Paris attack reveals hidden meaning of "terrorism"

There is no question that the deadly gun attack on the French weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo was a heinous crime of mass murder. It was completely reprehensible. It appears to be the work of Islamist extremists as payback for the publication of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed; the gunmen claimed to represent al Qaeda of Yemen. The magazine they attacked has a long history of outraging the narrow minded; it was once banned in France for its portrayal of Charles De Gaulle.

This attack was gangsterism pure and simple. This is exactly what Al Capone, and a million other mobsters would do. They make threats of violence if you don't do what they say, and when you refuse their "advise," they come and shoot up your place, maybe even fire bomb it, and of course, kill some of your people. What separates it from terrorism per se is that the target is very specific and the murders are gangster negotiation. The target is not the general public as with 9/11, the Kenya mall attack, or the Boston bombing, and the aim is not to terrorize a people generally with random violence. Of course when Al Capone blew up a bar, a child might be killed, but he was trying to force bars to buy his beer, the kid was "collateral damage" and nobody called it "terrorism."

While groups like al Qaeda do make liberal use of terrorist tactics, and hide behind a religious veil, most of their daily stock and trade is gangsterism, including intimidation, robbery, extortion, money laundering, murder, prostitution and other forms of human trafficking including slavery. This gangsterism may not affect the West so much because it is directed at the people these gangsters dominate, but it is the main aspect of these groups. It is fully on display in the parts of Iraq and Syria now controlled by ISIS. Killing people who don't do what they say is what these gangsters do all the time back home.

Yet, this barbaric Paris attack is being widely condemned as a "terrorist attack." How is this a "terrorist attack?" How does "terrorism" come by its meaning in the context of these murders? We find similarly, that attacks against purely military objectives, be it a US military convoy in Iraq or an Assad helicopter gunship base in Syria, are condemned as "terrorist attacks" if the attackers are Muslim. One wonders if a Muslim can be violent any more without at the same time being a terrorist?

It would appear that there is an implied racial or ethnic component to the official definition of "terrorism" that the officials don't like to talk about, but it is hanging out there in this case.

This morning we have reports of "reprisal" attacks against mosques in France. This makes as much sense as attacking a random Italian restaurant because of something Al Capone did. The official media bears some responsibility for these attacks on mosques because they have identified the Paris attack as a Muslim crime with their code word "terrorism."

Happy New Year from Linux Beach

My New Year's Resolution is to resume my political blogging in defense of the people of Syria, Libya, Ferguson, Missouri and from around the world.

2014 was an eventful year both personally and politically. The first half of 2014 saw my personal financial situation deteriorate to a dangerous low in spite of two successful GoFundMe campaigns in which I asked my readers to contribute to my survival. Finally in July, my search for employment bore fruit. I landed my dream job - Linux System Administrator, Work From Home position with Rackspace Hosting.

This job quest actually started about this time a year ago. I was talking to my brother, Chris, over the Holidays. He was working for Rackspace in San Antonio, TX then, and being aware of Rackspace's reputation as an Open Source company and a great place to work, being on the Forbes list of best 100 places to work and all that, I casually said "I wish Rackspace had something in LA, I'd ask you to help me get a job there," knowing their only California facility was in San Francisco. Sometime later, in January or February, he sent me a list of job openings at Rackspace, and I immediately applied for the one that said Linux System Administrator, this is a work from home position.

Rackspace is growing fast and in spite good pay and benefits, they have had a problem enticing Linux people to relocate to San Antonio or even Austin, hence, the work from home offerings. Still, getting the job was neither quick nor simple. Rackspace has over 6,000 employees worldwide but less than 300 work from home full-time.

For a variety of reasons, Rackspace rates very high on the desirable-places-to-work scale in the tech world, so getting into Rackspace is said to be harder than getting into Harvard. In September, they told my on-boarding class, which included workers that had left Google and Microsoft, that they had accepted over 32,000 applications but hired only 750 YTD. It took a string of interviews and tests over a 6 month period before I was offered the position. By then my brother had already moved on.

Why this job?

Those of you who know me, know of my long advocacy and association with the Open Source/Free Software Linux operating system. Its not just half the name of this blog, it's what I do professionally. Only doing it as an independent contractor while in fact focusing on blogging for Syria wasn't working out that well for me.

Work From Home is a no-brainer. Or do I have to mention West LA traffic? Haven't I long had the dual mantras "Avoid the 405 like the plague", "Avoid Lincoln Blvd. like the plague"? And I've often spoken of my desire to earn an income without going east of Lincoln. Now I don't have to go east of Main Street!

Rackspace is a major Internet server and Cloud provider. Its headquarters are in San Antonio, where it is the largest private employer. About 4,000 of those employees work out of an abandoned and then re-purposed mall just outside of San Antonio that sprawls over a half-million square feet of workstations and meeting rooms known as the Castle. For more than three months after I was hired, I worked out of the Castle in San Antonio.

For 97 days I lived at the Hilton Home2 near the San Antonio airport and commuted to the Castle via I-410 NE Loop in a rented Ford Fusion Titanium with a speedometer that went to 160 mph. This period also gave me an opportunity to re-connect with family I have in San Antonio, including two young nephews I hadn't met before.

I was there to learn the Rackspace way to Linux SysAdm and their vast infrastructure. The Rackspace CEO likes to brag that they don't have corporate jets or mahogany desks [but he does have the biggest cubicle at the Castle] because they put their money into their people. I'm here to tell you its not just talk.

My blogging tailed off while I was in San Antonio and after my initial stay was extended, with a question raised as to whether I could learn enough to return to LA with the job before Thanksgiving, it ceased altogether while I focused on the chief task at hand - returning to LA with the job before Thanksgiving. That mission was accomplished. I am still working second shift, as I did in San Antonio. I'm still with the Austin Team, which now actually is in Austin except for another remote racker on the East coast. Rackspace runs everywhere on CST so my PST hours are noon to 9pm with an hour off for lunch, Tuesday through Saturday. In those hours I work with my team to maintain over a hundred thousand servers in datacenters spanning from London to Hong Kong. I am on the corporate network, via virtual private network [VPN], my phone rings as the same extension it did in the Castle, and I can log into and play "God" on systems all over the globe. I also make heavy use of email, chat, IM and video conferencing, and through these wonders of modern technology I am able to do this highly technical job in my pjs, in my apartment a block from the beach in Venice, CA.

Did I also mention that a Rackspace job comes with good benefits like medical, dental, vision, 401K contributions, earned time off, all of which start on day one? I'm back with Kaiser Permanente now and  have my old doctor back. I even have a $200/mo. personal cloud account. I've already put up a WordPress site running on CentOS 6.5, with a copy of this blog here.

So now that I've more or less resolved the question of how I was going to be able to continue to live in the style to which I've grown accustom, and as I ease into the new routine of working this regular schedule and grind my way through the list of tasks that accumulated in my absence, it is becoming high time to bring my blogging back on line. This New Year's greeting is a first effort in that direction.

Although I haven't published a new post since the end of October, it is most gratifying to see that the material that I have already written continues to attract new readers, and I certainly have reason to believe that my Syria writings have stood the test of time. A year ago today I published Bashar al-Jihad: Is ISIS a child of the regime?, warning of the growing threat of ISIS and the Syrian regime's links to it at a time when few were concerned. James Foley was beheaded on 19 August, my second day of work at Rackspace, and that gruesome murder brought ISIS to the world's attention. More than 8 months earlier, on 5 January 2013, I wrote of the rise of ISIS:

It has caused many that claimed to support the struggle for democracy in Syria to turn their backs on the revolution in the name of "stability," claiming that the victory of [the Assad] regime is essential for the "war on terror." It has allowed US President Barack Obama to come out of the closet with his support for Bashar al-Assad. He is quickly manoeuvring to openly put the United States openly on Assad's side.

Fast-forward one year and we see Bashar al-Assad making a mockery of those on the Left that for years slandered the Syrian democratic revolution as an Obama driven "regime change" plot by loudly complaining that Obama's air strikes against Assad's enemies in Syria aren't robust enough! I warned that these pro-Assad US air strikes were coming almost two years ago in Obama planning drone strikes against Assad's opposition in Syria, 16 March 2013:

From the LA Times today we have breaking news that the Obama Administration is presently in the planning stages for a direct US armed intervention into the Syrian civil war. The plan will be to intervene on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with a series of armed drone strikes against his opposition.
...
While drone strikes against Islamist militants fighting Assad may be taken in the name of saving US lives in some hypothetical future, they won't save any Syrian lives now or hinder Assad's massive "Death from Above" campaign against Syrian civilians. Actually, since al-Nusra has been most effective in relieving Assad of bases for his air operations and are attempting to implement a "no-fly zone" over Syria, any Obama attack against al-Nusra would certainly be most welcomed by the embattled Assad regime.

And so it has been.

Predictive writing like this put me in a good position to take a slight hiatus and remain relevant, but now, with the money secure, its time to get busy again. According to the UK based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) 76,021 people were killed in the Syrian conflict in 2014 and while ISIS got a lot more press for beheading six westerners in Iraq and Syria, the UK-based Iraq Body Count credited them with a minimum 4,325 of the 17,000 deaths in the Iraqi conflict where the US, and the Iraqi government it put in place, have the big guns and air planes. But it is Syria's Bashar al-Assad, with his air force and large mechanized army, that remains far and away, the biggest mass murderer in the region. Now, as Bashar al-Assad's four year old campaign of "Death from Above" is joined by US war planes, there is a curious silence from a US Peace movement that continues to welcome Assad supporters into its ranks.

Black Lives Matter!

Closer to home, I welcome the new vigor that has joined the long campaign to opposed police violence against Black people. The outrage over the police murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford and Ezell Ford in 2014 has lit a fire in the mass movement that is spreading and it deserves careful nurturing. Ever since the days of slavery, police it this country have had a role in suppressing Black people and this country can never be free until that role is destroyed.

So there is much to be done.

Happy New Year

Rackspace on YouTube
These short videos will tell you more about life at Rackspace Hosting.


I was there for Halloween 2014, but it was much more subdued than this one.


Click here for a list of my other blogs on SyriaClick here for a list of my other blogs on LibyaClick here for a list of my other blogs on Tunisia, Egypt and the Arab SpringClick here for a list of my blogs on Occupy Los Angeles

We can only beat ebola if we defeat it in Africa

Many in the US are in a panic about ebola and in their panic they are suggesting that we cut off all flights from the ebola infested parts of Africa as our first line of defense. From a purely pragmatic point of view this is a strategy that simply won't work. Ebola is a disease that kills most humans it comes in contact with and as long as it is uncontrolled in any part of the human population we are all put at risk.

Because Africa is oceans away from America, stopping travellers from West Africa sounds like a feasible solution, and the subtext of this solution is that its spread within Africa is not such a big problem for us as long as we close our borders to it.

This is nothing but an illusion with fatal consequences for the whole of humanity. Africa may be a long way from the United States but it is very close to Europe, and Europe has already seen that it is incapable of stopping the flow of African immigrants to its shores. The European Union paid the Libyan dictator Mummar Qaddafi billions of Euro's to gain his assistance in stopping the flow of Africans through Libya and into Europe, and he used the most draconian methods without success. These were immigrants driven for the most part by fear of civil war and economic deprivation. Does anyone realistically think Africans fleeing ebola can be kept out of Europe? If ebola spreads to Europe, does the U.S. then also cancel at flights from Europe? Economic crisis would follow, making it even more difficult for the people of the world to combat this virus that is a menace to us all. What is true about Europe is no less true about African immigration to the Middle East and Asia. The first humans were Africans, and their migration by the most primitive means to farthest reaches of the planet eons ago is how our species came to dominate it. How can anyone, in this era of rapid transit, think that a deadly disease, spread by human contact, can be contained in West Africa?

It must be defeated there and it must be defeated now! The little island of Cuba has given an example to the world of how we should respond. While President Obama, as in the movie "Outbreak," has sent soldiers, Cuba has sent more than 160 doctors to fight ebola in Africa. The fact that CNN, Fox News & MSNBC don't talk about this shows how willing they still are to play politics with ebola because if every country were to follow Cuba's lead ebola would already be well on it's way to being defeated.

We learned long ago that just letting your neighbour's house burn would not protect yours. We have seen in our modern era that so many problems that face us all have to be tackled on a global level with all of humanity pulling together if we are to survive. This is true of climate change, the scourge of war, and poverty. This is no less true of the disease called ebola. We must have all hands on deck to defeat ebola now in West Africa. Nothing less can save us from a most terrible global catastrophe.

Is Joe Biden Turkey "roast" is a feast for Assad?

Joe Biden did tell "an Inconvenient Truth" when he told a Harvard crowd, "Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria." That is what Foreign Policy called the Vice President's remarks at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum of Harvard University late last week. He directed his fire particularly at Turkey: 

"The Turks were great friends, and I've a great relationship with [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, … the Saudis, the Emiratis, etc. What were they doing? They were so determined to take down [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do?" Biden asked, according to a recording of the speech posted on the White House's website. "They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra, and al Qaeda, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world."

"President Erdogan told me -- he is an old friend -- said, 'You were right; we let too many people through. Now we are trying to seal the border" with Syria, Biden said.

Calling these remarks "an inconvenient truth" has become something of a banality in the media when reporting on this speech. I've heard it called that on CNN and FoxNews, so Foreign Policy was hardly being creative with this tag line. They all mean to say that Biden's remarks about Turkey rang truth., but as regular readers of this blog already know, I often see things differently, and I think the "inconvenient truth" to be found in these remarks is what it reveals about the Obama Administration’s view of the Assad regime.

By making the Syrian government the victim in his analysis, Biden was saying that the regime of Bashar al Assad was not the biggest problem "we" - he was speaking as an executive representative of the United States - face, in Syria. That may well be the position of the Obama Administration, but it is certainly not the reality that millions of Syrians and all the countries bordering Syria have had to deal with as Assad's brutal crack down on pro-democracy protesters turned into a civil war in which that regime has used the most vicious tactics and committed war crime after war crime as it has attempted to crush any opposition to its forty plus years of dictatorship.

The "inconvenient truth" revealed in Biden's remarks is that such dictatorships and such tactics have never been a problem for the US government and they don't really oppose them now in Syria either.

Missing from Biden's remarks was any mention of Assad's three year air assault on Syrian civilians, his use of long range artillery to decimate Syrian cities and villages, his attacks on hospitals, schools and breadlines, even his use of chemical weapons. This civil war has resulted from Assad's desperate attempts to cling to power and it has killed as many as two hundred thousand Syrians, displaced about 9.5 million, and forced 3 million to flee to neighbouring countries to escape the carnage, sometimes with Assad's forces trying to shoot children in the back as they crossed the border. 1.6 million have become refugees in Turkey and that has placed a tremendous burden on Syria's northern neighbour. Joe Biden doesn't mind about that, and he doesn't mention it in his one-sided condemnation of Turkey. He doesn't care about Assad's slaughter or the people desperate to escape it. He demands that Turkey close its border.

Syrian refugees walk past tents at the Boynuyogun Turkish Red Crescent camp

The flow of Syrian refugees fleeing to Turkey began slowly at first. It got its first big push in June 2011 before the Syrian Army siege of Jisr al-Shughour. This town of 41,000 near the Turkish-Syrian border was nearly abandoned by its residents, with many seeking refuge across the border. As Assad's violence against his people increased, what began as a trickle became a torrent. While the Obama Administration may have liked to see that border closed, leaving those refugees to their fate, the Turkish people and the Turkish government took a more humanitarian approach. They welcomed the these refugees, and at great cost and "inconvenience" they did what they could to care for and protect them.

They realized that they may have to make space for millions of uprooted neighbours as the wounds of war were allowed to fester by its NATO allies while Assad was provided almost unlimited military support, and "boots on the ground," from his allies, Russian and Iran, two other forces that were conspicuously absent from Biden's list of countries causing problems in Syria. The Turks also realized that these people could never go home as long as Assad was in power. So they did help to arm and protect the Free Syrian Army and other democratic forces fighting his regime. However they never supported ISIS and other jihadists as Joe Biden and Bashar al-Assad have claimed. Hence Biden's apology.

For all its rhetoric to the contrary, the Obama Administration has never viewed the Assad regime as the problem. It used his torture chambers as he partnered with the CIA in the "War on Terror," he allowed Israel to keep Golan without too much fuss, his brutal methods were credited with creating "stability" in the region, and Obama thought he was on the verge of forging a new "peace deal" with Assad when protests against his rule broke out. From the US government perspective, Assad has not been the problem, those who would overthrow him are. This is the "inconvenient truth" hidden in Joe Biden's Harvard comments.

2013 saw more than a million Syrians flee Assad's killing spree to Turkey. Hundreds of thousands more fled to Syrian neigbors Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, tens of thousand to other Arab countries. Bulgaria accepted about ten thousand, while more than a thousand each were taken in by countries as far away as Sweden, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil. Joe Biden wants borders closed to Syrian refugees and in this case, the Obama Administration practises what it preaches, in 2013 only 36 Syrian refugees were accepted by the United States.

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria

Why did Glenn Greenwald moderated this comment off The Intercept?

After I read The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria. by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept Sunday, I tried to post this comment:

It seems to me that Greenwald and Co. are still to a large extent participating in the cover up. While this article makes for a fine catalog of all the statements made by gov’t and media about Khorasan, Greenwald never says who was being bombed it their name. It is al Nusra that the US is calling Khorasan and al Nusra has been in alliance with the FSA and IF and fighting both Assad and ISIS. I don’t think this oversight accidental because if Greenwald is forced to admit that the US has entered the Syrian civil war on the side of Assad he will have to admit that he has been wrong about Syria all along. Khorasan was a fiction created to cover up the real target of US air strikes and Greenwald & Co. continues this cover-up.

They moderate comments at The Intercept and this one was never published.

The Intercept article said:

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

Paul Woodward wrote a good critique of the Intercept piece on War in Context, 29 September 2014, Glenn Greenwald’s Khorasan conspiracy theory misses the point. In it he said:

The invention of the Khorasan Group — which is to say, the creation of the name — seems to have been necessitated not by the desire to find a pretext for bombing another Muslim country, but instead the desire to avoid headlines which would identify the target of a cluster of airstrikes by its real name: Jabhat al-Nusra (JN).

The closest The Intercept article came to acknowledging that "Korasan Group" was a US created alias for Jabhat al Nusra came in a quote it used from a September 13 article by the Associated Press:

At the center is a cell known as the Khorasan group, a cadre of veteran al-Qaida fighters from Afghanistan and Pakistan who traveled to Syria to link up with the al-Qaida affiliate there, the Nusra Front.

Glenn Greenwald has had very little to say about the conflict in Syria before now and what he has said veers toward conspiracy theory or parrots the popular left view that because Obama has asked Assad to step down and many people have repeated the misleading claim that the US has provided significant material aid to Assad's opposition, that the Syrian revolution is nothing more than a western plot against his rule. For example he has supported Wesley Clark's view that the attempt to overthrow Assad in Syria, which began in 2011 is part of a neo-con five year plan which started in 2001  for "regime change" in seven Middle East and African countries, and he has repeated discredited claims that it was rebels rather than Assad who used sarin against rebel held areas near Damascus. So he might not like it being pointed out that Obama's military intervention, now that it has come, is opposed by the rebels and supported by the regime.

I thought I'd try to post my comment to The Intercept a second time before I published this piece so as to guard against the possibility that a technical glitch was responsible for its failure to be accepted the first time and this is the feedback I received:
 

I double-checked that all fields were filled in properly and tried again but got back the same error message until I changed both the name and the email address. Only then was it accept for moderation. However I won't hold my breath waiting to see it on their website. [Note on screenshot below: Once the comment is sent to moderation the comment field is cleared.]

Apparently the problem with the comment the second time was the person posting it. Am I now banned from posting to The Intercept?

Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer by trade and has built himself quite a reputation as an advocate of free speech, openness and transparency. If this experience is any indication of how he practises what he preaches with regards to criticism of his views and an example of the way he is willing to censor those criticisms where he is able, I can only hope that he is never in a position to shut down reasoned discussion in larger forums. 

Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria