Panama Canard: The ”crimes” of France’s enemies

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin | American Herald Tribune | April 8, 2016

If there’s something to be happy about this week in France, surely it has to do with the fact that the Panama Papers don’t reveal much about the French political elite and their fiscal havens. The focus in the French media- albeit muted acknowledgement of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s off shore assets- has been entirely on the  so-called enemies of freedom-‘dictators killing their own people’ such as Bashar Al-Assad of Syria and of course primus inter pares of the world’s great villains: Russian President Vladimir Putin; that is in spite of the fact Putin’s name does not appear on any document released by the Soros and USAID-funded International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Nowhere can one read in the French press, however, that institutions which represent the richest and most powerful people on the planet; institutions which are all intimately linked to to the Central Intelligence Agency- the Ford Foundation; Carnegie Endowment for Internatioanl Peace; and of course the parent company of US engineered destabilization campaigns throughout the world- the Open Society Foundation- are financing this ‘exclusive leak’ of documents.

Instead, we find leaders France has been diligently attempting to overthrow, conveniently linked to the Panama Papers. Notwithstanding the fact that Bashar Al-Assad’s name does not appear on any document, Le Monde published the Syrian president’s portrait on the front page of it April 4th edition.

The ‘Assad connection’ to the documents is provided by the Syrian president’s cousin Berkane Maklouf who, we are told, attempted to get around sanctions against his country by setting up off-shore companies which supplied parts to the Syrian air force. Maklouf’s declarations about wanting to stay and die in Syria are also quoted to show how loyal he is to the ‘brutal regime’.

Here we need to clarify a few points about Syria and it’s ‘brutal regime.’ Syria is a democratic republic. The Syrian government is, ipso facto, not a ‘brutal regime’. Since unknown snipers opened fire on police and protesters in the city of Deraa on March 17th 2011, Syria has been invaded by mercenary terrorists from all over the world-whose passage into the country has been prepared by Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council in accordance with NATO Central Command.

Most, if not all, of the crimes in this war have been committed by the NATO-backed ‘rebels’. The NATO-backed rebels are Takfiri terrorists. All European and American press agencies have been telling lies about the war in Syria, which means that thousands of journalists are complicit in war crimes- the very journalists now accusing the ‘Assad clan’ of financial fraud.

NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council are not attempting to defeat Daesh in Syria. Rather, as former NATO commander General Wesley Clark has admitted, Daesh is a creation of the United States and Israel, whose purpose is to crush the Shia axis of anti-Zionist resistance in the Middle East.

Media disinformation about Syria is an integral part of the NATO war effort- a fact admitted by former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski.

There was never any crackdown by the Syrian government on peaceful protests.  The Syrian Arab Army has been fighting an armed insurgency supported by Western powers. All of its military operations are therefore fully in accordance with international law, which clearly stipulates that nations have a right to self-defense. A key strategy used by the terrorist brigades in Syria is to commit atrocities and blame them on the government.

The most infamous and widely publicized of these atrocities was the Houla Massacre of 2012, when the children of pro-government families were slaughtered by the Western-backed terrorists.  One of the only journalists in the Western press to confirm this was Rainer Hermann of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an article published on June 6th 2012.

In spite of the fact that Hermann  is considered to be one of Europe’s foremost experts on Syria, the Franco-German station ARTE ignored his analysis in their deeply dishonest documentary of 2012- which has since disappeared from their archives.

In the years leading up to the Syrian war, President Bashar Al-Assad was considered a ‘reformer’ by the Western political establishment. The reforms Assad was instituting favored the emerging national bourgeoisie at the expense of the country’s burgeoning working class. Privatization was ‘kept in the family’, with important contracts going to well-connected business men, loyal to the state, such as Berkane Maklouf.

The problem for the Western corporate elite, however, had nothing to do with the plight of the working class; rather it was that Syria still remained a sovereign, protectionist state, with no foreign debt and a high degree of political and economic autonomy. The ‘Washington Consensus’ demanded the ‘opening up’ of Syria to more direct, foreign investment, together with the weakening of its national sovereignty- so that the Arab nationalist state would no longer be able to defend itself against Israel. When Assad refused to comply, NATO fomented a proxy-war against the Arab nation.

Now an attempt is being made by the French press to smear the Assad family by portraying Berkane Maklouf as a money-laundering criminal; when in fact, the Syrian business man’s use of off-shore accounts to aid the Syrian war effort is not only excusable, it is highly commendable.

Maklouf contrasts poignantly with another Assad clan member, whose illegal activities were recently investigated by French courts; his name is Rifaat Al-Assad and he is an uncle of the Syrian incumbent. On April 28th 2014, Liberation reported that Rifaat’s expensive Parisian properties were being investigated by the French courts for tax evasion.

We are told in the headline that Rafaat is a cousin of the ‘Syrian dictator’; a few lines into the piece, we learn that he was disgraced and exiled after an aborted coup d’Etat in 1984; then the article casually reveals that the Syrian traitor and criminal had in fact joined an entirely different family: the French secret service. In essence, although the article appears to show the criminality of the Assad clan, it actually proves the opposite. For Rifaat Al-Assad, banished from Syria, had found work in the service of French foreign policy.

Similarly, as more documents are ‘leaked’ from the Panama Papers, real investigative journalists not on the Soros/USAID/CIA payroll will be better placed to make a concrete assessment of the Empire’s next stratagem of chaos.

German journalist Ernst Wolf, and French journalist Thierry Meyssan, have argued that the Panama Papers are part of a US financial conspiracy against Europe, whereby investors are being blackmailed into lodging their money in American banks-a prelude, they argue, to a new global financial crisis, which threatens to plunge the Old Continent into chaos.

In 1892, another major scandal involving Panama rocked Paris, when it was revealed that the French government- in order to cover up the bankruptcy of their canal project in Panama- had accepted bribes from the industrialists involved. The French political climate became particularly anti-Semitic when the newspaper La Libre Parole (Free Speech) began to publish all of the names of the financiers involved in the cover up- most of whom were Jewish. Given what we now know about those financing the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, France’s Zionist ruling class have nothing to fear this time round.