{"id":51607,"date":"2014-12-29T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=51607"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:27:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:27:07","slug":"selling-peace-groups-on-us-led-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/12\/selling-peace-groups-on-us-led-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Selling \u2018Peace Groups\u2019 on US-Led Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Dec 2014 – Since the anti-war protests on Vietnam, the U.S. government has made \u201cperception management\u201d of the American people a high priority, feeding them a steady diet of propaganda about foreign crises, even getting \u201cpeace groups\u201d to buy into \u201cpro-democracy\u201d wars.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"us<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWar is peace\u201d double-speak has become commonplace these days.\u00a0And, the more astute foreign policy\u00a0journalists and commentators\u00a0are beginning to realize\u00a0the extent of how\u00a0\u201cliberal interventionists\u201d work in sync with neocon warhawks\u00a0to produce and sustain\u00a0a perpetual state of\u00a0U.S. war.<\/p>\n

More and more \u201cpeace and social justice\u201d groups are even being twisted into \u201cdemocracy promotion,\u201d U.S. militarism style.\u00a0But rarely do we get a window to see as clearly into how this Orwellian\u00a0transformation\u00a0occurs as with the\u00a0\u201cCommittee in Solidarity with the People of Syria\u201d (CISPOS) based in Minnesota\u2019s Twin Cities, a spin-off of \u201cFriends for a Nonviolent World\u201d (FNVW), steering its Quaker-inspired founding in nonviolence to promote speakers and essayists with strong ties to the violent uprising to topple the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, resulting in a war that has already\u00a0taken some 200,000 lives.<\/p>\n

Do the real pacifist members approve?\u00a0Or even know?<\/p>\n

Middle Eastern expats who support U.S. intervention in their countries are especially effective in promoting their message to Western audiences because they provide \u201cproof\u201d of the demonization of governments that the U.S. plans to invade and dominate, and often peace groups include these expats in presentations believing them to be representatives of an entire country.<\/p>\n

In Minneapolis, FNVW and its spin-off CISPOS\u00a0hosted several events with Syrian expats who were on record as supporting the U.S. bombing of their country.\u00a0(This isn\u2019t only happening in the U.S. In April 2011, a Vancouver peace group\u00a0documented its objection to the fact that other Canadian \u201cpeace\u201d groups were sponsoring speakers who justified and advocated \u201cin favour of the NATO bombing of Libya<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Often Syrian \u201cexperts\u201d speaking to peace groups, such as FNVW\/CISPOS\u2019s upcoming speaker, Mohja Kahf, have ties to the early destabilization of Syria.\u00a0This American Prospect article<\/a> documents how Najib Ghadbian, Kahf\u2019s husband of over 20 years (apparently up to last year when they divorced) was one of the Syrian dissidents who attended the early 2006 meeting with Liz Cheney (then-Vice President Dick Cheney\u2019s daughter), along with other Syrian dissidents to plan how to destabilize Syria and topple its government.\u00a0Like some Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons\u2019 choice to run post-invasion Iraq, Kahf\u2019s husband apparently got himself invited to Liz Cheney\u2019s \u201cIran-Syria Operations Group\u201d by having signed the \u201cDamascus Declaration\u201d in 2005, the year before.<\/p>\n

When Najib and Mohja sat down for a long 2011 interview with The Arkansas Traveler<\/a>, they discussed their involvement with the Syrian Revolution, even joking about Ghadbian becoming the next Prime Minister.\u00a0Kahf and Ghadbian reportedly divorced in 2013 but when CISPOS-FNVW first published her long essays, they were still appearing together at Syrian revolutionary meetings and speaking forums.\u00a0Additionally, CISPOS\u2019s latest handout (December 2014) lists Ghadbian\u2019s organization, www.etilaf.us<\/a> (The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary Forces) as a resource \u201cFor More Information on Syria and How to Help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Resources for information on Syria often come from \u201ccitizen journalists\u201d with deep ties to neocons and U.S. government sources.\u00a0From the State Department\u2019s website<\/a> , the $330 million in support for the Syrian opposition includes training for networks of citizen journalists, bloggers and cyber-activists to support their documentation and dissemination of information on developments in Syria.<\/p>\n

Syrian dissidents received funding from the Los Angeles-based Democracy Council, which ran a Syria-related program called the \u201cCivil Society Strengthening Initiative\u201d funded with $6.3 million from the State Department.<\/a> The program is described as \u201ca discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners\u201d to produce, among other things, \u201cvarious broadcast concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Prince, the founder and President of the Democracy Council, is also an adviser to CyberDissidents.org<\/a> , a project created in 2008 by the Jerusalem-based Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, founded and funded by Sheldon Adelson, a patron and confidant of Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/p>\n

Other resources include postings on social media and alternative websites with sensational stories such as the anti-Assad activist \u201cGay Girl in Damascus<\/a>\u201d who turned out to be a middle-aged American man in Scotland or Syrian Danny Abdul Dayem, who was frequently interviewed using fake gun fire and flames in his interviews<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With all of the information about Syria, what are we to believe as true?\u00a0We know the facts about recent U.S. interventions in Middle Eastern countries.\u00a0Why would Syria be any different?<\/p>\n

Afghanistan is still in shambles with the majority of the people living in extreme poverty; Libya, which had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent, is now a failed state; Western intervention transformed Iraq from an emerging country with moderate prosperity into an impoverished country with a starving population.\u00a0In the lead-up to each intervention, \u201cexperts\u201d emerged to explain that while anti-imperialism is good in general and in past scenarios, this time is different. Is it?<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it time for war-weary Americans to wise up and stop\u00a0falling for these pretexts of bringing democracy and human rights to foreign countries through training and funding of \u201ccolor (and umbrella) revolutions,\u201d inciting of coups and regime changes and eventually, through U.S.-NATO military might?<\/p>\n

Liberal interventionists clearly assist neocon warhawks towards their mutual goal\u00a0of \u201cfull spectrum dominance\u201d under the euphemistic guise of Pax Americana.\u00a0Only the \u201cPax\u201d always turns out to be endless war and occupation.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Margaret Sarfehjooy is an anti-war activist and registered nurse in Minnesota.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Coleen Rowley is a retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More and more \u201cpeace and social justice\u201d groups are being twisted into \u201cdemocracy promotion,\u201d U.S. militarism style. But rarely do we see as clearly into how this Orwellian transformation occurs as with the \u201cCommittee in Solidarity with the People of Syria,\u201d a spin-off of \u201cFriends for a Nonviolent World.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}