Reading these articles, published between April 2007 and October 2011, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, for Chomsky, America is virtually the sole obstacle to peace in the world. Crimes committed by other powers are mentioned occasionally, but only in passing. Nowhere does he acknowledge the fact that many regions have intractable conflicts of their own, which will persist whatever the US does.

For Chomsky, conflict in the Middle East is exclusively the work of America and Israel. There is no struggle for hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or if any such struggle does exist it can be easily resolved so long as the US is ready to alter its policies. Again, unending war in Afghanistan does not reflect that unfortunate country’s internal divisions and its long history as a focal point of geopolitical rivalry, which now includes a stalemate between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. War in Afghanistan could be ended very simply, if only the US withdrew its forces and brokered a grand diplomatic bargain.

Looking further ahead, there is the prospect of antagonism between China and India. But since there is no major conflict that America has not caused, or at any rate seriously aggravated, there is none that America cannot end. It does not occur to Chomsky that the US may not have the ability to perform these miracles. The fact that America has not brought peace throughout the world only confirms its position as a uniquely powerful force for evil.
[...]
During the past 20 years America has been unhinged by ideological hubris – a disorder that Chomsky cannot analyse or even properly comprehend, since he embodies it himself.

“Look at the percentages,” he said. “The percentage of people who use [illegal] drugs are about the same with blacks and whites, and yet blacks are arrested way disproportionately. They’re prosecuted and imprisoned way disproportionately. They get the death penalty way disproportionately. How many times have you seen a white rich person get the electric chair?” Those truly concerned about racism, he said, should “look at the drug laws which are being so unfairly enforced.”

Such anti-racist sentiments contradict what was published under Paul’s name in the 1980s and 1990s. But far more often what comes out of his mouth ought to appall those who think of themselves as being on the liberal Left.

Nonetheless many self-identified liberals and leftists manage to keep a warm spot in their hearts for Paul.

James Kirchick writes at The New Republic:

The consumer advocate and sometime presidential candidate Ralph Nader was one of the first prominent liberals to offer Paul support, telling The American Conservative in September that there exists a “foundational convergence” between progressives and libertarians like Paul. “Ron Paul has always been anti-corporate, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-big banks, anti-bailouts,” Nader said. He has since been joined by others on the left, including the editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel. “I have big problems w/Ron Paul on many issues. But on ending preemptive wars & on challenging bipartisan elite consensus on FP, good he’s in,” she tweeted on December 30.

But it’s not just prominent progressive writers who are neglecting to grapple with Paul’s record and ideas. A Public Policy Polling survey conducted in Iowa a week after the media drew renewed attention to his bigoted newsletters found that Paul’s favorability rating among Democrats increased from an already surprisingly high 59 percent to 70 percent. The same poll found that Paul enjoyed a remarkable 68 percent favorable rating from voters who identify as “very liberal.” Indeed, among all Iowans, it was the “very liberal” voters with whom Paul was most popular. Not bad for a man who wants to eliminate Medicare and Social Security, opposes the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has warned of “a coming race war,” and believes that legalized abortion is unconstitutional.

What is it that liberals find so attractive about Ron Paul? An answer is indicated in the tweet from vanden Heuvel quoted above. Some liberals are so enamored with Paul’s foreign policy—namely, his opposition to practically any form of overseas military engagement—that they are willing to overlook all of Paul’s other heresies (not to mention lunacies). In certain parts of the left-wing imagination, America’s aggressive imperial overreach is so acute that it must be stopped at all costs. Left-wing blogger Philip Weiss has even suggested that liberals think of supporting Paul as an ugly, but necessary, progressive compromise, likening it to nothing less than “seculars joining with the Muslim Brothers to get rid of Mubarak. You needed a broad coalition to push Hosni out.”

Of course, there are plenty of reasonable grounds on which to criticize current American military policy: Issues like the Afghanistan war, drone attacks in Pakistan, massive military expenditures, and the whole slew of Bush administration counter-terrorism policies (many of them continued by President Obama) all deserve to be debated. Writing in Salon, David Sirota tries to praise Paul for doing just that, by being “one of the only presidential candidates in contemporary American history in either party to overtly question our nation’s invade-bomb-and-occupy first, ask-questions later doctrine.”

The problem is that Paul does much more than challenge the bipartisan consensus on the uses of American power. Indeed, by backing Paul and allowing themselves to be seduced by his vision of an American empire run amok, liberals are also rejecting their own proud tradition of foreign engagement. In a Paul administration, we wouldn’t only see an end to wars like the one in Iraq. It would mean an end to any humanitarian intervention at all, no matter how grave the circumstances. Also gone would be foreign aid: All of it. If Paul had his way, he would also eliminate all the sources of American “soft power,” from USAID to the Peace Corps to Voice of America. Nor would there be any promotion of international human rights, not even notionally, in a Paul administration. Paul has voted against awarding the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal; forget even meager statements of support for dissidents in Iran or Burma, never mind sanctions or visa bans on officials who commit abuses. These are policies that ought to have liberals worried.

Instead, however, Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation, blames Paul’s critics for “attempting to marginalize his views beyond recognition.” But who is doing the marginalizing here? Paul has praised accused Wikileaks source Bradley Manning—charged with the capital crime of “aiding the enemy”—as a “true patriot.” In 2009, Paul appeared on Iranian state-funded television and referred to Israel’s embargo of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as a “concentration camp.” Last year he attacked President Obama’s order to execute Osama bin Laden as “absolutely not necessary.” And he continues to speak regularly before the John Birch Society, an organization so reactionary that William F. Buckley Jr. wrote it out of the nascent conservative movement that he was building—in 1962.

The truth is, Paul has marginalized himself. And to the extent that liberals embrace him—whether from genuine enthusiasm, or cool calculation—they are doing the same to themselves.

Francis Fukuyama of “End of History” fame is contemplating “The Future of History” in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. (Note that the article will be available to non-subscribers only until 12/29/2011). The central focus of his essay is the question if liberal democracy can survive the decline of the middle class that is currently struggling to cope with the impact of technological advances and globalization.

Fukuyama argues that for the past few decades, “the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right,” while the left has failed “in the realm of ideas.” He warns that the “absence of a plausible progressive counter­narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.”

Here is Fukuyama’s verdict on the left:

But the deeper reason a broad-based populist left has failed to materialize is an intellectual one. It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting a middle-class society.

The main trends in left-wing thought in the last two generations have been, frankly, disastrous as either conceptual frameworks or tools for mobilization. Marxism died many years ago, and the few old believers still around are ready for nursing homes. The academic left replaced it with postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, critical theory, and a host of other fragmented intellectual trends that are more cultural than economic in focus. Postmodernism begins with a denial of the possibility of any master narrative of history or society, undercutting its own authority as a voice for the majority of citizens who feel betrayed by their elites. Multiculturalism validates the victimhood of virtually every out-group. It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition: most of the working- and lower-middle-class citizens victimized by the system are culturally conservative and would be embarrassed to be seen in the presence of allies like this.

We are a national campaign and for the last couple of years we’ve been the people in the room arguing for a combination of strikes, direct action and occupations as a means of defending public services, the welfare state, stopping the cuts and fighting job losses.

Looking at the Right to Work website, we find a plan to ‘Knock Cameron out for good‘. According to this document, the struggle for democracy in the Arab world and the acts of looting and vandalism that occurred in the 2011 riots in England are all part of an international workers’ uprising:

The “Arab Spring” has seen workers rejecting austerity and demanding democracy. Dictators have been overthrown as revolutions, led by the young and the poor, have swept the streets. Egypt saw huge strikes at  the centre of the movement against Mubarak.

In recent days the Egyptian people have been battling reaction and demanding democracy.

We’ve seen mass strikes across Europe against austerity with a wave of general strikes in Greece, France,  and Italy – there was a general strike  just last week in Portugal. Unions’ and workers’ action is coming to the  forefront of resistance on a global scale.

In Britain over the last year we’ve seen a huge upswing of opposition.  The student revolt against the attack  on EMA and spiralling tuition fees  kicked things off. On 26 March we  saw the historic half million strong  demo called by the TUC. On J30 750,000 members of PCS, NUT, UCU and ATL were on strike.

This summer growing poverty and unemployment led to riots spreading  like wildfire across our inner cities.

In addition to offering links to Morning Star and Socialist Worker articles, the Right to Work site also features guest blog posts from people such as Paul Feldman from ‘A World to Win’ and Mark Barrett, ‘Democracy Campaigner and co-convenor of the People’s Assembly Network’ (who is also active with A World to Win).

A World to Win is a far-left campaign which wants ‘a future without global capitalism’ and hopes to ‘reorganise the economy along co-operative, not-for-profit, self-management lines’ (yeah, we’ve seen that tried before). It was launched at a 2005 conference which featured ex-MI5 crank David Shayler as a guest speaker. At that same conference, Paul Feldman ‘explained’ the 7/7 jihadist attacks as follows:

It is urgent, therefore, that we come back to this question of an alternative political and economic framework.

The market economy will be imposed on countries as a result of what the G8 decided, and, as in Iraq, if it requires an illegal invasion and occupation to achieve this, this will be done.

And increasingly authoritarian rule will continue to replace nominal forms of democracy in countries like Britain. The right to vote, hard won in this and in other countries, will continue to lose its meaning.

This, in our view, is the background to the terror attacks in London which the political elite is content to dismiss as the work of a few people with some evil in their heads.

The fact is that while we oppose these terror attacks absolutely, aimed as they are at people whose only crime is to go to work in the morning, not at the leaders of these regimes – the fact is that this profit-driven globalisation, on top of decades and decades of colonial and imperialist exploitation, has the conditions for this deep alienation and these attacks on workers in London.

In his Right to Work guest post, Feldman writes approvingly of Marx and offers quotes from Lenin:

Lenin called for “an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags” which, naturally, could only be achieved with the overthrow of the capitalist state.

And as this BBC profile of Lenin helpfully reminds us:

During this period of revolution, war and famine, Lenin demonstrated a chilling disregard for the sufferings of his fellow countrymen and mercilessly crushed any opposition.

So, Right to Work are the usual bunch of revolutionary communist nutjobs who support the resurrection of a failed ideology that led to untold human suffering. No great surprise there, I suppose.

Of course, no credible mainstream organisation would hook up with this bunch of Soviet wannabes. Except…

The University and College Union

The Bakers Food & Allied Workers Union

The Educational Institute of Scotland

The Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association

The Public and Commercial Services Union

The Communication Workers Union

The National Union of Teachers

The National Union of Journalists

As well as branches of…

ASLEF

The GMB

Unite

UNISON

Are there any trade unions in Britain that aren’t infested with communists?

To the best of my knowledge, no CPB stall has ever sold an anti-semitic publication, not would it knowingly do so.

When the CPB received regular unsolicited copies of North Star Compass, a “communist” journal produced by ex-members of the Canadian CP, we wrote to them attacking an anti-semitic article in it and asked them to stop posting copies of NSC to us. When a deputy of the Russian Federation CP delivered an anti-semitic speech in the Duma, we protested to that party in the strongest terms.

That’s good, I suppose. But the problem with antisemitism (and ultra-nationalism and homophobia) in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation goes far beyond a single speech in the Duma. And that problem hasn’t prevented the Communist Party of Britain from inviting CPRF activist Yuri Yemelianov to participate in its 21st Century Marxism Festival November 26 and 27 in London.

Griffith’s mention of a CPRF deputy’s antisemitic speech refers to Albert Makashov. The Anti-Defamation League reported in 1998:

As a member of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, … Makashov has become infamous worldwide for his anti-Semitic outbursts blaming Jews for the country’s economic problems, and advocating the establishment of a quota on the number of Jews allowed in Russia. He has also publicly supported the reinstatement of the Pale of Settlement, territory in which Jews were restricted to live during the 19th century.

Other outrageous pronouncements by… Makashov include an editorial by him in the Russian newspaper Zavtra, printed in October 1998, which stated that a “Yid,” a derogatory term used in Russia to mean Jew, is “a bloodsucker feeding on the misfortunes of other people. They drink the blood of the indigenous peoples of the state; they are destroying industry and agriculture.” He caused the greatest splash later in October when he led two fiery rallies, in Moscow and Samara, commemorating the 81st anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which were repeatedly shown on Russian television. At these rallies Makashov angrily shouted “I will round up all the Yids and send them to the next world!”

The Duma has failed to explicitly censure General Makashov for his anti-Semitic remarks, and in particular for his comments calling for death to Jews. In November 1998, the Communist members blocked two different motions to censure the retired General, which had been put forward by the opposition Yabloko party. Rather, the Parliament adopted a vaguely worded resolution, condemning ethnic hatred, with no reference to Jews, anti-Semitism or General Makashov. The Communist party has also failed to condemn General Makashov or to discipline him. Instead, the General has found a number of vocal supporters within his party and among Russia’s many nationalists.

In reaction to General Makashov’s October comments and the Duma’s failure to censure him, President Yeltsin requested a statement from Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov regarding his party’s position on anti-Semitism. Mr. Zyuganov’s response reiterated the accusations made by the most anti-Semitic members of his party. In the form of a letter to the Ministry of Justice and the National Security Chief, Zyuganov’s response contained harsh anti-Semitic references reminiscent of the old Soviet era and served only to heighten concerns about anti-Semitism in Russia.

The letter stated open opposition to Zionists, contending that Zionism is among the “most aggressive imperialist circles striving for world domination. In this respect it is related to fascism,” and further asserted that, “Communists…rightly ask how it can be that key positions in a number of economic sectors were seized by representatives of one ethnic group. They see how control over most of the electronic media — which are waging a destructive campaign against our fatherland and its morality, language, culture and beliefs — is concentrated in the hands of those same individuals.” To many, Mr. Zyuganov’s remarks came as no surprise, as he has long been known to use anti-Semitism for political gain.

The website GayRussia reported this year:

Communist Party of Russian Federation is… notoriously homophobic. Its leader Gennady Zyuganov says homosexuality “contradicts to moral values of Russian people”. Communist members of Duma call for re-criminalization of homosexuality in Russia and for ban of family and parental rights of gays and lesbians.

In 2008 UK Gay News reported:

Young homophobic communist Pavel Tarasov, who 18 months ago infamously said that a “good faggot is a dead faggot”, has surfaced as a staffer for Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov.

As a representative of the communist leader, Mr. Tarasov took part recently in debates between presidential candidates on Russian national TV channel.

He also participated in the anti-gay riots in Moscow during the city’s two Gay Prides in 2006 and last year, helping to disperse gay men and women with a group of young homophobic communists.

Wearing a red T-shirt with communist symbols, Mr. Tarasov was at the head of homophobic mob which shouted on the streets: “Death to faggots!”

In 2006 photographs of Tarasov and his comrades appeared on the Internet against a background of nationalists and Cossacks dispersing LGBT demonstrators.

During last year’s Gay Pride, he appeared again on the Moscow streets with his friends and made homophobic statements in front of the cameras.

Mr. Tarasov has published reports on his anti-gay riots on the official homepage of Youth Communist Union.

I can find no evidence that either Zyuganov or Makashov has ever apologized or renounced his noxious views. That Zyuganov is still the leader of the Russian Communists and plans to run for president of Russia next year should come as no surprise to Robert Griffiths; nor should Albert Makashov’s continued membership in the Duma as a CPRF deputy.

General Secretary Griffiths: Do you consider Zyuganov, Makashov and the other haters in the CPRF to be your comrades? Do you still consider the CPB and the CPRF to be part of the same movement? If not, why have you invited an “activist” from their party to participate in your Marxism Festival? Do you really believe your protest of Makashov’s antisemitism absolves you of further responsibility in the matter?

Or to paraphrase CPB member Andrew Murray on the racist regime in North Korea, have you made your basic position of solidarity with the Russian Communist party clear?

(Hat tip: Ryan)

If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn’t you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, “nuclear latency” (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?

Let’s be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb. The latest report from the IAEA, despite its much discussed reference to “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme”, also admits that its inspectors continue “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at [Iran's] nuclear facilities”. The leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – maintain their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs.

Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?

…

So what is to be done? Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t work. Iranians refuse to compromise on what they believe to be their “inalienable” right to nuclear power under the Non-proliferation treaty.

But Harry’s Place readers will have heard this all before. You’ll have heard it in a sermon Mehdi Hasan delivered a few years back, where, after insisting that non-Muslims lived ‘like animals’, he praised a religious ruling by  Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic:

“Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa saying the stockpiling, the production, the use of nuclear weapons us forbidden under Islam. Spot on. Islamic Republic of Iran. The fatwa of the Supreme Leader.”

As far as I can tell, Mehdi Hasan takes this argument at face value. The Ayatollah has spoken! The matter is settled! Perhaps why he’s so insistent that there is “no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb”.

I’m not sure that Mehdi Hasan is very good at decoupling religion from politics.

Whichever side you believe, left-wing liberals in the UK who, like Press TV, are quite rightly against another military intervention in the Middle East, are overlooking a significant point in this debate. The standards by which Press TV gathers information and presents it are very different to, I imagine, their own benchmarks. Bahari’s case should act as a stark warning.

Like many print journalists looking for a lucky break into broadcast, I jumped at the chance to report on Turkey and joined the channel in 2007. As an accredited member of the press and Istanbul resident, I was fascinated by the relationship between Turkey and Iran. It was an exciting prospect to be part of a new world which challenged western news agencies’ agenda.  I was part of a group of professional journalists and we believed we could influence the channel in a positive way.

However, since the regional uprisings began, pro-democracy movements have been presented as a follow-on to the 1979 Islamic revolution on Press TV, and therefore an Islamic awakening – except of course Iran’s own protests. While it may be true that Islam will play a larger role in the region’s future politics, the regime is using this line as propaganda to promote its agenda. For example, I was asked “urgently” to cover anti-Bahrain regime protests in Istanbul, but told “forget it!” when suggesting coverage of anti-Syrian regime protests.

My four-year relationship ended with Press TV on October 17, mainly because there has been a deliberate attempt to suppress information on the Syrian uprising. It’s one thing to take a position on the news you report, but it’s another to completely ignore a story of interest to the public. It’s well known that Iran politically backs the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but I was shocked to learn of the extent to which Press TV could be used to propagate propaganda.

After months of ignoring the Syrian opposition, the day finally came when Press TV called me to cover something. As thousands of Syrian refugees poured into Turkey to escape the violence across the border, a newsroom producer called asking whether I could go to the refugee camps close to the Turkish-Syrian border. I asked the producer about Press TV’s editorial position on the story. “We’re not denying there is a crackdown going on in Syria but we believe Turkey is gun running into the country to create a Libyan-style civil war,” he said.

When I asked what our source was, he couldn’t answer, and instead he replied: “Turkey will do anything to get into the EU.” It was a laughable response and I obviously refused to go. The next day, to my horror, I watched as a young Turkish translator with no reporting experience appeared on TV covering one of the world’s most critically watched news stories. This was incredibly irresponsible. The translator, who I had worked with before, had no background in journalism and was easily manipulated while live on air to fit with the narrative coming out of Tehran, which had evolved into a denial of AFP reports that Iranian snipers were firing on Syrian demonstrators. This report went out to millions of viewers. You have to ask, what kind of alternative information is this?

I have now come to realise instead of a newly launched news channel living up to its aspirations, Press TV is slowly being taken over by an ideology that merely defends a specific agenda. Experienced journalists with news training eventually come unstuck with editorial policy, a policy that can never be explained because it changes with Iranian politics, which can be quite schizophrenic.

File under: Andrew Gilligan/Better Late Than Never

So I have a feeling she wasn’t speaking entirely for herself at Saturday night’s candidates’ debate when she said:

“So what would I cut? I think really what I would want to do is go back and take a look at Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘The Great Society.’ The Great Society has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

Presumably this would include Medicare, one of the Great Society programs, which Bachmann pledges to defend on her website.

But what’s fascinating here is her call for the US to stop being a “modern welfare state” and become more like the nominally-socialist People’s Republic of China– where of course free trade unions, opposition political parties and other inconveniences are strictly forbidden.

It appears Bachmann has found some common ground with that other admirer of the People’s Republic, Andy Newman of Socialist Unity, who wrote on the 60th anniversary of the Communist victory:

It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress.

Update: And Bachmann likely would find even more common ground with Jin Liqun, the supervising chairman of China Investment Corporation, China’s sovereign wealth fund, who told Al Jazeera:

“If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labour laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack.

“Why should, for instance, within [the] eurozone some member’s people have to work to 65, even longer, whereas in some other countries they are happily retiring at 55, languishing on the beach? This is unfair. The welfare system is good for any society to reduce the gap, to help those who happen to have disadvantages, to enjoy a good life, but a welfare society should not induce people not to work hard.”

(Via Shiraz Socialist. Hat tip: Sarah AB)

Where threats to free speech are concerned anyway. Look at how the French Left has reacted to the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices. From France24 :

A demonstration in Paris on Sunday attracted hundreds of supporters, including some famous French faces, “in defence of the right to blaspheme”. Organised by the anti-xenophobia organisation SOS Racisme, the impromptu movement aims to fight “religious fundamentalism” and preserve democracy and secularism.

Sounds like good old fashioned standing up for secular values to me, the UK Left used to do that once as well.

Also here’s how a French Ledt Wing paper reacts :

While the police continue their investigation into the fire, which they have classified as a terrorist attack, the magazine itself has been housed by newspaper Libération, which is one of a number of publications that reprinted the Mohammed cartoon in support of Charlie Hebdo.

But the left-wing daily faces the same fate as its adopted magazine. “If Libération continues publishing those cartoons, then we’ll have to deal with them as well” said Ekber.

Do you think the Guardian would do such a thing ? Answers on a postcard please.

Gene adds: To clarify, Ekber quoted above admitted hacking into the Charlie Hebdo website after the arson attack but was not involved in that attack. His threat to Libération was in reference to hacking.

The Iranian officers who knocked out Saeid Pourheydar’s four front teeth also enlightened the opposition journalist. Held in Evin Prison for weeks following his arrest early last year for protesting, he says, he learned that he was not only fighting the regime, but also companies that armed Tehran with technology to monitor dissidents like him.

Pourheydar, 30, says the power of this enemy became clear as intelligence officers brandished transcripts of his mobile phone calls, e-mails and text messages during his detention. About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones, he says.

“This is a commerce of death for the companies that place this technology in the hands of dictatorships,” Pourheydar says.

So begins a must-read report by Bloomberg News on the complicity of Western technology companies in Iran’s suppression of anti-regime protests. It deserves the widest possible circulation and attention.

Bloomberg singles out three companies for scrutiny:

Even as the pariah state pursued a brutal political crackdown, including arrests and executions surrounding its contested 2009 elections, European companies supplied Iran with location tracking and text-message monitoring equipment that can turn mobile phones into tools for surveillance.

Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.

Ericsson and Creativity Software offered technology expressly for law enforcement use — including a location- monitoring product proposed by Ericsson in early 2009 and one sold this year by Creativity, according to the interviews.

By all means read the rest.

As for Creativity Software, based in Kingston upon Thames, you can get a quick idea of what it’s all about from its homepage (click to enlarge):

Creativity Software specialises in Location Based Services. Our turnkey solutions enable mobile operators around the world to capitalise on the LBS market opportunity and to meet regulatory Lawful Intercept requirements.

“Lawful Intercept requirements”? As required by the murderous, repressive Islamic Republic of Iran?

Bloomberg reports:

Early this year, Creativity Software sold a system that enables Iranian law enforcement and security forces to monitor cell phone locations, according to three people familiar with the transaction. With it, police can track a target’s movements every 15 seconds and plot the locations on a map, according to a 19-page company product specification document. Creativity Software confirms that Irancell is a client, but declined to discuss sales of any location-tracking gear for law enforcement purposes, saying it would breach contract confidentiality.
…..
The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds — eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.
…..
Employees at Creativity Software were concerned about selling the technology to Iran, says Venu Gokaram, who worked as a test manager for the company until early this year.

“A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.”

Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran.

Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients.

So here we have a British company that is profiting by aiding a brutal rightwing regime to stay in power through suppression of pro-democracy opponents.

And where is the Left? Who is raising bloody hell about this?

Well, if you’re Kevin Ovenden, John Wight or Richard Seymour, among many others, you’re aiding the Islamic Republic’s propaganda efforts by appearing on George Galloway’s program “The Real Deal” on the Iranian state-funded Press TV.

Seriously, folks in London, who or what are you waiting for? How huge a task is it to print up some flyers, gather a like-minded friend or two, call a few newspapers and TV stations, and spend a morning or afternoon leafleting in front of Creativity Software’s offices?