S1 Ep5 The Great Unmasking

WTO chief: Why the choice of an African woman is a big deal

Former colleagues of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala speak highly of the economist as she prepares to become the next director-general of the World Trade Organization. Her tenure begins during turbulent times.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala's former colleagues say she is more than qualified to head the WTO

The Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala already had broad support from World Trade Organization (WTO) members, including China, the European Union, the African Union, Japan and Australia. Her challenger, Yoo Myung-hee, the South Korean trade minister, withdrew her candidacy last Friday.

Former colleagues also believe she is well-suited for the position. "Ngozi is one of the most qualified people for that particular post she vied for. So I wish her well in terms of the final decision," Dr. Shamsudeen Usman, a former minister of national planning, told DW. Okonjo-Iweala and Usman served alongside each other as ministers under Nigerian President Jonathan Goodluck in 2011.

However, she was not the favourite candidate for the United States under the Trump administration — hence complicating the decision-making process.

The election of a new director-general requires the consensus of all WTO) members.

"I know that she will discharge her duties very well as she has done in a lot of jobs she has held before," Usman said of his former colleague.

The WTO, a Geneva-based body tasked with promoting free trade, has been without a permanent leader since Roberto Azevedo stepped down a year earlier than planned at the end of August 2020.

Azevedo's resignation came after the WTO was embroiled in an escalating trade spat between the US and China.

Tide is turning for women

If she is confirmed, Okonjo-Iweala will become the first African and the first woman to hold the top position at the WTO.

She was the first female foreign minister and held the position of finance minister twice in her home country of Nigeria.

"I see her appointment as a validation of African women's competency and leadership skills, and of African women's excelling despite the systematic hurdles and obstacles facing them," Fadumo Dayib, the first female Somali presidential candidate, told DW.

Dayib added that the choice of Okonjo-Iweala is a sign that "the tide is turning in favour of competent women and it's about time that happened."

Nigerian economist Tunji Andrews agrees with Dayib. He says the international community has finally realized that Africans can sit at the table with global powers.

"Many people across the world will start to say, let's put more Africans in such roles, not just roles of peacekeeping, but roles of intellectual capacity and roles of pedigree."

Accomplished economist on global stage

Although Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will make history by becoming the first female and black African to lead WTO, Amara Nwankpa says his fellow Nigerian brings more than just "diversity and inclusion" to the world stage.

"I'm optimistic that her impact on global trade will be positive, given that her antecedents suggest that she's passionately committed to reducing inequality, poverty, and corruption across the world," Nwankpa, director of Public Policy Initiative at Shehu Musa Yar'Adua Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit that is committed to promoting national unity and good governance, told DW.

Political heavyweight

During her second term as finance minister, Okonjo-Iweala was "credited with developing reform programs that helped improve governmental transparency and stabilize the economy," according to the US business magazine Forbes, which ranked her No. 48 in the world's top 50 "Power Women" in 2015.

The Harvard-educated economist holds a Ph.D. from MIT and chairs the Gavi board, a global vaccine alliance instrumental in ensuring that developing countries have much-needed access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Nwankpa says her background shows that "she brings to this job impressive skills in international negotiations and leadership capacity to confront the key challenges currently facing the planet."

"She's exactly the person that the world needs at the helm of international trade in these turbulent times," he added.

Source: DW

Biden's cybersecurity pick is a threat to US security

US President Joe Biden on February 05, 2021 in Washington, DC [Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

Just after Christmas, Jonathan and Esther Pollard were flown on a private jet from New Jersey to Tel Aviv. After touching down, Jonathan kissed the tarmac and was greeted by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Pollards had been flown in style at the expense of Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. The casino mogul seems to have been on his death bed at the time, as he passed away less than two weeks later, and yet he was determined to see this through.

Sheldon's string of ostentatious casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore made him one of the top twenty richest people in the world. Unwell for a long time, he had already signed the shares in his company over to his wife in 2019. That made her Israel's richest person "by a long stretch," according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

For two decades, the Adelsons have founded and fostered a network of right-wing, anti-Palestinian organisations. They were the power couple of the pro-Israel lobby in the US. They bankrolled such groups as AIPAC, the Israeli American Council and Birthright; all are organisations which further Israel's apartheid colonisation of Palestine in one way or another.

Unlike some of the rich US donors upon whom Israel has always relied to fund some of its nefarious activities, the Adelsons did not live in the shadows. Supposed Israeli "dove" Shimon Peres, for example, recruited Jewish millionaires in New York to fund Israel's nuclear weapons programme while keeping it off the government books in Israel. This was done in order to keep its existence a secret from the Israeli cabinet until it was a done deal because some ministers opposed the programme. Today, Israel is thought to have about 200 nuclear warheads, the supposedly secret "Samson Option".

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson were a political power in their own right, though, a mantle now taken up by Mrs Adelson alone. Her agenda is anti-Palestinian, anti-Iranian and anti-Muslim; in short, generally Likudnik and Republican.

Upon flying the Pollards to Tel Aviv, she wrote a column in the Israeli newspaper she owns celebrating Jonathan's release. "Jonathan deserves Israel's deepest and eternal gratitude," she wrote. "Like a wounded soldier returning from a long and difficult journey, he deserves every benefit and grant the state can offer to ensure he can live his life comfortably."

What she failed to acknowledge was that Jonathan Pollard had committed treason against his country, the United States. Pollard was not an Israeli, yet he spied on the US for Israel, selling reams of top-secret documents in exchange for wads of cash stuffed into envelopes. He spent 30 years in a US prison as a traitor before being released by President Barack Obama. His parole ended under President Donald Trump, allowing him and his wife to fly to Israel.

Pollard's activities damaged US security. According to some intelligence experts, his was the worst act of treason in decades.

As a Zionist ideologue, it is unsurprising that Miriam Adelson praised Pollard's treason. However, the Adelsons are by no means the only wealthy Zionists who seek to influence the US government and democratic process and push it in a more pro-Israel direction.

Jonathan Pollard, the American convicted of spying for Israel [Spencer Platt/Getty Images]

We now know that President Joe Biden has appointed Anne Neuberger as his aide responsible for coordinating the federal government's cybersecurity efforts. As a senior cybersecurity official at the National Security Agency, on the surface, Neuberger may seem like an obvious and very suitable pick.

What very few press reports have noted, though, is that she's also a major funder of the pro-Israel lobby in the US. The family foundation controlled by Neuberger and her husband has donated more than $600,000 to AIPAC alone since 2008. According to the foundation's tax returns, these donations were carried out "to influence a legislative body" or "to influence public opinion" in the US on behalf of Israel.

Combined with her powerful positions at the upper echelons of US government and US intelligence, this, I believe, makes her a threat to US security, not least because Israel itself is considered a high-level threat by US counterintelligence officials. Although the colonial state claims publicly to be an "ally", in reality, it invests massive resources into spying on the US, as the Pollard case illustrates.

Israel and its defenders claim that Pollard was a one-off and that "Israel has learned its lesson," to quote Miriam Adelson. But nothing could be further from the truth.

As recently as 2015, Israel launched a major espionage campaign against the US in order to sabotage the Obama administration's negotiations with Iran over its nuclear energy programme. The campaign was unsuccessful, and the deal with Iran went through. But Obama's successor, Donald Trump – under the influence, no doubt, of his campaign funders the Adelsons – reversed that US commitment to ease sanctions in exchange for inspections of Iran's nuclear energy programme. He went on to impose even tougher sanctions to boot. So Israel got its way in the end.

Sheldon Adelson once advocated dropping nuclear bombs on Iran, so a hard-line anti-Iranian stance seems no surprise. In an interview on Friday, Biden said that he will continue to impose the harsh Trump-era sanctions. A US return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal thus seems a long way off. The president in the White House may have changed, but America's pro-Israel policy hasn't.

Source: MEMO