Why has the UK descended into violence？

By: Azhar Azam

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday vowed to quell anti-immigration riots in the country with full force. "Whatever the apparent motivation, this is not protest. It is pure violence and we will not tolerate attacks on mosques or our Muslim communities," he said after convening an urgent meeting.

The UK has been gripped with unrest and "far right thuggery" after three primary school girls were killed and several others injured in a fatal stabbing by a 17-year-old boy last week in the northwest town of Southport. The violence broke out once social media posts falsely disseminated the suspected attacker was a radical Muslim migrant.

Ever since, minority ethnic communities, especially Muslims, have been assaulted with shocking scenes of shops being looted, mosques, Asian-owned businesses and police attacked, and cars set alight.

These violent events cannot and must not be tolerated and all the UK government's efforts to suppress the appalling unrest should be supported internationally since there is no excuse for killing innocent people as well as looting shops, vandalizing property, torching the hotel and attacking the police and throwing petrol bombs at them.

However, once the situation calms and order is restored, London should review the factors such as allowing the anti-immigrant rhetoric to burgeon and become widespread over the last few years, which has emboldened the protesters to challenge peace in the country and safety of the Britons. The result is a more divided community with black and brown people being forced to live in fear.

The law and order in the UK has turned so gruesome that former country's head of Counter Terrorism Policing Neil Basu has sought to treat the violence as terrorism. "Not only does it fit the definition of terrorism, it is terrorism. It's nothing short of an attempt at a modern-day lynching and the people who did it should be facing life imprisonment, not a five-year sentence for violent disorder."

Knife crimes have become prevalent in the UK. According to the country's home office, more than 14,500 offenses were recorded last year, 46 percent of all homicides across Britain. Per the Labor Party, such crimes have risen nearly 80 percent since 2015, describing an arduous task for Prime Minister Starmer who during his campaign promised to tackle knife crimes as his "absolute priority."

Starmer should also consider an array of entwined factors driving violence in the UK. For instance, certain vulnerabilities within the UK youth such as "unmet primary needs" due to poverty, inequality and austerity cuts have allowed criminals and gangs to tempt youth into doing such violent activities.

While analysts blame the Conservative Party and British media for playing a destructive role in radicalizing the UK youth and instigating the violence, criticizing the attempts to frame the unrest as legitimate – scholars have also slammed the conservatives for ignoring the years-long warnings about growing far-right activism in the society and exploiting divisions in the UK with their complicity toward such far-right groups. Even former adviser to three UK prime ministers, Dame Sara Khan, held the Conservative government responsible for the chaos, saying the country was "woefully unprepared" to handle the catastrophe.

Still, British mainstream media is downplaying the threat by representing the violence as "deep-rooted anger" and "festering resentment" as some conservative leaders are trying to take political advantage of the mayhem. Burning down hotels and a children's library, looting shops, setting cars on fire, breaking windows, and assaulting mosques, black, Arab and Asian communities and police with mobsters roaming in streets cannot be defended and must be straightly and thoroughly condemned.

The violence has put the UK justice system to the test which has been overstretched over previous UK administrations' lack of focus on domestic issues. Just last month, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the release of thousands of prisoners who had served 40 percent of their sentences to "avert disaster." Unfortunately, the Starmer government now has to suddenly ramp up prison places and deploy a "standing army" to cope with the crisis, which was in the making for years but his predecessors ignored.

For more than a decade, the Tories ruled Britain. Throughout their tenure, their austerity on public services adversely impacted the police force's ability to respond to domestic challenges; it risked the lives of more than one million children with real-term cuts, increased poverty, homelessness and unemployment and bred more apathy, shirking their basic responsibility of providing a safe and secure environment to the Britons. Resultantly, the UK has descended into violence.

*My article that first appeared in "CGTN"

NATO is a key US tool to drive up its arms sales

By: Azhar Azam


A “robust and flexible” defense industry lies at the center of NATO’s “core business,” deterrence and defense. Marking 75 years of the military alliance, NATO leaders recently convened in Washington and committed to accelerate the growth of industrial capacity and production across member states.

Over the years, NATO has become a tool for the US to drive up the sales of its defense companies. For decades, the military coalition has been creating a market for US arms and by urging allies to increase their defense spending to 2% of GDP, it seeks to provide America with a thriving defense industry.

More than two-thirds of Europe’s defense acquisitions or $140 billion in the last two years, revealed outgoing Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, were made from US companies, showcasing how the crisis on European shores was helping the powerful US military-industrial complex to advance its objectives.

The Ukraine conflict has allowed America’s defense industry to witness a boom at the expense of NATO’s European allies as by end of last year, new contracts to supply arms to Ukraine or backfill the US weapons had started to flow to US defense contractors.

Industrial production in the US defense and space sector had increased 17.5% since the onset of the Ukraine conflict in February; it continues to rise, reaching nearly 10% above its year-earlier level in May. The US officials have acknowledged “bulk of this money is going right back into the US economy to make those weapons including good paying jobs."

Several analyses also found much of the assistance appropriated by Congress to Ukraine had returned to America – benefitting the domestic arms industry, offering once-in-a-generation opportunity and injecting 0.5% of one year’s GDP into the US defense industrial base over several years.

While Washington and allies since 24-February-2022 has provided $51.2 billion in military assistance to Kyiv; it in the financial year 2023 alone struck arms deals of $80.9 billion, mostly with European countries. This underscores America’s defense industry is being boosted by the Biden administration’s military aid to Ukraine as well as arms sales to Europe, whose major arms imports have doubled. NATO’s expansion and Israel’s relentless brutality against Palestinians too are opportunities for the US to push the demand of its arms sales.

Adding financial and humanitarian support, non-US states have provided significantly more than the US, boasted Stoltenberg; still, they are threatened by Donald Trump who encouraged Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to Europe with his skepticism of Ukraine, NATO and the European Union (EU).

Joe Biden and Trump have divergent approaches toward NATO; both seek to maximize from this “generational type investment.” And NATO is helping the US to realize its goal of boosting its arms sales. Stoltenberg’s assertion “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit, the sooner Ukraine can have peace” and alliance’s intent to “provide a minimum baseline funding of €40 billion within the next year” to Ukraine describe the US defense factories will keep producing arms to fuel the war in Europe for at least another year.

Earlier this year, the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance” in history with Stoltenberg echoing his assertion at the Washington Summit. But the alliance's humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan busts these claims, exposing a veiled coordination between the US and NATO to issue a “blank check” to the US arms industry.

In fact, NATO, supposed to create “shield against aggression,” has botched miserably in its military missions, spreading chaos, instability and horror across countries through its illegal invasions, failed operations and killing of civilians. It continues to face a failure in its biggest cold war test in Ukraine for the alliance never chose the path of peace and pursued a zero-sum mindset of victory against Russia.

NATO is trying to expand its footprint in Asia-Pacific over munitions supplied by North Korea to Russia and Beijing’s “sharing (of) high-end technologies” with Moscow. As the US attempts to link the treaty's Article 5 of collective security with regional security to push its defense sales, such efforts could stoke confrontation with China and divide the world in global blocs.

Due to the US bloody and futile history of interventions, many Americans, especially the post-cold war generation, don’t want to see their country more involved in conflicts and wars or playing the role of the “world’s policeman.” Positive views of NATO in several countries including US, France, Germany and UK are plunging as a result of its deadly invasions that have brought starvation, destruction and death to civilians. NATO’s own polling has found the number of citizens who would vote to stay in the alliance has declined with a surge in those who would vote to leave NATO.

With $1.3trillion of defense spending – mostly by the US, thanks to massive defense sales – NATO is by far the world’s largest military alliance. As Washington forces Brussels into spending more on its defense and finding a military solution in Ukraine, this ambition is driven by America’s desire to extend its lead as the world’s biggest trader of arms.

The approaches of existing and former US presidents are no different from each other as both of them have incorporated a strong "defense industrial base" in their respective national security strategies. This policy to help flourish the corrupting influence of US military-industrial complex is at odds even with country’s own President Dwight Eisenhower who in his 1961 farewell address warned against this dangerous phenomenon and will undercut economy and geoeconomic role of EU, which is the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods and services and the biggest export market for 80 countries.

*My article (unedited) that first appeared in the "Express Tribune"

Exposed: US attempts to invade China's cybersecurity

By: Azhar Azam

In response to the concerns raised by the international community and cybersecurity research entities, China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) and others on July 8 released complete details of its investigation about the alleged China-backed Volt Typhoon.

The secret disinformation campaign, orchestrated by the U.S. intelligence agencies in collaboration with anti-China U.S. politicians and cybersecurity authorities of the "Five Eyes" nations, hyped up "China cyber threat theory" with the objective of preserving its warrantless snooping powers on the people around the world including Americans and maintain its cyber hegemony through Section 702 of the U.S. Federal Intelligence Surveillance (FISA).

A U.S. court in May last year ruled the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) repeatedly violated the rules by improperly searching for information in a U.S. database of foreign intelligence 278,000 times over several years including on Americans as there was "no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of crime," drawing criticism of the unlawful searches and emphasizing the need of reining in the FBI's egregious abuses of the law.

The U.S. intelligence itself claims the law authorizes intelligence collection on foreign targets located overseas and can never be used to "target Americans anywhere or anyone" located in the U.S.; revelations such as the FBI's misuse of powers to hunt for information about Black Lives Matter protesters, congressional campaign donors and the U.S. lawmakers cast more doubts on the program's integrity. Still just this April, the U.S. Senate reauthorized the controversial spy program, allowing the U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic eavesdropping and collect messages without any judicial warrant.

Even former U.S. President Donald Trump had urged Congress to oppose the bill that would reauthorize the U.S. intelligence's warrantless spying powers and said "Kill FISA, it was illegally used against me and many others. They spied on my campaign!!!" This endorses CVERC's exposes that "Volt Typhoon" is a typical cognitive warfare operation but it actually targets the U.S. taxpayers, congressmen and political rivals and seeks more funds to push its offensive cyber operations against China.

Since May 2023, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI have teamed up with the other federal agencies, Five Eyes cybersecurity institutions and industry partners and accused China-sponsored cyber actors, also known as Volt Typhoon, of "seeking to preposition themselves on information technology networks for disruptive or destructive cyber attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States."

These efforts were intended, as the report disclosed, to defame China, sow discord between Beijing and its partners, contain China's development and crack down on the Chinese companies. The U.S. court's ruling on the FBI abuses and the fear of political fallouts in response to the Biden administration's activities to spy on its own people ahead of the presidential election drove the U.S. government to further focus on China and camouflage its malicious domestic activities.

One of the major goals of Washington's barrage of accusations on Beijing is to conceal its own cyber attacks against China. In this regard, CVERC's report has brought some telling and irrefutable evidence. According to its analysis of existing data, the U.S. government-backed hackers have carried out a whopping 45 million cyber attacks against the Chinese government, universities, research institutions, large enterprises and critical infrastructure.

Tradecrafts collected from the victim networks led to the cyber warfare program, being operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, NSA and FBI. The detection described a growing U.S. unease about China's development as well as raised doubts about Washington's nefarious cyber activities against sovereign countries under which it is believed to have created and implemented cyber weapons such as Stuxnet computer worm to derail Iran's nuclear program in addition to conducting cyber attacks against Tehran to damage the key elements of Iranian military command and control structures.

Over the last decades, Chinese institutions have released several reports that unmask the U.S. cyber attacks against China. In 2014, China's State Internet Information Office published data on Washington's cyber attacks against Beijing, showing America had the leading role in launching cyber attacks on China by means of Trojans, botnets, phishing and others.

The U.S. has historically created an unprecedented electronic espionage system the world over including in its own ally states, sparking tensions and causing distrust; NSA's targeting of nearly 50 countries and regions including China for more than 10 years through its cyber-attacks has now positioned the U.S. as the world's largest cyber invader.

America's silence on the new and prior report so far is indicative of its culpability. In 2013, an infamous U.S. PRISM surveillance program – which per Edward Snowden NSA operated with the FISA approval and gathered messaging data from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other major tech companies – shattered America's plans to pressure China over alleged state-sponsored cyber attacks, owing China an explanation over its hacking activities.

More than a decade later, Washington once again is caught off guard by the new revelations that have exposed the U.S. disinformation campaign against China and whereby it has to clarify its position and stop smearing Beijing. This demands that U.S. officials come out of the shock and justify its attempts to sneak through China's cybersecurity via an intricate web of surveillance network.

*My article that first appeared at "CGTN"