RT

The West is rapidly degrading, while the economies of Russia and the Global South are growing, Maksim Oreshkin says.

 Major Bunel

By Pierre-Henry Bunel

World Affairs Quarterly

[…]

In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.

It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.

[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored.

In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database.

But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the base.”

In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat.

In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . .

We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.

These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media.

The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.

Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.

Because of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database.

Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon.

Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.

Meet “Al Qaeda”

Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property

. . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister Erdogan for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician.

. . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact “rogue states”,  specially the US and other NATO countries. Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the ‘liberal” economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.

The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this.

But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-the-database-2/24738

Renee Parsons

Internationalist 360°

While it is astounding that one small, feisty Arab tribe in the nation of Yemen has shown the mega-world how to creatively stand up to the Hegemon without threatening nuclear weapons, without initiating direct military conflict and yet achieve their goals – what is even more astounding is that the Houthis are not the least intimidated by the Empire’s pretentious display of empty threats and waning power.

As a 28-year-old country and being the poorest of all nations in the Middle East has not stopped the Houthis from exercise of their principles as equal participants on the global stage.

Even as the Ukraine war grinds to a reluctant halt with Zelensky and the US refusing to call it quits, continued funding going for naught in someone’s pocket, the US preps for military expansion in the Middle East. The Israeli-Gaza war mutates into another military adventure for an additional wasteful expenditure of resources and lives.

It is fair to say that the Houthis have the Hegemon neo-con militarists over a barrel with nowhere to go unless WW III is a valid objective. If the US with its feeble-minded Congress and equally anemic foreign policy apparatus believe they are still to be feared, the Houthis have called their bluff.

From mid-November when the Ansarullah launched their first drone, the world has followed their heroic deeds to protect the Moustazafeen (oppressed ones) of planet Earth. It may be that the Houthis own experience at the hands of the Empire has sensitized and empowered them to the Hegemon-initiated suffering they have endured.
Yemenis demonstrate in the capital Sana’a on December 22, 2023 to express solidarity with Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, who are enduring relentless Israeli attacks.

The Houthis are unique individuals as it appears they get their dander up when they experience raw genocide conducted against a defenseless civilian population which has now suffered 20,000 fatalities, gratis US bombs and missiles.

Drone attacks were conducted through the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a 20-mile wide narrow passageway leading from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea and up to the Suez Canal which has now, in effect, closed down. It is that Strait which controls 30% of the world’s shipping.

Houthi boardings on cargo ships have been unexpectedly effective as five of the largest international shipping lines chose to ‘pause’ their operations as the Houthis forced shipping to find an alternative route around Africa.

The Israel goal has shifted from destroying Hamas since it is now recognized that strategy was never realistic. Israel has instead focused on the extermination of Palestinians from their indigenous home, incurring a full range of war crimes.

Disrupting the supply chain of shipments headed for the psychotic Israel is nothing short of genius strategy as it goes to the heart of what the Zionists value most; it took the Houthis to recognize the vulnerability of international trade on its way to Israel to brazenly intercept tankers and oilers exhibiting more chutzpah than seen among many other more well-heeled Islamic nations.

As if Israel and its patron, had not enough to worry about, Malaysia, another small chink in the chain, has joined the fray as it has closed all its ports to Israel traffic.

Literally landing on-board a specific liner in question via a helicopter drop, the Houthis displayed acourage rarely seen in maritime encounters against the Empire as Jordan, the UAE and the Saudis may be quivering in their sandals at the thought.

Even US Secretary of Defense Austin’s haughty promise to “jointly address security challenges in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, with the goal of ensuring freedom of navigation for all countries and bolstering regional security and prosperity” has fallen on deaf ears. “The recent escalation in reckless Houthi attacks originating from Yemen threatens the free flow of commerce, endangers innocent mariners, and violates international law.”

Spokesman for the Houthi rebels replied,

“Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire world, our operations in the Red Sea will not stop unless the massacre in Gaza stops. We will not give up the responsibility of defending the Moustazafeen (oppressed ones) of the Earth.”

Meanwhile the USS Eisenhower remains floating idly in the tropical waters of the Red Sea without any sign of retaliation against the Houthis who could be expected to respond with an armed, under water drone to take out one US bazillion dollar floating bathtub.

As the Israel-Gaza conflict becomes more intense along the Lebanon border with Hezbollah adopting a more aggressive response, it is no coincidence that Yemen has been bombed since 2014, sanctioned by the US since 2012 and at war with its Saudi neighbors (with US weapons) in 2015, all of which failed as the Houthi’s refused to succumb to the Hegemon.

With a sitting duck flotilla of US Navy’s Operation Prosperity Guardian, the US has pushed the panic button with creation of an unimpressive ten member maritime coalition (including Bahrain — home to the US Fifth Fleet and member of the limp-noodle Abraham Accords), Canada sent three staff officers and the UK sent one rusted-out tin can to patrol the Red Sea in a futile effort to stop underwater armed drones.

To date, the US/UK have shot down a dozen drones as if to challenge Houthi’s authority in international waters as the US remains in a self delusional world. The Houthis shot down a $30 million American MQ-9 Ripper unmanned aerial vehicle since it“engaged in hostile surveillance and espionage activities in the airspace of Yemeni territorial waters.”

Suddenly, creation of a Palestinian state is now on the table even as the US will remain the largest block of resistance despite the election of Trump who, as a Zionist, will dance to Israel’s tune.

Never one to miss an opportunity to blame Iran for any military aggressive behavior, the US accused Iran of being “deeply involved’ with the Houthis as if US motives are pure as the driven snow.

As if the US’ highest priority is to continue confrontational relations with every country in the world which denies its status as Empire, there is no serious strategy on dealing with a principled opponent except more violence and hatred.  The Houthis continue to make fools of the multi-billion dollar US Navy.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/12/26/the-houthis-take-on-the-empire/

Rhoda Wilson

The Expose

Imperial socialism has always been at the heart of 20th-century fascism, writes Matthew Ehret. Without the force of numerous anti-Semitic fascists throughout the last two centuries, Zionism would have never been possible.

“The role of British intelligence’s hidden hand in shaping the state of Israel, as well as international fascism more broadly, is often ignored,” he said.

Ehret recently wrote an essay titled ‘Sir Henry Kissinger: Midwife to New Babylon’ describing how Henry Kissinger’s 2012 prophecy that “in 10 years, there will be no more Israel” is linked to mystical Babylon.

As his essay is more than most would read in one sitting, we are republishing it in sections over a series of articles, you can read Part 1 HERE.  The following is the section of Ehret’s essay with the same title.  You can read his full essay HERE.

‘Greater Israel’ as a British Imperial Project

By Matthew Ehret

In 1914, the man who later became Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizman, stated:

“Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews there-perhaps more; they would. . . form a very effective guard for the Suez/Canal.”

These words indicated a deeply underappreciated value that leading Jewish Zionists had for the British empire’s plans for global control over a century ago; these Zionists believed the empire could further their own plans for a Jewish state. Lord Shaftesbury’s Zionist project was launched in 1839, the British Empire created the Palestinian Exploration Fund in 1865, and the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, joined the cause of convincing the world’s Jews to live in the desert, but the role of British intelligence’s hidden hand in shaping the state of Israel, as well as international fascism more broadly, is often ignored. ^[1]

It wasn’t ignored by Sir Winston Churchill, then Lord of the British Admiralty during WWI. He wrote forcefully about the international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world on one hand, but he also spoke proudly of Zionism, saying in 1917: “If, as it may well happen, there should be created in our own lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish state under the protection of the British crown … [it] would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.”

While Churchill could not be said to be a supporter of Hitler’s National Socialism, up until 1935, he loudly proclaimed his admiration for Hitler and also spoke fondly of Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Churchill was also a rampant racist who presided over the mass extermination of “lower races” as displayed in the controlled Bengal famine (killing three million Indians) in 1943. Like most other dominant Round Table leaders of Britain at this time, Churchill was an “imperial socialist,” which has always been at the heart of 20th-century fascism.

Without the force of numerous anti-Semitic fascists throughout the last two centuries, Zionism would have never been possible.

Take as an example the case of Lord Arthur Balfour, a leading strategist of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group. Balfour co-authored the Balfour Accords in 1917 alongside Leo Amery, Lord Milner, and Walter Rothschild. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that, like Churchill, Lord Balfour was also a devoted white supremacist, Zionist, and supporter of fascism. Prime Minister Lloyd George, who oversaw the project at this time, was an ardent social imperialist (aka international fascist) who openly praised Nazism alongside another pro-Nazi royal named King Edward VIII.

While Leo Amery was not openly anti-Semitic, his son John was a devoted supporter of British Nazism and Adolph Hitler. His other son, Julian Amery, worked closely with unreconstructed Nazis after World War II as part of Operation Gladio. It was under Julian Amery ^[2] that Nazis like Otto Skorzeny, Walter Rauft, and Alois Brunner were transplanted to the Middle East and even worked for the Mossad after the CIA played a direct role in establishing that organisation in 1951.

Additionally, Leo Amery was a close collaborator of pro-fascist Zionist leader Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky during the former’s management of British Mandate Palestine (1925-1929) and co-founder of the Jewish Legion, which Jabotinsky went on to control. More than a Zionist, Amery was a believer in Cecil Rhodes’ vision for “a Church of the British Empire.”

Amery stated of his peculiar religion: “The Empire is not external to any of the British nation. It is something like the Kingdom of Heaven within ourselves.” (Take note that the term “Kingdom of Heaven” was the name of the Templar Kingdom of Jerusalem, which will play a larger role in this story).

After leading the passage of anti-Jewish immigration laws in England in 1905 that prevented persecuted Russian Jews from coming to the UK, Balfour wrote in 1919 that Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.”

Balfour saw the creation of Israel as one stone that could kill two birds by 1) providing an excuse to purge the Jews from Europe and 2) creating a perfect weapon for destabilisation in the geopolitical pivot of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland and the cross-section of all major civilisational forces on the earth.

[…]

Via https://expose-news.com/2023/12/26/without-numerous-anti-semitic-fascists-zionism/

Episode 21 The Etruscan World Falls Apart

The Mysterious Etruscans

Dr Steven L Tuck (2016)

Film Review

Rome conquered Etruria in gradual steps:

• 396 BC – Rome conquers Veiji
• 358-51 BC – brutal war between Rome an the other major Etruscan cities, followed by 40-year truce.
• 311 BC – Central Italy’s Samnites, Umbreites and Celts assist the Etruscan cities in resisting Roman military aggression.
• 294 BC – Rome defeats Tarquinia
• 293 BC – Rome defeats Orvieto
• 280 BC – Rome defeats Vulchi
• 273 BC – Rome elects to occupy Cheveteri, Vulchi and Orvieto instead of relying on treaties and puppet Etruscan aristocrats to subdue hostile lower class Etruscans and pay duty.
• 264 BC – Rome forcibly exiles the resident of Orvieto to Bulsenna and razed it to the ground.* Opposition to Roman rule prompt a cultural renaissance in the other  Etruscan league cities who continue to thrive in their trade with Greek colonies.
• 218-204 During Rome’s wars with Carthage, the Etruscan cities ally with Hannibal during his invasion of Italy.
• 211 BC – Rome conquers Capua and executes all Etruscan rebels who supported Hannibal. Roman aristocrats create vast estates of conquered Etruscan land and worked it with (Greek and Etruscan) slave labor. Unable to compete, the Etruscan rural poor are forced to move into the cities.
• 91-88 BC – Rome’s refusal to grant their Soqui allies Roman citizenship leads to the Social War. Some of these Soqui cities (like Pompei) were old Etruscan communities.
• 83-82 BC During his coup against the Roman consul Marus, the Roman general Sulla occupies and sacks the remaining Etruscan league cities.
• 41 BC – During the Perusian War, Octavia (the future Augustus) besieges and sacks the Etruscan City of Perusia, which was occupied by his adversary Mark Antony.

Etruscan religious, cultural and (some) political institutions continued long after Roman conquest. The Etruscan league continued to elect annually a judicial officer known as the Praeter Etruriae until the Goth invasion in the 4th century AD. Etruscan divination schools also continued until 410 AD. The emperor Claudius, known for lecturing the Roman senate about the Etruscans, restored the Harupuces, the Etruscan college of divination.

The Etruscan language persisted in Tunisia where it was used for boundary stones until the first century AD. There is also evidence of an Etruscan colony in Thebes (in Egypt), where an ancient Etruscan linen document was used to wrap a mummy. Tuck believes Rome may have exiled Etruscans to North Africa when it resettled their cities.

*During the period 327 -218 BC, Rome also conquered and occupied all the Greek colonies in southern Italy.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/239710/239651

Tim Anderson

Internationalist 360°

Washington and the Israelis understand that the fig leaf of ‘two states’ hides apartheid and prevents the construction of a broad anti-apartheid movement.

The popular but fallacious touchstone of a political resolution in Palestine has been a ‘two-state solution’. Washington constantly reverts to this and, more disturbingly, so too do many of Palestine’s international friends. Yet, faced with an apartheid regime, the idea is outdated and irrelevant, South African leader Mandla Mandela pointed out at the 5th Global Convention of Solidarity with Palestine, over 3-5 December in Johannesburg.

Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson, head of the Mandela Foundation, clan chief, and an ANC member of Parliament, called for a global anti-apartheid campaign aimed at dismantling the Israeli regime, rejecting the Bantustan-like ‘two-state solution’, and calling for a single democratic state in Palestine.

South Africans know about Bantustans: these were the so-called native ‘homelands’ – small enclaves set up to help enforce apartheid and prevent democracy in South Africa. The most recent ‘two-state’ proposal, put up by the Trump administration in 2020, shares many features with these Bantustans. But few outside South Africa remember this history in detail.

The ‘two-state solution’ seems to have support in UNSC resolutions since 1967 (#242 and its successors), but the right “to sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries” was conditional on Israeli withdrawal “from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The Israeli regime never met that condition. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s saw the PLO recognizing an “Israeli state”, on the basis that the colonization of the West Bank would end and a Palestinian state would emerge. Those conditions were never met.

Veteran analyst Rashid Khalidi, a leading US scholar on Palestine, says there was never a serious attempt by the Israelis or Washington to create an Arab state that would be “sovereign, contiguous and viable.” Further, the entrenchment of second-class citizenship for Arab Israelis (in ‘1948 Palestine’), the emergence of an open apartheid regime on the West Bank, and the periodic massacres in Gaza have imposed a new reality.

Yet, the pretext of ‘two states’ and the myth of a “return to 1967 borders” (a fantasy destroyed by constant Israeli colonization of the occupied territories) is maintained to obscure the reality of a predatory apartheid Israeli regime that can never co-exist with an independent Palestine. Washington and the Israelis understand that the fig leaf of ‘two states’ hides apartheid and prevents the construction of a broad anti-apartheid movement.

That path is obscured by the ‘two states’ myth, as two former Israeli prime ministers have pointed out. In 2017, former PM Ehud Barak warned that the regime was “on a slippery slope” toward apartheid. Similarly, former PM Ehud Olmert (2007) said, “If the day comes when the [idea of a] two-state solution collapses and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights,” then we will face an “apartheid-like struggle … [and] the State of Israel is finished.”

The Trump ‘peace plan’ of 2020 is the most recent, detailed version of the deceptive ‘two-state’ idea. It supported the illegal West Bank, Syrian Golan, and eastern part of al-Quds annexations, trying to ‘normalize’ those breaches of earlier international agreements and offering some desert land in ‘compensation’. In recent years these ‘settlements’ have grown so that there are more than 700,000 Israeli colonists on the West Bank. Despite muted international protests, “Tel Aviv’s” backing for this process makes it unlikely that the ‘settlers’ might (as was done in Gaza) simply be persuaded to pack up and go home. Under the Trump ‘peace plan’, total Israeli control over borders, security, and even education would be maintained. That is a close parallel to the Bantustan policy of apartheid South Africa, as Mandla Mandela observed.

The Palestinian struggle can and should draw important lessons from South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaigns and draw on the political capital it built, including in international resolutions. First of all, in 1973, the United Nations declared apartheid a crime against humanity, punishable under the 1988 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Systematic racial discrimination is a crime that should not be aided and abetted, and the Israeli entity has been declared an apartheid regime by six independent reports. As jurists Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley (2017) point out, “States have a collective duty: (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a state in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end.” That duty militates against recognition of or support for the apartheid regime as a ‘state’.

Second, while the South African apartheid regime tried to present the Bantustan enclaves as some form of ‘self-determination’, this was rejected both by black South Africans and the United Nations. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said tribal enclaves had nothing to do with the South African reality, “we are thoroughly detribalized, it is the government of South Africa that has sought to exacerbate tribal feelings.” The Bantustan policy and practice aimed at reinforcing apartheid by forcing the majority black African population into 13% of the country’s land, with few resources and basic services. Yet collaborating chiefs like Gatsha Buthelezi of KwaZulu were relied on to present a veneer of tribal ‘independence’. This Bantustan policy, including the third class ‘Bantu education’ system which began in the 1950s and catalyzed huge protests, was said to be “the logical territorial extension of apartheid as both a general policy and a way of life for whites as a single preferred tribe over blacks as an inferior collection of tribes.”

In the 1970s, three UN resolutions were passed, which condemned the Bantustan policy. In 1971, General Assembly Resolution 2775 E (XXVI) on the Establishment of Bantustans condemned the practice as “in pursuance of apartheid,” “violating the right to self-determination,” and “prejudicial to territorial integrity.” In 1975, General Assembly Resolution 3411 D (XXX) on Apartheid again condemned the Bantustan policy, and in 1976, the General Assembly unanimously (with the USA abstaining) passed Resolution 31/6 which condemned the designation of an “independent” Transkei Bantustan as “sham independence”, calling on all governments to not recognize it and to prohibit dealings with the artificial entity. The UN, thus, authoritatively condemned the creation of small subordinate enclaves in place of national self-determination for black South Africans.

Just as Apartheid South Africa tried to force the majority Black population into 13% of the country’s land, so the Israelis have forced Palestinians into increasingly restricted enclaves, all of which are controlled by the Israeli regime.

While the Palestinian Arab population today, according to Israeli officials, is about the same as the Jewish, the Israeli population’s control of land and resources is massively unequal. The so-called Palestinian Territories comprise about 22% of historic Palestine and, of that, more than half is zoned to be under exclusive Israeli control Anera.

Zionist apologists try to justify the steady land theft by saying, first of all, that the Israelis acquired that land by military conquest (in the post-colonial era, UNSC 242 declared such claims null and void) and second, that Palestinians somehow acquired control over land for “the first time” under the Oslo Accords. In fact, Palestinians lost even more land to Israeli “annexation” after the Oslo Accords.

The Israeli lobby has relentlessly abused Chief Mandla Mandela. Responding to his accusations that “Israel” had “committed genocide and crimes against humanity,” Tali Feinberg claimed that Mandla’s “anti-Israel vitriol contrasts with his grandfather’s legacy.” Indeed, Nelson Mandela met Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Ezer Weizman and said, in 1999, “I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognise Israel within secure borders.” Feinberg blames Mandla’s anti-“Israel” stance on his conversion to Islam.

However, Nelson Mandla was responding to the circumstances of the early 1990s, when his friend Yasser Arafat was engaged in the Oslo Accords, and no reports on the Apartheid character of the Israeli colonial regime had yet emerged. After the failure of the Oslo agreements to produce any benefit, and after six independent reports branding “Israel” as apartheid regime, Chief Mandla is justified in adjusting his response.

Support for the armed, as well as civil resistance in Palestine, has been a feature of Chief Mandla Mandela’s advocacy. It was his grandfather, after all, who created uMkhonto we Siswe (MK, the spear of the nation), the armed wing of the ANC, when all other avenues had failed. So, at a time when Western regimes try to brand all Palestinian Resistance as ‘terrorism’, Chief Mandela has urged the factions “to come together and have joint operations” to defend their land. He also backed the call for boycotts, divestment and sanctions on the Israeli regime.

After the December 2023 conference in Johannesburg, Mandla Mandela stood alongside leaders of various Palestinian Resistance factions at Government House in Pretoria. Recalling his grandfather’s famous quote, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” Mandla Mandela recognized that Palestinians had the “absolute right” to the land of their forefathers using all available means, including armed resistance.

Chief Mandela made it very clear that the call for a true and meaningful liberation for Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea was one that means a one-state solution for indigenous Palestinians including the inalienable right of return for over seven million refugees and their descendants, displaced since 1948.

Mandla Mandela called on South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to abandon the “two-state delusion” in favor of a single democratic state for all indigenous peoples of Palestine, abandoning separate development, racism, and apartheid in occupied Palestine.

South African veterans and leaders have a unique experience and moral authority to denounce Bantustan-like proposals that divert the Palestinian struggle from its emancipatory goals.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/12/23/rejecting-the-bantustan-two-state-solution-mandla-mandela-calls-for-a-single-democratic-state-in-palestine/