There is an interesting counterpart to the Kim Davis debate over the right of people to follow their religious beliefs in the denial of services to others. A Muslim flight attendant Charee Stanley says she was suspended by ExpressJet for refusing to serve alcohol in accordance with her Islamic faith. While there are clearly significant differences between a public official using her office to impose their religious views and an employee demanding accommodation in the work place, the controversy shows the increasing conflicts occurring between religious principles and public accommodation. We have seen this conflict most vividly in the controversy over Christian and Muslim bakeries and photographers declining to service same-sex weddings. We have previously discussed (here and here and here) the growing conflicts over businesses that decline to accommodate same-sex weddings and events in a clash between anti-discrimination and free speech (and free exercise) values. Despite my support for gay rights and same-sex marriage, I have previously written that anti-discrimination laws are threatening the free exercise of religion. Yet, these cases also raise concerns over rising burdens on both customers and businesses in having to deal with a myriad of different religious objections as in the ExpressJet case.
Stanley refused to serve alcohol on flights and was suspended since that is a central part of the duties of flight attendants. She has filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday for the revocation of a reasonable religious accommodation.
Lena Masri, an attorney with Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, stated “What this case comes down to is no one should have to choose between their career and religion and it’s incumbent upon employers to provide a safe environment where employees can feel they can practice their religion freely.” However, the airline is likely to argue that this is like someone applying for a bartending job or a waitress job in a bar/restaurant and then refusing to serve drinks. The counterargument might be found in the common statement of pilots or flight stewards that their primary job is to guarantee the safety of the passengers. Thus, they could argue that the the food and drinks are optional or collateral elements to their positions.
A similar controversy has erupted in cities like Minneapolis where Muslim taxi drivers refused to take anyone carrying alcohol — a common practice at the airport with people bringing back wines or liquors. They lost in court. One could easily view Stanley’s case in the same light.
Stanley, 40, started working for ExpressJet nearly three years ago. About two years ago she converted to Islam and this year Masri said she learned her faith prohibits her from not only consuming alcohol but serving it.
Masri said that a supervisor said that she could work out an arrangement with other flight attendants to have them handle the alcohol and “this arrangement has worked beautifully and without incident.” However, one flight attendant clearly disagreed and filed a complaint that she was not fulfilling her duties and requiring other flight attendants to take up the slack. The complaint also reportedly objected to her having a book “foreign writings” and wearing a headdress. The airline ruled against Stanley and said that it would no longer accommodate her religious objections. She was placed on unpaid leave and told that she would be fired in 12 months if she did not comply with standard rules.
We recently discussed another case involving Abercrombie in which an employee insisted on wearing a headscarf despite the rule of the store for employees to fit a certain “Abercrombie look.” The case raised the right of businesses to maintain certain styles and appearances among employees. The Supreme Court ruled against the company after the !0th Circuit ruled for the company. The case specifically turned on the level of knowledge and disclosure required to trigger the protections under federal law for religious accommodation. However, many businesses are unclear now as to how far they have to accommodate such practices. Would Abercrombie be required to allow a full burka or, alternatively, ultra-orthodox clothing for a Jewish employee.
The question is how much a burden a company is expected to bear. There are a host of businesses that seek to supply a common level of services and common look among employees. Should the airline or its customers have to accommodate employees who object to handling alcohol or particular types of foods? We discussed a British stores that already allows Muslim employees to refuse to ring up purchases of pork or alcohol .
There are a wide array of such religious practices that might come into play in such circumstances. The result could be delays in service or an unacceptable burden on flight attendants who are willing to perform all of the functions of their position. Likewise, what if a majority of flight attendants then claim a no alcohol accommodation. An airline would likely be sued if it only allowed one practicing Muslim to work on any given crew. It would also be on difficult ground in demanding to know the religion and religious practices of applicants. The airline would seem on strong ground to claim that the need to serve alcohol is a bona fide occupational qualification, even if it is optional on flights. It is a standard part of service for most flights in this market.
What do you think?
Source: CNN
Po where I said: Not to crazy about returning my own home to the Algonquian Fox or Kickapoo tribes… I really am referring the productivity of the majority people here where I live now. Without the Muslims, mostly Shia’, this would be a ghetto, and extension of west Detroit along Warren Avenue, but for the investment and diligence of my neighbors. I thank them for that and try to explain it to those who ask why I live here…hey, I can walk to many small markets for every necessity, and only drive about 4500 miles per year (I gotta go further I fly)…no long treks to some far suburban mega-market for me…this place is almost a replica of the small west Detroit neighborhood I grew up in in the 40’s & 50’s…so I feel quite “at home.”
BTW…the famous battle of “Custer’s Last Stand” with the Sioux & Cheyenne was fought on (arguably) Crow land along the Big Horn and Little Bighorn Rivers. The largest tribal group, and reservation zones, in the area to this day are the Crow Nation peoples.
Aridog – the Little Bighorn was known as the Greasy Grass.
Po & Paul C … I tend to agree with Paul. Ask some Crow tribesmen in Montana what they think of the Sioux & Cheyenne? Yep, Po, man has been killing and robbing since time immemorial. Not sure we can eliminate that these days. However, I usually hold that the group that can make the most productive use of territory deserves to hold it. I might make an exception for San Francisco where I’d likely favor returning the place to the Ohlone/Costanoan people as more productive. 😀
PS: Not to crazy about returning my own home to the Algonquian Fox or Kickapoo tribes however…YMMV.
In a perfect world Kim Davis and Charee Stanley would be arguing with each other over who’s first in line at the unemployment office. Kim Davis, “But the lord said Jesus, come forth.” Charee Stanley, “Yeah but he came in fifth and lost the race.”
forgotwhoiam said …
Let the Arabs take care of the Arabs. Western taxpayers have no obligation to take care of Arabs especially if the Arabs don’t even have an obligation to take care of Arabs.
You might be surprised, but I agree with your premise. I’m hardly an advocate for bringing more Syrian refugees to the US mainland…among my reasons is the potential for terrorist infiltration. We’ve already provided refugee to thousands and my own neighborhood is a good example…and I have no problem with my neighbors…mostly Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni…who don’t alwsy agree with or like each other…as someone else mentioned on another thread, its a “tribal thing.” Now add in some Syrians of any ilk and we have new issues here…which I’m sure we could solve over time, but I am all for letting some other liberal bastions of white folks get the chance to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
Problem is with the proposal that other “Arab” nations take in these refugees, is that some of those non-receptive to refugees Arab nations “take care” of dissident elements by slaughtering them. Thus few wish to go there and the nations of potential refugee don’t want them either.
All that said, hindsight being 20-20, I suspect we’d have been far better off not meddling in the middle east or north Africa. Then Arabs and other ethnicities would have had to deal with each other, for better or worse and not found focus on us, the “Great Satan.” 😀 So you could say we agree on this point.
…wahabism, the scourge…
I notice a lot of Americans not only conflate Arabs with Muslims, ignoring the millions of Arab Christians in
the world, but they also are quite ignorant of the difference between Shiites and Sunnis and various other sects, Druze, or non-Muslims middle eastern sects like Yezhidis etc.
Americans are also blithely ignorant of the history of English and Americans supporting radical Arab Salafist types, going all the way back to world war one and the contretemps against the Ottomans, from the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt to the camel-riding Saudi insurrection, the the Taliban we paid to rebel against the Soviets, to Ahkhayda their radical allies, and the Salafists of the middle east today, from the beheadders of the Saudi regime to their hirelings who are the ones behind ISIS and the disastrous refugee problem invading Europe.
And who opposes much of this insanity? The Persians and Shiites. Yes, the Shiites are a saner lot than the Salafists by far. But they have the misfortune of being allied with the Russians instead of Uncle Sam and the Zionists and neocons.
Well said, John. Strange to say but Iran and shiism is the only rampart against Saudi Arabia’s wahabism, is the scourge of the middle east.
Though a sunni, I support Iran all the way in this.
According to your own logic, Forgot, Syrian/Arab/Muslim refugees can come here and take over anything they want because, according to their laws and rules, you don’t own anything!
Native americans were the ones here before anyone else. They were established, had well defined territories in which they could hunt and forage. They owned it.
To the point that the early US government made (il) legal deals with them to be given some of that land in exchange for less genocide.
Sorry man, bad history right there.
po – some Indian tribes had established ranges. Some intruded on the ranges of others. Some tried to wipe out their opponents. A few were mainly in villages and stayed where they were but they were continually attacked by others who raided them for their food and children, who were either traded as slaves to other tribes or added to their tribe. I idea of the “noble savage” is the fiction of Nathanial Hawthorne.
Paul, that’s not the point, this isn’t an argument about noble or ignoble savages, it is solely about the fact that to follow on Forgot’s point, is to ultimately reach a crescendo of causality that leaves the native Americans the sole people to, legitimately, be able to make this claim:
“The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
po – you have to realize that the Indians were fighting among themselves and committing genocide. There were very few ‘peaceful’ tribe whose primary job was to raise food. Even these spent a certain amount of time fight off predator Indian attacks. That is why they built palisades around their communities.
Hatred ran deep. The greatest slaughter of Apaches in Arizona was actually done by Pimas and Pagagos, who signed up to fight them for free. It is called the Camp Grant Massacre.
Paul, are you holding indians to a different standard?
Everybody fought everybody all across the globe, since the first 2 men came nose to nose, do you feel indians deserved to lose their land simply because they fought one another?
po – I am holding Indians to the same standard as everyone else. If they were in the habit of stealing their neighbors land they can expect to have their land stolen.
po,
And still the Arab/Muslim people in the countries of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait et al. have refused to accept Arab/Muslim “refugees” from Syria in the current Middle Eastern “migration” event.
The collectivist Globalists want to make Arab/Muslim so-called “refugees” (i.e. Syrian dentists, doctors, lawyers – the “crème de la crème” of high Syrian society) have the authority to BILL the American and Western taxpayers for cash payments and infinite “benefits” of their liking. They may also arbitrarily overcrowd America and the West, again to any level that pleases them. Just order it from the American and Western taxpayers, Your Eminences, and it shall be yours.
My, my!
It’s good to be King.
po,
Let’s be factual. Indians, in what is now referred to as America, are Asiatic by DNA. They crossed the Alaskan Land Bridge about 20K years ago. It is impossible for them to have ever been “American” anything, as America did not exist before 1789.
The Indians did not loose anything because they continue to own their personal or “moveable” property on their respective reservations.
The Indians did not loose any “real property” because they owned none. The Indians were nomadic people who accomplished no surveys and recorded no title, transfers, deeds, receipts or ownership documentation.
You remind me of the Supreme Court, which cavalierly and subjectively commingles the definitions of “state” and “federal” to achieve aspects of its ideological agenda, rather than rationally and objectively providing justice.
Native Americans, to be sure.
I haven’t read all the comments (time problem). I think we have too many trouble makers and not enough people who just want to work. Did she read a job description or discussed the requirements before being hired? Or was this a lawsuit opportunity? Whatever,mdon’t let her on planes.
Sandi, at least read the original post!
And one that puts it all together. The moral of the lesson? Wherever neocons go, refugees follow.
—————————————————-
How Neocons Destabilized Europe
The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change,”
By Robert Parry
September 08, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “Consortiumnews” – The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change.”
Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change.”
For instance, The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed “realists” for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for “regime change.”
But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.
In early 2014, the neocons and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in Geneva by blocking Iran’s participation and turning the peace conference into a one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad’s representatives who then went home. All the while, the Post’s editors and their friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad’s forces.
The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings back into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement first emerged as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way and Obama had conducted a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad’s military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red with blood.
But now a year later, the likes of Hiatt still have not absorbed that lesson — and the spreading chaos from neocon strategies is destabilizing Europe. As shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it should have come as much of a surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their wake.
When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central America to play with. President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them, bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the Mideast and Europe.
Those strategic areas went to the “adults,” people like James Baker, George Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft. The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide against peasants, students and workers.
The result – not surprisingly – was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon “success” in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called “feet people” through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.
Messing Up the Mideast
But the neocons weren’t satisfied sitting at the kids’ table. Even during the Reagan administration, they tried to squeeze themselves among the “adults” at the grown-ups’ table. For instance, neocons, such as Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz, pushed Israel-friendly policies toward Iran, which the Israelis then saw as a counterweight to Iraq. That strategy led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair, the worst scandal of the Reagan administration. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “When Israel /Neocons Favored Iran.”]
However, the right-wing and mainstream U.S. media never liked the complex Iran-Contra story and thus exposure of the many levels of the scandal’s criminality was avoided. Democrats also preferred compromise to confrontation. So, most of the key neocons survived the Iran-Contra fallout, leaving their ranks still firmly in place for the next phase of their rise to power.
In the 1990s, the neocons built up a well-funded infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets, benefiting from both the largesse of military contractors donating to think tanks and government-funded operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, headed by neocon Carl Gershman.
The neocons gained more political momentum from the U.S. military might displayed during the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Many Americans began to see war as fun, almost like a video game in which “enemy” forces get obliterated from afar. On TV news shows, tough-talking pundits were all the rage. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn’t go wrong taking the most macho position, what I sometimes call the “er-er-er” growling effect.
Combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the notion that U.S. military supremacy was unmatched and unchallengeable gave rise to neocon theories about turning “diplomacy” into nothing more than the delivery of U.S. ultimatums. In the Middle East, that was a view shared by Israeli hardliners, who had grown tired of negotiating with the Palestinians and other Arabs.
Instead of talk, there would be “regime change” for any government that would not fall into line. This strategy was articulated in 1996 when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign in Israel and compiled a strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next came Syria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table.
In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol, called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but President Bill Clinton balked at something that extreme. The situation changed, however, when President George W. Bush took office and the 9/11 attacks terrified and infuriated the American public.
Suddenly, the neocons had a Commander-in-Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – and Americans were easily persuaded although Iraq and Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]
The Death of ‘Realism’
The 2003 Iraq invasion sounded the death knell for foreign policy “realism” in Official Washington. Aging or dead, the old adult voices were silent or ignored. From Congress and the Executive Branch to the think tanks and the mainstream news media, almost all the “opinion leaders” were neocons and many liberals fell into line behind Bush’s case for war.
And, even though the Iraq War “group think” was almost entirely wrong, both on the WMD justifications for war and the “cakewalk” expectations for remaking Iraq, almost no one who promoted the fiasco suffered punishment for either the illegality of the invasion or the absence of sanity in promoting such a harebrained scheme.
Instead of negative repercussions, the Iraq War backers – the neocons and their liberal-hawk accomplices – essentially solidified their control over U.S. foreign policy and the major news media. From The New York Times and The Washington Post to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, the “regime change” agenda continued to hold sway.
It didn’t even matter when the sectarian warfare unleashed in Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead, displaced millions and gave rise to Al Qaeda’s ruthless Iraq affiliate. Not even the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent, changed this overall dynamic.
Rather than standing up to this new foreign policy establishment, Obama bowed to it, retaining key players from President Bush’s national security team, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and by hiring hawkish Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, who became Secretary of State, and Samantha Power at the National Security Council.
Thus, the cult of “regime change” did not just survive the Iraq disaster; it thrived. Whenever a difficult foreign problem emerged, the go-to solution was still “regime change,” accompanied by the usual demonizing of a targeted leader, support for the “democratic opposition” and calls for military intervention. President Obama, arguably a “closet realist,” found himself as the foot-dragger-in-chief as he reluctantly was pulled along on one “regime change” crusade after another.
In 2011, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Council aide Power persuaded Obama to join with some hot-for-war European leaders to achieve “regime change” in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi had gone on the offensive against groups in eastern Libya that he identified as Islamic terrorists.
But Clinton and Power saw the case as a test for their theories of “humanitarian warfare” – or “regime change” to remove a “bad guy” like Gaddafi from power. Obama soon signed on and, with the U.S. military providing crucial technological support, a devastating bombing campaign destroyed Gaddafi’s army, drove him from Tripoli, and ultimately led to his torture-murder.
‘We Came, We Saw, He Died’
Secretary Clinton scurried to secure credit for this “regime change.” According to one email chain in August 2011, her longtime friend and personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal praised the bombing campaign to destroy Gaddafi’s army and hailed the dictator’s impending ouster.
“First, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it,” Blumenthal wrote on Aug. 22, 2011. “When Qaddafi himself is finally removed, you should of course make a public statement before the cameras wherever you are, even in the driveway of your vacation home. … You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment. … The most important phrase is: ‘successful strategy.’”
Clinton forwarded Blumenthal’s advice to Jake Sullivan, a close State Department aide. “Pls read below,” she wrote. “Sid makes a good case for what I should say, but it’s premised on being said after Q[addafi] goes, which will make it more dramatic. That’s my hesitancy, since I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get.”
Sullivan responded, saying “it might make sense for you to do an op-ed to run right after he falls, making this point. … You can reinforce the op-ed in all your appearances, but it makes sense to lay down something definitive, almost like the Clinton Doctrine.”
However, when Gaddafi abandoned Tripoli that day, President Obama seized the moment to make a triumphant announcement. Clinton’s opportunity to highlight her joy at the Libyan “regime change” had to wait until Oct. 20, 2011, when Gaddafi was captured, tortured and murdered.
In a TV interview, Clinton celebrated the news when it appeared on her cell phone and paraphrased Julius Caesar’s famous line after Roman forces achieved a resounding victory in 46 B.C. and he declared, “veni, vidi, vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Clinton’s reprise of Caesar’s boast went: “We came; we saw; he died.” She then laughed and clapped her hands.
Presumably, the “Clinton Doctrine” would have been a policy of “liberal interventionism” to achieve “regime change” in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action.
But the problem with Clinton’s boasting about the “Clinton Doctrine” was that the Libyan adventure quickly turned sour with the Islamic terrorists, whom Gaddafi had warned about, seizing wide swaths of territory and turning it into another Iraq-like badlands.
On Sept. 11, 2012, this reality hit home when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was overrun and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomatic personnel were killed. It turned out that Gaddafi wasn’t entirely wrong about the nature of his opposition.
Eventually, the extremist violence in Libya grew so out of control that the United States and European countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Since then, Islamic State terrorists have begun decapitating Coptic Christians on Libyan beaches and slaughtering other “heretics.” Amid the anarchy, Libya has become a route for desperate migrants seeking passage across the Mediterranean to Europe.
A War on Assad
Parallel to the “regime change” in Libya was a similar enterprise in Syria in which the neocons and liberal interventionists pressed for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government in 2011 cracked down on what had quickly become a violent rebellion led by extremist elements, though the Western propaganda portrayed the opposition as “moderate” and “peaceful.”
For the first years of the Syrian civil war, the pretense remained that these “moderate” rebels were facing unjustified repression and the only answer was “regime change” in Damascus. Assad’s claim that the opposition included many Islamic extremists was largely dismissed as were Gaddafi’s alarms in Libya.
On Aug. 21, 2013, a sarin gas attack outside Damascus killed hundreds of civilians and the U.S. State Department and the mainstream news media immediately blamed Assad’s forces amid demands for military retaliation against the Syrian army.
Despite doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about Assad’s responsibility for the sarin attack, which some analysts saw instead as a provocation by anti-Assad terrorists, the clamor from Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists for war was intense and any doubts were brushed aside.
But President Obama, aware of the uncertainty within the U.S. intelligence community, held back from a military strike and eventually worked out a deal, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical-weapons arsenal while still denying any role in the sarin attack.
Though the case pinning the sarin attack on the Syrian government eventually fell apart – with evidence pointing to a “false flag” operation by Sunni radicals to trick the United States into intervening on their side – Official Washington’s “group think” refused to reconsider the initial rush to judgment. In Monday’s column, Hiatt still references Assad’s “savagery of chemical weapons.”
Any suggestion that the only realistic option in Syria is a power-sharing compromise that would include Assad – who is viewed as the protector of Syria’s Christian, Shiite and Alawite minorities – is rejected out of hand with the slogan, “Assad must go!”
The neocons have created a conventional wisdom which holds that the Syrian crisis would have been prevented if only Obama had followed the neocons’ 2011 prescription of another U.S. intervention to force another “regime change.” Yet, the far more likely outcome would have been either another indefinite and bloody U.S. military occupation of Syria or the black flag of Islamic terrorism flying over Damascus.
Get Putin
Another villain who emerged from the 2013 failure to bomb Syria was Russian President Putin, who infuriated the neocons by his work with Obama on Syria’s surrender of its chemical weapons and who further annoyed the neocons by helping to get the Iranians to negotiate seriously on constraining their nuclear program. Despite the “regime change” disasters in Iraq and Libya, the neocons wanted to wave the “regime change” wand again over Syria and Iran.
Putin got his comeuppance when U.S. neocons, including NED President Carl Gershman and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife), helped orchestrate a “regime change” in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and putting in a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border.
As thrilled as the neocons were with their “victory” in Kiev and their success in demonizing Putin in the mainstream U.S. news media, Ukraine followed the now-predictable post-regime-change descent into a vicious civil war. Western Ukrainians waged a brutal “anti-terrorist operation” against ethnic Russians in the east who resisted the U.S.-backed coup.
Thousands of Ukrainians died and millions were displaced as Ukraine’s national economy teetered toward collapse. Yet, the neocons and their liberal-hawk friends again showed their propaganda skills by pinning the blame for everything on “Russian aggression” and Putin.
Though Obama was apparently caught off-guard by the Ukrainian “regime change,” he soon joined in denouncing Putin and Russia. The European Union also got behind U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia despite the harm those sanctions also inflicted on Europe’s already shaky economy. Europe’s stability is now under additional strain because of the flows of refugees from the war zones of the Middle East.
A Dozen Years of Chaos
So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under the spell of neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” strategies. According to many estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with several million more refugees flooding into – and stretching the resources – of fragile Mideast countries.
Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe, putting major strains on the Continent’s social structures already stressed by the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling to meet their citizens’ needs.
Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well.
And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too.
We now see the human tragedies of neocon/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the suffering of the Syrians and other refugees flooding Europe and the death of children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by “regime change.” But will the neocon/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of “regime change” prescriptions in the future?
Not if the likes of The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt have anything to say about it. The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of “regime change” but on the failure to undertake even more “regime change.”
The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a belated “realism” will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such as Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Rather than more and more tough-guy/gal confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at reconciliation.
But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves deeply in Official Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave dangers created by neocon policies.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
The last one from
Whether Jewish Refugees in the ’30s or Syrians Today
The U.S. Falls Short of Own Ideals
By Juan Cole
And some more:
——————————————————
But the US in the 1930s did betray its ideals as a refuge for people yearning to be free. The episode of the SS St Louis, a ship full of 900 Jewish refugees that got close enough to Miami to see its lights before being turned back to Europe, epitomized this failure. A third of the passengers were later murdered by the Nazis.
One Jewish refugee the US did take in was Albert Einstein. How would we not have been better off if we’d had more like him?
The bad economy of the Great Depression was one reason for fear of immigrants. Politicians and labor leaders worried that they would take jobs from workers already in the US. Racism was rampant. In 1924 Congress passed a basically Nazi immigration law that limited immigration on the basis of country — i.e. racial — quotas. The Semitic countries like Syria should, according to this law, keep their people (I recollect that the annual quota for Syrian immigrants was 400– even though tens of thousans of Syro-Lebanese had come from about 1880, including famed writer Kahlil Gibran. All the Norwegians could come who wanted to.)
There was a Chinese exclusion Act, i.e. zero Chinese were wanted.
So simple Aryan racism was partially responsible for the exclusion of the Jews. If the US had thrown open its doors, the 200,000 Jews who went to Palestine in the 30s would have come here and there never would have been Arab-Israeli wars or 7 million Palestinian refugees.
Jews were also seen by some US Neanderthals as having socialist tendencies and so were kept out as radicals. There was talk of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. (Hatred of Jews was irrational, so that they were blamed for being bankers [they were less than 1 percent of bankers] at the same time they were excoriated for being Marxists). There was also the Society for the Defense of Christianity, so fundamentalists did their part.
All the same arguments against letting in the Jews are now being deployed to keep out the Syrians. Not Christian. Alien ideology. Would take jobs. Nobody is openly saying they aren’t Aryan but the Trumpists might as well be.
In the clip below IRA / terrorism supporter Rep Peter King, of Irish descent (i.e. refugees taken in by Protestant America from famine), warns against letting more than a handful of Syrians in. He isn’t worse than most of us, unfortunately. (The Irish discontent was justified, but terrorism never is; and King is a hypocrite.)
Steve Jobs’s father was an immigrant from Syria. We need more like him, and we need fewer children washing up dead on beaches. If we’re going to bomb Syria, we need to take care of the displaced.
po – see a documentary The American Holocaust.
Thank Paul, I will.
Some perspective:
—————————-September 08, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “The Independent” – It is an era of violence in the Middle East and North Africa, with nine civil wars now going on in Islamic countries between Pakistan and Nigeria. This is why there are so many refugees fleeing for their lives. Half of the 23 million population of Syria have been forced from their homes, with four million becoming refugees in other countries.
Some 2.6 million Iraqis have been displaced by Islamic State – Isis – offensives in the last year and squat in tents or half-finished buildings. Unnoticed by the outside world, some 1.5 million people have been displaced in South Sudan since fighting there resumed at the end of 2013.
Other parts of the world, notably south-east Asia, have become more peaceful over the last 50 years or so, but in the vast swathe of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the western side of the Sahara, religious, ethnic and separatist conflicts are tearing countries apart. Everywhere states are collapsing, weakening or are under attack; and, in many of these places, extreme Sunni Islamist insurgencies are on the rise which use terror against civilians in order to provoke mass flight.
Another feature of these wars is that none of them show any sign of ending, so people cannot go back to their homes. Most Syrian refugees who fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan in 2011 and 2012, believed the war in Syria would soon be over and they could return. It is only in the last couple of years that they have realised that this is not going to happen and they must seek permanent sanctuary elsewhere. The very length of these wars means immense and irreversible destruction of all means of making a living, so refugees, who at first just sought safety, are also driven by economic necessity.
https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A2KLqIU4ce9VFyEAxCMsnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByZWc0dGJtBHNlYwNzcgRzbGsDdmlkBHZ0aWQDBGdwb3MDMQ–?p=john+Turley+On+muslim+Flight+attendant&vid=8b604f865b36b92b69c664740176fb90&turl=http%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DVQ.351383674314%26pid%3D15.1%26h%3D360%26w%3D480%26c%3D7%26rs%3D1&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzXeLRPMOw_k&tit=Stupidity+Today%3A+Islam+and+the+Flight+Attendant&c=0&h=360&w=480&l=1050&sigr=11bdusn0u&sigt=11fk4msci&sigi=12bgm5lni&age=1441671972&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av&fr=yhs-mozilla-002&hsimp=yhs-002&hspart=mozilla&tt=b
The Washington Post
WorldViews
The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees
By Ishaan Tharoor September 4
Migrants hold up a migrant man as a sign of protest against the closure of Keleti Railway Station in Budapest on Sept. 2. (Zoltan Balogh/European Pressphoto Agency)
The world has been transfixed in recent weeks by the unfolding refugee crisis in Europe, an influx of migrants unprecedented since World War II. Their plight was chillingly highlighted on Wednesday in the image of a drowned Syrian toddler, his lifeless body lying alone on a Turkish beach.
A fair amount of attention has fallen on the failure of many Western governments to adequately address the burden on Syria’s neighboring countries, which are struggling to host the brunt of the roughly 4 million Syrians forced out of the country by its civil war.
Some European countries have been criticized for offering sanctuary only to a small number of refugees, or for discriminating between Muslims and Christians. There’s also been a good deal of continental hand-wringing over the general dysfunction of Europe’s systems for migration and asylum.
Hundreds of migrants marching west from Budapest
Play Video1:36
Several hundred migrants are hoping to make the 90-mile trek to Austria on foot if no trains would take them from Budapest’s Keleti train station. (Storyful)
[Europe’s refugee crisis is America’s problem, too]
Less ire, though, has been directed at another set of stakeholders who almost certainly should be doing more: Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Arab states along the Persian Gulf.
As Amnesty International recently pointed out, the “six Gulf countries — Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain — have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.” This claim was echoed by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, on Twitter:
Or see this map tweeted by Luay Al Khatteeb, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, showing the numbers accommodated by Syria’s overwhelmed neighbors in comparison to the oil-rich states further south:
That’s a shocking figure, given these countries’ relative proximity to Syria, as well as the incredible resources at their disposal. As Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi, a Dubai-based political commentator, observes, these countries include some of the Arab world’s largest military budgets, its highest standards of living, as well as a lengthy history — especially in the case of the United Arab Emirates — of welcoming immigrants from other Arab nations and turning them into citizens.
Moreover, these countries aren’t totally innocent bystanders. To varying degrees, elements within Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Kuwait have invested in the Syrian conflict, playing a conspicuous role in funding and arming a constellation of rebel and Islamist factions fighting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
None of these countries are signatories of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, which defines what a refugee is and lays out their rights, as well as the obligations of states to safeguard them. For a Syrian to enter these countries, they would have to apply for a visa, which, in the current circumstances, is rarely granted. According to the BBC, the only Arab countries where a Syrian can travel without a visa are Algeria, Mauritania, Sudan and Yemen — hardly choice or practical destinations.
Spokesman for UNHCR, the U.N.’s refugee agency, told Bloomberg that there are roughly 500,000 Syrians living in Saudi Arabia, though they are not classified as refugees and it isn’t clear when the majority of them arrived in the country.
Like European countries, Saudi Arabia and its neighbors also have fears over new arrivals taking jobs from citizens, and may also invoke concerns about security and terrorism. But the current gulf aid outlay for Syrian refugees, which amounts to collective donations under $1 billion (the United States has given four times that sum), seems short — and is made all the more galling when you consider the vast sums Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. poured into this year’s war effort in Yemen, an intervention some consider a strategic blunder.
As Bobby Ghosh, managing editor of the news site Quartz, points out, the gulf states in theory have a far greater ability to deal with large numbers of arrivals than Syria’s more immediate and poorer neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan:
The region has the capacity to quickly build housing for the refugees. The giant construction companies that have built the gleaming towers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh should be contracted to create shelters for the influx. Saudi Arabia has plenty of expertise at managing large numbers of arrivals: It receives an annual surge of millions of Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. There’s no reason all this knowhow can’t be put to humanitarian use.
No reason other than either indifference or a total lack of political will. In social media, many are calling for action. The Arabic hashtag #Welcoming_Syria’s_refugees_is_a_Gulf_duty was tweeted more than 33,000 times in the past week, according to the BBC.
“The Gulf must realize that now is the time to change their policy regarding accepting refugees from the Syria crisis,” writes the columnist Qassemi. “It is the moral, ethical and responsible step to take.”
Bam, I think I agree with whatever point you are trying to make…and I think you are saying that the gulf nations are abdicating their duty to help.
Worse yet, they are abdicating their responsibility to help in light of the fact that Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are at least 3 of the gulf countries involved, directly or indirectly in causing the situation in Syria behind the waves of refugees.
They are actively, along with the US, arming and funding the various groups working to overthrow Assad and thereby curtailing Iran’s supposed influence creep into the region.
So citizens of a country, decide they want to obtain benefits in a superior country and just go there. Why were “nations” created? What are “boundaries.” Did you know Washington was a surveyor. The essence of nation building – surveys.
How about those American Founders? “…TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY…” That quotation doesn’t mention illegal aliens and foreigners, does it?
See if you can “interpret” what Alexander Hamilton wrote below:
“The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
You can’t possibly imagine Muslims (i.e. Arabs) as a “…discordant intermixture…an injurious tendency.”
You probably erroneously extend European “melting pot” into global “——–.”
It’s a damned shame the native Americans did not heed that advice, I can’t imagine a more discordant intermixture than the one that resulted in their losing everything…and more.
Man, Forgot, your grasp of history is completely off!
So now Americans were the heroes for going into Vietnam?
What is an Arab? Who is an Arab?
Are you unaware of how the US were constituted? Where did your ancestors come from, or were they native?
Send them there? For someone who is railing against dictatorship, you sound pretty dictatorial?
PO, I like that. According to you, beggars can be choosers.
Honorable men would expect citizens to stay and fight for their own country, no? Kinda like the Vietnamese cowards who allowed little kids from America to be taken out of there hometowns to die for Vietnam then the Vietnamese came running over here to enjoy all that America had to give them as “free stuff.” You’d have to admit, that’s pretty messed up. Were you forced to serve your country?
The issue is similar to homosexual marriage.
The PEOPLE vote it down and the SCOTUS makes it “law.”
The PEOPLE voted for Prop. 8 and the Supreme Court struck it down.
The PEOPLE voted for Prop. 187 and the Supreme Court struck it down.
Looks like it’s the SUPREME COURT vs. the PEOPLE.
Looks like the dictatorship of the Supreme Court.
__________
I guess you couldn’t take a vote now because America is full of foreigners who skew the vote – foreigners that previous votes would have kept out.
The inmates have taken over the asylum.