Who wouldn’t like to take a break and escape to far-away places when one is experiencing trouble at home? Business-tycoon-turned-US President Donald Trump is now touring glamourous Asia just as his popularity ratings at home dipped to a new low, his political aides are being charged with serious crimes and, one aide has already pleaded ‘guilty’ to federal charges that included conspiracy against the State.
That the so-called Islamic State insurgent movement is collapsing in West Asia under the combined military pressure by regional and global powers may not be on the US president’s radar right now, but certainly much of the world is watching the battles in the remote borderlands of Iraq and Syria. After all, these new wars have only added to the massive displacement of entire populations that began with the Western-aided Zionist occupation of Palestine in the 1940s.
Balfour Declaration
In fact, last week also saw a sombre centenary commemoration of the infamous ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917 in which then United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour formally pledged to the UK Jewish community that the UK would help in establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. As Al Jazeera reported, that landmark pledge came in the form of a letter from Balfour addressed to business magnate Lionel Walter Rothschild, a senior leader of the British Jewish community.
That pledge gave official sanction to the Zionist movement which proceeded with a military-led settler occupation of Palestine with the UK government providing formal authority in the form of a ‘British Protectorate’ in Palestine that came to be controlled by a new government comprising European Jewish community leaders. The entire original population of Palestinian Arabs – Christians and Muslims – were either terrorised and driven out of their homeland or allowed to remain as an under-privileged minority dominated by the thousands of European Jewish migrants flooding in with European and American support.
In hindsight, that mass migration of Jews from the European continent during the post-World War 2 era, was a kind of grim extension of that horrific ‘Final Solution’ implemented by the Adolf Hitler fascist regime of Germany under which the German Nazis tried to wipe out the European Jewish population. To the Nazis, the ‘death factories’ which slaughtered over six million European Jews (and millions of other European ethnic minorities) was the ‘Final Solution’ to what they, as the self-recognised ‘White Aryan European’ master race saw as the ‘problem’ of a minority Jewish population in Europe that they considered as a threat to European prosperity and culture.
The attitude of the Nazis towards Europe’s small but economically powerful Jewish minority was but an extreme version of the racist prejudice with which most Europeans of the pre-modern era treated the Jews. For centuries, the Jews of European have endured social ill treatment and marginalisation by European society. Hitler took that treatment to the genocidal extreme with the attempted physical slaughter of the Jews.
At the end of the War, the European Jews sought to use their horrific predicament and the guilt of Europe over the ‘Holocaust’ by demanding and getting support by the Western powers to migrate to a newly carved out ‘colony’ in Palestine which the European Jews had long fantasized as their ‘promised land’ of the Biblical ‘Zion’.
Many European government were clearly happy to have their harassed Jewish minorities migrate elsewhere – a kind of voluntary ethnic cleansing, as it were. For the Zionists, traumatised as they were by the horrors of Nazi dominated Europe, the setting up of a Jewish homeland away from Europe was the kind of final solution to their age-old problem of being minority communities in countries not their own to which they fled to escape racist ill-treatment elsewhere.
The bitter irony was that the European Jews forcibly carved out their new ‘homeland’ of Israel from a land already populated by other communities and at the terrible cost of displacing those indigenous populations whole sale and completely redrawing the map and landscape to suit the ethos of Zionist supremacy. That is the ‘Israel’ that we now have today and that is the semi-genocidal tragedy that the displaced Palestinians have been experiencing for nearly a century in permanent refugee camps or as second class citizens of Israel.
Global Superpower
President Trump has begun his first presidential visit to Asia at a time when America’s stature as global superpower has begun to wane while his own stature is in doubt given the criminal and political investigations of his presidency almost from the time he entered the White House. After a visit to the US military cantonment islands of Hawaii yesterday, the American President today begins his visit to Japan, his country’s strongest ally in Asia.
The American President is probably happy to spend the next 11 days swinging through Japan, South Korea, China, The Philippines and Vietnam, given that he and his immediate political circle are under siege by American federal agencies for suspected collusion with Russia in that former rival superpower’s alleged attempted subversion of the last US presidential elections – which Trump narrowly won.
By the time that election was over, the dozen or more US intelligence and national security agencies had reported to the US government that they had clear evidence of Russian covert infiltration of US cyberspace to subvert and disrupt the computerised US voting system. Worse, intensive surveillance of Russian subversive interactions with Americans have convinced US security agencies that Moscow had attempted to tilt the presidential election in favour of Donald Trump.
Thus, when Trump arrived at the White House, he found that his own State security apparatus was suspicious of his political entourage for their suspected dealings with the Russians precisely for the purpose of turning the presidential polls in their candidate’s favour. In fact, within weeks of coming to power, Trump found various senior officials newly appointed by him were caught having lied to the security authorities about their dealings with the Russians.
Indeed, this is the first time in the history of that ‘superpower’ that its head of state is under suspicion of colluding secretly with its chief geo-political rival and former most hostile power.
Donald Trump may have lived a life of glamour thanks to his wealthy family background, personal fortune and TV stardom, but his life as his country’s head of state has been possibly the most scandal ridden and unpopular of any American President so far.
Two former senior election campaign aides, including Paul Manafort who had served as campaign chairman (until exposure of his previous political dealings with Russia), are now charged with numerous federal offences including money laundering of Russian black monery and possible conspiracy together with Russian agents to subvert the US presidential election.
Last week these two suspects were served with indictments and placed under house arrest. Meanwhile it was also revealed through the US news media that a third Trump campaign adviser had already secretly entered a ‘guilty’ plea to his own indictment with similar charges by the FBI. The news media also revealed that that Trump aide, George Papadopulous, had agreed to cooperate with the FBI in the hope of getting a lighter sentence.
American analysts are now speculating that Trump’s much touted Asian tour in which he will meet emerging world strongman, China’s President Xi Jinping, will not help in boosting his popularity ratings back home because of these latest revelations that seem to confirm suspicions of collusion with Russia.