Why Are There Two ‘Justice for Kurds’ Organizations? On Cutouts and Front Groups in Geopolitics

By David Miller – Jul 10, 2024

Is this about justice for Kurds or Zionist foreign policy objectives?

Justice for Kurds is a US-based non-profit group created in 2017. It says it is a “Franco-American” initiative “created to defend a loyal friend of the West: The Kurdish people.”

The French element of the group is headed up by the famous pro-war agitator and self-regarding “philosopher” Bernard-Henri Levy, who is the president. The American chairman is Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, who is a member of the staunchly establishment Council of Foreign Relations and attached to Harvard University’s Belfer Center, where he created the Recanati-Kaplan Intelligence Fellows program.

As it is well known, the Harvard Kennedy School in which this program is based is core to providing academic cover to US imperial ambitions. When one looks at the very long list of members of the Advisory Council, these interests are well evidenced. There are more than ten ex-military or counter-terrorism officials including,

● Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, former Director, United Kingdom Special Forces

● General Stanley A. McChrystal, former Commander, United States Joint Special Operations Command

● General David H. Petraeus, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

● Robert Richer, former Associate Deputy Director of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency

The connections with the Western military and intelligence agencies are instructive, but the most revealing element of the advisory council is its exceptionally strong neoconservative and Zionist makeup including:

● Well-known Islamophobes Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Caroline Fourest;

● Leading neocons Bill Kristol and Anne Appelbaum;

● Directors of many Zionist lobby groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Institute for National Security of America, American Jewish Committee, United Against Nuclear Iran Foreign Policy Research Institute;

● The UK is well represented by hardline Zionists including Mick Davis of the United Jewish Israel Appeal, Jonathan Mendelsohn, and Stuart Polak, both long-time “Israel” lobbyists associated with Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel, respectively. The pair are also both directors of the “Abraham Accords”, a UK company devoted to pushing forward the normalization of the Zionist entity.

Of course, both Levy and Kaplan are well-known Zionist extremists too, but there are further links as well. In its 2021 annual report, it discloses that it gave £100,000 to MEMRI the Zionist media watchdog run by a former colonel in the Zionist occupation forces.

Is this about justice for Kurds or Zionist foreign policy objectives?

Progressive International?

Justice for Kurds has a seemingly unlikely ally in a radical left-wing group called Progressive International. The two jointly delivered a letter to the EU institutions calling for the delisting of the Kurdish Workers Party as a terrorist group. The signatories included some of the world’s leading leftists.

● Ken Loach – filmmaker, UK

● Leila Chaibi – MEP, GUE/NGL, France

● Massimiliano Smeriglio – MEP S&D, Italy

● Slavoj Žižek – Philosopher, Slovenia

● Vittorio Agnoletto – Doctor – Former MEP, Italy

A number of leftist parties and groups signed on to the letter en bloc or as branches or regions, including:

● DIE LINKE – Erlangen/Erlangen – Höchstadt, Germany

● District Association of DIE LINKE – Mönchengladbach, Germany

● Feminist Party – DIE FRAUEN, Germany

● Fraktion DIE LINKE – Mönchengladbach, Germany

● PRC – Communist Refoundation Party-European Left, Italy

● Revolutionary Guevarist Organisation and Guevarist Youth, Argentina

● Rote Hilfe e.V., Germany

● Sinistra Italia- Italy

● Women’s Rights Centre of Chiapas, Mexico

● Youth Council of the Maya K’iche’ People (CPK), Guatemala

It turns out, however, that despite having the same name and a very nearly identical web address, (justiceforkurds.org vs. justiceforkurds.info) this “Justice for Kurds” is a different organization.

But what is Progressive International? It is the creation of two other groups: the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and the Sanders Institute. The Sanders Institute is the organization set up by Vermont Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders. Much of the money donated to Sanders for the presidential race was diverted into the creation of the Sanders Institute. Among those donating to Sanders were employees at the largest Arms companies in the US. Politico reported in 2016 that Sanders’ campaign “accepted at least $310,055 from defense-related workers — more than any Republican presidential candidate — since the start of the 2016 campaign cycle.” In the 2020 cycle, it was reported that Senator Bernie Sanders “has collected more presidential campaign contributions from defense industry sources than any other candidate, including Donald Trump. That’s according to data on 2020 funding at the OpenSecrets.org website.”

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Leading Western leftists including Jeremy Corbyn, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, Yanis Varoufakis, and Naomi Klein serve on its “Council”. They sit alongside a number of individuals from the global South whose names are well-known from the “alter-globalization” movement such as Nnimmo Bassey and Walden Bellow, as well as the former Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa. It is not clear how many of the Council members are aware of the analysis of the organization laid out here.

Also at Progressive International are staff with a record of directing left-wing social movements, such as the Corbyn movement in the UK. James Schneider was director of communications for Corbyn and in the allegedly “hard-left” group Momentum. He performs the same role at Progressive International.

The British writer Phil Bevin has described Schneider’s model for how “progressive” forces should organize as “unnervingly anti-democratic”, arguing that it “nevertheless resembles the current role played by Progressive International as an aspiring umbrella organization drawing together the red-green Left while leading it down the path of imperialism as it has been laid down by the NGO-intelligence complex.” Bevin saw the operation of Schneider as a communications advisor to Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party up close as he also worked in the office.

One key point of difference between the two groups is that the French/US version promotes the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). By contrast, the open letter on the PKK shows a different orientation – toward supporting the CIA/US operation to occupy part of Syria and steal its oil reserves. Progressive International, while being soft on Zionism, is fully bought into the CIA operation in “Rojava”.

The Zionist entity itself is ambivalent about the PKK and the “Rojava” operation. In 2017, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Israel opposes the PKK and considers it a terrorist organization.” This was interpreted as slapping down the former deputy IDF chief of staff Yair Golan who had said he did not consider the PKK a terror group.

However, in 2022, Mossad threatened Turkish intelligence that “Israel” “is ready to cooperate with the PKK should Ankara continue its support for the Hamas military wing.” This came after three Mossad agents were arrested in Turkey in 2022 for spying.

In July 2022, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry announced a sabotage team detained by security forces had planned to blow up a “sensitive” defense industry center in Isfahan. Those detained belonged to the Iranian Kurdish “Marxist” opposition group Komala who had reportedly been recruited by Mossad. Komala is a “leftist” group from Iranian “Kurdistan” with an armed wing that relaunched “armed struggle” against the Islamic Republic in 2017 and, in 2018, launched a lobbying office in Washington DC. In 2021, there were reports of armed clashes between Komala and the PKK.

This may go some way to explaining why the Zionist entity is in two minds about Rojava and the PKK, but it is an enthusiastic supporter of any Kurdish faction that can pursue its interests in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, or Iran. Meanwhile, the PKK-aligned version of Justice for Kurds and Progressive International are fully on board with the US-led occupation of Syria and the theft of its oil resources.

We can see in this curious tale of two groups with exactly the same name a story about the various ways in which campaigning NGOs can be associated to the point of being cutouts or front groups with the geopolitical ambitions of the Pentagon and/or the CIA, on the one hand, and the Zionist regime, on the other.

David Miller, investigative researcher, broadcaster, and academic. He is the founder and co-director of the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch and editor of Powerbase.info.

(Al Mayadeen)