Pussy Riot and Malaysian foreign-funded NGOs

Bizarre as it seems, two prominent Malaysian NGOs have something in common with Pussy Riot – the support of the US National Endowment for Democracy.

WHO loves Pussy Riot? Paul McCartney, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sting are in the long list of celebrities supporting the so-called Russian feminist punk rock outfit.



But Madonna appears to have made the biggest impact with her brazen display of endorsement.

Midway through her 1984 hit Like a Virgin during a concert in Moscow last month, she stripped to exhibit the words “Pussy Riot” written across her back.

Her show did little to prevent three members of the group – Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich – from being jailed for two years.

They were found guilty of hooliganism and inciting religious hatred in an orthodox Moscow cathedral.

There has been much global media frenzy over their perceived persecution.The international condemnation has come from Amnesty International, the White House, the European Union, the British and German governments and an assortment of human rights groups.

Among the latest to join the chorus are Yoko Ono, wife of ex-Beatle John Lennon, and Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The story as being spun by the mainstream global media is that of three young innocent women who were merely expressing their freedom being jailed by the dissent-silencing president Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB, remember?) and as such, need the support from all the outraged freedom-loving, justice-seeking and human rights-embracing people of the world.

After presenting the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace award to Tolokonnikova’s husband, Ono said: “I thank Pussy Riot in standing firmly in their belief for freedom of expression and making all women of the world proud to be women.”

Oh yeah? Let’s look at what they did to earn such an honour. On Feb 21, they stormed the altar of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour wearing balaclavas and bright outfits to “perform” what has been reported as a “punk prayer to the Virgin Mary”.

In reality, it was a grossly blasphemous parody of a Latin hymn, the English lyrics of which read: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts 


Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest

What they yelled during their “performance” was this:

Holy s***, s***, Lord’s s***! Holy s***, s***, Lord’s s***! St Maria, Virgin, become a feminist ...*Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin *(The Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, whose secular name is Vladimir Gundyaev)
 B****, you better believe in God!

The group is an offshoot of another known as “Voina”, or “War” in Russian, which has since 2008 staged several offensively shocking events in the name of “performance art”, including painting a mural of a penis on a bridge, having group sex in a museum, throwing live cats at workers of a McDonald’s outlet, overturning of police cars and firebombing buildings. They also stole a chicken from a supermarket and performed a lewd act with it.

It’s highly doubtful that the information would be revealed by the Western media when the case comes up for appeal on Oct 1.

Imagine the repercussions if such a group entered a mosque, church, or a Hindu or Buddhist temple in Malaysia to similarly “express their freedom”.

People who commit such acts in the US or in most European countries would also be arrested, charged and jailed, so what’s the big deal about these women?

For one thing, they seem to have powerful backers, in the form of the US National Endowment for Democracy.

Yes, the same entity supporting Bersih and Suaram, which is now being probed over its sources of foreign funding.

According to conspirazzi.com, Pussy Riot and Voina have open links to the NED through Oksana Chelysheva, who is deputy executive director of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society funded by the NED and George Soros-funded outfits.

The NED was created in 1983, seemingly as a non-profit-making organisation to promote human rights and democracy but as its first president Allen Weinstein admitted to The Washington Post in 1991, a lot of what it does overtly used to be done covertly by the CIA.

In the words of ex-CIA officer Ralph McGeehee, it subsidises and influences elections, political parties, think tanks, academia, publishers, media and labour, religious, women’s and youth groups.

Russia has since introduced a new Bill to label NGOs that get foreign funds and are involved in politics as “foreign agents”, with their accounts subject to public scrutiny.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, says the US, too, has laws which require foreign interests to register as foreign agents but this does not always apply to all Israeli lobby groups.

“There are no political parties in the US that are funded by foreign interests. No such thing would be permitted. It would be regarded as high treason,” he was quoted as saying by Pravda.

So, if outsiders are not allowed to fund and interfere in US politics, why should we allow its agencies to meddle in ours?

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
By M. VEERA PANDIYAN

> Associate Editor M. Veera Pandiyan sees the wisdom in this quote from Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Related post

Foreign funding for political purposes in Malaysia

Sep 22, 2012

China, Russia sound alarm on world economy at APEC summit

By Timothy Heritage

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia

(Reuters) - China and Russia sounded the alarm about the state of the global economy and urged Asian-Pacific countries at a summit on Saturday to protect themselves by forging deeper regional economic ties.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said Beijing would do all it could to strengthen the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) by rebalancing its economy, Asia's biggest, to improve the chances of a global economic recovery.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said trade barriers must be smashed down as he opened the APEC summit which he is hosting on a small island linked to the Pacific port of Vladivostok by a spectacular new bridge that symbolizes Moscow's pivotal turn to Asia away from debt-stricken Europe.

"It's important to build bridges, not walls. We must continue striving for greater integration," Putin told the APEC leaders, seated at a round table in a room with a view of the $1 billion cable-stayed bridge, the largest of its kind.

"The global economic recovery is faltering. We can overcome the negative trends only by increasing the volume of trade in goods and services and enhancing the flow of capital."

Hu told business leaders before the summit the world economy was being hampered by "destabilizing factors and uncertainties" and the crisis that hit in 2008-09 was far from over. China would play its role, he said, in strengthening the recovery.

"We will work to maintain the balance between keeping steady and robust growth, adjusting the economic structure and managing inflation expectations. We will boost domestic demand and maintain steady and robust growth as well as basic price stability," he said.

Hu spelled out plans for China, whose economic growth has slowed as Europe's debt crisis worsened, to pump $157 billion into infrastructure investment in agriculture, energy, railways and roads.

Hu steps down as China's leader in the autumn after a Communist Party congress, but he promised continuity and stability for the economy.

Putin, who has just begun a new six-year term as president, said on Friday Russia would be a stable energy supplier and a gateway to Europe for Asian countries, and also pledged to develop his country's transport network.

RUSSIA LOOKS EAST

The relative strength of China's economy, by far the largest in Asia and second in the world to the United States, is key to Russia's decision to look eastwards as it seeks to develop its economy and Europe battles economic problems.

APEC, which includes the United States, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Canada, groups countries around the Pacific Rim which account for 40 percent of the world's population, 54 percent of its economic output and 44 percent of trade.

APEC members are broadly showing relatively strong growth, but boosting trade and growth is vital for the group as it tries to remove the trade barriers that hinder investment.

The European Union has been at odds with both China and Russia over trade practices it regards as limiting free competition. Cooperation in APEC is also hindered by territorial and other disputes among some of the members.

Putin, 59, limped slightly as he greeted leaders at the summit. Aides said he had merely pulled a muscle. Underlining Putin's good health, a spokesman said he had a "very active lifestyle."

Discussions at the two-day meeting will focus on food security and trade liberalization. An agreement was reached before the summit to slash import duties on technologies that can promote economic growth without endangering the environment.

Breakthroughs are not expected on other trade issues at the meeting, which U.S. President Barack Obama is missing. He has been attending the Democratic Party convention and Washington is being represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

U.S. officials say Clinton's trip is partly intended to assess Russia's push to expand engagement in Asia, which parallels Washington's own turn towards the Asia-Pacific region.

Also missing the summit was Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Putin said she had dropped out because her father had died.

(Additional reporting by Gleb Bryanski, Andrew Quinn, Katya Golubkova, Douglas Busvine, Denis Pinchuk and Andrey Ostroukh; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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Western Imperial powers overreach, yet again!

From Egypt to Russia, the Western urge to meddle in other countries continues to be troublesome.

Behind The Headlines By Bunn Nagara

THE so-called Arab Spring continues to spring surprises, most of all on its Western backers. With double standards in international politics, just about anything goes.

US, Israeli and European cheerleaders of Arab “regime change” through street politics have realised by now that the naive notion of ousting dictators does not travel in a straight line. Among other things, the new regimes that emerge have tended to be more independent and less Western-friendly.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist Freedom and Justice Party has taken the pivotal role in post-Mubarak political life, including the upper house of Parliament. In Tunisia much the same has been happening with the Islamist Ennahda party.

Shifting the goalposts: When allegations of voter fraud bore no fruit, Moscow’s street protesters switched to accusing Putin of using rough tactics on them as police made arrests. — AFP

 

An element of that plays in the opposition Syrian National Council’s multiple splits. The more cautious Western officials are currently hesitant to provide “hard power” to the rebels battling Damascus, since rebel ranks include al-Qaeda.

Right-wing US lawmakers like John McCain are chiding President Obama for not arming Syrian rebels. It is telling that McCain’s best claim to fame is as a veteran of the Vietnam War, that classic icon of a failed and futile US armed intervention.

Even so, the temptation for a hyperpower to intervene can be irresistible, so Washington covertly dispatches regime-change NGO activists as catalysts instead of the Marines. It is what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “smart power.”

However, the double standards when compared to similar situations elsewhere then become glaring. After Western-allied Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to suppress protesters there one year ago, Western-compliant Qatar has called for supplying troops and weapons to Syrian rebels fighting President Assad.

To an incumbent government in Iran that is also being targeted by Western and Israeli policymakers, all of that is enough to invoke Islamism in defiant response. Although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains the convenient bogeyman for the West, his political rivals at home are even more conservative and Islamist as shown in parliamentary elections early this month.

Nonetheless, neither religion nor showy forms of piety is the issue: it is a country’s unwillingness to comply with Western requests and demands that is. The stakes are raised when such a country is oil-rich and occasionally snubs Western concerns as well.

Currently the most conspicuous example of this is Russia, or rather president-elect Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is a country that happens to channel the West’s worst “fears” today: being big, rich in oil and gas, independent-minded, “uncooperative” with the West over Libya, Syria and Iran, and even opposed to Nato’s eastwards expansion right up to Moscow’s doorstep.

Thus US and some European leaders are as keen for a “Russian spring” as they have been about a political spring-cleaning in Arab and Muslim countries they do not yet control. How the West would respond to anti-Putin street protests was therefore a foregone conclusion.

Russia’s recent presidential election provided the moment for a convergence of anti-Putin posturing. Russian street protesters, then Western media, and then Western governments formed a chorus to denounce Putin’s victory and the electoral process that led to it.

This happened both from a distance, such as the State Department or the Oval Office, as well as from within Russia by a visiting team of OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) election observers. It also occurred from the editorial offices of supposedly liberal Western media.

But what is the substance of complaints, apart from the usual geopolitical power plays?

If indeed the election had been a sham as the protesters and critics have been claiming, the evidence for it would have been presented, analysed, commented on and displayed. The Putin electoral bandwagon would and should have been stigmatised, although the appropriateness of any foreign political action would still be in question.

Russian protesters at least would have been justified in their street demonstrations, and assured of the justice of their cause. Instead, the protesters were already out in the streets denouncing Putin months before the election, which gives some indication about the content of their complaint.

Now weeks later, opposition claims of vote fraud favouring Putin is still without substance. Opinion polls before the election indicated a two-thirds majority support for Putin, and the results have since shown 64%.

Even Putin’s opponents had agreed that he had no problem securing enough votes to win the election. Until now his opponents and critics have not explained why he needed to cheat to win, and furthermore they failed to show that he had cheated.

No evidence 

Interestingly, the OSCE observers indirectly rebuffed opposition claims of multiple voting by Putin supporters, and instead reported on the negative perceptions that attended the voting. The Europeans had no evidence of vote fraud and declared that there were no significant violations, but they still hankered after attaching a negative spin to the election and its result.

They cited no improper motives by Putin’s United Russia party, yet they were not above tainting the election result through implication or by default. Perhaps that was an attempt at smart power too.

If anyone had any “actionable” evidence of fraud it would have been the OSCE observers, yet they served up nothing. Their position would in effect have been a workable endorsement of the election’s credibility.

United Russia had failed to secure a two-thirds majority, yet the CIA-linked Voice of America reported that Putin had won “by a landslide.” Meanwhile, the opposition claim of voter fraud persisted all-round in the face of the absence of any evidence to substantiate it.

That much might have been expected of Putin’s opponents at home and even Western governments averse to his independent ways. But for Western media to chime along without questioning the basis of their presumptions, and even failing to report dispassionately, shows a decline in professional ethics.

At the heart of such reporting and editing is a tendency to approach opposition claims with less scepticism than government ones, although both sides are equally interested parties in an electoral contest. It is an approach typical of the Western media in the Third World.

As for Moscow’s street protesters, they have lately taken to shifting the goalposts. After their allegations of vote fraud bore no fruit, they switched to accusing Putin of using rough tactics on them as police made arrests.

At the same time, protesters say they want neither violence nor a revolution, just more transparency and the rule of law. They have no alternative candidate they prefer to Putin, just an alternative mode of the government’s handling of the election for a better sense of confidence in the process.

Essentially, the protesters did not endorse any particular candidate but were instead just being anti-Putin. The very fact that they have been doing so openly without being packed off to a gulag in Siberia for life shows the distance Russia has travelled since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For now, Putin’s main rival candidates – a communist, a crypto-fascist and a controversial oligarch – seem to leave little to be desired between them. If the unspoken objective of Russian voters is getting a president who can act competently and confidently to safeguard Russia’s interests, the election might already have been purposeful enough.

The protesters and their Western backers might then just need a little time to reconcile themselves to it. That could be their best option in smart politics yet.

Learning from Putin’s reversal

Image via WikipediaTweet

Ceritalah By Karim Raslan

 Slick but cynical power-exchange with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev outraged millions of ordinary Russians who vented their anger whenever former strongman Vladimir Putin appeared.

BECAUSE my work is now so South-East Asia-centric, I rarely follow the news from Europe closely.
Still, I think we can learn valuable lessons from the recent developments in Russia.

On Dec 4, Russians went to the polls to elect a new State Duma – their lower house of Parliament.

Although he was not running in the election, the vote was seen as a test of the popularity of strongman Vladimir Putin, who is seeking to regain the presidency of the Russian Federation after three years as Prime Minister, replacing his former trusted aide Dmitry Medvedev.

Most observers expected the United Russia Party to secure a thumping majority.

Putin’s party had, after all, engineered Russia’s remarkable economic turnaround after the fall of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic tenure.

The brusque St Petersburg veteran was the party’s “killer app” – popular and ruthless: an embodiment of Russian machismo.

However, Putin’s return to the centre-stage wasn’t quite so well-received: the slick but cynical power-exchange with Medvedev outraged millions of ordinary Russians.

As a result, Putin’s standing in the opinion polls plummeted.At the same time, public sentiment turned ugly.

Denied access to the mainstream media, ordinary Russians vented their anger whenever Putin appeared.

On one occasion, he was booed at a mixed martial arts match – an incident captured on YouTube and viewed by millions.

Moreover, Putin’s United Russia fared even worse as voters realised that they would be enduring yet another term of massive, institutionalised corruption and abuse of power by high-handed party apparatchiks.

In the end, Putin received a stinging rebuke as his party ended up winning just 49.3% of the vote – leaving it with about 238 seats in the 450-seat Duma compared to its previous 315.

To make matters worse, allegations of electoral fraud – also immortalised on YouTube – have led to demonstrations in Moscow.

More are in the offing, leading some to wonder whether the world will witness yet another “spring”.

Putin reacted in his tough-guy way, sending police out on a crackdown and insisting that he will still run for president in March next year.

Nevertheless, United Russia’s electoral drubbing cannot help but damage his image as a popular,performance-driven autocrat.



What can we learn from Putin’s (excuse my pun) Russian reversal? First, it again shows the power of the alternative media.

Putin’s control of Russia’s newspapers and televisions may be absolute, but this stranglehold can do nothing to prevent Russians from turning to blogs and social networks to express their disenchantment.

As with the Arab Spring, Facebook, YouTube and Russia’s own VKontakte have emerged as powerful tools to mobilise the masses against autocrats.

Which brings me to my next point: style cannot trump substance, especially when it comes to reform.

Putin’s obsession with spin is legendary – witness the proliferation of photos of him doing manly things like hunting, horseback riding or scuba-diving.

The United Russia party’s website is, likewise, flashy with links to its Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Read through the speeches of Putin or his sidekick Medvedev and you will often find them extolling democracy and moderation.

Still, these carefully-crafted images cannot conceal the fact that poverty and corruption run deep in Russia despite its economic successes.

While oligarchs close to the Kremlin enjoy the high life, the number of people living under the official poverty line increased from 20.6 million in the first quarter of last year to 22.9 million this year.

Also, the abuse of civil liberties under Putin’s watch is just as brutal as anything that occurred under the Tsars or the Communist Party.

Erstwhile allies, long-time dissidents and critical journalists were silenced, jailed and, in some cases, even died under highly suspicious circumstances.

Worst of all is Putin’s stubborn desire to cling to power.

Had he stepped down gracefully in 2008 having served two terms as president, he would have been hailed as the man who revived Russia despite the rough methods he used.

As it is, he now risks being just the latest of a long line of leaders who overstayed their welcome and were toppled.

One can detect painful shades of toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad in Putin’s blaming of Hillary Clinton for supposedly inciting the protests.

So it’s simply not enough these days for politicians to possess the formal, outward trappings of democracy or social engagement (like Facebook or Twitter pages) if they do nothing to increase the public space and empower their people.

More importantly, they need to realise that they fool no one when they speak of the need for reform but do nothing to change the status quo.

Indeed, such disingenuousness will come back to haunt leaders.

What I find remarkable about the Russian demonstrations against electoral fraud is that most of the protestors were middle-class: urban, young and well-to-do Muscovites who theoretically should have benefitted most from Putin’s management.

They ought to have been, and indeed were, his political base.

However, after years of being lied to, frustrated or simply ignored, Russia’s bourgeoisie (now 20% of the population after the oil boom) are now emerging as the force that could bring Putin down.