they are doing so for the global corportocracy to which they clearly owe their existence to. When Thaksin Shinawatra was in office, Prachatai's US funding was meant to keep him from becoming a nationalist autocratic strongman. With him removed and fully in the service of the global corporatocracy, Prachatai's job has now become undermining the current government and making way for an indebted Thaksin to return to power and pay back his Western patrons. While Thailand will be free of any Thai autocrat, they will be subservant to the various unelected authors and signatories within PNAC calling for American global hegemony. Ironically, the "freedom" Prachatai believes it is bringing to Thailand through the nihilistic destruction of Thailand's traditional institutions will usher in the very colonialism those institutions had warded off for centuries - Thailand being the only Southeast Asian nation to escape European colonization.
Image: Illustrating how large the actual globalist machine is and how small both Thaksin Shinawatra and Prachatai are in comparison. Either is entirely replaceable at any given moment. And while Prachatai was initially receiving money to keep Thaksin in order and now being used to undermine the current Thai establishment, it is being done so not for the Thai people's benefit, but for a globalist empire attempting to prevent any strong nationalist entity from controlling land, resources, and people they presume dominion over. (click image to enlarge)
....
Reading the "Rebuilding of America's Defenses" and the various documents promoted by PNAC and now FPI and even throughout the CFR, Brookings Institution and others, we can see clearly the proposal and pursuit of an international order presumably led by Anglo-American interests with their system of "liberal democracy" imposed upon the collective population of the world. They are building a global homogeneous network they refer to as "civil society" to slowly take over the roles various national governments carry out today. When these networks reach critical mass, or when an opportunity to remove a nationalist government presents itself, governments are toppled, stooges installed, and "civil society" groomed until it reaches full maturity. In turn this "civil society" then interfaces with the myriad of contrived "international institutions" like the UN, IMF, World Bank, the fraudulent International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization.
Image: Illustrated are the policy think-tanks funded by the largest, most powerful corporations on earth and representing their collective interests. They are the unelected authors of human destiny. Their funding arms channel money into propaganda, contrived international arbiters, illegitimate "international institutions" like the International Criminal Court, and of course the various armies of dupes, propagandists, and street fronts that operate within any given nation. (click image to enlarge)
....
In the United States we can see the total pervasion of the global corporatocracy in everyday life. Laws and regulations are dictated by unelected policy wonks within organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which are then rubber-stamped by feckless, corporate-serving politicians and enforced by an omnipresent, ever growing national security force. We are then expected to believe, somehow, that these very same organizations are "exporting" freedom, democracy, and human rights abroad. Indeed they are not. What is being built in Thailand, as is being built in Malaysia, across the US-backed destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, and along Russia's western border with Belarus, is the modern day equivalent of Britain's or even Rome's imperial networks.
Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by "integrating" them into their own Roman "international order."
From HistoryWorld.net:
'His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.'
Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72
Indeed the alleged freedom proposed to us by the likes of NED and Freedom House and the myriad of foreign-funded dupes carrying out their agenda, is nothing more than features of our own enslavement. As Egyptians rallied to "free" themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and let in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group. Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the "Arab Spring," took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly "freed" Cairo. Their agenda is "economic liberalization" and the total integration of Egypt's once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy.
Conclusion
True freedom comes from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and economic and political independence as a community, as a state or province, and as a sovereign nation. Those peddling the allure of regional integration and global community are nothing more than the very same agents that peddled Roman culture to young British tribesmen. For all the promise the Roman Empire proclaimed, it festered into a despotic global regime which eventually collapsed in on itself leaving much of the world in a feudal dark age for centuries. The promise of globalization is no different, with cracks already beginning to show, it is disingenuous in both its intentions and its final outcome. We will not be one world living harmoniously, we will be one world under the thumb of a degenerate self-anointed elite.
If you are not self-sufficient and truly independent, you are not free, no matter how many paper ballots you stuff in a box, no matter how many marches you attend, and no matter how many Freedom House wires you cut & paste onto your foreign-funded "independent media" website. As long as you depend on these corporations, you belong to them, just as you did as a child dependent on your parents. The real revolution, and the real political awakening will occur when the people realize they do not need politicians or their contrived systems to lead and manage them, and begin using their own two hands to work from the land beneath them their own existence.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
3 Cups of Orientalism
I haven’t read 3 Cups of Tea, and I don’t really have any intention of doing so. (I haven’t yet seen any compelling argument for why I should read the book.) However, I did read another book in the genre, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, by the founder of Room2Read. I was interested because we became involved in a project to support a library/informal school in India while making our last film, and I wanted to see if I could learn anything from the book. While it was mostly about what a great guy the author is (I guess that is a requirement for this genre), I did like the fundraising model they use—in which local communities are expected to buy-in to the project. We are working on trying to replicate that on a smaller scale in the library project. (If you have any relevant experience and would like to help – please contact me.)
I tend to be very skeptical of such efforts, but I think anyone who sees the film will understand how important the library is to the community – and we wanted to have some kind of mechanism in place so that when the film cames out people could support the library. But we’ve also learned that it is important not to go too fast or try to do too much. For this reason, I really liked Timothy Burke’s piece on the 3 Cups scandal:
If I gave you an unlimited line of credit and carte blanche to run everything your way, do you think you could make a single secondary school work? I mean, really work so it was beyond reproach, was by almost any measure superior in outcomes and character and ethos to any alternative? Now what if I took away from you the choice of where your school was located and restricted you to pupils who lived within 30 miles of your school? Now what if I required you to obey all relevant national and local laws addressing education? Still confident? Now what if I made you operate within a budgetary limit that was generous by local and national standards but not unlimited? Getting harder yet? Now what if I put your school in a location with very little infrastructure and serious structural poverty?
The point here is that when one crucial task like that is hard enough, we should be deliriously happy to see a person dedicate their life and money and effort to make that task work. One. When we keep our checkbooks closed and our frowny-faces on because that’s not enough, not nearly enough, we create a situation where development messianism is inevitable. We invite not mission creep but mission gallop: make a hundred schools! change gender ideology! eliminate poverty! Under the circumstances, looking back, you have to ask how that was ever creditable, why anyone cheered and hoped and wrote checks.
But enough about saving the world. You’ve all waited patiently for some juicy postcolonial critique and I don’t intend to disappoint you. The best place to start is Aaron Bady’s excellent round up of online commentary on the subject.
One of the pieces listed there is Nosheen Ali’s article [PDF] (originally linked to by Carole McGranahan on Twitter) published in Third World Quarterly before the recent scandal broke. The article challenges the narrative of fear and danger which pervades the book:
The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in TCT. While it has madrassas affiliated with different interpretations of Islam, the Northern Areas more generally is not a terrain teeming with fundamentalist madrassas and Taliban on the loose—the definitive image of the region in TCT, especially on its back cover, in its introduction and in its general publicity. Hence, despite the now characteristic token statements like ‘not every madrassa was a hotbed of extremism’, the subtext of TCT remains rooted in a narrative of fear and danger.
She also challenges the “taken-for-granted assumption that an American individual can casually talk about ‘changing the culture’ in places where culture and life itself has already been radically transformed through US support of the military and the militant.” Both important points to make.
A more subtle argument was also made by Manan Ahmed about the role of “expertise” in pursuing the War on Terror—an issue which touches on some of the debates we’ve had here about HTS:
In July 2010, The New York Times reported on the popularity of Greg Mortenson’s 2006 memoir Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time among the US Military high-command. The report described General McChrystal and Admiral McMullen using the text as a guide to their civilian strategy in Pakistan. Mortenson’s book quickly became required reading in military academies (the report hinted at the role played by the wives of senior military brass in promoting the title) and Mortenson has since spoken to the US Congress and testified in front of committees. Mortenson himself, though a selfless worker for the most disenfranchised of Pakistan’s northwestern citizens, possesses no deep knowledge of the region’s past or present and is avowedly “non-political” in his local role. Still, his personal story, his experiences and the work of his charity are now widely considered to be a blueprint for US strategy in the Af-Pak region.
Both Stewart and Mortenson illustrate one particular configuration of the relationship between knowledge and the American empire – the “non-expert” insider who can traverse that unknown terrain and, hence, become an “expert”.
The HTS argument would be that what we need is simply better experts, ones who actually know something about the local culture (although from what I’ve read about HTS it seems that this is not always the case). Ahmed challenges the Niall Fergusonesque notion that we simply need to learn better ways of managing empire:
There is no better way to do empire. The condition of asserting political and military will over a distant population is one that cannot sustain itself in any modern, liberal society. The efforts to understand, will inevitably lead to the understanding that the people of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq desire the power to make their own decisions – without the imposition of governments or militaries sanctioned and placed from afar.
I started by discussing how I liked the development model used by Room To Read. It involves treating local organizations as full partners in the development process. Just as thinking through power relationships is an essential part of effective anthropological collaboration, I think it is an equally essential part of development work. The problem with the approach taken by the US military and 3 Cups is that it wants us to think about culture without thinking about power, and I don’t think that can ever work.
Greg Mortenson and the Trouble With Celebrity Philanthropy
April 21, 2011
I am pretty blown away by Three Cups of Deceit, Jon Krakauer's investigative e-book revealing the depth of philanthropic guru Greg Mortenson's lies.
To summarize: Mortenson is the founder of the Central Asia Institute, which constructs schools in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is also the author of the best-sellers Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, which purport to tell the story of how Mortenson's 8-day kidnapping by the Taliban inspired him to commit his life to educating the children of Central Asia.
It is hard to overstate Mortenson's influence in the world of international philanthropy. When President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he donated $100,000 of his winnings to CAI. From fall 2009 to summer 2010, I worked full-time at The Daily Beast, mostly editing stories on philanthropy and international social issues. Mortenson's name came up again and again among my writers and the sources they interviewed. He was a huge celebrity, well-known from his speaking tours and media appearances, and was regarded as a hero for championing girls' education.
Now Krakauer, in a feat of reporting across cultural and linguistic boundaries, has revealed that Mortenson completely fabricated the tale of his kidnapping, that he renegged on a promise to build a school in the village of Khane, that he spent very little time in the places where his books are set, that many of CAI's schools are completely empty or lack teachers and basic supplies, and that just a fraction of the money the charity raises actually goes toward educating kids.
Nick Kristof, who has promoted Mortenson's work, responded to the revelations with a defensive column this morning, arguing that even if all these accusations are true, Mortenson has still "built more schools and transformed more children’s lives than you or I ever will."
I find this unconvincing. To me, the most troubling aspect of Krakauer's reporting is that Mortenson portrayed entire regions and ethnic groups within Pakistan as corrupted by terrorism, when in fact, at the time that his narrative purpotedly takes place, in 1996, there were no Taliban or Al-Qaeda fighters in regions such as Ladha. In fact, it was only after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 that, as Krakauer writes, "large numbers of Taliban fled across the Durand Line into the tribal areas of Pakistan, seeking refuge from American drones and bombers."
Mortenson's lies have deep political significance. They obscure the true effects of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and misrepresent Pakistan and the Pakistani people to the American public. In the words of sociologist Nosheen Ali, as reported by Krakauer:
"The most troubling irony is that the focal region of Mortenson’s work—the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage—has nothing to do with the war on terror, yet is primarily viewed through this lens in [Three Cups of Tea]."
What's more, in responding to Krakauer's allegations, Mortenson has engaged in more offensive cultural stereotying, claiming, "It is important to know that Balti people have a completely different notion about time." It is ridiculous to claim that any group of people do not know when a pack of lies have been spread about them. Here are the words--written in a letter to Krakauer--of Ghulam Parvi, CAI's former Pakistan program manager, who has split with Mortenson and his organization:
"...innocent people working with him in Pakistan, especially in Baltistan, had to face disgrace, loathsome from the society, religiously bashfulness and financial losses. Times and again Greg Mortenson was requested not to perform such acts, which bring bad name and defame to us, but he always very politely and smilingly neglected our requests."
The reporting and editing I've done on international social justice work has made me extremely wary of self-promotional, celebrity philanthropy. So often, the most amazing non-profit work is done by organizations and people you've never head of, folks like Molly Melching and Sunitha Krishnan, who live in the countries and communities on whose behalf they advocate.
What's more, celebrity philanthropy very often obscures the fact that without political, legal, and military reforms on-the-ground, no amount of private funding can eradicate problems such as sexual violence or girls' lack of access to education.
The upside of celebrity philanthropy, of course, is that it draws attention to important issues. But I hope this sordid tale serves as a reminder that the media ought to be far more skeptical and hard-headed about evaluating philanthropic claims, both domestic and international. Krakauer's reporting deserves to be celebrated.
Vijay Prashad on Mortensen October 2010: Sifting the 'Three Cups' tea leaves
Created 10/19/2010 - 4:00am
NORTHAMPTON - I read Greg Mortenson and David Relin's "Three Cups of Tea" shortly after it was published in 2006. I was moved by the despair in Mortenson's life (the death of his sister) that sent him on his quixotic adventure to climb K2 in Pakistan. An accident ends his quest. The villagers of Korphe rescue him. In response, Mortenson wants to promote education not only in this village, but also in the region.
Thus far, the story is inspirational. But matters are more complex from here on. Mortenson is taken over by his publishers, by the nonprofit industry and by the Pentagon. His genuineness is less relevant than the brand he becomes and the work his charity is able to do for the U. S. war aims in Afghanistan.
Mortenson wanted to subtitle his book, "One Man's Mission to Promote Peace - One School at a Time." Penguin insisted it be subtitled "One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations" (after it became a hit, the book took Mortenson's subtitle).
The small voice of charity had already been suborned to the war on terror. That was how the book came to us, putting forward the liberal view that the war should not only be fought with guns, but with books.
"I supported the war in Afghanistan," Mortenson has said. "I believed in it because I believed we were serious when we said we planned to rebuild Afghanistan. I'm here because I know that military victory is only the first phase of winning the war on terror and I'm afraid we're not willing to take the next steps."
The schools are the next steps, or, more accurately, the simultaneous steps.
In 2002, Mortenson comes to Congress and at a briefing makes his pitch for the schools project. He is not driven by the war on terror, he says, but notes that terrorism "happens because children aren't being offered a bright enough future that they have a reason to choose life over death." This statement startles. It comes with insufficient context. Mortenson talks about "Pakistan's impoverished public schools," and the "Wahhabi madrassas sprouting like cancerous cells," as well as the "factories of jihad."
Anthropologist Nosheen Ali points out that "the Shia region of Baltistan with its Tibetan-Buddhist heritage has nothing to do with the war on terror," and it is not the place that Mortensen says, "gave birth to the Taliban." By making such a rash assertion, Ali points out, the subtext of "Three Cups of Tea" is "rooted in a narrative of fear and danger."
The Taliban emerged in the southern districts of Afghanistan and in refugee camps funded by the United States government, the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani military. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, a brutal civil war broke out among rebel factions. The U. S. government colluded with the Pakistani military to bring stability in Afghanistan via the Taliban. Stability was needed to finish plans for an oil pipeline to run from the Caspian Sea to Pakistan.
Why do children in Pakistan's northern region find themselves without education? Not because of "tribal" reticence or some ancient animosity to learning, but because of the long war (since 1979) that has disrupted the region and brought nothing but suffering to the people. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund forced Islamabad to end its support of public education, and opened the door to the madrassas, most of which are not "factories of jihad," but the last resort of children from the lower middle class and the working class - all of whom want an education.
In 2010, the U. S. military has already conducted over 75 drone attacks in the areas of northern Pakistan where Mortenson's project operates. His close association with the Pentagon disturbs people in the region, as the anthropologist Shafqat Hussain found over this summer. One friend writes, "School girls, then bomb them. Or bomb them first, and then school the survivors. The order's not important."
There are many other sincere agencies at work in northern Pakistan. None come with the association of the Pentagon, or with a compelling book. Hafiz Muhammad Iqbal, the dean of the faculty of education at the University of Punjab, says of the work of Aga Khan Education Services in particular, "It is because of such interventions that education facilities have reached almost in each and every corner of the region" (he is referring to Baltistan and Gilgit).
I took to Mortenson's book because he does not seek to elevate himself above the villagers (people like Haji Ali, Sakina, Ghulam Parvi, Hussein and others). In "Three Cups," Mortenson is careful to avoid the lineage of the "white man's burden" and his own temperament seems unequal to the colonial official.
Nonetheless, the Mortenson effect allows us to adulate Mortenson for his sacrifices and to reduce the efforts of people in Pakistan, who wish to bring dignity to their own lives. Indeed, their work is often undermined by the very policies Mortenson supports, and that he allows his foundation to run alongside. This is colonialism by book, as the bombs fall with apologies.
Vijay Prashad is director of international studies at Trinity College and author of "The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World" (New Press, 2007). He lives in Northampton.
Fabricated Philanthropy: Echoes Beyond Mortenson
By FARZANA VERSEY
It is being vilified as a yarn, for plagiarism, for making up the Taliban threats. Frothing mouths are expressing anger over being cheated. Cheated about what? A chronicler who took liberties in the telling of his story or one who embezzled funds from the charity he set up?
Let us go beyond the mountain story. Greg Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, wrote the bestselling 'Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time' based on his experiences with the tribals after having lost his way on a mountaineering expedition and landing up in Korphe, a Balti village. It is possible that he exaggerated bits of the anecdotes, but surely he did not know that the Central Asia Institute charity he set up to fund schools in the region would turn out to be a cash cow? If, as the reports now reveal, only 41 per cent of that money was utilised for the charity work and the rest went on his book marketing, then we need to use another route of inquiry. There is hypocrisy in the manner in which it was promoted; the author was following the good old altruism trail. The reality and deception lie between the lines.
One report stated: "President Obama was so impressed with the book that he donated $140,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to education ventures it spawned. The US military made it compulsory reading for personnel deployed in the Af-Pak theatre. American kids emptied their piggy banks to give to schools the author claimed to be building in Pakistan."
Why was it made compulsory reading for army personnel and why humanise what is being demonised? Why did Barack Obama donate the money to this charity and not to any local one? Mortenson's greater crime is one by default – of whitewashing the image of the US administration, even if to a small degree.
It has come to light that he was not kidnapped by the Taliban. In one of the photographs of 1996, his so-called kidnapper turns out to be Mansur Khan Mahsud, a research director of the FATA Research Center. After all these years, he now tells the Daily Beast that the author "just wanted to sell books because by 2006 everyone wanted to know about the Taliban and Waziristan…He thought this was a good chance to cash in". Going by this argument, he too is cashing in after the expose. Did he not recognise himself earlier in the picture?
There are many organisations that work in those areas and if one writer has conjured up stories about Taliban intimidation it does not mean they are entirely untrue. It isn't, in fact, just the Taliban. The government agencies too keep track. There have been cases of some activists being poisoned, of phone calls being tapped, of attempts at conversion. This I have first-hand knowledge of. But many of them also understand that they could be seen as suspect. There are some who admit that being do-gooders can be a pampered job profile where you don't socialise with the locals beyond three cups of tea, and return to the UN club for your dance and drink evenings.
The Mortenson story, as opposed to Mortenson's story, is not as unusual as it is made out to be. Misappropriating funds from charity is a known racket. In this case an individual has been exposed. What about the conniving methods by respectable people who ride on the philanthropy bandwagon in needy societies?
Lady Gaga's bracelet for Japan's tsunami victims is less devious than what the two Williams had been upto in India. Gates and Buffett made the idea of aid a business enterprise. It is a shame that they are sponging on the Indian economy while pretending to be "cheerleaders" for the game of giving.
With evangelical fervour they went about tutoring Indian industrialists on philanthropy. In this manner they got to meet all the big honchos under one roof and make a sound investment, not just in the poverty sector but to further their own businesses back home.
Beneath the umbrella of donations, it is raining opportunities. Buffett, the third richest man in the world, even manages to get upfront about it: "India is now a logical destination for an investor. I am an enormous believer in global trade and the better the rest of the world economies do, the better the US economy will do."
So insular is the attitude that while flashing sympathy he commented on the two recent world crises - in Libya and Japan - rather callously: "Of course it is a tragedy for the people who have lost their loved ones. But for trade these events are just an interruption. Business will go on and this will not slow down world economic growth."
India's poverty will work as a testing ground for experimental entrepreneurship and can also be a means of skirting bureaucratic stasis. Together with the vaccines, they will be pumped in "chewing gum and coca-cola". His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has a stake in Wrigley and Coca-Cola.
Bill Gates follows a similar principle when he says, "Giving and making money has a lot of similarities." It is, if seen in entrepreneurial terms. A minuscule portion of the growing individual wealth is channelised into a large nameless pool. But success is rarely shared by those who contribute directly and are seen as competitors.
It is easy to speak about the Third World black money that can be routed for such legitimate activities. Buffett made a startling comment, "A child receiving a vaccine is not going to question the source of the money." This could well apply to those coming from outside as well.
The plans for healthcare may set dangerous precedents. Bill Gates has been travelling through the villages of Bihar and while talking to NGOs, there is an attempt to educate and train the people. The simple fact is that such training will be quite useless, not because the rural folks are resistant – most do not question – but because it will be open season for the multinational pharmaceutical industry to dump their medical waste on us. This is not new and banned drugs even in urban areas are still prescribed and sold in India.
In a shocking bit of news a while ago, four Indian public-funded national universities entered into a pact with Nestle for nutrition awareness programmes for adolescent school-going girls in government-run village schools. This was kept under wraps because it has come to light that there was a Memorandum of Understanding between the two sides that stated: "This MoU, its existence and all information exchanged between the parties under this MoU or during the negotiations preceding this MoU is confidential to them and may not be shared with a third party."
When questioned on the basis of the Right to Information Act, the response from Nestle mentioned that the programme was"specially developed by scientists and experts to be used exclusively to carry out the set objectives of the MoU. The contents of the programme are of commercial and confidential nature and the disclosure of which may harm our competitive position." It is amazing that public institutions are being utilised for such competitiveness.
Our societies are also pulled up by the international philanthropist communities for spending on religion – people are more interested in building temples or donating to shrines. But when a huge tragedy occurs, it is the local NGOs and people who join in to help without waiting – the earthquake and floods in Pakistan, the tsunami in India. Except for foreign agencies, the Samaritan business community prefers to seek areas where they can spread their wings. This too is proselytisation.
Perhaps, it would make sense to talk about a preacher from Oakland, California. Harold Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, runs a $120 million Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded by donations from listeners. He now owns 66 stations in the US alone.
There are many kinds of stories to be told and as many subterfuges. Greg Mortenson's charity will be examined. He has, however, only fabricated the truth a bit. The real fabricators are the ones who delude people into believing that while they are emptying their pockets their motives cannot be questioned. They are not selling books. They are buying obeisance, these altruistic colonisers.
Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based columnist and author of 'A Journey Interrupted: Being Indian in Pakistan'.
It is being vilified as a yarn, for plagiarism, for making up the Taliban threats. Frothing mouths are expressing anger over being cheated. Cheated about what? A chronicler who took liberties in the telling of his story or one who embezzled funds from the charity he set up?
Let us go beyond the mountain story. Greg Mortenson, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, wrote the bestselling 'Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time' based on his experiences with the tribals after having lost his way on a mountaineering expedition and landing up in Korphe, a Balti village. It is possible that he exaggerated bits of the anecdotes, but surely he did not know that the Central Asia Institute charity he set up to fund schools in the region would turn out to be a cash cow? If, as the reports now reveal, only 41 per cent of that money was utilised for the charity work and the rest went on his book marketing, then we need to use another route of inquiry. There is hypocrisy in the manner in which it was promoted; the author was following the good old altruism trail. The reality and deception lie between the lines.
One report stated: "President Obama was so impressed with the book that he donated $140,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize money to education ventures it spawned. The US military made it compulsory reading for personnel deployed in the Af-Pak theatre. American kids emptied their piggy banks to give to schools the author claimed to be building in Pakistan."
Why was it made compulsory reading for army personnel and why humanise what is being demonised? Why did Barack Obama donate the money to this charity and not to any local one? Mortenson's greater crime is one by default – of whitewashing the image of the US administration, even if to a small degree.
It has come to light that he was not kidnapped by the Taliban. In one of the photographs of 1996, his so-called kidnapper turns out to be Mansur Khan Mahsud, a research director of the FATA Research Center. After all these years, he now tells the Daily Beast that the author "just wanted to sell books because by 2006 everyone wanted to know about the Taliban and Waziristan…He thought this was a good chance to cash in". Going by this argument, he too is cashing in after the expose. Did he not recognise himself earlier in the picture?
There are many organisations that work in those areas and if one writer has conjured up stories about Taliban intimidation it does not mean they are entirely untrue. It isn't, in fact, just the Taliban. The government agencies too keep track. There have been cases of some activists being poisoned, of phone calls being tapped, of attempts at conversion. This I have first-hand knowledge of. But many of them also understand that they could be seen as suspect. There are some who admit that being do-gooders can be a pampered job profile where you don't socialise with the locals beyond three cups of tea, and return to the UN club for your dance and drink evenings.
The Mortenson story, as opposed to Mortenson's story, is not as unusual as it is made out to be. Misappropriating funds from charity is a known racket. In this case an individual has been exposed. What about the conniving methods by respectable people who ride on the philanthropy bandwagon in needy societies?
Lady Gaga's bracelet for Japan's tsunami victims is less devious than what the two Williams had been upto in India. Gates and Buffett made the idea of aid a business enterprise. It is a shame that they are sponging on the Indian economy while pretending to be "cheerleaders" for the game of giving.
With evangelical fervour they went about tutoring Indian industrialists on philanthropy. In this manner they got to meet all the big honchos under one roof and make a sound investment, not just in the poverty sector but to further their own businesses back home.
Beneath the umbrella of donations, it is raining opportunities. Buffett, the third richest man in the world, even manages to get upfront about it: "India is now a logical destination for an investor. I am an enormous believer in global trade and the better the rest of the world economies do, the better the US economy will do."
So insular is the attitude that while flashing sympathy he commented on the two recent world crises - in Libya and Japan - rather callously: "Of course it is a tragedy for the people who have lost their loved ones. But for trade these events are just an interruption. Business will go on and this will not slow down world economic growth."
India's poverty will work as a testing ground for experimental entrepreneurship and can also be a means of skirting bureaucratic stasis. Together with the vaccines, they will be pumped in "chewing gum and coca-cola". His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has a stake in Wrigley and Coca-Cola.
Bill Gates follows a similar principle when he says, "Giving and making money has a lot of similarities." It is, if seen in entrepreneurial terms. A minuscule portion of the growing individual wealth is channelised into a large nameless pool. But success is rarely shared by those who contribute directly and are seen as competitors.
It is easy to speak about the Third World black money that can be routed for such legitimate activities. Buffett made a startling comment, "A child receiving a vaccine is not going to question the source of the money." This could well apply to those coming from outside as well.
The plans for healthcare may set dangerous precedents. Bill Gates has been travelling through the villages of Bihar and while talking to NGOs, there is an attempt to educate and train the people. The simple fact is that such training will be quite useless, not because the rural folks are resistant – most do not question – but because it will be open season for the multinational pharmaceutical industry to dump their medical waste on us. This is not new and banned drugs even in urban areas are still prescribed and sold in India.
In a shocking bit of news a while ago, four Indian public-funded national universities entered into a pact with Nestle for nutrition awareness programmes for adolescent school-going girls in government-run village schools. This was kept under wraps because it has come to light that there was a Memorandum of Understanding between the two sides that stated: "This MoU, its existence and all information exchanged between the parties under this MoU or during the negotiations preceding this MoU is confidential to them and may not be shared with a third party."
When questioned on the basis of the Right to Information Act, the response from Nestle mentioned that the programme was"specially developed by scientists and experts to be used exclusively to carry out the set objectives of the MoU. The contents of the programme are of commercial and confidential nature and the disclosure of which may harm our competitive position." It is amazing that public institutions are being utilised for such competitiveness.
Our societies are also pulled up by the international philanthropist communities for spending on religion – people are more interested in building temples or donating to shrines. But when a huge tragedy occurs, it is the local NGOs and people who join in to help without waiting – the earthquake and floods in Pakistan, the tsunami in India. Except for foreign agencies, the Samaritan business community prefers to seek areas where they can spread their wings. This too is proselytisation.
Perhaps, it would make sense to talk about a preacher from Oakland, California. Harold Camping, an 89-year-old former civil engineer, runs a $120 million Family Radio Network, a religious broadcasting organisation funded by donations from listeners. He now owns 66 stations in the US alone.
There are many kinds of stories to be told and as many subterfuges. Greg Mortenson's charity will be examined. He has, however, only fabricated the truth a bit. The real fabricators are the ones who delude people into believing that while they are emptying their pockets their motives cannot be questioned. They are not selling books. They are buying obeisance, these altruistic colonisers.
Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based columnist and author of 'A Journey Interrupted: Being Indian in Pakistan'.
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