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Tagged ‘Médecins Sans Frontières‘

AFGHANISTAN: DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS RECOGNIZED AS THE TOP BRAND IN THE MISERY INDUSTRY

Exhibit Abstract

“‘Great Harm Has Been Done to US,’ declared George Bush in a speech thunderously applauded by the U.S. Congress on 20 September 2001. With this disingenuous slogan the United States directed its unaccountable permanent warfare machine at the people of Afghanistan, a place that few U.S. citizens know much about. Our ‘allies’ jumped aboard, unleashing high-tech weaponry and shock-and-awe destruction on a simple people that have been subject to the nasty prerogatives of Empire since ~ 1838.

Civilians bear the brunt of this ugly war: over the past 4 years far more than 33,000 Afghan civilians were injured or killed. The cowardice of our war includes drone strikes, targeted assassinations, ‘dirty tricks’ black operations, snatch-and-snuff kidnappings, torture—all as policy.  The War of Terror has caused millions of direct / indirect deaths since 2001, and millions more displaced persons, and the U.S. has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Dilawar of Yakubi was a young taxi driver tortured/killed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

+++

“Decades of war means destruction of homes and villages, destruction of crops, croplands mined, failed crops, and rising displacement. Starvation and malnutrition were named in a major New York Times ‘news’ article that appears to be more a plug for the UNICEF brand and the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières brand than any serious reportage on the hunger crisis. The disingenuous title of the January 2014 article was: ‘Afghanistan’s Worsening, and Baffling, Hunger Crisis.’ What is baffling? This is a way to diminish responsibility and deflect attention from the obvious causes of starvation, crop failures, starvation, malnutrition, high infant mortality, and other obvious effects of the illegal U.S. war in Afghanistan. Further, the article notes that ‘despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children’s health is not only still a problem, but also worsening’ but nowhere does the New York Times probe the massive corruption and outright (advertising & branding) lies of the for-profit humanitarian sector that, obviously, benefits from our permanent warfare economy.”

“Hunger in Afghanistan is a very real problem. These children play at sunset amidst piles of grain being processed—separating the wheat from the chaff using straw brooms on a dirt ground—by their fathers and uncles. To grasp the gross inequity between the level of suffering for children in Afghanistan (the target population that the AID industry preys upon), consider that combined salaries of the top seven Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières executives total $1,169,715 (* 2016 IRS form 990) and they receive $256479 in ‘other’ compensation. Of course, information about Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres corporate sponsors is not easily discoverable from either their web site or their published reports available therein.”

“This father and his son suffer alike after the child was wounded and rests in critical condition in a hospital bed in Kabul.”

“The landscapes in Afghanistan are vast, and the real reasons for the war are for access to the land and its natural resources. In the calculated equations of predatory western capitalism and the profit motives of unconscious demagogues and warmongers the people of Afghanistan are considered in the way: they are expendable, and the depopulation of Afghanistan is underway.”

“Afghan herders often trip unexploded ordnance and land mines while herding domestic donkeys, sheep and goats. Landmines and other battlefield unexploded ordnance (UXOs) contaminate at least 724 million square meters of land in Afghanistan, more than any other country in the world. Only two of Afghanistan’s twenty-nine provinces are believed to be free of landmines. The Northern Alliance and United Front forces have laid mines, while many Russian-era mines remain. According to Human Rights Watch in 2001, the Taliban had stopped using landmines in 1998, declaring it un-Islamic and punishable by death; after 1998 the Taliban were often falsely blamed for using them. Mine clearance teams in Afghanistan still find UXOs from the former Soviet Union but also from Belgium, Italy, the United States and Britain. The United States dropped about 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 bomblets between October 2001 and March 2002 alone; these weapons destroyed the homes and lives of countless civilians.”

“Afghan men discuss war and politics outside a mosque in northern Afghanistan. The people are angry at the U.S. occupation, the corruption of their leaders working with the occupation, and they admit that every U.S. attack redoubles the popular resistance to the U.S. and its goals.”

“Afghan farmers see the profit and value in planting their fields in poppies. The Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military have their fingers in the Afghan opium/heroin trade: heroin processed in Afghanistan by ‘Taliban’ and ‘Isis’ and other factions backed by the U.S. does not leave Afghanistan on the backs of donkeys. Warlords run the heroin business. The heroin is allegedly shipped by air to Bondsteel Air Base in Kosovo, where it is then allegedly distributed to Western Europe by the Albanian mafia.”

“As Dr. Alfred McCoy pointed out: On 16 November 2017 the United Nations released its opium report for 2017: total crop area up from 200,000 hectares in 2016 to 328,000 hectares in 2017; the opium harvest nearly doubled since 2016 from 4,600 to 9,000 tons, well above the 2007 peak of 8,200 tons.”

“A boy of ten years old—another obvious civilian casualty in the U.S.-led war “to win hearts and minds”—rests awake and immobile and terrified, his wounds still fresh and bloody, in the intensive care section of a hospital in Kabul.”

“The LOVE THY ENEMY sign I posted on my family’s farmland in Williamsburg Massachusetts on September 13, 2001, defaced over night by local people directly connected to the war machine. The people responsible for the war in suffering in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Central Africa are the people of the western nations whose soldiers are fighting and killing there, the populations whose complacency and acceptance make these wars in ‘far off places’ possible. There is little discussion of these wars in popular quarters in the United States, Canada or Europe, as they are hidden and downplayed and obfuscated by the western media propaganda system. The U.S. population is deeply divided between those who favor war and killing and ‘putting America first’ at all costs, and those who see the pointlessness of war, and the profits being made to sustain it, at the expense of all people everywhere, and at the expense of nature, and all of planet earth.”

Photographer’s Statement

View Keith Harmon Snow’s stunning exhibition, in it’s entirety:

http://socialdocumentary.net/exhibit/keith_harmon_snow

[Keith Harmon Snow has worked as a journalist, war correspondent, genocide investigator and/or photographer in 46 countries — often traveling by simple means (mountain bike, raft, horse, foot) to enable a deeper engagement with the land and people.  He is the 2009 Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work documenting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  He is also a certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator, and author of the non-fiction book: The Worst Interests of the Child: The Trafficking of Children & Families Through U.S. Family Courts.  In July 2016 his SDN exhibit Inside the Company, Down on the Farm (plantations in the DR Congo) won an Honorable Mention in the SDN Call for Entries on The Fine Art of Documentary.  He is available for assignment. You can also visit his website All Things Pass.]

 

George Soros: Anti -Syria Campaign Impresario

The Wall Will Fall

January 21, 2016

by Vanessa Beeley

 

“They [the media] are news-as-entertainment professionals – packaging glossy corporate content for maximum distribution and big bucks. The goal is not objective reportage. Their targets are quantifiable and highlighted in a business plan somewhere. Success is based on a simple formula: stay within parameters “understandable” to a wide audience that devours sound bites and familiar storylines on the hour, every hour. Like trained seals whose every desire, instinct and buying pattern has been measured by corporate media’s marketing department for the consumption of its advertisers, the audience demands satisfaction – and western media delivers it.” ~ Sharmine Narwani

THE BBC BAMBOOZLE

The Madaya media circus lumbers on regardless of the multitude of proven anomalies and outright deceit of the mainstream narrative.  Deaf to either public opinion or investigation, institutions like the BBC consider they are above accountability to those who pay for their existence, the British public.  They consider it perfectly acceptable to release footage from Yarmouk 2014 and represent it as Madaya 2016..and when questioned, to remove the offending footage without explanation or responsibility for their obscurantism and misinformation tactics.

Thankfully, Robert Stuart, ardent campaigner against the BBC’s long running, hostile, anti Syria propaganda offensive did raise an official complaint and demanded answers that the BBC has, for too long, been allowed to avoid answering.

Al Mayadeen, Al Manar, Al Masirah TV channels and many others, representing the voices of the oppressed in the Middle East are being systematically excluded from Saudi funded Satellite channels and Israeli biased social media.  Press TV, headquarters in Tehran,  had its licence revoked by Ofcom in 2012

RT has come under relentless attack by the BBC since the “Kremlin launched its international media operation”.  The BBC lexicon never fails to maintain and celebrate the “cold war” terminology or to keep fear of the Russian “indoctrination”  stewing in peoples minds.

“But it [RT] is also coming under increased scrutiny over its lack of editorial balance and accusations that it is deliberately using disinformation to counter and divide the West.” ~ Russia’s Global Media Operation Under the Spotlight

This astounding display of projectionism can only be matched by the Zionist ability to turn their own crimes against Humanity into a neatly packaged accusation that those they are oppressing, the Palestinians, on whose broken bones Israel has built its settlements, are the guilty and that Israel is exempt from judgement for its crimes which are committed in “self defence”.

Is the BBC embellishing the truth in “self-defence” or is it being creative with the truth in defence of our Government’s appalling neo-colonialist foreign policy which is ensuring the fomenting of sectarian divide in the Middle East to facilitate desired “regime change” in Syria & the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Yemen,  obliterated by  made-in-UK missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

These are just two examples of the BBC collusion in global de-stabilization and reduction of sovereign nations to perpetual conflict  or “failed state” status, ripe for economic and pseudo “humanitarian” NGO complex, stealth invasion and occupation and of course the bolstering of the Military Industrial Complex profitability index.

WILL THE BBC BE SOROS-IZED

The following extraordinary statement is taken from a paper produced by the Wilson Center.org. in the section titled “The Role of NGOs in Building Civil Society

“In some countries, local NGOs also have been funded to mount “people power” campaigns. As in the recent “color revolutions,” these campaigns are aimed at opening up political regimes to opposition parties and ousting leaders who were holding onto power through irregular methods. Viewed more broadly, all these programs supporting NGO activities and capacity-building are seen as ways to foster the progressive emergence of a broad civil society, one that both supplements the state in providing for public needs and makes governments more responsive to their populations.” 

The gloves appear to be off.  Here, the Wilson Centre is blithely exposing the NGO’s trojan horse policy with regards to its role as outreach agents for Imperialism in any resource rich or strategically important, prey nation.

It explains perfectly the funding of the people power, time for change campaigns that run in synch with any regional or national schisms that are then piggybacked by imported or locally fostered opposition movements to propel the Imperialist friendly movements towards regime change.

Of course there is never any intention from the behind- the- scenes- string- pullers of allowing the much acclaimed people power.  The goal is the now familiar power vacuum to be filled by an Imperialist compatible ruling entity that will ensure the completion of Empire’s hostile corporate take over bid.

You may be asking why is this relevant to the BBC truth distortion.  As explanation, please consider the inclusion of the BEEB in the Open Democracy website.  Then have a look at the Open Democracy impressive list of funders and donors.  No surprise for many of you that  George Soros, Open Society Foundation is on that list.  In fact, the only “philanthropic” mogul missing is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Then, let us consider who holds the purse strings of the majority of the primary propaganda rings and regime change facilitating NGO elements in Syria.

The yellow brick road of Neocon ambitions and imperialist missions- impossible in Syria leads unerringly to the global chaos strategist,   George Soros, pedalling furiously behind his NGO Humanitarian shield.

First a reminder from The Wrong Kind of Green’s NGO myth shattering article, Syria, Avaaz, Purpose, the art of selling hate for Empire. 

“It should not be considered a coincidence that at the same time, a polished, sophisticated and highly financed “Save Syria” campaign is being created in the board rooms of the Empire’s favourite Harvard boys.

 

Where, under the organization Avaaz, the public hasn’t acquiesced to an air strike on Syria, the New York public relations firm Purpose Inc. has stepped in.”

 

[Purpose’s partnership with Soros, Open Society Foundation is highlighted in same article]

SYRIA CAMPAIGN ~ Latest Campaign: Break the Sieges

This campaign has been launched in conjunction with the #OperationMadaya propaganda storm, itself,  perfectly timed to coincide with the lawless & characteristically brutal execution of Saudi Arabia’s primary campaigner for Democracy, unity and freedom from the despotic House of Saud rule and subjugation, Sheikh Nimr al Nimr.

In true Manhattan corporate branding style, the Break the Siege high profile publicity campaign hit the streets running, just as public outrage was peaking and the Western media, inspired by Qatari governed Al Jazeera,  was rolling out repeat fake photographs. The familiar “Assad is the root of all evil” headlines served very nicely as backdrop for the dramatic, slick,  advertising campaign.  One might also be forgiven for thinking it had been prepared in advance.

Syria Campaign break the sieges

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New York public relations firm Purpose has created at least four anti-Assad NGOs/campaigns: The White Helmets, Free Syrian Voices [3], The Syria Campaign [4] and March Campaign #withSyria. [The Wrong Kind of Green]

Dr Al Jaafari, permanent Syrian representative at the UN reduced such exploitative drama to the succinct truth with little histrionics & a great deal of dignity despite the ongoing media hostility against the Syrian Government.  This distinguished calm is now a familiar component of the Syrian, Iranian or Russian rebuff of Western hysteria.

Dr Al Jaafari

Included under the Syria Campaign heading are Free Syrian Voices, March Campaign#WithSyria & Medics Under Fire all of whom are creations of Purpose.inc.

AVAAZ

Avaaz petition madaya

 

Yet another polished and unashamedly biased petition from Avaaz with very little relation to the reality on the ground in Madaya.  Click here for What the Media is not telling you About Madaya produced by SyriaGirl.

“Avaaz who, hand in hand with the Rockefellers, George Soros, Bill Gates and other powerful elites, are meticulously shaping global society by utilizing and building upon strategic psychological marketing, soft power, technology and social media – shaping public consensus…” ~ Cory Morningstar.

ANA press logo2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAMI JARRAH ~ ANA PRESS

Ah now here we have a really fascinating can of worms, one that will be investigated in far greater depth in the follow up article with a few shock supporting actors..watch this space.

However, for now, a very brief overview of Mr Rami Jarrah.  Previously known as Alexander Page in his heady BBC, CNN days as Avaaz sponsored “citizen journalist”, foreign correspondent smuggler and all round fixer on the regime change battle front in Syria. He and Danny Abdul Dayem, that well known CNN bombs and rockets studio actor were co-conspirators on the Avaaz Democracy band wagon.

Of course ANA Press makes all the usual laudable claims.

“We are an independent organization that will not stand for any political affiliation, as this would affect our neutralism and honesty. We have not and will not accept funding from any political groups.” ~ Rami Jarrah

Interestingly when we take a peep behind that integrity curtain we find all these claims of neutrality are compromised by the Government agency and Corporatocratic investment into these multiple crowd funding and influencing neocon proxies.

With very little effort we can trace ANA Press to HIVOS and SIDA and of course to SOROS.

SIDA: Development Aid agency affiliated to the Swedish Government, the EU, the UN & the World Bank.  George Soros figures most prominently in yet another vehicle for change programme in their portfolio “Making all Voices Count“.

Making All Voices Count’s unique Research, Evidence and Learning component is working to better understand what works – and what doesn’t – in projects using technology to promote transparent, accountable governance.

The fund is financed jointly by Sida, USAID, DFID, the Open Society Foundation and Omidyar Network.

Hivos has worked with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), an initiative of philanthropist George Soros, since 2005. The OSF work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens. That mission is a perfect fit with Hivos’s policies.”

jarrah hivos

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Jarrah’s mission – to ensure that the voices of Syrians are heard around the world – embodies not only the spirit of CJFE’s International Press Freedom Award, but also that of the Alternative & Independent Media area of Hivos’ Expression & Engagement programme”

Vibrant and tolerant democracies….

Moving on..or should that be Move On?

“Avaaz was created in part by MoveOn, a Democratic Party associated Political Action Committee (or PAC), formed in response to the impeachment of President Clinton. Avaaz and MoveOn are funded in part by convicted inside-trader and billionaire hedge fund mogul, George Soros.” ~ SYRIA: Avaaz, Purpose & the art of selling hate for Empire. 

WISSAM TARIF ~ AVAAZ CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Wissam Tarif was another one of the original poster boys for the regime change marketing campaign in Syria, launched almost exclusively by public opinion changers,  Avaaz in 2011 with a little help from their friends in CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera.  Again this will be explored in greater detail in a subsequent article.

This is one of Tarif’s early democratization of Syria pitches to the Oxford Research Group in 2011.

Wissam Tarif has since been promoted to senior campaign manager for Avaaz & remains a persistent advocate of global Open Democracy and the NATO US GCC, Israeli,  democratization of Syria.

“WT ~ “Unless the people of Madaya and other besieged towns in Syria get freedom as well as food, children will continue to starve to death. The United Nations has already brokered agreements for these sieges to be lifted, and now Ban Ki Moon must urgently ensure they are implemented to save thousands of lives and build confidence ahead of Syria peace talks later this month.”  ~ Operation Madaya, Avaaz calling.

Wissam Tarif, in the early days of the war on Syria, was a member of the Avaaz fifth column,  with Rami Jarrah/Alexander Page and Danny Abdul Dayem among thousands more, financed by over $ 1.2 million public money raised by the Avaaz petitions.

In 2011 Tarif was described euphemistically as an Avaaz campaign manager but he was also associated with a Spanish based NGO called INSAN, meaning human, in Arabic.

Insan search

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curiously,  when I delved into his connections I had difficulty locating INSAN which was rumoured to be based in Spain yet no such NGO came up with a Spanish address.  Eventually scanning Wassim’s contact page, I noticed his email address was directed to Insan International. wissamtarif@insanintl.com.  The website was listed as Insanassociation.org. 

INSAN

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the time of my initial investigation, INSAN had listed its partners on its website. Luckily I took a screenshot because when I went back to the website tonight to get the link, the partner link had been altered to patner and threw up an error 404 message.

Also, coincidentally, INSAN now has a brand new web page InsanIntl.com that even more coincidentally no longer displays information on its funding partners.

However, George Soros and the Open Society Foundation are obviously in the frame once more.

THE WHITE HELMETS

White helmet selfie with FAB russian bomb

The White Helmets have perhaps the most diverse array of backers and donors.  The Majority of which have been covered in previous in- depth investigations, but naturally still following the yellow brick road back to Soros.

For a full analysis of the White Helmet’s funding ~ Syria’s White Helmets: War by Way of Deception Part 1 & 2

Madaya White Helmets

 

 

 

 

 

Impartial and neutral saviours of ALL Syrian people regardless of their allegiances..displaying banners calling for the burning and destruction of Kafarya and Foua, two Idlib Shia villages under partial siege from Ahrar al Sham and Jabhat Al Nusra since 2011, full siege since March 2015. An “unbiased” display of naked Wahhabi sectarianism by the Humanitarian heroes, idolised by Western governments, Media and audiences worldwide.

For further insight into the terrifying Ahrar al Sham and Al Nusra siege of Kafarya and Foua, please read Eva Bartlett’s series in Counterpunch:  Untold Suffering in Kafarya & Foua.

white helmet infographic (2)

SNHR

Soros the Puppet Master SNHR

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The SN4HR website has no information on who funds the group, and its website ownership information is hidden from public view but shows that it is hosted in the US. The organisation identifies itself as an outgrowth of “the revolution in Syria” (clearly a partisan organization, see at the very bottom of their home page) claims to be ‘a trusted source’ that supplies information about the Syria Conflict to all leading human rights organisations, charities and government departments including the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the US State Department. “The network’s database and archives are considered as a reliable source and reference for international and local media outlets, and international organizations and agencies working in the field of human rights.”

Taken from:  Madaya: West Engineer another Humanitarian Media Hoax in Syria. by 21st Century Wire.

..and in the same article we follow the route markers once more back to Soros..”there is no place like home”

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Ken-Roth-George-Soros

“Soros-financed Human Rights Watch has played a major role in falsely portraying ISIS and Al Qaeda civilian bombings and other atrocities as the work of the Assad regime, building support for military action from the US and EU.”  ~ William Engdahl  Syria Plays Both Ends in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

HRW tim

PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Well hello Mr Soros.

Soros and Mukwege

“Dr. Denis Mukwege and George Soros devote their lives to working on behalf of others and readily tackling the most difficult issues – advocating for the women of the Congo and improving the lives and advancing the human rights of oppressed people around the world,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director. “Their tireless efforts and leadership inspire human rights defenders worldwide and build vital resistance to human rights violators.”

 

Soros, whose philanthropic leadership and dedication to the cause of human rights was honored with the 2015 Physicians for Human Rights Lifetime Achievement Award, has been a PHR supporter since its inception in 1985. “George Soros grasped, early on, that doctors play a vital role in preserving human dignity, a core human rights principle,” said McKay. “His faith in our cause paved the way for other supporters and helped to ensure that health professionals have the opportunity to use their skills as a means towards justice.” ~  PHR Press Release

Soros PHR

MEDECINS SANS FRONTIERES & MEDECINS DU MONDE [DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS & DOCTORS OF THE WORLD]

Kouchner-es-Soros-Foto-Tury-Gyorgy-hvghu

MSF have made concerted efforts to distance themselves from their Interventionist advocate,  Co-Founder, Bernard Kouchner, to little avail, as Kouchner was still invited to comment on the US bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2015.

Once more the sole purpose of this article is to show how the NGOs having greatest impact on the ground in Syria, & in our media,  are connected to George Soros [among a myriad of undeniably biased and very partial-to-a-slice-of -Syria western governmental agencies.]

The Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC) is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) with a membership of over 2,500 organizations worldwide advocating for a fair, effective and independent International Criminal Court

 

The CICC is a project of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and has secretariats in New York City, near the United Nations (UN), and in The Hague, The Netherlands. 

Taken from Wikipedia

The CICC steering committee includes Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The World Federalist Movement is funded in part by George Soros.

Medecins sans Frontieres and Medecins du Monde are both listed as members of the CICC, certainly in France.

NGO Partners

 

Another form of partnership is also of enormous importance to the Soros foundations: the relationships with grantees that over the years have developed into alliances in pursuing crucial parts of the open society agenda. These partners include, but are not limited to the following:

 

Médecins Sans Frontières, AIDS Foundation East-West, Doctors of the World, and Partners in Health for their efforts in addressing crucial public health emergencies that are often connected to abuses of human rights

 

Taken from an Open Society Foundation list of Partners.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

soros-amnesty

“Another Soros-financed NGO active demonizing the Assad government as cause of all atrocities in Syria and helping build public support for a war in Syria from the US and EU is Amnesty International. Suzanne Nossel, until 2013 the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, came to the job from the US State Department where she was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, not exactly an unbiased agency in regard to Syria”

William Engdahl for New Eastern Outlook

SYRIA: THE BILLIONAIRES REVOLUTION

Infographic created by Professor Tim Anderson whose book The Dirty War on Syria is now on sale in E Book format at Global Research.

billionaires revolution

IS THE BBC ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD?

Open Democracy

OurBeeb. Has the BBC gone into partnership with Soros’ Open Democracy.net?

Certainly when we view the webpage, its hard not to assume there is at least some degree of mutual back scratching going on.

“Funded by 95% of British homes via the licence fee, the BBC belongs to the people, not the government. OurBeeb is independent, non-partisan, and aims to ensure that the discussion about the future of British Broadcasting Corporation is in the hands of the British people.” ~ OurBeeb

Did the British people have a say in the choice of Mr Soros as mentor and campaign manager for their publicly owned media broadcasting flagship whose power to alter public perception is legendary.

How to ensure that the BBC itself is felt to be ‘ours’ by the public who fund it and whose many voices it claims to represent? At a time of cuts in public revenues and rapid technological change, the role of the BBC as overwhelmingly the main source of news towers over traditional party politics. It is time to reshape the debate on the future of the UK’s most important cultural institution.

Then let us consider one of the fall outs from Operation Madaya.  The Open Democracy headline reads..

How is Citizen Journalism transforming the BBC’s Newsroom practices?

“User-generated content offers new ways of covering ‘black hole’ stories such as the Syrian conflict. But how do journalists make sense of what is happening on the ground?” 

How indeed?  There then follows a series of apologies for why the BBC journalists such as Lyse Doucet are not always able to be on the ground in Syria. Various spurious arguments are brought into play. The death of Marie Colvin Sunday Times correspondent in Homs 2012.  No mention that Colvin was smuggled in without permission from the Syrian Government by, among others, Rami Jarrah. The beheading of suspected fifth columnist James Foley.  Not to mention, the danger of “foreign airstrikes” & Islamic State.

And why, might you ask, can the BBC not find the voices in Syria that decry foreign intervention or support their elected Government? Strangely, they are “unwilling to speak”.  Nothing to do with the fact that the BBC are known as anti Syrian propagandists by those people who would not trust them to report the truth as told from the Syrian people’s perspective.

Sharmine Narwani fiercely challenged the Western Media neutral observer status in her article:  Western Journalist: Visa Denied

Because, right now, I honestly cannot think of a group of people less capable of verifying things in Syria than western journalists. And it is not because they aren’t physically there or can’t string together more than two words in Arabic. It is largely because they feast at the trough of their own governments’ narratives on All Things. Western journalists are heady with a sense of righteousness leached from the oxymoronic “western values” shoved down our collective throats. Those same western values that demand “accountability” and “transparency” from all nations – while offering cover for western governments to hack their way through Muslim and Arab bodies in endless “national security” wars.

In hindsight, would we be deemed conspiracy theorists to consider that perhaps all these events have adroitly navigated us to this point of  utter news blackout but for that which serves our government’s globalist objectives?

Are we seeing the placing of the cherry on the regime change cake? Soros has apparently officialised the co-opting of the BBC into the Soros owned and orchestrated Syria propaganda ring and is funnelling their news source outreach operation into his perfectly constructed network of lies and multi headed anti Assad narrative generators.

The yellow brick road leads to Soros and the BBC is off to see the Wizard.  If only they were on a quest for heart, courage and brains.

Soros Sees Spain Seeking Aid

END.

 

[Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her blog The Wall Will Fall.]

Civil Society, NGOs, and Saving the Needy: Imperial Neoliberalism

Zero Anthropology

August 28, 2014

by Maximilian Forte


The following is an extract from my chapter, “Imperial Abduction Lore and Humanitarian Seduction,” which serves as the introduction to Good Intentions: Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism (Montreal: Alert Press, 2014), pp. 1-34:


Outsourcing Empire, Privatizing State Functions: NGOs

First, we need to get a sense of the size and scope of the spread of just those NGOs that work on an international plane, or INGOs, many of which are officially associated with, though not part of, the UN. Estimates of the number of INGOs (such as Care, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières) vary greatly depending on the source, the definition of INGOs used, and the methods used to locate and count them. In broad terms, INGOs numbered roughly 28,000 by the mid-1990s, which represented a 500% increase from the 1970s; other estimates suggest that by the early years of this century they numbered 40,000, while some put the number at around 30,000, which is still nearly double the number of INGOs in 1990, and some figures are lower at 20,000 by 2005 (Anheier & Themudo, 2005, p. 106; Bloodgood & Schmitz, 2012, p. 10; Boli, 2006, p. 334; Makoba, 2002, p. 54). While the sources differ in their estimates, all of them agree that there has been a substantial rise in the number of INGOs over the past two decades.

Second, there is also evidence that INGOs and local NGOs are taking on a much larger role in international development assistance than ever before. The UK’s Overseas Development Institute reported in 1996 that, by then, between 10% and 15% of all aid to developing countries was channeled through NGOs, accounting for a total amount of $6 billion US. Other sources report that “about a fifth of all reported official and private aid to developing countries has been provided or managed by NGOs and public-private partnerships” (International Development Association [IDA], 2007, p. 31). It has also been reported that, “from 1970 to 1985 total development aid disbursed by international NGOs increased ten-fold,” while in 1992 INGOs, “channeled over $7.6 billion of aid to developing countries”.1 In 2004, INGOs “employed the full time equivalent of 140,000 staff—probably larger than the total staff of all bilateral and multilateral donors combined—and generated revenues for US$13 billion from philanthropy (36%), government contributions (35%) and fees (29%)” (IDA, 2007, p. 31). The budgets of the larger INGOs “have surpassed those of some Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) donor countries” (Morton, n.d., p. 325). For its part, the US government “gave more than twice the amount of aid assistance in 2000 ($4 billion) through nongovernmental organizations than was given directly to foreign governments (est. $1.9 billion)” (Kinney, 2006, p. 3).

The military is one arm of the imperialist order, and the other arm is made up of NGOs (though often these two arms are interlocked, as even Colin Powell says in the introductory quote in this chapter). The political-economic program of neoliberalism is, as Hanieh (2006, p. 168) argues, the economic logic of the current imperialist drive. This agenda involves, among other policies, cutbacks to state services and social spending by governments in order to open up local economies to private and non-governmental interests. Indeed, the meteoric rise of NGOs, and the great increase in their numbers, came at a particular time in history: “the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher made support for the voluntary sector a central part of their strategies to reduce government social spending” (Salamon, 1994). By more or less direct means, sometimes diffuse and other times well-coordinated, the interests of the US and its allies can thus be pursued under the cover of humanitarian “aid,” “charity,” and “development assistance”.

In his extensive critique of neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005) credits the explosive growth of the NGO sector under neoliberalism with the rise of, “the belief that opposition mobilized outside the state apparatus and within some separate entity called ‘civil society’ is the powerhouse of oppositional politics and social transformation” (p. 78). Yet many of these NGOs are commanded by unelected and elite actors, who are accountable primarily to their chief sources of funds, which may include governments and usually includes corporate donors and private foundations. The broader point of importance is that this rise of NGOs under neoliberalism is also the period in which the concept of “civil society” has become central not just to the formulation of oppositional politics, as Harvey (2005, p. 78) argues, but also central to the modes of covert intervention and destabilization openly adopted by the US around the world. More on this just below, but first we need to pause and focus on this emergence of “civil society” as a topic in the new imperialism.

The “Civil Society” of the New Imperialism: Neoliberal Solutions to Problems Created by Neoliberalism

There has been a growing popularization of “civil society,” that James Ferguson, an anthropologist, even calls a “fad”. Part of the growing popularity of this concept is tied to some social scientists’ attraction to democratization, social movements and NGOs, and even some anthropologists have been inspired to recoup the local under the heading of “civil society” (Ferguson, 2007, p. 383). The very notion of “civil society” comes from 18th-century European liberal thought of the Enlightenment, as something that stood between the state and the family. “Civil society” has been universalized, with “little regard for historical context or critical genealogy”:

“this new conception (of ‘civil society’ as the road to democracy) not only met the political needs of the Eastern European struggle against communist statism, it also found a ready export market—both in the First World (where it was appropriated by conservative Reagan/Thatcher projects for ‘rolling back the state’) and in the Third World…”. (Ferguson, 2007, p. 384)

Today “civil society” has been reconceived as the road to democratization and freedom, and is explicitly promoted as such by the US State Department. Whether from the western left or right which have both appropriated the concern for “civil society,” Ferguson argues that the concept helps to legitimate a profoundly anti-democratic politics (2007, p. 385).

The African state, once held high as the chief engine of development, is now treated as the enemy of development and nation-building (especially by western elites), constructed as too bureaucratic, stagnant and corrupt. Now “civil society” is celebrated as the hero of liberatory change, and the aim is to get the state to become more aligned with civil society (Ferguson, 2007, p. 387). Not only that, the aim is to standardize state practices, so as to lessen or remove barriers to foreign penetration and to increase predictability of political outcomes and investment decisions (see Obama, 2013/7/1).

In practice, most writers conceive of contemporary “civil society” as composed of small, voluntary, grassroots organizations (which opens the door, conceptually, to the focus on NGOs). As Ferguson notes, civil society is largely made up of international organizations:

“For indeed, the local voluntary organizations in Africa, so beloved of ‘civil society’ theorists, very often, upon inspection, turn out to be integrally linked with national and transnational-level entities. One might think, for instance, of the myriad South African ‘community organizations’ that are bankrolled by USAID or European church groups; or of the profusion of ‘local’ Christian development NGOs in Zimbabwe, which may be conceived equally well as the most local, ‘grassroots’ expressions of civil society, or as parts of the vast international bureaucratic organizations that organize and sustain their deletion. When such organizations begin to take over the most basic functions and powers of the state, it becomes only too clear that ‘NGOs’ are not as ‘NG’ as they might wish us to believe. Indeed, the World Bank baldly refers to what they call BONGOs (Bank-organized NGOs) and now even GONGOs (Government-organized NGOs)”. (Ferguson, 2007, p. 391).

That NGOs serve the purpose of privatizing state functions, is also demonstrated by Schuller (2009) with reference to Haiti. NGOs provide legitimacy to neoliberal globalization by filling in the “gaps” in the state’s social services created by structural adjustment programs (Schuller, 2009, p. 85)—a neoliberal solution to a problem first created by neoliberalism itself. Moreover, in providing high-paying jobs to an educated middle class, NGOs serve to reproduce the global inequalities created by, and required by, neoliberal globalization (Schuller, 2009, p. 85). NGOs also work as “buffers between elites and impoverished masses” and can thus erect or reinforce “institutional barriers against local participation and priority setting” (Schuller, 2009, p. 85).

Thanks to neoliberal structural adjustment, INGOs and other international organizations (such as the UN, IMF, and World Bank) are “eroding the power of African states (and usurping their sovereignty),” and are busy making “end runs around these states” by “directly sponsoring their own programs or interventions via NGOs in a wide range of areas” (Ferguson, 2007, p. 391). INGOs and some local NGOs thus also serve the purposes of neoliberal interventionism.

Trojan Horses: NGOs, Human Rights, and Intervention to “Save” the “Needy”

David Harvey argues that “the rise of advocacy groups and NGOs has, like rights discourses more generally, accompanied the neoliberal turn and increased spectacularly since 1980 or so” (2005, p. 177). NGOs have been called forth, and have been abundantly provisioned as we saw above, in a situation where neoliberal programs have forced the withdrawal of the state away from social welfare. As Harvey puts it, “this amounts to privatization by NGO” (2005, p. 177). NGOs function as the Trojan Horses of global neoliberalism. Following Chandler (2002, p. 89), those NGOs that are oriented toward human rights issues and humanitarian assistance find support “in the growing consensus of support for Western involvement in the internal affairs of the developing world since the 1970s”. Moreover, as Horace Campbell explained,

“During the nineties military journals such as Parameters honed the discussion of the planning for the increased engagement of international NGO’s and by the end of the 20th century the big international NGO’s [like] Care, Catholic Relief Services, Save The Children, World Vision, and Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) were acting like major international corporations doing subcontracting work for the US military”. (Campbell (2014/5/2)

Private military contractors in the US, many of them part of Fortune 500 companies, are indispensable to the US military—and in some cases there are “clear linkages between the ‘development ‘agencies and Wall Street” as perhaps best exemplified by Casals & Associates, Inc., a subsidiary of Dyncorp, a private military contractor that was itself purchased by Cerberus Capital Management for $1.5 billion in 2010, and which received financing commitments from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank (Campbell (2014/5/2). Casals declares that its work is about “international development,” “democracy and governance,” and various humanitarian aid initiatives, in over 25 countries, in some instances working in partnership with USAID and the State Department’s Office of Transition Initiatives (Campbell (2014/5/2).

In order for NGOs to intervene and take on a more prominent role, something else is required for their work to be carried out, in addition to gaining visibility, attracting funding and support from powerful institutions, and being well placed to capitalize on the opportunities created by neoliberal structural adjustment. They require a “need” for their work. In other words, to have humanitarian action, one must have a needy subject. As Andria Timmer (2010) explains, NGOs overemphasize poverty and stories of discrimination, in order to construct a “needy subject”—a population constructed as a “problem” in need of a “solution”. The needs identified by NGOs may not correspond to the actual needs of the people in question, but need, nonetheless, is the dominant discourse by which those people come to be defined as a “humanitarian project”. To attract funding, and to gain visibility by claiming that its work is necessary, a NGO must have “tales that inspire pathos and encourage people to act” (Timmer, 2010, p. 268). However, in constantly producing images of poverty, despair, hopelessness, and helplessness, NGOs reinforce “an Orientialist dialectic,” especially when these images are loaded with markers of ethnic otherness (Timmer, 2010, p. 269). Entire peoples then come to be known through their poverty, particularly by audiences in the global North who only see particular peoples “through the lens of aid and need” (Timmer, 2010, p. 269). In the process what is also (re)created is the anthropological myth of the helpless object, one devoid of any agency at all, one cast as a void, as a barely animate object through which we define our special subjecthood. By constructing the needy as the effectively empty, we thus monopolize not only agency but we also corner the market on “humanity”.

References

Anheier, H. K., & Themudo, N. (2005). The Internationalization of the Nonprofit Sector. In R. D. Herman (Ed.), The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, 2nd ed. (pp. 102–127). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Bloodgood, E., & Schmitz, H. P. (2012). Researching INGOs: Innovations in Data Collection and Methods of Analysis. Paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, March 31, San Diego, CA.
http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/hpschmitz/papers/researchingingos_february6.pdf

Boli, J. (2006). International Nongovernmental Organizations. In W. W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The Nonprofit Sector (pp. 333–351). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Campbell, H. C. (2014/5/2). Understanding the US Policy of Diplomacy, Development, and Defense: The Office of Transition Initiatives and the Subversion of Societies. CounterPunch.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-office-of-transition-initiatives-and-the-subversion-of-societies/

Chandler, D. (2002). From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention. London, UK: Pluto Press.

Ferguson, J. (2007). Power Topographies. In D. Nugent & J. Vincent (Eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (pp. 383–399). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Hanieh, A. (2006). Praising Empire: Neoliberalism under Pax Americana. In C. Mooers (Ed.), The New Imperialists: Ideologies of Empire (pp. 167–198). Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications.

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

International Development Association (IDA). (2007). Aid Architecture: An Overview of the Main Trends in Official Development Assistance Flows. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
http://www.worldbank.org/ida/papers/IDA15_Replenishment/Aidarchitecture.pdf

Kinney, N. T. (2006). The Political Dimensions of Donor Nation Support for Humanitarian INGOs. Paper presented at the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) Conference, July 11, Bangkok, Thailand.
http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.istr.org/resource/resmgr/working_papers_bangkok/kinney.nancy.pdf

Makoba, J. W. (2002). Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) and Third World Development: An Alternative Approach to Development. Journal of Third World Studies, 19(1), 53–63.

Morton, B. (n.d.). An Overview of International NGOs in Development Cooperation. United Nations Development Program.
http://www.undp.org/content/dam/china/docs/Publications/UNDP-CH11%20An%20Overview%20of%20International%20NGOs%20in%20Development%20Cooperation.pdf

Obama, B. (2013/7/1). Remarks by President Obama at Business Leaders Forum. Washington, DC: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/01/remarks-president-obama-business-leaders-forum

Salamon, L. M. (1994). The Rise of the Nonprofit Sector. Foreign Affairs, July-August.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/50105/lester-m-salamon/the-rise-of-the-nonprofit-sector

Schuller, M. (2009). Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 32(1), 84–104.

Timmer, A. D. (2010). Constructing the “Needy Subject”: NGO Discourses of Roma Need. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33(2), 264–281.

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GOOD INTENTIONSGOOD INTENTIONS

Norms and Practices of Imperial Humanitarianism

Edited by Maximilian C. Forte

Montreal, QC: Alert Press, 2014

Hard Cover ISBN 978-0-9868021-5-7
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9868021-4-0


WATCH | RT: NGO Documents Plan Ukraine War

Published March 8, 2014

 

The Humanitarian Industry: A “Force Multiplier” for Imperialism

WSWS

December 30 2013

By Nancy Hanover 

Humanitarianism Contested, Where Angels Fear to Tread, by Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss

Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in November, once again highlighted the nature of internationally-organized humanitarian aid: the paucity of real help and the exploitation of such crises by the Great Powers to further their own geo-strategic and military agendas.

The pattern, from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, has become brutally apparent. Food and medical support is woefully inadequate, administered by a patchwork of uncoordinated agencies, each with its own agenda. No lasting improvements are made to forestall the next disaster.

The most striking continuity to the pattern is, however, the fact that humanitarian responses by International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) are increasingly dominated by the military. In the wake of the typhoon in the Philippines, the arrival of the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, with its seven warships, reflects the preoccupation of the American government with its “pivot” to Asia and associated military preparations against China.

The role of INGOs as a Trojan Horse for world imperialism was also demonstrated in the propaganda lead-up to the planned shock-and-awe style assault against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad last August-September. Among the most strident voices was that of Bernard Kouchner, the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders—MSF) and former foreign minister in the right-wing government of President Nicolas Sarkozy. He impatiently asked in late July, “The famous American drones, where are they?” imploring the imperialist powers to take military action in the name of humanitarianism.[1]

“Doctors” Behind Syrian Chemical Weapons Claims are Aiding Terrorists

msf

Land Destroyer

August 25, 2013

by Tony Cartalucci

The “evidence” upon which the West is propping up its narrative of the Syrian government using chemical weapons against large numbers of civilians hinges so far entirely on claims made by “Doctors Without Borders.” In the New York Times article, “Signs of Chemical Attack Detailed by Aid Group,” it is reported:

An international aid group said Saturday that medical centers it supported near the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack near Damascus received more than 3,000 patients showing symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic nerve agents on the morning of the reported attack.

Of those, 355 died, said the group, Doctors Without Borders.

The statement is the first issued by an international organization working in Syria about the attack on Wednesday in the suburbs northeast of Damascus, the capital.

While it is often described by the Western media as “independent,” nothing could be further from the truth.

To begin with, Doctors Without Borders is fully funded by the very same corporate financier interests behind Wall Street and London’s collective foreign policy, including regime change in Syria and neighboring Iran. Doctors Without Borders’ own annual report (2010 report can be accessed here), includes as financial donors, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Google, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, and a myriad of other corporate-financier interests.