Monday, June 29, 2020

Impunity of the Banking Giants - case of HSBC

June 26,  is The International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking:  “an expression of  determination to strengthen action and cooperation to achieve the goal of an international society free of drug abuse” (UN General Assembly).

The following article by Tom Burghardt, first published in 2012, focusses on the issue of narcotics and fraudulent money laundering.

Fraud, Money Laundering and Narcotics. Impunity of the Banking Giants
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, June 26, 2020
In another shameful decision by the US Department of Justice, earlier this month federal prosecutors reached a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with UK banking giant HSBC, Europe’s largest bank.

Shameful perhaps, but entirely predictable. After all, in an era characterized by economic collapse owing to gross criminality by leading financial actors, policy decisions and the legal environment framing those decisions have been shaped by oligarchs who quite literally have “captured” the state.

Founded in 1865 by flush-with-cash opium merchants after the British Crown seized Hong Kong from China in the aftermath of the First Opium War, HSBC has been a permanent fixture on the radar of US law enforcement and regulatory agencies for more than a decade.

Not that anything so trifling as terrorist financing or global narcotrafficking mattered much to the Obama administration.

As I previously reported, (here, here, here and here), when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued their mammoth 335-page report, “U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History,” we learned that amongst the “services” offered by HSBC subsidiaries and correspondent banks were sweet deals, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, with financial entities with ties to international terrorism and the grisly drug trade.

Charged with multiple violations of the Bank Secrecy Act for their role in laundering blood money for Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, as a sideline HSBC’s Canary Wharf masters conducted a highly profitable business with the alleged financiers of the 9/11 attacks who washed funds through Saudi Arabia’s Al Rajhi Bank.

While the media breathlessly reported that the DPA will levy fines totaling some $1.92 billion (£1.2bn) which includes $655 million (£408m) in civil penalties, the largest penalty of its kind ever levied against a bank, under terms of the agreement not a single senior officer will be criminally charged. In fact, those fines will be paid by shareholders which include municipal investors, pension funds and the public at large.

With some 7,200 offices in more than 80 countries and 2011 profits topping $22 billion (£13.6bn), Senate investigators found that HSBC’s web of 1,200 correspondent banks provided drug traffickers, other organized crime groups and terrorists with “U.S. dollar services, including services to move funds, exchange currencies, cash monetary instruments, and carry out other financial transactions. Correspondent banking can become a major conduit for illicit money flows unless U.S. laws to prevent money laundering are followed.” They weren’t and as a result the bank’s balance sheets were inflated with illicit proceeds from terrorists and drug gangsters.

Revelations of widespread institutional criminality are hardly a recent phenomenon. More than a decade ago journalist Stephen Bender published a Z Magazine piece which found that “99.9 percent of the laundered criminal money that is presented for deposit in the United States gets comfortably into secure accounts.”

According to Bender: “The key institution in the enabling of money laundering is the ‘private bank,’ a subdivision of every major US financial institution. Private banks exclusively seek out a wealthy clientele, the threshold often being an annual income in excess of $1 million. With the prerogatives of wealth comes a certain regulatory deference.”

Such “regulatory deference” in the era of “too big to fail” and its corollary, “too big to prosecute,” is a signal characteristic as noted above, of state capture by criminal financial elites.

Indeed, HSBC’s private banking arm, HSBC Private Bank is the principal private banking business of the HSBC Group. A holding company wholly owned by HSBC Bank Plc, its subsidiaries include HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA, HSBC Private Bank (UK) Limited, HSBC Private Bank (CI) Limited, HSBC Private Bank (Luxembourg) SA, HSBC Private Bank (Monaco) SA and HSBC Financial Services (Cayman) Limited. All of these entities featured prominently in money laundering and tax evasion schemes uncovered by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee in their report. Combined client assets have been estimated by regulators to top $352 billion (£217.68).

According to Senate investigators, HSBC Financial Services (Cayman) was the principle conduit through which drug money laundered through HSBC Mexico (HBMX) flowed. “This branch,” Senate staff averred, “is a shell operation with no physical presence in the Caymans, and is managed by HBMX personnel in Mexico City who allow Cayman accounts to be opened by any HBMX branch across Mexico.”

“Total assets in the Cayman accounts peaked at $2.1 billion in 2008. Internal documents show that the Cayman accounts had operated for years with deficient AML [anti-money laundering] and KYC [know your client] controls and information. An estimated 15% of the accounts had no KYC information at all, which meant that HBMX had no idea who was behind them, while other accounts were, in the words of one HBMX compliance officer, misused by ‘organized crime’.”

In fact, the “normal” business model employed by HSBC and other entities bailed out by Western governments fully conform to the “control fraud” model first described by financial crime expert William K. Black.

According to Black, a control fraud occurs when a CEO and other senior managers remove checks and balances that prevent criminal behaviors, thus subverting regulatory requirements that prevent things like money laundering, shortfalls due to bad investments or the sale of toxic financial instruments.

In The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, Black informed us: “A control fraud is a company run by a criminal who uses it as a weapon and shield to defraud others and makes it difficult to detect and punish the fraud.”

“Control frauds,” Black reported, “are financial superpredators that cause vastly larger losses than blue-collar thieves. They cause catastrophic business failures. Control frauds can occur in waves that imperil the general economy. The savings and loan (S&L) debacle was one such wave.”

Indeed, “control frauds” like HSBC “create a ‘fraud friendly’ corporate culture by hiring yes-men. They combine excessive pay, ego strokes (e.g., calling the employees ‘geniuses’) and terror to get employees who will not cross the CEO.” In such a “criminogenic” environment, the CEO (paging Lord Green!) “optimizes the firm as a fraud vehicle and can optimize the regulatory environment.”

In their press release, the Department of Justice announced that HSBC Group “have agreed to forfeit $1.256 billion and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department for HSBC’s violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA).”

“According to court documents,” the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs informed us, “HSBC Bank USA violated the BSA by failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program and to conduct appropriate due diligence on its foreign correspondent account holders.”

The DOJ goes on to state, “A four-count felony criminal information was filed today in federal court in the Eastern District of New York charging HSBC with willfully failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program, willfully failing to conduct due diligence on its foreign correspondent affiliates, violating IEEPA and violating TWEA.”

However, “HSBC has waived federal indictment, agreed to the filing of the information, and has accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct and that of its employees.”

In other words, because they accepted “responsibility” for acts that would land the average citizen in the slammer for decades, those guilty of “palling around with terrorists” or smoothing the way as billionaire drug traffickers hid their loot in the so-called “legitimate economy,” got a free pass. In fact, under terms of the agreement DOJ’s “deferred prosecution” will be “deferred” alright, like forever!

Why might that be the case?

The New York Times informed us that state and federal officials, eager beavers when it comes to protecting the integrity of a system lacking all integrity, “decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.”

Keep in mind this is a “system” which former United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime director Antonio Maria Costa told The Observer thrives on illicit money flows. In 2009, Costa told the London broadsheet that “in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.” Costa said that “a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

Glossing over these facts, Times’ stenographers Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, cautioned that “four years after the failure of Lehman Brothers nearly toppled the financial system,” federal regulators “are still wary that a single institution could undermine the recovery of the industry and the economy.”

“Given the extent of the evidence against HSBC, some prosecutors saw the charge as a healthy compromise between a settlement and a harsher money-laundering indictment. While the charge would most likely tarnish the bank’s reputation, some officials argued that it would not set off a series of devastating consequences.”

Devastating to whom one might ask? The 100,000 Mexicans brutally murdered by drug gangsters, corrupt police and Mexican Army soldiers whose scorched-earth campaign kills off the competition on behalf of Mexico’s largest narcotics organization, the Sinaloa Cartel run by fugitive billionaire drug lord Chapo Guzmán?

“A money-laundering indictment, or a guilty plea over such charges,” the Times averred, “would essentially be a death sentence for the bank. Such actions could cut off the bank from certain investors like pension funds and ultimately cost it its charter to operate in the United States, officials said.”

Many of the same lame excuses for prosecutorial inaction were also prominent features in the British press.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the “largest banks have become too big to prosecute because of the impact criminal charges would have on confidence in them, Britain’s most senior bank regulator has admitted.”

“In a variant of the ‘too big to fail’ problem, Andrew Bailey, chief executive designate of the Prudential Regulation Authority, said bringing a legal action against a major financial institution raised ‘very difficult questions’.”

“‘Because of the confidence issue with banks, a major criminal indictment, which we haven’t seen and I’m not saying we are going to see… this is not an ordinary criminal indictment’,” Bailey told the Telegraph.

Echoing Bailey, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said the decision not to prosecute HSBC was made because “in this day and age we have to evaluate that innocent people will face very big consequences if you make a decision.”

This from an administration that continues to prosecute–and jail–low-level drug offenders at record rates!

“Breuer’s argument is facially absurd,” according to William K. Black. In a piece published by New Economic Perspectives, Black argues:

Prosecuting HSBC’s fraudulent controlling managers would not harm anyone innocent other than their families–and virtually all prosecutions hurt some family members. Breuer claims that virtually all of HSBC’s senior officers have been removed, so his argument is doubly absurd. Mostly, however, Breuer ignores all of the innocents harmed by the control frauds. SDIs [systemically dangerous institutions] that are control frauds are weapons of mass economic destruction that drive global crises and are the greatest enemy of ‘free’ markets. They are also the greatest threat to democracy, for they create crony capitalism. We are all innocent victims of these control frauds–and the Obama and Cameron governments are allowing them to commit their frauds with impunity from criminal prosecutions. The controlling officers get wealthy without fear of prosecution. The SDIs controlled by fraudulent officers have to purchase an indulgence, but the price of the indulgence is capped by the ‘too big to prosecute’ doctrine at a level that will not cause it any real distress. Breuer’s and Bailey’s embrace of too big to prosecute should have led to their immediate dismissals. Obama and Cameron should either fire them or announce that they stand with the criminal enterprises and their fraudulent controlling officers against their citizens.

As Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a former financial crimes specialist with London’s Metropolitan Police observed on his web site, “When you get a bank which admits, like HSBC has just done, that it is nothing more than a low-life money launderer for Mexican drug kingpins, and when it serves powerful vested interests to get round internationally-ratified sanctions against rogue nations, what possible benefit is achieved by trying to pretend that they cannot be prosecuted and charged with criminal offences?”

“Oh, excuse me,” Bosworth-Davies wrote, “it might impact the confidence they enjoy? Whose confidence, their Mexican drug traffickers, their international sanctions breakers, their global tax evaders, or the ordinary, law-abiding clients who are entitled to assume that their bank will obey the laws imposed on them and will provide a safe place of deposit?”

“Confidence,” the former Met detective averred, “what bloody confidence can anyone have when they know their bank is an admitted criminal? When their money is deposited with a bank that breaks the criminal law at every possible opportunity, which cheats them at every turn, sells them fraudulent products, launders drug money, evades international sanctions, moves foreign oligarchs’ tax evasion, safeguards the deposit accounts of Third World dictators and their families, then what is that confidence worth?”

Instead, as with the 2010 deal with Wachovia Bank, federal prosecutors cobbled together a DPA that levied a “fine” of $160 million (£99.2m) on laundered drug profits that topped $378 billion (£234.5bn).

Although top Justice Department officials charged that HSBC laundered upwards of $881 million (£546.5m) on behalf of the Sinaloa and Colombia’s Norte del Valle drug cartels, federal prosecutors investigating the bank told Reuters in September that this was merely the “tip of the iceberg.”

In fact, as Senate investigators discovered during their probe, the bank failed to monitor more than $670 billion (£415.6bn) in wire transfers from HSBC Mexico (HBMX) between 2006 and 2009, and failed to adequately monitor over $9.4 billion (£5.83bn) in purchases of physical U.S. dollars from HBMX during the same period.

Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer, said in prepared remarks announcing the DPA that “traffickers didn’t have to try very hard” when it came to laundering drug cash. “They would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account,” Breuer said, “using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows in HSBC Mexico’s branches.”

While Breuer’s dramatic account of the money laundering process may have offered a gullible financial press corps a breathless moment or two, a closer look at Breuer’s CV offer hints as to why he chose not to criminally charge the bank.

A corporatist insider, after representing President Bill Clinton during ginned-up impeachment hearings, Breuer became a partner in the white shoe Washington, DC law firm Covington & Burling. From his perch, he represented Moody’s Investor Service in the wake of Enron’s ignominious collapse and Dick Cheney’s old firm Halliburton/KBR during Bush regime scandals. Talk about “safe hands”!

Appointed as the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division by Obama in 2009, Breuer presided over the prosecution/persecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas A. Drake on charges that he violated the Espionage Act of 1917 for disclosing massive contractor fraud at NSA to The Baltimore Sun.

More recently, along with 14 other officials Breuer was recommended for potential “disciplinary action” by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General over the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal which put some 2,000 firearms into the hands of cartel killers in Mexico.

“A Justice official said Breuer has been ‘admonished'” by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, “but will not be disciplined,” The Washington Post reported.

Breuer had the temerity to claim that deferred prosecution agreements “have the same punitive, deterrent, and rehabilitative effect as a guilty plea.”

“When a company enters into a deferred prosecution agreement with the government, or an non prosecution agreement for that matter,” Breuer asserted, “it almost always must acknowledge wrongdoing, agree to cooperate with the government’s investigation, pay a fine, agree to improve its compliance program, and agree to face prosecution if it fails to satisfy the terms of the agreement.”

As is evident from this brief synopsis, when it came to holding HSBC to account, the fix was already in even before a single signature was affixed to the DPA.

Without batting an eyelash, Breuer informed us that HSBC has “committed” to undertake “enhanced AML and other compliance obligations and structural changes within its entire global operations to prevent a repeat of the conduct that led to this prosecution.”

“HSBC has replaced almost all of its senior management, ‘clawed back’ deferred compensation bonuses given to its most senior AML and compliance officers, and has agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior executives–its group general managers and group managing directors–during the period of the five-year DPA.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Despite charges that would land the average citizen in a federal gulag for decades, senior managers have “agreed” to “partially defer bonus compensation” for the length of the DPA!

As Rolling Stone financial journalist Matt Taibbi commented:

“Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s the punishment? The government’s negotiators couldn’t hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them ‘partially’ wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department’s opening offer–asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?”

“So you might ask,” Taibbi writes,

“what’s the appropriate penalty for a bank in HSBC’s position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we’re talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you’re the prosecutor, you’ve got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?”

“How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they’ve ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby’s auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don’t think twice. And then throw them in jail.”

But there’s the rub and the proverbial fly in the ointment. The government can’t and won’t take such measures. Far from being impartial arbiters sworn to defend us from financial predators, speculators, drug lords, terrorists, warmongers and out-of-control corporate vultures hiding trillions of taxable dollars offshore, officials of this criminalized state are hand picked servants of a thoroughly debauched ruling class.

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, Barry Grey observed: HSBC “was allowed to pay a token fine–less than 10 percent of its profits for 2011 and a fraction of the money it made laundering the drug bosses’ blood money. Meanwhile, small-time drug dealers and users, often among the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the population, are routinely arrested and locked up for years in the American prison gulag.”

“The financial parasites who keep the global drug trade churning and make the lion’s share of money from the social devastation it wreaks are above the law,” Grey noted.

“Here, in a nutshell,” Grey wrote, “is the modern-day aristocratic principle that prevails behind the threadbare trappings of ‘democracy.’ The financial robber barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and police–from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police precinct–to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from criminal prosecution.”

Regarding America’s fraudulent “War on Drugs,” researcher Oliver Villar, who with Drew Cottle coauthored the essential book, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia, told Asia Times Online, it is a “war” that the state and leading banks and financial institutions in the capitalist West have no interest whatsoever in “winning.”

When queried why he argued that the “war on drugs is no failure at all, but a success,” Villar noted: “I come to that conclusion because what do we know so far about the war on drugs? Well, the US has spent about US$1 trillion throughout the globe. Can we simply say it has failed? Has it failed the drug money-laundering banks? No. Has it failed the key Western financial centers? No. Has it failed the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia–or in Afghanistan, where we can see similar patterns emerging? No. Is it a success in maintaining that political economy? Absolutely.”

Equally important, what does the impunity shamelessly enjoyed by such loathsome parasites say about us?

Have we become so indifferent to officially sanctioned crime and corruption, the myriad petty tyrannies and tyrants, from the boardroom to the security checkpoint to the job, not to mention murderous state policies that have transformed so-called “advanced” democracies into hated and loathed pariah states, who we really are?

As the late author J. G. Ballard pointed out in his masterful novel Kingdom Come, “Consumer fascism provides its own ideology, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements.”

Paranoid fantasy? Wake up and smell the corporatized police state.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano’s Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Newton's experience of working from home...

Newton was still quite productive whilst working from home. We can, during this coronavirus pandemic, try to emulate as much as we can...

During a pandemic, Isaac Newton had to work from home, too. He used the time wisely.
By Gillian Brockell
The Washington Post
March 12, 2020

Isaac Newton was in his early 20s when the Great Plague of London hit. He wasn’t a “Sir” yet, didn’t have that big formal wig. He was just another college student at Trinity College, Cambridge.

It would be another 200 years before scientists discovered the bacteria that causes plague, but even without knowing exactly why, folks back then still practiced some of the same things we do to avoid illness.

In 1665, it was a version of “social distancing” — a public health tool making a comeback this week as governments, schools and many businesses, including The Washington Post, send people home to try to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Cambridge sent students home to continue their studies. For Newton, that meant Woolsthorpe Manor, the family estate about 60 miles northwest of Cambridge.

Without his professors to guide him, Newton apparently thrived. The year-plus he spent away was later referred to as his annus mirabilis, the “year of wonders.”

First, he continued to work on mathematical problems he had begun at Cambridge; the papers he wrote on this became early calculus.

Next, he acquired a few prisms and experimented with them in his bedroom, even going so far as to bore a hole in his shutters so only a small beam could come through. From this sprung his theories on optics.

And right outside his window at Woolsthorpe, there was an apple tree. That apple tree.

The story of how Newton sat under the tree, was bonked on the head by an apple and suddenly understood theories of gravity and motion, is largely apocryphal. But according to his assistant, John Conduitt, there’s an element of truth. Here’s how Conduitt later explained it:

“ … Whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought. ‘Why not as high as the Moon?’ said he to himself..”

In London, a quarter of the population would die of plague from 1665 to 1666. It was one of the last major outbreaks in the 400 years that the Black Death ravaged Europe.

Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667, theories in hand. Within six months, he was made a fellow; two years later, a professor.

So if you’re working or studying from home over the next few weeks, perhaps remember the example Newton set. Having time to muse and experiment in unstructured comfort proved life-changing for him — and no one remembers whether he made it out of his pajamas before noon.

The 1919 Chicago Race Riot that western media don't mention...

This is the grisly story of how the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 spilled blood of hundreds of black Americans during the presidency of Widrow Wilson, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan, who was against black suffrage and re-segregated elements of American society. This sordid tale is told neither by the media nor the western govts. No wonder Wilson's statue is now in the process of removal from Princeton University's premises!

Lynching, stoning and burning: The 1919 ‘Red Summer’ race riots that America and Britain want you to forget but which echo today
Andrew Dickens
RT : 28 Jun, 2020

In 1919, hundreds of people were murdered in race riots across the US and UK. Men, women and children were butchered. So why is it a footnote in history? Because the media and governments don’t want you to know how they reacted.
charred corpse of Will Brown after being killed 1919
Remember when we thought that 2020 was going to be the Year of Coronavirus? Then along came the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, violent unrest and clashes between police, the far right and anti-fascists. Covid-19 is going to have to share top billing.

Remember, too, how everyone compared the virus to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19? And yet few people compared the protests and violence to another event from that time: “Red Summer”. That’s because these bloody and shameful few months in 1919 aren’t the kind of history that countries want to teach their kids.

Red Summer saw hundreds of people killed in a series of race riots across the US. Most deaths were white-on-black – including people being lynched, stoned to death and burned at the stake – but it was also the first time the black population had resisted the violence, both peacefully and with force. And, while the words and images of such medieval savagery chill the blood, and the levels of cruelty astound a 21st-century sensibility, there are parallels with 2020. So, what fuelled it and why has it been brushed under the carpet of history?
White mobs chasing black man in Chicago 1919

The US at the time was a deeply racially divided country led by President Woodrow Wilson – a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan who was against black suffrage and actually resegregated elements of American society. White-led race riots and lynchings were commonplace – from 1889 to 1918, more than 3,000 were lynched, 2,472 of whom were black men and 50 black women. Black people, despite emancipation 57 years earlier, had far fewer rights than white people. But what lit the touchpaper for the bloodshed of 1919, and what made it so significant, was the return of soldiers from World War One.

Armed, angry and ready to fight
whites rejoice after arson attack
whites rejoice after arson attack
These soldiers, both white and black, were demobilised at a time of already-rising racial tension and economic difficulty. They were trained to fight and, in many cases, were suffering from “shell shock” (nowadays known as PTSD). Violence flared easily.

White servicemen jumped on fabricated rumours of white women being assaulted by “Negro fiends” – rumours sensationalised by the press – and went on random sprees of assault and murder. The Washington Post, that famously “liberal” rag, even ran a front-page story organising white servicemen to gather at a certain location so they could attack black people in the city en masse.

The white servicemen had also come home to cities with few available jobs and homes, an economy ravaged by war and a pandemic, and an influx of black workers from the South, due to war-related labour shortages.

By 1919, in the first wave of the Great Migration, an estimated 500,000 African Americans had moved to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Between 1910 and 1920, the black population in Chicago grew by 148 per cent and in Philadelphia by 500 per cent. Alongside the economic effects, white people blamed these black migrants for spreading Spanish flu – a foreshadowing, perhaps, of those just waiting to blame a spike in Covid-19 infections on Black Lives Matter rallies.

Some black migrants prospered, creating a new black middle class. This both enraged and frightened people used to a “white privilege” that was off the charts compared to today.

Black soldiers returned to a different set of ire-inducing issues. They came home from risking their lives for their country to discover that their country and its president didn’t see them as complete human beings. At least 13 black veterans were lynched after the war. They weren’t war heroes; they were second-class citizens. But they were also motivated and emboldened.

A bloody rampage

“Red Summer” - a phrase coined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) field secretary, James Weldon Johnson, referring to the bloodshed - was a series of events. The most serious of these began in April and ended in November. In that time, across dozens of American cities, white mobs, including women and children rampaged, destroying black properties and churches, and murdering black people.

The Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence after decades of slumber, committing 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919. In one of the deadliest events, more than 200 black Americans of all sexes and ages were massacred in Elaine, Arkansas, after black sharecroppers campaigned for better working conditions.

Many of the attacks were focused on those black veterans, who numbered around 380,000 and were seen as a threat to white supremacy and power. They had fought for their country, so why shouldn’t they be treated the same as everyone else? They had returned battle-hardened and ready to stand up for equal rights and for themselves.

This meant that, in some cities, for the first time, black people fought back against the brutality, notably in Chicago and Washington, DC, where riots saw both black and white people killed (albeit still mostly black). In Chicago, 23 black people and 15 white people died after a black teenager, Eugene Williams, drifted on his raft into a whites-only section of Lake Michigan. He drowned when a white man, George Stauber, threw rocks at him, knocking him unconscious.

Despite several witnesses, a white police officer refused to arrest Stauber. Black people protested and, reacting to that, white mobs swarmed through the city, shooting at and torching buildings as they went. Still, the police did nothing, so black veterans organised to defend their neighbourhoods. The riots lasted a week and, alongside the 38 deaths, 537 people were injured and an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 lost their homes.

Similar riots took place in British cities, too – mainly in ports such as London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff and Hull. Five people were killed – all non-white – as soldiers returned from an even longer war than the Americans endured, to find similar hardship and similarly easy-to-blame minorities, including South Asian, African, Afro-Caribbean, Chinese and Arab sailors.

Ignored & forgotten because of shame?
Police checks corpse of a murdered Black man
And yet few people know about any of this. There is relatively little reference to it in the mainstream or any other media. Nor in any school curriculum. This is probably because the greatest shame was how the press and authorities reacted.

In the UK, the British government, still with a huge multi-ethnic empire, intensified its repatriation scheme. It removed colonial citizens to avoid a “black backlash,” offering a resettlement allowance. Between 1919 and 1921, an estimated 3,000 black and Arab seamen and their families were deported under the scheme.

In the US, black resistance was politicised. It was leapt on by the federal government and the press as being Marxist and pro-Soviet. This being just two years after the Russian Revolution, black-rights movements were labelled “Bolshevik.” Sound familiar?

Just about every mainstream newspaper, including other supposedly “liberal” titles, such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, spun the line of black “Bolsheviks.” The Times ran the headline “Reds Try to Stir Negroes to Revolt.”

This was in part due to federal briefings to the press. The state was determined to ignore racial inequality and heap the blame on socialists. The attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, reported to Congress on the anarchist and Bolshevik threat, and accused black community leaders of an “ill-governed reaction toward race rioting.”

The riots also coincided with the beginning of J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious career. He blamed the Washington riots on “numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women,” despite an absence of evidence, and the Elaine massacre on “agitation in a Negro lodge.” He also initiated an investigation of “Negro activities.”

While there were most certainly leftist elements at play, the resistance was without question a defensive reaction to years of unpunished violence by white individuals and mobs. There was no grey area in all this, no “very fine people” on both sides. Yet only one major report, by Dr George Haynes, a black civil servant and academic, in October 1919, recognised this, noting lynching as a national problem and connecting it to the riots.

He wrote: “Persistence of unpunished lynchings of Negroes fosters lawlessness among white men imbued with the mob spirit and creates a spirit of bitterness among Negroes. In such a state of public mind, a trivial incident can precipitate a riot… Unchecked mob violence creates hatred and intolerance, making impossible free and dispassionate discussion, not only of race problems, but questions on which races and sections differ.”

‘American apartheid’
Some Black American soldiers who returned from WW-I

President Wilson had condemned the violence but refused to take any significant action to stop it. Not only that, but after months in which black people were butchered in the most horrific and sadistic manners imaginable – strung up, stoned and burned alive – the authorities did nothing to improve their lot. No legal protections, no additional rights. Indeed, as Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, recently told NBC, it made things worse.

“That reign of racial terror, where again the exculpatory work of the white press, police, grand juries and others ensured that perpetrators were protected rather than punished, undoubtedly prolonged the period of American apartheid,” he said.

The violence continued. More riots occurred, some even bloodier than those of 1919. Nothing changed for black people, but something did change in black people – something that carried through to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and into today. They were now prepared to fight back.


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Andrew Dickens is an award-winning writer on culture, society, politics, health and travel for major titles such as the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and Empire.

Monday, June 22, 2020

The Global Reset – Unplugged. “The Deep State”

The writer exposed, in this article, all the organisations that make up the Deep State and how they are controlling various facets of the vast majority of people around the world.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Marmaduke Pickthall : The Musilm convert novelist

An early British Muslim convert Marmaduke Pickthall was not only a novelist, he also translated the Holy Quran in English.

Marmaduke Pickthall: A Forgotten English Novelist
By Md. Mahmudul Hasan
April 24, 2020

When I joined International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) in 2010, one of the courses I was assigned to teach was what is now renamed “Islamic Literature in English.” Although I had studied Islam and read the Qur’an in its original language, I had never taught an organized course of study on Islamic literature before. Therefore, I needed to prepare thoroughly before mustering enough confidence to run the course.

In order to get a better grip on the subject, I started collecting and reading books and other materials on the subject. IIUM Library was of immense help in tracking down and acquiring resources.

One of the books I borrowed from the library was James Kritzeck’s Anthology of Islamic Literature (in two volumes [1964]). Among the authors featured in this book is Marmaduke Pickthall (1875-1936). I turned to Kritzeck’s chapter on the British writer and came across these lines:

Today Marmaduke Pickthall is perhaps best known as a translator of the Koran, a British convert to Islam who produced the nearest thing to an “authorized” English version of its sacred book. But he once enjoyed widespread and deserved acclaim as a novelist, and was ranked among the best of his contemporaries in this art.

As Kritzeck has pointed out, like many others, I knew Pickthall only as a British Muslim convert and an English translator of the Qur’an, not as a novelist or a travel writer. Hence, Kritzeck’s information about Pickthall’s literary career came as a total revelation to me. It led me to read many other works on the British novelist, and I contemplated writing an essay on him.

What eventually brought me to produce this essay is Anastasia Valassopoulos’s interview with Claire Chambers which was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing in 2018. In Valassopoulos’s “Britain Through Muslim Eyes: An interview with Claire Chambers,” Chambers makes the following observation about the reception of Pickthall’s works:

"People tend to remember him for his translation, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an (Pickthall [1930] 2004). Most don’t realize that he wrote about 30 novels. He was as well known in the early 20th century as H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster, and those authors thought he was great.

On a personal note, I majored in English literature at the University of Dhaka, completed a PhD in English and comparative literature at the University of Portsmouth and taught the subject for many years. However, before my encounter with Kritzeck’s book, I had never learned that Pickthall was a literary artist of the first order."

Pickthall was one of the writers E.M. Forster read “during the gestation of his” A Passage to India (1924) to gain a greater understanding of issues related to the representation of the Other. Sources Forster used in writing his Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922) included Pickthall’s Said the Fisherman (1903) and The Children of the Nile (1908). One of Forster’s remarks about Pickthall reads: “He does not sentimentalize about the East, he is a part of it, and only incidentally does his passionate love shine out.”

Pickthall lived in British India from 1920 to 1935. After the publication of A Passage to India, Forster sent a copy to Pickthall for it to be reviewed in the latter’s Bombay Chronicle. In a letter of 18 July 1924, Pickthall wrote to Forster :

"How very kind of you to send me your Passage to India. I have read it with a strong desire to understand what it is that so depresses all my fellow countrymen here, except of course the purely animal among them. I cannot say that I have fathomed it exactly, but your book has given me ideas which I shall try to express when I review it in the Bombay Chronicle."

Pickthall was born into a middle-class English family. He attended Harrow School, the alma mater of a number of Prime Ministers (including Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru), literary luminaries and many other notable figures. At an early age, he traveled most of the countries and important cities in the Levant, which he later described in his travelogues.

Through his association with the influential literary and political magazine The New Age from 1912 to 1920, Pickthall played a leading role in the literary world of early twentieth-century London. In the weekly (that focused on “Politics, Arts, and Letters”), his name was featured prominently alongside other regular contributors, including George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), H.G. Wells (1866-1946), Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), T.E. Hulme (1883-1917), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), Edwin Muir (1887-1959) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923).

Pickthall published his first novel All Fools in 1900 and continued to produce many more until he left for India in 1920. He even published more than one novel in certain years. During Pickthall’s years in India, among other activities, he edited the Bombay Chronicle and Islamic Culture: The Hyderabad Quarterly Review, delivered Madras Lectures on Islam that comprised eight lectures – now contained in The Cultural Side of Islam – and completed his translation of the Qur’an.

Given his impressive literary achievements, I wondered what could be the reason behind Pickthall’s near deletion from the history of English literature.

Recently, I came across Saudi scholar of English literature Ebtisam A. Sadiq’s book titled Marmaduke Pickthall Reinstated: What Canon? (2016). In his review of the book, Peter Clark (author of Marmaduke Pickthall: British Muslim [1986]) said that Pickthall’s “reputation was for many years in eclipse … [and his] embracing Islam and being a dissident in the First World Wars had not helped that reputation.”

Clark appears to identify two reasons that prevented Pickthall from being part of the literary canon. One is his embracement of Islam in 1917 and the other is his conscientious objection to military service during WWI. He refused to serve the British against the Turks in the war, for which his politician friend Aubrey Herbert (1880-1923) regarded him as “England’s most loyal enemy.” However, Pickthall himself maintained that he was “pro-Turk, but not anti-British.”
Pickthall’s criticisms of British policy vis-à-vis Turkey through a series of articles in The New Age and his refusal to fight Muslims during WWI can be considered a lesser defiance of national authority if compared to the American writer Ezra Pound’s support for and collaboration with Italy during WWII. From Italy, Pound launched letter writing and radio broadcast campaigns against the USA. His opposition to US President Franklin Roosevelt and his support for Italy’s fascist dictator Mussolini was so effusive that he “had found in Mussolini an Augustus for whom he could be a Virgil.”

Pound was indicted on charges of treason, especially for his pro-Axis and anti-American wartime speeches on Radio Rome. As he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, on 14 December 1945 he was confined in a mental hospital in Washington, DC. He was released on 18 April 1958 “on the condition that he leave the United States.”

Ezra Pound’s political dissidence did not deny him recognition as a literary figure. In fact, the more than a decade-long period of incarceration earned him the “greatest fame and influence,” especially in the western literary and artistic tradition.

It may be suggested that Marmaduke Pickthall’s political stance during WWI would not have ruined his literary reputation had the added factor of conversion to Islam not been present. Various anthologies have included selections from Pound’s poetry. We do not know when and if at all Pickthall would be immune to the politics of canon formation and be included in literary anthologies as a novelist and a travel writer.

Pickthall’s absence from the canon and curriculum has deprived students and academics alike. The long overdue inclusion of his works in both will enrich English literature studies, delight the lovers of travel literature and “remedy a long period of neglect”.
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Md. Mahmudul Hasan competed an English Literature PhD at Portsmouth in 2007. He is currently with the Department of English Language and Literature at International Islamic University Malaysia.

Murad Hofmann: Some thoughts & recollections

I was saddened to hear of the death of Murad Hoffmann (1932-2020), a career German diplomat and ambassador to some Muslim countries in the 80s and 90s.

He was a very sharp and educated man; he studied at Harvard in the late 50s, and wrote several profound books on Islam and the Muslim experience in Europe. His last book was entitled, 'The Future of Islam in the East and in the West'.

I had the honor of meeting him when he attended an international conference in Madinah, around 2003 I believe. I was pleasantly surprised that he had read my Du'a book, and thanked me for some specific points in it. During our conversation, I asked him how he dealt with his conversion to Islam as an ambassador and whether it affected his career. He laughed out loud and told me that he had sent a fax back to his supervisors in Germany, in 1980, stating that he would like to inform them he had converted to Islam.

He said, "I told them that this was my personal choice and that I felt you should be aware of this decision; they replied back that as far as they were concerned my religion was none of their business and that as long as it wouldn't affect my work, it should not affect my career in the slightest!" And he went on to be Germany's ambassador to Morocco and Algeria, as a practicing Muslim!

Truly a rare breed of our times, and a person who left an amazing legacy and story. I hope someone writes a detailed biography of his life and times.

Allah yar'amuh.
Yasir Qadhi


Death of Murad Hofmann: Some thoughts and recollections
By Md. Mahmudul Hasan
New Strait Times, January 30, 2020

ON Tuesday Jan 14, 2020, in the morning, I was in my office doing work after having glanced through the news in various online media outlets. I received a message from my wife saying that Murad Wilfried Hofmann (born 1931) died the previous day and that she learnt the information from Facebook.

Soon afterwards, she shared with me a Facebook status of Yale graduate and American scholar Yasir Qadhi. He posted:

I was saddened to hear of the death of Murad Hoffman … [who] wrote several profound books on Islam and the Muslim experience in Europe…. I had the honor of meeting him…. I asked him how he dealt with his conversion to Islam as an ambassador…. He said, “I told them that this was my personal choice and that I felt you should be aware of this decision; they replied back that as far as they were concerned my religion was none of their business and that as long as it wouldn’t affect my work, it should not affect my career in the slightest!”

After receiving the shocking news of Hofmann’s death from my wife, I sifted through the Internet for more details and for other related information about his demise. My efforts were met with little success, as after several attempts I found only two reports on his death.

AboutIslam.net ran a news story titled “Muslims Mourn German Muslim Pioneer Murad Hofmann” and Anadolu Agency published the news of his death under the heading of “Prominent German diplomat Murad Hofmann passes away”.

I saw no obituary at all for the German ambassador and scholar. The silence of the so-called mainstream news organisations on the death of this writer perplexed me and made me wonder about the politics of media representation and media’s neglect of certain groups of people.

What would the media coverage be like had a comparable western or secular writer of non-Muslim background died?

What are the reasons why Hofmann’s death did not receive adequate and commensurate media attention?

Islamophobia and hatred of Muslims? Muslims’ inability to promote and create an interest in writers and scholars like Hofmann? A combination of these and similar reasons? – Such questions have vexed me and a sense of bewilderment has crept in. This and my personal recollections of the man partly prompted me to write this essay.

Whatever the reason behind the neglect of such writers, oblivion about their work is a collective loss because writers are part of our common human heritage.

They are our friends in the deepest sense and “our most incisive critics and self-critics”. They are our
visionaries and companions in our common effort to discern the meaning of life; they are our guides to gaining an awareness of real life and real time, as they represent themselves as well as us the readers in the act of writing.

Writers live by their words. Media’s bias against writers of a certain religious community may not keep them neglected or forgotten forever.

There is a deep psychic connection between writers and readers. The former write for the latter, and the latter are always in search of the former. Once the readers come across the writings they appreciate, they immediately form a spiritual bond with their authors.

No geographical, cultural, religious or ideological barrier can prevent this rapport.

However, the inability of those whose job it was to promote Hofmann and make his works known to a wider audience is most puzzling. The absence of adequate number of competent researchers and research organisations among Muslims is evidently appalling.

Many research establishments run by so-called Islamic people are not focused or fit for purpose. Muslims are demonstrably underrepresented in the realm of knowledge and information.

As the great Bangladeshi scholar Syed Sajjad Husain said in A Young Muslim’s Guide to Religions in the World (1992): “Many of the real Islamic values, especially the emphasis on knowledge as the key to salvation, find greater adherents outside Islam today than within it” (pp.3-4).

Creating stellar writers for the future is a challenge, knowing them is a blessing and preserving them is a responsibility. Muslims around the world seem to have collectively failed in their responsibilities of preserving their writers and articulating their intellectual heritage.

One reason why many writers of Muslim heritage are not considered universal enough to warrant wider academic attention or mainstream cultural reference is the unnecessary characterization of them as "Islamic".

Many Muslims have the tendency to use the prefix "Islamic" for writers of Islamic background. This tendency of identity-centeredness often contributes to making such writers parochial and keeps them from being mainstream.

This is largely not the case with writers of other religious backgrounds. For example, most prominent western writers are of Christian or Jewish background but are not known by their religion. We do not hear terms like "Christian writer", "Christian poet", "Christian philosopher", "Christian scholar", etc.

Unfortunately, the over-enthusiasm to describe writers from Muslim background as "Islamic" for no good reasons has not fared very well in terms of making them universal and allowing people of other religions or no religions to benefit from them.

Perhaps, this "over-Islamisation" of writers like Hofmann drifted readers of non-Muslim backgrounds away from them, as they do not feel the need of studying a writer who is ghettoised into one religious community.

As a result, only a section of readers study such writers; and unless there are research or other involuntary reasons, ordinary non-Muslim readers generally distance themselves from writers who are overly identified as "Islamic".

Consequently, despite the explosion of knowledge and information in the 21st century, the message of Islam and its teachings are still mostly wrapped and sealed in a cloud of obscurity and mystery.

When I met Hofmann in the UK in 2000 I had lived in the country only for a few weeks. I was attending his week-long lecture series at Markfield Conference Centre in Leicestershire. We stayed in the same building and used to chat over breakfast when he was not occupied with other people or with tasks that were more important.

Conspicuous by his tall and majestic figure, he was the first German I had ever met in person. His scholarly composure, intellectual precision and articulate conversational skills impressed me a lot, and I considered myself truly fortunate to have met and listened to him.

I admired his ability to handle question-and-answer sessions smartly – in a calm and confident manner – avoiding confrontation when addressing critical comments from the audience. I became more acquainted with the depth of his insight and the clarity of his thoughts when I started reading him. His Islam 2000 (1996), Journey to Makkah (1998) and Journey to Islam: Diary of a German Diplomat (1951 - 2000) (2001) left a lasting impression on me.

Born a Catholic in Germany’s Aschaffenburg, Hofmann began his university education at Union College in New York in 1951. Then he studied law at Munich and Harvard Universities with a PhD in jurisprudence from the former in 1957 and a Master of Law from Harvard Law School in 1960.

A prolific author of about a dozen books and an eloquent speaker, Hofmann embraced Islam in 1980, performed hajj in 1992 and describes his hajj experiences and his thoughts and reflections on various aspects of Islam in Journey to Makkah.

Although his acceptance of Islam sent a shock wave through some sections in Germany and spurred political debate, he was not discriminated against in career development opportunities for his religious belief or for his views on religious matters. In 1984, on behalf of the federal government, Karl Carstens (1914-1992) – Germany’s fifth President (1979-84) – awarded him the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contributions to the public welfare. It is Germany’s most important public recognition its first President Theodor Heuss (1884-1963) created in 1951.

The government distributed his German book Tagebuch eines deutschen Muslims (Diary of a German Muslim [1985]) to all its foreign missions in Muslim countries as a manual how to operate in Muslim-majority societies.

He began his over three-decade long diplomatic career in 1961 and ended it in 1994. His conversion to Islam did not deter him from climbing higher in the career ladder.

From 1983 to 1987, he served the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as its Director of Information in Brussels. In 1987, the German government appointed him its ambassador to Algeria and he remained in that position until 1990. He ended his career as Germany’s ambassador to Morocco from 1990 to 1994.

In his memoirs and diaries, he makes it clear that in his own life he never experienced any dichotomy of being a Muslim and a European. He successfully balanced being a Muslim and a western diplomat, and demonstrated that the two are not necessarily at odds with each other and that Islam does not encumber one’s career progression.

Although Hofmann had a smooth career that can be envied by many, his book Der Islam als Alternative (1992) which was later translated into English as Islam: The Alternative (1997) caused a great uproar in Europe, especially in the German media establishment. Here he presents Islam as the only available alternative for western societies.

Many found it difficult to accept his argument that, after Europe had tried many isms and philosophies, Islam is the only alternative that will remedy her woes and societal challenges in particular and global crises in general.

Published by the well-known German press Eugen Diederichs Verlag soon after the First Gulf War (1990-91), the book received negative reviews mainly from the dominant critics of Islam in Germany.

They even attempted to stall its publication on a flimsy excuse that it promotes “fundamentalism, corporal punishment, stoning and cutting off of hands”. They also “demanded his recall from Morocco where he was the German Ambassador” at that time.

However, once the book came out in print and its intellectual merit and rigour became evident, the hostility to it and to its author subsided.

In the book, Hofmann makes an emphatic point that the Hesperian (western) societies are on the brink of failure, morally and socially, as people’s spiritual needs are not catered to and their attempts to give meaning to life are somewhat ineffectual.

According to Hofmann, the moral and spiritual predicament of the west increases the possibility of Islam’s wider acceptance among the people there, as the religion has the potential to provide a spiritual basis for a universal framework for human development and civilisation. He also envisions a greater responsibility Muslims have to shoulder in this regard by way of living Islam in its truest sense and exemplifying the Islamic faith and its ethical principles in their own lives.

Hofmann’s contribution to scholarship in the field of Islam is reminiscent of that of Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad [1900-92]) whom he regards as “Europe’s Gift to Islam” and to whom he paid a generous tribute.
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Md. Mahmudul Hasan, PhD, is with the Department of English Language and Literature at the International Islamic University Malaysia.