Posts

Qassem Soleimani And The Re-Making Of The Middle East

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Qassem Soleimani and the Re-making of the middle east by Sharif Loghdey 10 days after 911, retired US general Wesley Clark visited the Pentagon and was privy to a Memo that detailed the US’s plan to invade 7 Middle Eastern Countries in 5 years. Backtrack 5 years to 1996, a year which saw the first election of Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing extremist. It was the same year that an Israeli think-tank authored a document called “A Clean Break: A new strategy for securing the realm” which detailed a total revision of Israeli policy in the Middle East, shelving the Oslo accords and advocated for the abandonement of peace with most of Israel’s neighbours in favour of the violent toppling of unfriendly Arab regimes and replacing them with puppet regimes friendly to Israel using proxy forces and pre-emption in order to redraw the map of the Middle East – Iraq was to be the first victim. Fast forward a few months later, when the
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Creeping Evil Empire - AFRICOM - Is SA Safe?

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Is South Africa Safe from US hegemonic designs? Rhodes: Bad old days of Colonialism is back Not according to shock reports by the ruling ANC who in February 2016 claimed it was being targeted for regime change. At the time, (19 February 2016), African National Congress Secretary General Gwede Mantashe made the startling claim at an Anti-Racism march that "western forces are plotting daily to advance regime change in South Africa". In a meeting convened in the wake of the publicised threats, a report* detailing the discussions reveals the West's despicable, racist and contemptuous attitude to Africa and the rest of the 3rd world, unashamedly articulated by Tory PM Tony Blair's Foreign Affairs advisor Robert Cooper, when he said "...The challenge in the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves (West), we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old fashioned kinds of states
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Owning ISIS

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First published on 5/7/17 "Wasatiyyah" Definition: "the middle path" or "Ummatul Wasatah" , "an Ummah justly balanced", the name of the May 2017 symposium convened to tackle the ISIS phenomenon in South Africa  might have added hype to a phenomenon not really a current crisis in the local Muslim community, and in so doing, also unwittingly took ownership of ISIS  - The ISIS "problem" in South Africa was beautifully put to rest - almost entirely debunked as a verifiable non-issue in South Africa by non other than (invited speaker), SA police minister Fikile Mbalule. In fact, the reality of ISIS was hidden in Mbalula's restrained attempt at subtly explaining the nefarious origins of ISIS and the challenges the SA government faces - not of over hyped Islamo-extremist terrorism, but of fighting off pressures of "certain" states who were bent on furthering an obviously deceptive agenda (of which ISIS is but one) and one which t
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Spaza Woes and Township Xenophobia

(The following post is a work in progress) : In attempting to understand the sporadic manifestation of Xenophobic flareups in South Africa's townships and in light of certain comments made by the ruling party's politicians, the effects of over proliferation of foreign owned Spazas in S.A. townships must be investigated. Although much of the background to this post is extremely well articulated in the groundbreaking study by the "Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation" study entitled " The Informal Economy of Township Spaza Shops " whose findings I wholeheartedly concur with on the basis of my 10 year long interaction with Spaza entrepreneurs on the Cape Flats, my conclusions differ somewhat. It's analysis resonates well with the  previous post on the global micro finance fiasco in that many of the ills resulting from foreigner dominated spazas are articulated in the Bateman expose of the micro-finance model namely that "...As new microenterprises
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Microloans for Development - The Myth and the Reality

There is nothing new about the exploitation of the weak and vulnerable by the wealthy and the powerful, but the sheer scale of destruction wrought by microfinance institutions modelled on Grameen Bank of Dr Mohammed Yunus in what was originally hailed as a development masterpiece - was staggering. Commercialised copycat banks provided microloans at mega interest rates to the poor and destitute with the intention of starting businesses. The Grameen Bank founder received the Nobel prize in 2006 and in "development circles", the project was hailed as a success, but nothing could be further from the truth. Grameen Bank has an apparently extremely relaxed approach to the no-interest loans they disburse and it apparently has extremely low default rates - or so it says. The problem is, that in Bangladesh, where Grameen covers 98% of villages in that country, the plight of the desperate rural poor have become worse, many have poor mortgaged land and limb, and lost. Yunus' loa
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