Archive for month: October, 2014

Fatima and Hussain’s home is tucked away in a quiet street in Melbourne western suburbs.

At the entrance to the modest property there is a shoe rack, where the family and visitors remove their shoes to follow the Muslim practice of keeping the house clean.

Mohammad, 3, runs up to say hello and then runs back to his father’s side, shyness quickly overtaking his initial exuberance.

“Welcome,” Hussain says.

His wife Fatima, whose black hijab is topped with a pink and white scarf framing her face, greets us with a warm smile.

The couple do not want their real names used, but they still want other Victorians to understand why they follow Shia Islam, one of the two major denominations of the religion. The other is Sunni.

“We all follow the same calender, the same practice, there are only a few opinions in history that are different,” says Hussain, an IT worker.

Their day starts before sunrise with a prayer in their specially designated room. It is the first of five obligatory daily prayers.

“You are taught from early childhood how to pray and there are rulings on prayers, where to pray, how you can pray, and the need to be clean,” Hussain explains.

“Shi’ites pray on either a sand tablet, or wood or stone, anything made out of nature or stone.

“Other sects also pray on mats or carpet. But it is the same prayer.”

The couple, both 29, came to Australia from India in 2008 because of its religious tolerance, strong economy and to allow Fatima to complete a masters degree in professional accounting.

Mohammed, who flits between riding a trike and drawing as his father talks, was born at Sunshine Hospital and his parents became Australian citizens two years ago.

Like most preschoolers, Mohammed is a fan of The Wiggles and Busy Beavers.

He is delighted when his father plays a video on his smartphone of The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round.

When he is older he will attend a Sunday school that combines cultural and religious teachings.

Fatima works three days a week at one of major banks and on these days the couple leaves home together about 7.30am and Mohammed is dropped off at daycare.

She wears the hijab whenever she leaves the house or if male visitors come to her house.

“For me, it’s a part of me, it is a symbol of modesty, and it also brings me closer to Allah. I think I am more confident, more secure when I wear hijab,” she says.

Hussain says he and his wife both grew up with strong family values and apart from religious gatherings, they spend most of their time at home.

“We do go out with other families. I have friends who are Hindus or Christians, atheists,

I have never had issues,” Hussain says.

“The only thing is, it’s a tradition, it’s a culture and it’s a religion, that doesn’t allow much interaction between the men and women, so we try and limit it to women meeting women and men meeting men.”

Their second prayer of the day is around lunchtime.

“I have enough good bosses; they allow me an extra 15 minutes of my break to go and pray.

I don’t smoke, I don’t go out for other free breaks, it is part of the deal,” Hussain says.

He says prayer is a form of submitting to God.

“When you go and bow down to him then you say, ‘OK, apart from all that I have achieved, what I have and all that I will have, the family, the kids, the money, the house, I stand here right in front of you, feeble and weak, asking for forgiveness if I have sinned’.”

Hussain says he is left with a feeling that God is right inside him.

“You feel peace, you feel marvellous.”

The couple have a local cleric they speak to about day-to-day issues and they travel to the mosque in St Albans for important dates on the Islamic calender.

“We have a gathering every Thursday with friends and family and do a few religious reading to understand the religion better,” Hussain says.

Tonight they sit down a meal of curry and bread, but they are just as likely to eat lasagne or burritos.

“We eat everything, the only thing is the meat used it is halah and no pork,” he says.

“We don’t have a problem with other people eating it (pork), it’s that we can’t eat it,” he says.

“That is the same with alcohol. A Muslim is always on duty in front of God. If you have wine you are not in your senses. You lose your sense for a bit or two and you are not under the divine law of God.”

Hussain regularly cooks and assists with the housework, though Fatima finds her days off work filled with cooking, cleaning and washing.

Before eating, they say a prayer that always begins with: “In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful.”

“These are the words of the Holy Koran, 113 of the 114 chapters start with this verse,’ Hussain says.

“It really surprises me what people nowadays say on the name of Islam or on the name of religion are killing each other.

“I don’t know what kind of book they are following, but the Lord I follow has said, read this, that in the name of the Lord that is most compassionate and merciful.”

After dinner, they play with Mohammad, who loves kicking the ball and swinging a small bat as though he is playing cricket. He goes to sleep with rhymes and a bottle of milk.

Hussain and Fatima watch a little TV, usually the news and documentaries and programs such as The Block and Masterchef.

“We try to go to bed early because you have to get up early for prayers again in the morning.”

SAARA Sabbagh, 42, and Ramzi Elsayed, 48, have a stunning view of Kinglake National Park from their loungeroom window.

The room, decorated with artwork depicting Middle Eastern architecture and Arabic script, also doubles as the place of prayer for the married couple and their daughter Saajeda.

Like all followers of Islam, they wake before sunrise for the first prayer of the day.

It’s a time for the family to come together before the pace picks up for work and school.

“We’ll begin with our morning prayer and then throughout the day as we go along, whether I’m at work, my husband’s at work and Saaj’s at school, we fit our daily schedule around the prayer times,” Ms Sabbagh says.

“We look at it like a meditation. It is like when you take time out for either a coffee break or a tea break. For me, it’s a meditation break,” Ms Sabbagh says.

Year 11 student Saajeda, who is a keen netballer and netball coach, says she plans her days accordingly.

“If I know I’m going to go shopping and my afternoon prayer will start at 1pm, I’ll probably leave at 1.10pm. There’s no point in leaving at 12.30pm and praying at the shops and putting myself in an uncomfortable situation.”

“At school and at netball it’s a bit difficult, but you get around it.”

The household is quieter since their two older children married, but both still live nearby. They bucked the general Australian trend of leaving marriage until their late 20s, early 30s.

“The reason people choose to marry young in the Islamic tradition is those who are practicising the faith will adhere to the idea that there is no relationship outside of a marriage,” Ms Sabbagh says.

A former accountant Mr Elsayed now runs a wholesale business selling carpets and mats.

His parents were Lebanese Muslims who come separately to Australia in the 1950s and met and married here. He was born in Colac and his family moved tnorth-easterns northeastern suburbs in the late 1960s.

The former president of the Islamic Council of Victoria has worked tirelessly in the community to help build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims and feels some of that work is being undone by the alarm over terrorism.

“That temperature is rising in the community and people are feeling unsafe, that is the sad part. The goodwill is being eroded, because one of the things we have to have as a community is safety.”

Sabbagh says it has made her more protective of Saajeda.

“How that affects our family is, for example, when she’s training at netball, I won’t let her travel on her own to the courts anymore, or use public transport,” she says. “So we’ve had to make adjustments to our life.”

However, they believe goodwill is prevailing.

Ms Sabbagh, who migrated to Australia at the age of 6 with her Syrian family from Lebanon, works part-time at Benevolence Australia.

“It has a focus on spiritualism, derived from the Islamic ethos, and health and wellbeing,” she says.

She also visits schools to talk and run workshops about understanding Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in today’s world.

“Often it’s the same questions: Why do you wear a headscarf? Do you get hot in that? The whole terrorism questions,” she says.

She enjoys debunking the stereotypes and talking about what Islam means to her.

“I’m not Muslim because I have to wear a headscarf — that’s not pleasant sometimes — I’m not a Muslim because I have to fast or pay charity. I’m Muslim because there is a purpose in my creation and I connect to a higher source,” she says.

“And there is a spiritual dimension, the disciplining of the inner self, the character, character-building, that is why I am Muslim.”

Saajeda stopped playing netball for a few years when she started wearing her scarf becself consciou sself-conscious.

“I think in year 9 I started again. I’m really inclined to doing sport, I’m not into going to the gym or working out, that bores me. But I’m into playing sport and being competitive. I missed it,” she says.

However, there were a few hurdles at the start.

“When I first started playing in games, they would always say ‘No, you are not allowed to play’ or ‘You can keep your scarf on, but you have to take your pants off.’ I’d go, ‘No, that’s not going to happen’,” Saajeda says.

Mr Elsayed says a lot of work has been done over the years to educate sporting groups about the need for Muslim girls and women to remain covered during play.

Saajeda, who is studying English language, psychology, legal studies and sociology at the Centre of Adult Education, has grown up without TV — not for religious reasons, her parents think it’s too mind-numbing — and is disinterested in social media.

“I used to have Facebook. I’m currently on and off with it. Social media used to be a big thing, but now it has died down for me personally. Instagram I use, on my phone, but that’s about it,” she says. “It was tiring to keep up with everything.”

She says the structure of Islam has helped her through her teenage years.

“I think all teenagers have that lost period, ‘Who am I?’ I think all Muslims have that too, ‘Do I want to be Muslim?’ Once you go through that period of, ‘Yeah, I do, I love this and I enjoy this’, you come out of it stronger.

“I have heaps of family who used to wear the scarf and then take it off, you go through that, it’s all about what you feel on the inside.

“You get your low times and you get your high times, I know my boundaries.

“I like the structure and doing the right things because of my faith.”

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Mortar shells fired by foreign-backed Takfiri militants have hit residential areas in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and the northwestern city of Aleppo, killing three people, Press TV reports.

According to the report, more than six mortar shells hit residential area of Mezze in western Damascus, killing one person and injuring at least ten others on Sunday.

In a separate terrorist attack, several shells fired by militants fell on the al-Seryan neighborhood in Aleppo, killing two people including a child. The report further said that 24 others sustained injuries in the deadly attack in the northwestern city.

Cities and towns across Syria have frequently come under mortar and rocket fire by foreign-sponsored militants since unrest erupted in the Arab country over three years ago.

The terrorist attacks came after significant victories by the Syrian army against militants across the crisis-hit country.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on October 22 that Syrian ground forces backed by airstrikes liberated the town of Morek from the militants belonging to the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front.

Morek is considered a significant town as it is located on the main road linking the Syrian capital to the country’s largest city of Aleppo in the northwest.

Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since 2011. Western powers and some of their regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – are reportedly supporting the militants operating in Syria.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein has said that more than 200,000 people have died in the Syrian conflict since March 2011.

IA/NT/SS

There is no question that, in the immediate aftermath and for several years following US military conquests, wars, occupations and sanctions, US multi-national corporations lost out on profitable sites for investments. The biggest losses were in the exploitation of natural resources – in particular, gas and oil – in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and South Asia.

As a result some observers speculated that there were deep fissures and contradictory interests within the US ruling class. They argued that, on the one hand, political elites linked to pro-Israel lobbies and the military industrial power configuration, promoted a highly militarized foreign policy agenda and, on the other hand, some of the biggest and wealthiest multi-national corporations sought diplomatic solutions.

Yet this seeming ‘elite division’ did not materialize. There is no evidence for example that the multi-national oil companies sought to oppose the Iraq, Libyan, Afghan, Syrian wars. Nor did the powerful 10 largest oil companies with a net value of over $1.1 trillion mobilize their lobbyists and influentials in the mass media to the cause of peaceful capital penetration and domination of the oil fields via neo-liberal political clients.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the three major US oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips, eager to exploit the third largest oil reserves in the world, did not engage in Congressional lobbying or exert pressure on the Bush or later Obama Administration for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. At no point did the Big Ten challenge the pro-war Israel lobby and its phony arguments that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction with an alternative policy.

Similar “political passivity” was evidenced in the run-up to the Libyan war. Big Oil was actually signing off on lucrative oil deals, when the militarists in Washington struck again – destroying the Libyan state and tearing asunder the entire fabric of the Libyan economy.

Big Oil may have bemoaned the loss of oil and profits but there was no concerted effort, before or after the Libyan debacle, to critically examine or evaluate the loss of a major oil producing region. In the case of economic sanctions against Iran, possessing the second largest oil reserves, the MNC again were notable by their absence from the halls of Congress and the Treasury Department where the sanctions policy was decided. Prominent Zionist policymakers, Stuart Levey and David Cohen designed and implemented sanctions which prevented US (and EU) oil companies from investing or trading with Tehran.

In fact, despite the seeming divergence of interest between a highly militarized foreign policy and the drive of MNC to pursue the global accumulation of capital, no political conflicts erupted. The basic question that this paper seeks to address is: Why did the major MNC submit to an imperial foreign policy which resulted in lost economic opportunities?

Why the MNC fail to oppose imperial militarism

There are several possible hypotheses accounting for the MNC accommodation to a highly militarized version of imperial expansion.

In the first instance, the CEO’s of the MNC may have believed that the wars, especially the Iraq war, would be short-term, and would lead to a period of stability under a client regime willing and able to privatize and de-nationalize the oil and gas sector. In other words, the petrol elites bought into the arguments of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, that the invasion and conquest would “pay for itself”.

Secondly, even after the prolonged-decade long destructive war and the deepening sectarian conflict, many CEOs believed that a lost decade would be compensated by “long term” gain. They believed that future profits would flow, once the country was stabilized. The oil majors entry after 2010; however, was immediately threatened by the ISIS offensive. The ‘time frame’ of the MNC strategic planners was understated if not totally wrong headed.

Thirdly, most CEOs believed that the US-NATO invasion of Libya would lead to monopoly ownership and greater profits than what they received from a public-private partnership with the Gadhafi regime. The oil majors believed that they would secure total or majority control. In other words the war would allow the oil MNC to secure monopoly profits for an extended period. Instead the end of a stable partnership led to a Hobbesian world in which anarchy and chaos inhibited any large scale, long-term entry of MNC.

Fourthly, the MNC, including the Big Oil corporations, have invested in hundreds of sites in dozens of countries. They are not tied to a single location. They depend on the militarized imperial state to defend their global interests. Hence they probably are not willing to contest or challenge the militarists in, say Iraq, for fear that it might endanger US imperial intervention in other sites.

Fifthly, many MNC interlock across economic sectors: they invest in oil fields and refineries; banking, financing and insurance as well as extractive sectors. To the degree that MNC capital is diversified they are less dependent on a single region, sector, or source for profit. Hence destructive wars, in one or several countries, may not have as great a prejudicial effect as in the past when “Big Oil” was just ‘oil’.

Six, the agencies of the US imperial state are heavily weighted to military rather than economic activity. The international bureaucracy of the US is overwhelmingly made up of military, intelligence and counter-insurgency officials. In contrast, China, Japan, Germany and other emerging states (Brazil, Russia and India) have a large economic component in their overseas bureaucracy. The difference is significant. US MNC do not have access to economic officials and resources in the same way as China’s MNC. The Chinese overseas expansion and its MNC, is built around powerful economic support systems and agencies. US MNC have to deal with Special Forces, spooks and highly militarized ‘aid officials’. In other words the CEO’s who look for “state support” perforce have mostly ‘military’ counterparts who view the MNC as instruments of policy rather than as subjects of policy.

Seventh, the recent decade has witnessed the rise of the financial sector as the dominant recipient of State support. As a result, big banks exercise major influence on public policy. To the extent that is true, much of what is ‘oil money’ has gone over to finance and profits accrue by pillaging the Treasury. As a result, oil interests merge with the financial sector and their ‘profits’ are as much dependent on the state as on exploiting overseas sites.

Eighth, while Big Oil has vast sums of capital, its diverse locations, multiple activities and dependence on state protection (military), weaken its opposition to US wars in lucrative oil countries. As a result other powerful pro-war lobbies which have no such constraints have a free hand. For example the pro-Israel power configuration has far less ‘capital’ than any of the top ten oil companies. But it has a far greater number of lobbyists with much more influence over Congress people. Moreover, it has far more effective propaganda – media leverage than Big Oil. Many more critics of US foreign policy, including its military and sanctions policies, are willing to criticize “Big Oil” than Zionist lobbies.

Finally the rise of domestic oil production resulting from fracking opens new sites for Big Oil to profit outside of the Middle East – even though the costs may be higher and the duration shorter. The oil industry has replaced losses in Middle East sites (due to wars) with domestic investments.

Nevertheless, there is tension and conflict between oil capital and militarism. The most recent case is between Exxon-Mobil’s plans to invest $38 billion in a joint venture in the Russian Arctic with the Russian oil grant Rosneft. Obama’s sanctions against Russia is scheduled to shut down the deal much to the dismay of the senior executives of Exxon Mobil, who have already invested $3.2 billion in an area the size of Texas.

Conclusion

The latent conflicts and overt difference between military and economic expansion may eventually find greater articulation in Washington. However, up to now, because of the global structures and orientation of the oil industry, because of their dependence on the military for ‘security’, the oil industry in particular, and the MNC in general, have sacrificed short and middle term profits for “future gains” in the hopes that the wars will end and lucrative profits will return.

James Petras is a retired Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada who has published prolifically on Latin American and Middle Eastern political issues.

GJH/GJH

Iraqi security forces killed 498 terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, including non-Iraqis, during the liberating operation of Jurf al-Sakhar, sources said.

Thirty of the ISIL terrorists were from Chechen and 24 others were from Syria and Saudi Arabia, the sources said, adding that 60 of the killed terrorists were snipers and 29 others were suicide bombers.

The Iraqi security forces liberated the district of Jurf al-Sakhar from the control of the ISIL terrorists on Friday.

“The security forces and brave men of the volunteers eliminated the ISIL terrorism in the district,” Governor of Babil province, Sadiq al-Madlol, said.

The ISIL Takfiri terrorists currently control parts of Syria and Iraq. They have threatened all communities, including Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Ezadi Kurds and others, as they continue their atrocities in Iraq.

Senior Iraqi officials have blamed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and some Persian Gulf Arab states for the growing terrorism in their country.

The ISIL has links with Saudi intelligence and is believed to be indirectly supported by the Israeli regime.

/1298

Twenty four banks in the European Union have failed health checks of their finances, a European banking regulator has warned.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) identified a 25-billion-euro ($32-billion) shortfall for the banks, saying that 14 of the lenders must act to raise more capital to be able to endure a series of economic shocks, including high levels of unemployment and low economic growth.

The review, which was based on the banks’ financial health at the end of 2013, examined 123 EU banks.

The EBA report put the focus on Italian banks, Banca Carige, Monte dei Paschi, Banca Popolare di Milano, and Banca Popolare di Vicenza. It said the worst affected was Monte dei Paschi, which had a capital shortfall of 2.1 billion euros.

Austrian bank, Oesterreichische Volksbanken, Cypriot bank, Hellenic Bank Public Company, Irish bank, Permanent TSB, and Portugal’s Banco Comercial Portugues failed the stress tests, the EBA added.

Two Greek banks, two Belgian banks, and two Slovenian banks also failed the financial health check, meaning that they have not raised enough capital.

The EU banking regulator said the banks will have from six to nine months to fill the gaps.

“We are still far from a solution to the banking crisis and the challenges facing the banking sector,” Colin Brereton, from the world’s second largest professional services network, PwC, said.

Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays were also subjected to the EBA financial stress tests. The banks did not fail the health checks but Lloyds passed the tests narrowly, with capital under adverse scenarios of 6.2 percent, close to the 5.5-percent benchmark.

MOS/HMV/SS