Dutch government stops paying Syrian jihadists

This video from the USA says about itself:

Do rebels that beheaded Syrian child get US funding? 09 Aug 2016

Elizabeth Trudeau, Director of Press Relations. U.S. Department of State – Daily Briefing

SYRIA CONFLICT: REBELS ‘FILMED BEHEADING BOY’ IN ALEPPO – 19 July – Videos have emerged online that appear to show Syrian rebels taunting and then beheading a [12-year-old ill] boy they say is a captured Palestinian pro-government fighter. Read more here.

U.S.-BACKED ‘MODERATE’ REBELS BEHEAD A CHILD NEAR ALEPPO – 19 July – Members of an American-backed rebel group in Syria beheaded a young child in a grisly execution video. The footage surfaced early Tuesday of members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki and a captured child in Handarat, near Aleppo. The young boy, who appears to be prepubescent, is then executed on the back of a pickup truck. The gruesome videotaped murder of a child drew outrage on social media and the promise of an inquiry from the group’s leadership, which has previously received U.S.-made weapons and American funding. … It also renewed questions about which rebels the American government has supported in Syria’s ongoing civil war. Read more here.

Translated from Dutch Algemeen Dagblad daily today:

The Netherlands stops paying Syrian police for possible ties with extremists

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has temporarily halted the millions of aid to a project in Syria, fearing that some of the money has ended up in the hands of extremist groups. This involves 12.5 million euros, which include funding a Syrian police force.

Cyril Rosman 06-12-17, 07:56 Last update: 09:30

The aid money is meant for the Free Syrian Police … who supposedly provide ‘peace and justice’ in the areas controlled by the Syrian opposition. This service was set up with millions of euros of relief money from the Netherlands, Germany and Great Britain.

The project came under fire this week after revelations from the British television program BBC Panorama. The broadcast was called: ‘Jihadists you pay for’. According to the BBC, the extremist paramilitary group Nour al-Din al-Zinki forced the Free Syrian Police in the Aleppo region to transfer 20 percent of all salaries (which were paid in cash) to them …

Executions and stoning

In another region the al-Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front is said to have appointed the officers of the Free Police. The policemen are also said to have cooperated with courts that imposed executions [eg, for being gay, according to the BBC] and stoning as punishment. In the report, a man says that members of the Free Syrian Police were aware of the torture in a prison where he was incarcerated. In addition to oral sources, the BBC journalists also have internal documents from Adam Smith International, the British aid organization that set up the project with money from six Western countries.

…

According to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands has contributed 12, 6 million euros since 2014 to the Access to Justice and Community Security Project, which includes the Free Syrian Police. …

The Dutch contribution – and that of our international partners the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and Canada – has been stopped immediately. “The US also participates in the project. …

This looks like the United States Trump administration has not ‘stopped immediately’ paying jihadist privatised police.

The Al-Zinki movement has also consisted of various groups in recent years. Members of the group have been associated by Amnesty International with kidnapping, torture and executions.

Adam Smith International was founded by the Adam Smith Institute, a self-styled ‘neoliberal’ pressure group for privatisation, austerity and other Thatcherite ways to help big corporations and the 1% richest people against 99% of the people. They have and had considerable influence on the 1980s British Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, the ‘new’ Labour government of Tony Blair, and the present Theresa May Conservative government.

Adam Smith International, which the NOS calls an ‘aid organization’, is a for profit business preaching Thatcherite neoliberalism abroad. According to their Internet site, they are especially active in war zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya. Which reminds one of ‘disaster capitalism‘ as mentioned by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine.

Adam Smith International is called after 18th century economist Adam Smith. If they would be honest, then they would call themselves Margaret Thatcher International instead of Adam Smith International. As Adam Smith lived at a time when there were still progressive sides to capitalism, as against absolute monarchy and feudalism. Capitalism was not big corporate capitalism yet then as now. Smith was not uncritical of negative sides of capitalism. He had a labour theory of value; which would later be expanded by classical liberal economist David Ricardo and still later by Karl Marx. Today, the Adam Smith Institute says they reject the labour theory of value. It is also somewhat strange that Adam Smith International, preaching all over the world how evil the collective sector and how fantastic the private sector are, gets the big majority of its budget and its profits from taxpayers; handed over to them by right-wing governments like in Britain or the Netherlands. Even the conservative Daily Mail thinks that is a bit strange.

It is not that unexpected that Thatcher International … sorry, Adam Smith International passes on some of that taxpayers’ money to beheaders and torturers in Syria. After all, Margaret Thatcher herself praised the jihadists in Afghanistan. And ‘market fundamentalism‘, as the beliefs of the 21st century abusers of Adam Smith’s name are called, sometimes goes hand in hand with Christian religious fundamentalism in the USA. Then why not with jihadi Muslim fundamentalism? Neoliberals favour privatising police, and the ‘Free’ Syrian Police certainly are privatised police.