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Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Yemen, Syria show up UK-Saudi-US as real ‘axis of evil’ in war on terror

While Britain and the USA accuse Russia and Syria of war crimes over civilian deaths in Eastern Aleppo, their leading Middle East ally Saudi Arabia has just used British and American weapons to bomb a funeral hall in Yemen, killing 140 and wounding more than 500 civilians, including ministers in the Yemeni government.

The difference is that in Eastern Aleppo, the Syrian government is fighting on its own territory against al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate formerly called al-Nusra, now renamed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), which is funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and the USA. In Yemen, a Saudi-led coalition composed largely of the dictatorial Gulf kingdoms and commanded by British and Australian mercenaries is bombing a separate country and committing actual war crimes, as documented by the UN, but the UK and USA continue to sell billions of pounds’ and dollars’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia (now the third largest military spender after the USA and China).

The carnage in Yemen and Syria, like Libya and Iraq before them, lays bare that the real “axis of evil” in the war on terror is not Iraq, Iran and North Korea, as George W. Bush proclaimed in his January 2002 State of the Union address, but the three nations that are responsible for the rise and success of the al-Qaeda terrorist network and its offshoots such as ISIS—the UK, Saudi Arabia, and the USA!

These are the facts about the UK’s, Saudi Arabia’s, and the USA’s support for terrorism:

  • Saudi Arabia was named in the US Congressional Joint Inquiry Report on 9/11 as having funded al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attack; when the report was published in December 2002, George W. Bush protected the Saudis (and by implication their British partners in the al-Yamamah arms deal that generated the money used to fund 9/11) by classifying the 28-page chapter on the Saudis, which remained classified under Obama, until finally being released in July this year.
  • The July 2016 Chilcot Report of the UK’s Iraq Inquiry found that the 2003 invasion of Iraq did not defeat terrorism, but increased it. The public is supposed to regard this as an “unintended consequence”, but in 2011 the UK and USA, along with France, did the same thing in Libya, with the same results.
  • The September 2016 UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s Libya Report found that the 2011 intervention was based on lies, as Gaddafi was not killing his own people and the “rebels” assisted by the intervention weren’t ordinary Libyans but were al-Qaeda terrorists, funded by Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf kingdoms. The intervention resulted in “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL [ISIS] in North Africa”.
  • An al-Nusra (al-Qaeda) unit commander in Syria named Abu al-Ezz told veteran German journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer in a candid 26 September 2016 interview in Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that al-Nusra was funded by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait; was originally one group with ISIS but “ISIS was used in the interests of big states like America” (whereas al-Qaeda likes to think it’s independent) and “most of their leaders work with [Western] secret security services”; and they were supplied weapons and technical support directly from the USA—“The Americans are on our side”, he said.
  • The latest WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton’s secretive speeches reveal she admitted in a paid speech to an October 2013 Jewish United Fund dinner that the “Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth”, and that “the Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons—and pretty indiscriminately” to terrorists in Syria.
  • Anglo-American neocon war cheerleader Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News UK on 18 August promoted al-Nusra in Eastern Aleppo, praising them as the unifying force that enabled the Syrian opposition to break the government’s siege. With the Syrian government and Russia now about to reverse al-Nusra’s gains and drive them from Eastern Aleppo, the 4 October Washington Post reported that the Obama administration refers to al-Nusra’s impending defeat as the “fall” of Aleppo, and is determined to stop it: “There’s an increased mood in support of kinetic actions against the [Syrian] regime,” one senior administration official said. “The CIA and the Joint Staff have said that the fall of Aleppo would undermine America’s counterterrorism goals in Syria.”
  • The USA does not act alone, but always in tandem with the UK; given that the Saudi kingdom and its royal family has a vassal-liege relationship to the United Kingdom and the British Crown, it is becoming evident that the UK is the major influence on the USA’s support for al-Qaeda and their Saudi backers. Kamal Alam, a research analyst at the British military think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told RT on 5 October that Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is extending the conflict in Syria: “We must come to the conclusion that from all of the countries in Europe, Britain has been one of the biggest supporters of the Syrian opposition”, he said. “They are ignoring the facts on the ground: the more they support the opposition, the more the war goes on, the more refugees will spill out of Syria. The Syrian government has proven to be legitimate and they are still standing after five years. A lot of governments are changing their stance, but the UK is still [lagging] behind those governments.”
  • Despite the UK House of Commons Arms Export Committee in September calling for a ban on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, due to their use by the Saudis in Yemen, the British government has refused to halt the arms trade (on which Prince Charles is the lead negotiator for the UK). Following the 9 October funeral bombing in Yemen the British government still refused to stop the sales, as did the US.

The late former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser labelled the UK and USA in the title of his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, and called for Australia to adopt an independent foreign policy. Our present support for and participation in their actions in Syria means we are effectively allied with al-Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS, against which Australian troops have died fighting in Afghanistan. More than most countries Australia can make a stand that exposes and isolates the UK-Saudi-US elites who have turned their nations into the real terrorism axis of evil, by withdrawing our military presence from Syria immediately.

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