[act-ma] Sun 10/21 Hear IAC Co-director Sara Flounders: Stop Nato/US Attacks on Syria and Iran 4pm in JP

[David Rolde]

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From: "Action Center" <iacboston at organizerweb.org> 
Subject: Sun 10/21 Hear IAC Co-director Sara Flounders: Stop Nato/US Attacks on Syria and Iran 


	
	
	
	

Stop Nato/US Attacks on Syria and Iran – A Call to Resist 

Join Us for a Workers World Party Forum -- 

The Global imperialist wars in Northern Africa and the Middle East - What's the truth behind the so-called "free Syrian army” and dirty, U.S. funded proxy wars in Libya, Syria and Iran? Hear why the Republicans and Democrats - all representatives of the ruling class, are hell-bent on carrying out the dictates of the Pentagon and Corporate War Makers in a period of intensifying global capitalist crisis. 
	Sara Flounders	Sara 
Flounders, 
co-director, International Action Center, author of 
The Pentagon's Achilles Heel: 
War Without Victory 

http://www.workers.org/2012/09/24/words-blow-away-pentagon-smokescreen/ 



The working class and oppressed everywhere are feeling the harmful effects of dropping wages, intensifying racism, sexism, LGBT oppression, unemployment, police brutality, immigrant bashing, and repression. The “wars of liberation" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are meant to rape and pillage the peoples of these countries, while stealing their resources, crippling their independence and subordinating their interests to the control of U.S Imperialism, NATO, Israel and the U.S. puppet Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. 


As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us during the U.S. war on Vietnam, every bomb dropped in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan -- explodes on cities and communities here at home - from Oakland and LA, to Detroit, Brooklyn and Boston. 


Join this important discussion on the expanding US/Nato War Drive and the global people's movement rising up to put a STOP to imperialist wars for profit. 



	

SUNDAY, October 21 st 4pm The Action Center 284 Amory St, JP 

The Brewery 
more info 617-522-6626 	

Also ….Team Solidarity- the Voice of United School Bus Union Workers, a new rank and file labor Eastern workers rallymovement in Greater Boston. Hear from newly organized workers from Eastern Bus lines and the United Steel Workers Union AFL-CIO 


Turkey uses false pretext to attack Syria 


by John Catalinatto October 14, 2012 

Mortar fire on the Turkish-Syria border — likely a provocation by Syrian rebels or at most an accident — has already exacerbated the crisis caused by the reactionary armed rebellion inside Syria. This event has awakened strong anti-government reaction inside Turkey. It also threatens a NATO-backed Turkish invasion of Syria and a wider war in the region. 

The incident setting off these events was mortar fire from Syrian territory that landed in the Turkish border town of Akçakale on Oct. 3, killing five Turkish citizens. A flurry of super-patriotic bluster from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan accompanied heavy Turkish artillery fire that killed Syrian troops. The Syrian government regretted the deaths, promised an investigation and said it would not happen again. 

German state TV ZDF’s first report was that Syrian rebels had fired the grenades and took responsibility for them. (See article by R. Teichmann at globalresearch.ca .) This scenario was gradually altered until all the corporate media and NATO regimes blamed the Syrian army for launching the mortars. 

NATO-member Turkey seized upon this suspicious pretext to begin daily artillery fire on Syrian army units close to the Turkish border. The U.S., German and NATO command backed Turkey’s actions, charging the Syrian government — without evidence — with “a flagrant breach of international law.” 

Whipped up by militarist chauvinism, the Turkish Parliament voted by about 3 to 1 to authorize Turkey’s army to take whatever measures it sees fit against Syria — much as the U.S. Congress backed President Lyndon Johnson’s Bay of Tonkin Resolution, which was the pretext for invading Vietnam in 1964. 

Turkish people oppose new war 

Turkey’s population, which has opposed the government’s role in arming the Syrian opposition and allowing them to stage attacks from bases in Turkey, immediately came out to protest the new war threats. 

Tens of thousands of people marched in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, and in Istanbul on Oct. 4, according to a report in the British Telegraph. The demonstrators “chanted slogans against the war and carried banners against the ruling AK Party. … The Turkish slogan ‘savasa havir’ (‘no to war’) was the top trending item on Turkey’s Twitter.” 

The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) took a strong position the next day against the decision in Parliament. Here are some excerpts: 

“The AKP Government is doing its best to lead our country into a war. AKP is primarily responsible for shooting of our town, Akçakale, and thus for the death of five innocent citizens. 

“AKP, which feeds, protects and organizes reactionary gangs which carry out armed attacks on Syria, is keeping on planting the seeds of hostility between our country and Syria for the sake of regional plans of imperialism. 

“Imperialism must be kicked out of the region. Turkey must immediately abandon supporting the reactionary armed gangs, and the camps, which have turned into warfare headquarters, must immediately be abolished.” 

While anti-war sentiment inside Turkey grows, the continued attacks have an immediate impact on the struggle inside Syria, whose army has pulled back 10 miles from the border to avoid new incidents. This “buffer zone” creates the potential for a staging area for the Syrian armed opposition — which contains many non-Syrian fighters whose ideology threatens people of many different religious beliefs inside Syria. 

IAC warns of wider war 

>From inside the U.S., the International Action Center released on Oct. 5 a statement, commenting that “this latest aggression by NATO-backed Turkey can be the opening move to direct military intervention from the imperialist powers. This is something that NATO is looking for. The imperialists have fomented, armed and financed the armed insurgency in Syria.” 

The IAC writes that despite all the deaths and destruction, the anti-Syria insurgency has begun to stall. The statement notes that even the Oct. 4 New York Times reports that almost no Syrian forces are defecting any longer, and that the opposition of Russia and China has prevented the U.N. Security Council from authorizing aggression against Syria. 

“The lesson of this latest event for the anti-war movement and the people of the U.S. is clear,” says the IAC. “Stay alert!” for new lies and new aggression from the imperialist powers in NATO. 

www.workers.org 
On Turkey's Grounding of Syrian Airliner - NATO MOVES CLOSER TO WAR 


INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER STATEMENT – IACenter.org 

ON TURKEY'S GROUNDING OF SYRIAN AIRLINER 



NATO MOVES CLOSER TO WAR ON SYRIA 



Turkey’s war-jets forced down a civilian airliner, flying from Moscow to Damascus. Thirty-five Russians and Syrians were passengers. This aggressive act brings NATO another step closer to open war against Syria as part of an imperialist plan to take over the country. 



U.S. spokesperson Victoria Nuland immediately supported Turkey's Oct. 10 act of air piracy. Some 150 U.S. special troops had moved into Syria's southern neighbor, Jordan. On Oct. 9 NATO Secretary Gen. Anders Fogh Rasmussen said NATO would back up Turkey. The British, French and German governments also backed up Turkey and blamed Syria for the crisis. 



Turkey had continued shelling Syria, using as a pretext the charge that Syrian forces had launched mortars into Turkey a week earlier. To this day it is unclear who launched the mortars. It might well have been the counterrevolutionary rebels that the NATO countries and the Gulf oil monarchies have been arming all along. 



Turkey claimed there were weapons aboard the airliner, along with 17 Russian and 18 Syrian passengers, whose lives were endangered by the grounding. As of now Turkey has shown no evidence that weapons were aboard, nor did it in any case have the right to ground an airliner flying on a regular air lane. It underlines the seriousness of the war threat that Turkey risked its important trade and diplomatic relationships with Russia to make this aggressive move. 



It is important to look at who are the forces now threatening to intervene in Syria. The NATO powers are the former colonialist powers that carved up Africa and Asia, and dominated Latin America. They still monopolize military and economic power in the world, they completely dominate the media and their 1% superrich are the exploiters of humanity. And they are making war to make new colonies out of sovereign states, with the U.S. leading the pack in the new colonial wars. 



While they pretend to be promoting "democracies," NATO's main allies in the Middle East are monarchies Jordanian monarchy. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been financing the Syrian counterrevolution with their ruling family's oil billions. NATO's front line is militarist Turkey, whose troops will supply the main cannon fodder for the war against Syria. 



Each week the civil war in Syria grows closer to a regional war into which all the NATO powers will jump. 



Those anti-war forces that exist in the United States and the other NATO powers have the following responsibilities: to refuse to be swept up in the war propaganda that demonizes Syria and its leader; to argue and educate others to understand that people in their countries can only lose from an intervention against Syria; and to mobilize to stop the aggression from NATO by whatever steps are possible. 



IACenter.org 






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