1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.

And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.

And he wants 4 more years:pic.twitter.com/j1jrzc34u8

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 13, 2024

And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) November 15, 2023

We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

President Biden at White House Correspondents' Dinner: "Journalism is clearly not a crime."#WHCA #WHCD #nerdprom pic.twitter.com/MpEmg7trz2

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 28, 2024

We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide.
A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB

— Nicholas McGeehan (@NcGeehan) November 28, 2023

All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The logistics that led to the bloodbath had been rehearsed with detail verging on the manic.  Many a vengeful mind was at play.  Two buildings were constructed for training purposes.  Participants involved the special counter-terrorism unit Yamam, Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, and members of the Israeli Defence Forces.  An enormous casualty rate would have already been contemplated given the remarks of IDF spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.  “We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise.”

The lies barely have time to fledge.  First, the numbers.  Hagari could only count “dozens”, and “knew of less than 100”.  He conceded to not knowing how many of such a reduced number were civilians.  Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, was happy to soften the carnage in attacking his country’s detractors.  “Only Israel’s enemies complained about the casualties of Hamas terrorists and their accomplices.”

Then came the praise, manifold, effusive.  The Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant cooed with satisfaction, calling the effort “one of the most extraordinary operations”.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu merely offered the following morsel: “Israel does not surrender to terrorism.”

Furthermore, no civilian trucks, claimed the IDF, were used in the operation.  Yet undercover vehicles were apparently deployed, one very much resembling those used by Israel to traffic commercial goods into Gaza; another being a white Mercedes truck packed and stacked with furniture and miscellaneous belongings typical of the dislocated and dispossessed.  Disgorged from the latter, Palestinian eye-witness accounts noted men in plainclothes and some 10 heavily armed soldiers ready for mischief.  The commencement of firing signalled the start of the butchery.

The UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was certain.  The IDF, she stated with exasperation, had “perfidiously” hidden “in an aid truck”.  This constituted “‘humanitarian camouflage’ at another level.”  While expressing relief at the rescue of four hostages, the enterprise “should not have come at the expense of at least 200 Palestinians, including children, killed and over 400 injured by Israel and allegedly foreign soldiers”.

In time, it became clear that the mission, venerated for its secrecy and praised for its planning, had not caught the Hamas guards responsible for three male hostages by surprise.  They duly engaged the Yamam operatives.  “Immediately, it became a war zone,” reservist brigadier general Amir Avivi told The Washington Post.  The Israeli air force commenced indulgent fire.  Death reigned at Nuseirat for some 75 minutes, concealed by the now standard refrain by the IDF: “Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation.”

Other, more tormented descriptions seemed closer to the mark.  The Intercept noted the observations of a Palestinian witness by the name of Suhail Mutlaq Abu Nasser. “The area turned to ashes… I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.”  The account goes on to document the use of armed quadcopter drones, the presence of tank tracks, the hovering of Apache attack helicopters, the targeting of homes by missiles.  Camp resident Anas Alayyan was also convinced that the entire military operation by Israeli forces did not fall short of a mass execution.

There is a pattern here, a murderous ratio justified by that most elastic yet horrific of reasons: self-defence.  The hostage rescue will go down a treat in Israel.  The names of those captured by Hamas on October 7 will be anointed in Israeli mythology: Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, Shlomi Ziv. But at what cost to those around them?

In addition to the slaughter, some indication of the aftermath is provided by Al Jazeera.  “The wounded were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, an already overwhelmed facility.”  Medics are found to be in utter despair.

The scale of killing on this score also raises troubling issues with Israel’s closest ally.  Despite some political grumbling in the ranks, the Biden administration remains steadfast in support.  The deaths in Rafah were still excusable because, in the words of US State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, Israel had not engaged in “a military operation on the scale of those previous operations [in Khan Younis and in Gaza City].”

The hefty death toll of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat operation was of lesser concern to President Joe Biden than the welfare of Israeli hostages.  Speaking in Paris, Biden welcomed “the safe rescue of four hostages that were returned to their families in Israel. We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached.”

The sanguinary episode at Nuseirat is hard to stomach, even by Biden’s rubbery standards.  It stands to reason.  The entire operation had the buttressing of what the New York Times reported to be “intelligence and other logistical support” from the United States.   Two Israeli intelligence officials also confirmed that “American military officials in Israel provided some of the intelligence about the hostages rescued Saturday.”  And let us not forget murderous military hardware, readily supplied from US defence companies.  It follows that the lives of Israeli hostages, dubbed “diamonds” by their rescuers, are invaluable, the precious stones of Israeli-US policy.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mere coal dust.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The logistics that led to the bloodbath had been rehearsed with detail verging on the manic.  Many a vengeful mind was at play.  Two buildings were constructed for training purposes.  Participants involved the special counter-terrorism unit Yamam, Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet, and members of the Israeli Defence Forces.  An enormous casualty rate would have already been contemplated given the remarks of IDF spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.  “We understood that in those apartments with those guards, daytime will be the ultimate surprise.”

The lies barely have time to fledge.  First, the numbers.  Hagari could only count “dozens”, and “knew of less than 100”.  He conceded to not knowing how many of such a reduced number were civilians.  Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, was happy to soften the carnage in attacking his country’s detractors.  “Only Israel’s enemies complained about the casualties of Hamas terrorists and their accomplices.”

Then came the praise, manifold, effusive.  The Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant cooed with satisfaction, calling the effort “one of the most extraordinary operations”.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu merely offered the following morsel: “Israel does not surrender to terrorism.”

Furthermore, no civilian trucks, claimed the IDF, were used in the operation.  Yet undercover vehicles were apparently deployed, one very much resembling those used by Israel to traffic commercial goods into Gaza; another being a white Mercedes truck packed and stacked with furniture and miscellaneous belongings typical of the dislocated and dispossessed.  Disgorged from the latter, Palestinian eye-witness accounts noted men in plainclothes and some 10 heavily armed soldiers ready for mischief.  The commencement of firing signalled the start of the butchery.

The UN Special Rapporteur of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was certain.  The IDF, she stated with exasperation, had “perfidiously” hidden “in an aid truck”.  This constituted “‘humanitarian camouflage’ at another level.”  While expressing relief at the rescue of four hostages, the enterprise “should not have come at the expense of at least 200 Palestinians, including children, killed and over 400 injured by Israel and allegedly foreign soldiers”.

In time, it became clear that the mission, venerated for its secrecy and praised for its planning, had not caught the Hamas guards responsible for three male hostages by surprise.  They duly engaged the Yamam operatives.  “Immediately, it became a war zone,” reservist brigadier general Amir Avivi told The Washington Post.  The Israeli air force commenced indulgent fire.  Death reigned at Nuseirat for some 75 minutes, concealed by the now standard refrain by the IDF: “Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation.”

Other, more tormented descriptions seemed closer to the mark.  The Intercept noted the observations of a Palestinian witness by the name of Suhail Mutlaq Abu Nasser. “The area turned to ashes… I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.”  The account goes on to document the use of armed quadcopter drones, the presence of tank tracks, the hovering of Apache attack helicopters, the targeting of homes by missiles.  Camp resident Anas Alayyan was also convinced that the entire military operation by Israeli forces did not fall short of a mass execution.

There is a pattern here, a murderous ratio justified by that most elastic yet horrific of reasons: self-defence.  The hostage rescue will go down a treat in Israel.  The names of those captured by Hamas on October 7 will be anointed in Israeli mythology: Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, Shlomi Ziv. But at what cost to those around them?

In addition to the slaughter, some indication of the aftermath is provided by Al Jazeera.  “The wounded were taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, an already overwhelmed facility.”  Medics are found to be in utter despair.

The scale of killing on this score also raises troubling issues with Israel’s closest ally.  Despite some political grumbling in the ranks, the Biden administration remains steadfast in support.  The deaths in Rafah were still excusable because, in the words of US State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, Israel had not engaged in “a military operation on the scale of those previous operations [in Khan Younis and in Gaza City].”

The hefty death toll of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat operation was of lesser concern to President Joe Biden than the welfare of Israeli hostages.  Speaking in Paris, Biden welcomed “the safe rescue of four hostages that were returned to their families in Israel. We won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a ceasefire is reached.”

The sanguinary episode at Nuseirat is hard to stomach, even by Biden’s rubbery standards.  It stands to reason.  The entire operation had the buttressing of what the New York Times reported to be “intelligence and other logistical support” from the United States.   Two Israeli intelligence officials also confirmed that “American military officials in Israel provided some of the intelligence about the hostages rescued Saturday.”  And let us not forget murderous military hardware, readily supplied from US defence companies.  It follows that the lives of Israeli hostages, dubbed “diamonds” by their rescuers, are invaluable, the precious stones of Israeli-US policy.  The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mere coal dust.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.

Here’s what happened:

1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.

3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!

6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”

7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).

If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.

University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.

The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.

Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.

Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.

In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.

There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.

We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The atrocities of Israel in Gaza continue to mount and to become more egregious by the day.  A month ago, on May 6, 2024, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden Administration.  Israel responded by rejecting this agreement and then immediately doing what Biden warned against doing – attacking Rafah where around 1.7 million Gazan refugees are now living in makeshift tents.  As part of this offensive, Israel closed off the Rafah crossing, the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza and preventing any people from leaving.  What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians which the Biden Administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.

One of the worst massacres took place on May 27, 2024, when Israeli forces carried out an air assault upon a neighborhood in Rafah in which, as explained by CNN, “[a]t least 45 people were killed and more than 200 others injured . . . most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and Palestinian medics. No hospital in Rafah had the capacity to take the number of casualties, the ministry said.”  Many were horrified by a video which went viral on social media showing a father holding his headless baby who had been decapitated in the assault.

Not even this abominable act elicited a rebuke from the Biden Administration which said that it would leave Israel to investigate itself in regard to this incident, and that it had no plans of changing policy as a result.

And now, Israel has just destroyed a school in Rafah which had been run by UNRWA and which had been sheltering 6,000 Gazan refugees at the time of its destruction.  In this assault, at least 40 civilians were killed, including 14 children and 9 women, bringing the total number of civilians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 36,000, including 15,500 children.  As is usually the case given that the US is by far the largest arms supplier to Israel, it was determined that Israel had used US munitions in this attack on the school.  After this atrocity, the UN added Israel to its “list of shame” — a distinction reserved for countries that bring extraordinary harm to children.  In response to this massacre and this shameful UN designation, the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be “transparent” about the assault.  No change in US policy toward Israel is forthcoming.

If this were not enough, reports of more grisly crimes are emerging daily.  For example, accounts have emerged of the heinous treatment of Palestinian prisoners at the hands of Israeli correctional officers and investigators.

As Mondoweiss explains in a June 7 article, “[b]ehind the bars of Israeli prisons, Israel has been waging war against Palestinian prisoners, creating conditions that make the continuation of human life impossible. The effects of this brutal campaign have reverberated among prisoners’ families outside of jail, who are watching their loved ones being systematically starved, beaten, tortured, and degraded.”  Mondoweiss cites a CNN exposé, based upon whistleblower testimony, which detailed “a number of medieval practices to which Palestinian prisoners have been subjected, including being strapped down to beds while blindfolded and made to wear diapers, having unqualified medical trainees conduct procedures on them without anesthesia, having dogs set on them by prison guards, being regularly beaten or put into stress positions for offenses as minor as peeking beneath their blindfolds, having zip-tie wounds fester to the point of requiring amputation, and a host of other horrific measures.”

Mondoweiss also cites a New York Times article “based on interviews with former detainees and Israeli military officers, doctors, and soldiers who worked at the prison, bringing new horrors to light about the treatment of Gazan prisoners. Detainee testimonies repeated many of these same accounts but also included additional disturbing accounts of sexual violence, including testimonies of rape and forcing detainees to sit on metal sticks that caused anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain.’”  And, of course, as Mondoweiss notes, the abominable treatment of Palestinian prisoners – which number in the thousands and includes women and children – has been going on long before October 7.

All of this illustrates how Israel has no limits or restraints upon its treatment of the Palestinian people.  And this is so because its great patron, the United States, imposes no such restraints upon it.  For all of the crocodile tears shed by Biden, his Cabinet officials and his spokespeople, there truly is no “red line” which Israel could cross which would elicit a cessation of US support, including lethal support, for its war upon the Palestinian people.  And for this reason, the war Israel is waging upon Gaza proceeds without pause and continues to descend into greater acts of depravity and horror.  In truth, as protest planners organizing to surround the White House to show opposition to the war in Gaza, it is the American people who must therefore be the “red line” to stop this genocide.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Khalil Al-Wazir and Daniel Kovalik.

NSM-20 requires the Secretary of State to obtain credible and reliable assurances within 45 days from any country engaged in armed conflict in which US defence articles are used.  The NSM-20 report, in addition to Israel, considers Colombia, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Ukraine.  But Israel, by far, is the most significant, given that it is the most prominent recipient of US weapons.  As John Ramming Chappell notes for Just Security, these include reported transfers of “bombs, artillery shells, precision guidance kits (which are attached to bombs for targeting purposes), tank ammunition, guided missiles, firearms, drones, various types of ammunition, and other weapons”.

The Israeli entry starts off with various qualifying conditions about the horror of the Gaza conflict.  Hamas is blamed for embedding “itself deliberately within and underneath the civilian population to use civilians as human shields.”  The scene is set.

In a pitiful dodge, the report claims it is “difficult to determine facts on the ground in an active war zone”, a state of mind that is bound to lend itself to justifications.  “The nature of the conflict in Gaza and the compressed review period in this initial report amplify those challenges.”

The report acknowledges various “reported incidents to raise serious concerns” that US weaponry is being used in a manner not in conformity with international law.  While it was “difficult to assess or reach conclusive findings on individual incidents,” it was “reasonable to assess that defense articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with IHL [International Humanitarian Law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm”.

The discussion is filled with softening qualifiers.  Israel had “the knowledge, experience, and tools to implement best practices for mitigating civilian harm in its military operations” but “results on the ground, including high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial questions as to whether the IDF is using them effectively in all cases.”

Despite concerns about IHL violations, the report accepts that in Israel, there are “a number of ongoing, active criminal investigations pending and there are hundreds of cases under administrative review.”  Surely this would be a troubling, rather than assuring fact.

The report goes on to reveal the view of the US Intelligence Community (IC) that, while Israel had “inflicted harm on civilians in military and security operations, potentially using US-provided equipment”, it had “no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians.”  It could, however, “do more to avoid civilian harm.”  How high a body count does one need before the intention to kill is evinced?

Mindful of the image of an ally, the report is seemingly less concerned by the staggering civilian death toll than “the impact of Israel’s military operations on humanitarian actors.”  Despite the intervention of the US government and engagement between humanitarian organisations with Israeli officials regarding deconfliction and coordination procedures, “the IDF has struck humanitarian workers and facilities.”

Inexplicably, Israel gets a clean bill of health in terms of section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars military aid to a state that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United states humanitarian assistance.”  This, despite the acceptance that Israeli actions had “delayed or had a negative impact in the delivery of aid to Gaza”. Current levels of aid reaching Palestinian civilians “while improved” remained “insufficient”.

The assessment of Israel’s use of US weapons, all in all, is paltry.  It glaringly omits making any specific adverse findings regarding breaches of international law.  This proved to be a satisfactory state of affairs for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who agreed with the “assessment that Israel has not violated International Humanitarian Law and that military assistance to support Israel’s security remains in the US interest and should continue.”

Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen begged to differ, noting the report’s failure “to do the hard work of making an assessment and ducks the ultimate questions that the report was designed to determine.”

In a fuller statement, Van Hollen identifies the “continuation of a disturbing pattern where the expertise and analyses of those working most closely on these issues at the State Department and at USAID have been swept aside to facilitate a predetermined policy outcome based on political convenience.”

While the Biden administration recently paused the transfer of a weapons shipment to Israel comprising 1,800 2000-pound bombs, and 1,700 500-pound bombs, Congressional sentiment is seemingly in favour of the status quo.  Despite the grumbling of some lawmakers, the general view is that the business of supplying the IDF is a sound one.  The killing of Palestinian civilians can, in all its ghoulishness and cruelty, continue.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. My temperament at the end of the 18th calendar week was shaped considerably by the recognition that the disputes which dominate the public debate, gaols and battlefields, not to mention the queues of suffering, have been quite successfully reduced to exchanges between those armed with fighter-bombers, assault rifles, judges and police and those whose principal responses are restricted to hide and/or die.

Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of government-sponsored universal literacy in the West as been to render large portions of the nominally educated incapable of reading and unwilling as well. By reading, I do not mean merely the consumption of print or screen text on whatever mass media is chosen. I mean reading as an auseinandersetzen, a deliberate almost surgical attention to the body of language in use. Instead I find even media claiming to be critical, obsequiously advising potential viewers, listeners, or readers of “potentially upsetting” content. I have heard that these are known as “trigger warnings”. Apparently in the world, with which I am only tangentially involved, has a series, perhaps malleable and innumerable, of words, images, and viewpoints that may not be publicly uttered. At the top end of the spectrum are the utterances deemed harmful because they could be “incitement”. Below that are those which suggest that the beliefs held by people real or imaginary, present or absent, are entitled to absolute protection regardless of content. An ambiguous class of “victims” has been created to satisfy the legal doctrines imposed by those in power– power they intend to preserve.

If I recall my school days with any veracity, then I cannot remember anyone who could object to criticism because it made the person “feel unsafe”. In fact, the whole basis of any critique, whether it was of personal conduct or academic performance, presumed that critique would make the person criticised feel “unsafe” with her or his conduct or performance. The very notion of being “wrong” implies discomfort or at least a desire to improve or correct the behaviour criticised, which logically could not be more comfortable once one has been criticised. The insincerity is obvious. Since unpleasantness cannot be tolerated, except when suppressed by pharmaments, the only ones allowed to raise objections to anything are those who are themselves anaesthetised.

Conspicuously, in the accumulating display of dissent among young people, mainly residing at universities, the students’ criticism is held to be a risk or violence against those who celebrate mass murder. This is a well established attitude with attendant repression. Almost all histories of the French Revolution of which I am aware treat the Bourbon monarch, his spouse and the estates that ruled France as victims of the Revolution. This is not an accident. Any ruling class prior to 1989 which had been deprived of its absolute power was held to be a victim, not a redundant, let alone, criminal perpetrator whose overthrow was an act of justice. After 1989 any government which could not be deposed by subterfuge and therefore was destroyed by force– either from air, land, or sea– was treated as justly punished once forces had accumulated sufficient to overthrow it. The citizens of the annexed GDR cannot claim to be victims of economic and political warfare, including bribery, election fraud, extortion, and other acts by the annexing agents which would ordinarily be subject to criminal prosecution. The citizens of Libya, since the savage murder and sodomising of their nation’s leader, are not victims of the forces who soiled the shores of Tripoli with bombs and blood.

This is not only a question of worthy vs. unworthy victims. It is a question far more serious: what is a victim in fact?

There was a time in the philosophical consideration of women’s rights when certain writers insisted that women were not victims. To call them victims was to deny their agency and far more importantly to deny the presence of institutional violence to which women (and other oppressed groups) were subjected. In essence a victim– this was the argument– was someone without power upon whom violence was exercised. Victimhood implied that the person was a mere object and suffered as if by act of god or nature. Instead by refusing to be treated or identified as a victim, real conflict was identified and the material exercise of excessive and unequal violence was made the focus of dispute.

Sadism and masochism rely on roles which are necessarily unequal with regard to the exercise of violence but not of force. The masochist plays the role of victim. The sadist plays the role of perpetrator. These two roles are dramatic complements. (It really is necessary to read de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom- La philosophie dans le boudoir -1795 – to understand how important sado-masochism is for contemporary politic-economy.) The performance of either sadist or masochist fails without the illusion of the victim. Christianity itself is a cult of victimhood. Its historical complement is a cult of perpetration. Thus the Sado-Masochism at the core of Western culture is prefigured in the term “Judeo-Christian”.

The legal regime created and enforced since 1945 and continuously reiterated is one which privileges victimhood but not human equality. However the victim is not the tortured, the expropriated, the displaced, or murdered. The victim is the performer of the role of “victim” who controls the stage upon which millions are abused, robbed and slaughtered while being labelled “terrorists”. These “terrorists” are the men, women, and children who refuse to perform in the theatre run for the titillation of the death cult that claims mastery over the world. Naturally they are not terrorists nor are they victims. However it is their refusal to play their appointed role in this malicious theatre that leaves the perpetrators no other choice but to feign the function of the helpless in the face of the merciless and evil.

Tearing away the mask of victimhood and confronting the face of evil power are necessary steps to restoring a playing field upon which Old Etonians and their like can be put in their proper place.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

This was the beginning of my education about Hamas, although I had previously been in touch with Dr. Bassem Naim, who was Minister of Health at the time, to coordinate our arrival. Dr. Naim was not the only MD in the Hamas cabinet. Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, who was Foreign Minister at the time, also welcomed a small group of us into his house, as well.

My view of Hamas is that they are a national liberation organization, which, like most such organizations, is depicted as terrorists by their oppressors, occupiers and enemies, in this case including Israel, the US and other western allies of Israel. We, who pride ourselves on hearing both sides of an issue, have never sought the Hamas point of view, much less to the same degree as the Israeli side.

I really don’t like the term terrorist any more than I do savage or barbarian, which have been used historically for much the same purpose. It is a pejorative term, almost a racist one, that paints in black and white. Every government and every resistance organization uses weapons, which means that they use fear and intimidation to a greater or lesser degree. Isn’t that the definition of terrorism? And isn’t it the purpose of armed forces?

Hamas, of course, is blamed for extensive use of terrorism on October 7, 2023. But if you look at the facts and the analyses, especially as reported by the Grayzone, the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, the exact opposite picture emerges. Not a single rape is verified, and not a single instance of deliberate killing of unarmed civilians, although some were obviously “collateral damage” killed in the process of engaging armed combatants.  Others may have been armed civilians or combatants out of uniform, part of a deliberate Israeli policy of creating armed settlements throughout territory that it claims. Many if not most of the civilians appear to have died as a result of the Israeli “Hannibal Directive” to kill everything in sight, while most of those killed by Hamas were soldiers. Furthermore, those who encountered or were taken captive by the Palestinian fighters often said that they were treated with respect and dignity. This is because the resistance forces are highly disciplined and devout Muslims who respect the teachings of Islam with respect to the rules of war, which are roughly the same as those of the Geneva Conventions, if not more stringent.

I am not prepared to say that Hamas has never committed an act that could be called terrorism. The suicide bombings of the Second Intifada come to mind. But they have also used nonviolent resistance on a massive scale, in the Great March of Return, during which more than 9,000 unarmed Palestinian civilians were shot by Israeli soldiers, and 223 killed. Sadly, the world looked the other way.

On the other hand, the following act, the video of which was posted to the Telegram channel of CCHS Resistance News on March 19, 2024 would meet most definitions of terrorism (caution: hard to watch): Jabalia girls school massacre

Israel, true to form, is reportedly doing everything possible to have this video removed from social media. But let’s face it: it’s not that exceptional. We’ve seen many such massacres since October 8, 2023, though not always at a girl’s school housing starving refugees in the Jabalia refugee camp, similar to the one I visited in 2008. It’s what we’ve come to expect as part of the Gaza genocide, despite our efforts to end it.

Is Israel a terrorist state? Apparently, they would be proud to say so. Even before its establishment, the Jabotinsky “Iron Wall” doctrine espoused expulsion and lethal force to clear the land of Palestinians and maintain a Jewish supremacist state. Israel has always explicitly relied upon fear and intimidation to achieve that objective. What Israel is doing in Gaza is not fundamentally different from what it did in 1948 except that its weapons today are vastly more destructive.

In 2006, I visited the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh the day after Israel had bombed it into obliteration. It was nothing more than a pile of rubble, still smoking in some places. Israel gave the name of that suburb to the doctrine that has dominated Zionist policy for the past century even if the name is recent. The Dahiyeh Doctrine became synonymous with the use of disproportionate force and the destruction of civilian infrastructure to achieve military ends. Is it terrorism? It’s certainly an explicit policy to commit war crimes. Is Israel committing terrorism in Gaza? You be the judge. Most of us agree that it is genocide. If there’s a distinction, who cares?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Corporate journalists are indeed ‘masters of self-adulation’, as Noam Chomsky has observed. In fact, they have to be; or at least they have to appear to be.

Consider BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson CBE, a long-term sparring partner and rare example of a BBC journalist who has bothered to reply to our challenges, often graciously. There have been times over the last two decades when Simpson genuinely seemed to get some of what we were saying. It’s no surprise, though, to read Simpson’s recent comment on X:

My colleagues at @itvnews, @SkyNews and @BBCNews jump through hoops to be balanced and impartial, and @Ofcom rightly holds us to the highest standard. Switch on @GBNews, and you watch unashamedly opinionated allegations being passed off as fact. What’s going on, Ofcom? (John Simpson, X, 25 February 2024)

Journalist Glenn Greenwald put this heroic claim in perspective:

The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.

But British media are the best of a bad bunch, right? Greenwald again, accurately:

The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.

I know it’s hard for people in other countries who hate their own media to believe, but whatever you hate about your country’s media, the UK media has in abundance and worse.

Indicatively, in November 2002, as Bush and Blair were trying to scare their way to war on Iraq, Simpson produced a BBC documentary called: ‘Saddam – A Warning From History’ (BBC1, 3 November 2002). The title was an unsubtle and ‘unashamedly opinionated’ reference to an earlier BBC series, ‘The Nazis – A Warning From History’. This, of course, was a comparison that dovetailed with the sleaziest themes of US-UK state propaganda.

In 2013, Simpson opined:

The US is still the world’s biggest economic and military power, but it seems to have lost the sense of moral mission that caused it to intervene everywhere from Vietnam to Iraq…

Alas, the US continues to struggle to regain its ‘sense of moral mission,’ as it supplies the missiles, bombs and diplomatic immunity fuelling the genocide in Gaza.

Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked

Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy

Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.

The BBC headline reporting this story read:

Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO

Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting.

Over a picture of an emaciated, skeletal child victim of Israeli starvation in Gaza, Peter Oborne made a related point:

If Gaza was Ukraine this terrible picture would be on every front page tomorrow morning.

Needless to say, that was not to be.

On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.

On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals

Author Assal Rad responded:

Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.

The Al-Rashid Humanitarian Aid ‘Tragedy’

What has been termed the ‘Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident’ – also described as ‘the Flour Massacre’ because the food convoy involved was carrying sacks of flour – occurred in Gaza on 29 February. At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid

And:

Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks

USA Today’s headline was surreal:

112 killed in Gaza food line carnage: Israel blames Palestinian aid drivers

On 1 March, a Guardian front-page headline read:

More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy

The standfirst (sub-heading):

Israeli military rejects claims it fired on crowd and blames deadly crush

Imagine that second, high-profile comment in response to claims of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine, especially if Russia had inflicted comparable levels of near-total destruction on Ukraine.

It wasn’t that the truth was unavailable. One day before the Guardian headline appeared, the UK’s sole left-wing national newspaper, the Morning Star, published this online headline, which appeared in the print edition the following day:

ISRAELI ARMY FIRES INTO CROWD WAITING FOR FOOD, KILLING 104

Compare also its standfirst:

ATROCITY: Gaza death toll tops 30,000 after soldiers gunned down starving civilians as they unloaded aid lorries

On 1 March, Associated Press reported:

The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of the Palestinians wounded in the bloodshed surrounding an aid convoy said Friday that more than 80% had been struck by gunfire, suggesting there was heavy shooting by Israeli troops. (Our emphasis)

The following day, a BBC headline read:

Fergal Keane: Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza

A massacre is first and foremost a crime, not a tragedy. The BBC continued to muddle the picture:

After the events at al-Rashid Street in Gaza, in which more than 100 people were reported killed after a rush on an aid convoy, the international community is under pressure to tackle the growing crisis of hunger in the territory, as Fergal Keane reports from Jerusalem. (Our emphasis)

The focus on people reported killed in a ‘tragedy’ ‘after a rush on an aid convoy’ suggested death by trampling, or perhaps troops shooting in panic at a rampaging mob. It led away from the truth that Israeli main battle tanks fired on starving civilians with heavy machine guns. While the word ‘tragedy’ was used four times in the report, the words ‘massacre’, ‘crime’ and ‘atrocity’ were not mentioned. These were Keane’s opening sentences after the introduction specifically mentioning the mass death in al-Rashid Street:

They die in all kinds of places and ways. Broken under the rubble of their homes, blasted by explosives, punctured by high velocity bullets, cut open by flying shards of metal.

And now – as the war enters its fifth month – death from hunger has come to haunt Gaza.

It is essential to know the when, what and how of the tragedy at al-Rashid Street.

Again, this obscured the fact that ‘now’ – in the incident actually under discussion – death also came from high velocity bullets, not hunger.

On 1 March, the much-vaunted BBC Verify – ostensibly tasked to sift truth from allegation – described the massacre as ‘a tragic incident’. The words ‘massacre’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘crime’ were not used. 9/11 was also ‘a tragic incident’, but that’s not how it would ever be described. Paul Brown of BBC Verify reported:

The tragic incident has given rise to differing claims about what happened and who was responsible for the carnage.

Brown commented on video footage:

Volleys of gunfire can be heard and people are seen scrambling over lorries and ducking behind the vehicles. Red tracer rounds can be seen in the sky.

Mahmoud Awadeyah [a journalist at the scene] said the Israeli vehicles had started firing at people when the aid arrived.

“Israelis purposefully fired at the men… they were trying to get near the trucks that had the flour,” he said. “They were fired at directly and prevented people to come near those killed.”

Brown added:

Dr Mohamed Salha, interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, where many of the dead and injured were taken, told the BBC: “Al-Awda hospital received around 176 injured people… 142 of these cases are bullet injuries and the rest are from the stampede and broken limbs in the upper and lower body parts.”

Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

The Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring analysed 176,627 television clips from over 13 broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Sky and Channel 4 from 7 October – 7 November 2023. The report found that Israeli perspectives were referenced almost three times more (4,311) than Palestinian ones (1,598).

This is an exact reversal of performance on the Russia-Ukraine war by our supposedly independent and impartial ‘free press’.

A BBC report on 5 March stated:

Last Thursday, more than 100 Palestinians were killed as crowds rushed to reach an aid convoy operated by private contractors that was being escorted by Israeli forces west of Gaza City.

Palestinian health officials said dozens were killed when Israeli forces opened fire. Israel’s military said most died from either being trampled on or run over by the aid lorries. It said soldiers near the aid convoy had fired towards people who approached them and who they considered a threat.

Those are indeed the two competing versions of events. Was the BBC unable to find meaningful testimony from the hundreds of eyewitnesses to what happened, as they invariably manage to do in reporting alleged Russian crimes in Ukraine?

According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, an eyewitness at the scene, Israeli firing occurred in two bursts: the first as people seized food from the convoy, the second when the crowd returned to the trucks:

After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,’ he said.

Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.

Hossam Abu Shaar, a 29-year-old resident of Gaza City, who was injured in the attack, said of the gunfire:

“It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured. I was among the very few lucky ones,” he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by.

”I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.

”I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific. We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera.”

CBS reported eyewitness Anwar Helewa:

We ran towards the food aid. The soldiers then started firing at us, and so we left the food and ran.

On 5 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights commented:

UN experts condemned the violence unleashed by Israeli forces, which killed at least 112 people gathered to collect flour in Gaza last week, as a “massacre” amid conditions of inevitable starvation and destruction of the local food production system in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

The UN added of its experts:

They noted that the 29 February massacre followed a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid, with over 14 recorded incidents of shooting, shelling and targeting groups gathered to receive urgently needed supplies from trucks or airdrops between mid-January and the end of February 2024.

“Israel has also opened fire on humanitarian aid convoys on several occasions, despite the fact that the convoys shared their coordinates with Israel,” the experts said.

None of this has been of much interest to the Western press. Media Matters reported that from February 29 to March 3, Fox News dedicated just 12 minutes of coverage to the massacre, noting:

During that period, Fox News aired only 1 interview about the carnage: a conversation with spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which she blamed Hamas for Israeli military violence without evidence.

Conclusion

It is instructive to compare this latest apologetic performance with media responses to the Houla massacre in Syria in 2012 where words like ‘murder’, ‘massacre’ and ‘atrocity’ – all instantly pinned on Syrian government forces – were the norm. This BBC headline was standard:

Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows

Note the very different, damning tone of the opening lines below:

Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.

The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.

On the BBC’s News at Ten, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins claimed:

The UN now says most victims, including many children, were murdered inside their homes by President Assad’s militias. (Robbins, BBC News at Ten, 29 May 2012)

See our 2-part media alert, ‘Massacres That Matter’, for detail and discussion on this long-term trend in reporting. See, also, our alert, ‘A Tale of Two “Massacres” – Jenin and Racak.’

Even more striking, of course, is the fact that in 2011 all major Western media propagandised heavily for the US-UK overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya, not for committing a massacre, but on the basis of fake claims that Gaddafi was planning a massacre in Benghazi.

We began with John Simpson’s lauding of the BBC, so let’s end with a couple of comments from the great and the good of BBC journalism. The BBC’s then Chief Political Correspondent, Norman Smith, declared that Cameron ‘must surely feel vindicated’ by the fall of Gaddafi. (Smith, BBC News online, 21 October 2011)

With Libya in ruins, the BBC’s John Humphrys asked sagely:

What, apart from a sort of moral glow… have we got out of it? (Humphrys, BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 21 October 2011)

The answer, of course, was oil.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.

Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.

The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).

The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.

While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.

The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.

The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.

The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.

One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.

Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.

In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.

The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.

One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.

The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.

Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.

The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.

Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.

The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?

That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.

On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?

Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.

Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.

— André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.

On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:

‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’

The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials.

But such a view is deemed too extreme for respectable BBC discourse. Even today, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg glibly notes:

Labour nerves still jangle over what went so terribly wrong in Iraq, even after all these years.

The implication, endlessly channelled by the BBC, is that a ‘disastrous miscalculation’ occurred, rather than an international war crime leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis; a crime for which no western leader, or their media cheerleaders, has ever been tried in court. That outcome, in any serious responsible society, would have been more fitting than mere ‘jangling nerves’ among politicians.

But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. This transformation is a power-serving alchemy turning the base metal of brutal realpolitik into the gold of benign intention, all for public consumption.

Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:

In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.

— Chomsky, Interventions, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p. 101.

It does not matter how frequently, or how horrifically, this benevolent claim is violated by Western countries, journalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.)

The list goes on and on. You might well ask: at what point do supposedly astute, well-informed, senior editors and political correspondents simply stop regurgitating government propaganda; even start challenging it? How much blood has to be spilled, how many lives lost, how much vital infrastructure – homes, hospitals, power plants – destroyed by ‘our’ weaponry, with ‘our’ diplomatic, political and economic support?

But, of course, serious media challenge of elite power is highly unlikely. ‘Successful’ media professionals are fed through an industrial filter system that rewards steady adherence to state-approved narratives. As Chomsky once so memorably told a discombobulated Andrew Marr:

I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’

Misleading The Public Is State Policy

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observed:

a basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes.

— Curtis, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, Vintage, London, 2004, p. 3.

He added:

in every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.

— Ibid., p. 3.

This is especially true when it comes to Western terrorism. But what exactly is terrorism? The definition from a US army manual is:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

— Chomsky, ‘The new war against terror’, talk given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 October 2001.

By this definition, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:

The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.

— Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.

The US-UK-supported genocidal attacks by Israel on the people of Gaza, now extending to over 100 days, have made it ever more difficult for politicians and managers of public perception to maintain the myth of western benevolence and a ‘global rules-based order’.

The Financial Times reported last October:

Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.

The FT article continued:

“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost…Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

The senior G7 diplomat added:

What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?

Why indeed.

Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, observed recently that:

I think this notion of international rules is very comfortable for some people to use when it suits them but they don’t believe in international rules when it doesn’t suit them. Because they don’t apply international rules or law equally in all circumstances.

She added:

You can’t say because Ukraine has been invaded, suddenly sovereignty is important, but it was never important for Palestine.

To put it bluntly, the notion of the West upholding a rules-based international system is a blood-drenched myth.

Gaza – A War ‘To Save Western Civilisation’

Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The case was brought under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. On 28 October last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech in which he compared the Palestinians to the Biblical people of Amalek. In the first Book of Samuel, God commanded King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel:

Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.

We could find no reference to Netanyahu’s genocidal comparison of the Palestinians to the Amalekites on the BBC News website.

Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. In other words, over 70 per cent of those killed are women and children. Around four per cent of Gaza’s population has either been killed, wounded or is missing under rubble.

According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. These include many families who have been displaced multiple times, forcibly and repeatedly moved to try to flee Israel’s bombardment. But, as the UN has warned, there is no safe place in Gaza. Oxfam reported that Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, exceeding the daily death toll of any other major 21st century conflict. Many more lives are at risk from hunger, disease and cold, warned Oxfam.

As of 30 December, about 65,000 residential units in Gaza had been destroyed or made uninhabitable and over 290,000 housing units had been damaged, meaning that over half a million people will have no home to return to. Thirty out of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals are not functioning, and the remaining six are only partially functioning.

Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:

Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.

Cook pointed out that it is significant that South Africa has brought the case of genocide against Israel. Both countries ‘bear the trauma of Europe’s long history of racial supremacism, but each has drawn precisely opposite lessons.’ As Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, said:

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the genocidal attacks on Gaza as a war ‘to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilisation.’ As the political writer Caitlin Johnstone pointed out, Herzog was right; but not in the way he intended. She explained:

The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.

Johnstone continued:

For centuries western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.

She added:

What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.

A BBC News report on the ICJ proceedings was titled, with fake balance, ‘South Africa’s genocide case against Israel: Both sides play heavy on emotion in ICJ hearing’. This was a distortion of the truth: the South African case was presented with dignity, clarity and forensic detail. As the BBC conceded deep in its report, it was Israel who made a strong appeal to emotions, displaying the images of 132 missing Israelis – most of them still being held hostage in Gaza. But, as Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted of Israel’s legal case:

Its repeated invocation of Hamas’s horrible 7 October attack and alleged genocidal aspirations are irrelevant because atrocities by one side do not justify genocide by another. Its argument of self-defence is beside the point because a legitimate defence does not allow genocide.

BBC News marked one hundred days of the current phase of the Israel-Palestine crisis with a classic example of propaganda bias. The BBC website headlined a major 3,000-word piece on the October 7 attacks. Underneath, there was a tiny link to a one-minute video of footage from Gaza that clearly underplayed the level of destruction. This is called BBC ‘impartiality’.

True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:

South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.

Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:

I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.

He added:

I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. Actually, if I remember correctly, that question started with a few words, “Just a quick one”. And then the question was asked and Kirby responded in this utterly disgusting way when the most important issue on the planet is in front of him, and couldn’t do more than one dismissive, phony and false statement. But then there’s no follow-up [by the journalists at the press briefing]. Then they move on to the next topic. And the next topic.

Sachs continued:

Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. That’s why I was grateful for today’s [ICJ] court proceedings because there were hours to put forward the evidence. There is a detailed legal complaint. There are dozens of countries that have supported this. But the US government is all spin, all propaganda, and all attempt at narrative control.

This is, of course, standard behaviour for the world’s major perpetrator of terrorism.

The Language Of Genocide

Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. Last month, Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the highly-respected Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. Philo and Berry noted that:

The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).

But more importantly:

The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.

Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, once observed that what is routinely missing from BBC coverage is that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land:

demeans and degrades people: not just the killing and the destruction, but the humiliation, the attempt to crush the human spirit and remove the identity; not just the bullet in the brain and the tank through the door, but the faeces Israel’s soldiers rub on the plundered ministry walls, the trashed kindergarten; the barriers to a people’s work, prayers and hopes.

Emre Azizlerli, a former senior BBC producer, said recently via X (formerly Twitter):

I worked there for over 20 years. Internal boards determine who gets promoted by a panel of the applicant’s superiors. The political likes and dislikes of those at the very top easily trickle down in this chain mechanism all the way down to how producers behave, since everyone wants to please their boss to move ahead.

No wonder that a Morning Star tribute to the late John Pilger, who reported on Palestine over many years, noted that his death ‘leaves a void’, adding:

There are few investigative journalists of his courage or integrity. And designedly so. From the censorship of “hostile” voices across the internet to the outrageous incarceration of Julian Assange, every effort is being made to stamp out independent journalism.

Throughout his career, Pilger drew attention to the role of the media as ‘an appendage of established power’. Addressing a conference last March, organised by the Morning Star, he called for:

urgent debate and activism around the issue of the media… the media was rarely a friend of working people, but there were spaces for independent journalists in the mainstream.

He continued:

My own career is testament to that. Until a few years ago I worked in mainstream newspapers — in later years the Guardian mainly — but the Guardian like the others is now closed to independent thinking and honest journalism… we need to understand that the media is now fully integrated into an extremist state, and that working people must look elsewhere — to the Morning Star, yes, and to oases on the internet where good journalism flourishes.

Pilger often cast a sceptical eye on those whom we are supposed to regard as the best journalists working in the major news media. They are nevertheless performing a propaganda role by demarcating the permissible limits of reporting. For example:

BBC reporter, Jeremy Bowen, who talks about a war between Israel and Hamas. Bowen knows that’s wrong. It’s an attack on an occupied people by the occupier, Israel, backed by great powers.

State-corporate journalism – BBC News is a prime example – is far removed from the mythical notion of reporting the truth to the public. As the playwright John McGrath once wrote:

The gentlemen at the head of the powerful opinion-forming corporations do not wish to have their articulate mediation of reality disturbed by a group of people going around with a different story, seeing events from a different perspective, even selecting different information. Still less do they wish to have the population at large emerging from their mental retreat – the inner exile of the powerless and alienated – and demanding a share of power, of control, of freedom.’

— McGrath, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, Nick Hern Books, 1981, pp. 89-90.

We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

I never thought I’d live to see a British prime minister warmly embracing a war criminal and genocidal thug like Netanyahu, go swanning around a hotel (the King David) which was used as the Jerusalem headquarters of the British Mandate aúthority and blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946, killing 91 and wounding 45, then tell Netanyahu: “We want you to win.”

Win what, exactly? And who’s “we”? Certainly not the man-in-the-street in Britain. No, it’ll be that band of brainwashed Ziofreaks in Westminster who have shamed us for over a century.

And they (the Ziofreaks, not “we”) want Israel to win its dirty 75-year campaign of terror, illegal military occupation, dispossession, annexation, ethnic cleansing and extreme cruelty against the harshly oppressed Palestinians who are trying to defend their homeland.

I was even more infuriated to see queues of lorries carrying desperately needed aid held up for days at Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt by the Israelis’ refusal to let them enter the mangled hell-hole they’ve created in the packed enclave. I hear they even bombed the crossing to make sure nothing could move.

Bypass Israel if necessary and deliver aid by sea

If the UN and the high and mighty powers wanted to, they could bypass Israeli and Egyptian cruelty and bring aid to Gaza by sea. They should have done so as soon as Israel slapped its illegal blockade on Gaza in 2006 following Hamas’s inconvenient election win. As it is, unarmed privateers have been left to try to break the siege.

In February 2003 British surgeon David Halpin chartered a small Danish cargo vessel, MV Barbara, filled her with important humanitarian items and sailed from Torquay to Ashdod, a port on the Israeli coast close to Gaza where the cargo was transferred by road into Gaza without too much trouble.

In 2008 two humanitarian vessels actually got through to Gaza. Their success in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention of the British Foreign Office. Before the peace activists set sail, they asked the British government “to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.

The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells later admitted that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.”

Nearly three years later, as Gaza Freedom Flotilla II prepared to sail, Israel was determined not to let the boats reach their destination because safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through Israel’s control-freakery. This prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council:

“We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II.

In the end Flotilla II didn’t sail. In all, five shipments were reportedly allowed access prior to the 2008–09 Gaza War, but after that everything was blocked by Israel.

In May 2010 the Mavi Marmara took part in a flotilla of ships operated by activist groups from 37 countries with the intention of directly confronting the Israeli blockade. While en route and in international waters Israeli Naval Forces communicated to them that a naval blockade around the Gaza area was in force and ordered the ships to follow them to Ashdod port or be boarded. The ships declined and were boarded in international waters.

Reports from journalists on the Mavi Marmara and from the UN claimed that Israeli gunboats opened fire with live rounds before boarding the ship. Passengers tried to repell the boarding parties of  Israeli commandos, and in the violent clash that followed nine were killed and a tenth died four years later of his wounds. Several dozen more were injured, some seriously. Israel claimed 10 of its troops were injured, one seriously.

The UN’s official report found Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be legal, but other UN experts, reporting to the Human Rights Council, disagreed and found it was a violation of international law.

A UN fact-finding mission, investigating the assault on the Mavi Marmara, declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception” and they therefore found that the interception was illegal and constituted collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It could not even be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].

The Centre for Constitutional Rights also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was illegal under international law and amounted to collective punishment. “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”

Craig Murray, an internationally recognized authority on these matters, was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He said that Israel had tried to justify previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing an embargo under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. “San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”

At the same time UN Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasised “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and called for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.

But when MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides put a question to the EU Commission this was their reply:

After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza….

The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.

It might have been scripted in Tel Aviv and not by anyone with Christian principles. The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate.

There’s nothing “provocative” about unarmed vessels with humanitarian cargoes using it. The organizers had offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to deal with a belligerent regime that was (and still is) cruelly waging a starvation war on women and children. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.

And where are the UN when a rogue nation – also a UN member – shows contempt for their maritime Convention?

By 2018 Her Majesty’s Government had abandoned all pretence of upholding the Law of the Seas or even pursuing its 2008 policy of intervening to obtain advance clearance from the Israeli authorities. The Foreign Office appeared to have joined the Zionist conspiracy to legitimise the Gaza blockade and support Israel’s control-freakery.

Lord Ahmad for the Government, answering a written question in the House of Lords, said: “Embassy officials discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June….. the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza including the waters off Gaza.”

The waters off Gaza are international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas. Why shouldn’t unarmed aid boats be able sail there unmolested? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? And why is the UN not upholdings its own Convention?

In particular, what happened to the diplomacy of 2008? Why didn’t our Government arrange advance clearance as before? Or were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission?

In reply to a question from myself, Alister Burt, minister for the Middle East at that time, said: “Delivery of aid should be co-ordinated with the UN and Israeli and Egyptian Governments. We expect Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law. If wrongdoing has taken place we expect those responsible to be held to account…. We remain deeply concerned about restrictions on movement and access in Gaza, and the impact that this is having on the humanitarian situation. We have frequent discussions with the Israeli Government about the need to ease restrictions on Gaza. We call on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt to work together to ensure a durable solution for Gaza.”

As if Israel ever respected international law or had ever been held to account.

So here we have a horrific humanitarian crisis where the population of Gaza (nearly half of whom are children) are badly injured, starving and bombed out of their homes, with few if any public services still functioning and with aid waiting outside and prevented from entering by Israel.

This is an acid test for the United Nations and the international community who need to show their real worth and recover the respect they have carelessly lost over the years.

They are drinking in the Last Chance saloon and this is possibly their final opportunity to prove that the world has, after all, developed moral sensibilities and emerged from the caveman era. All it takes is a mercy flotilla of ships belonging to few UN member states, not privateers, to bring the Middle East issue to a head so the root causes can finally be dealt with in accordance with international law.

In short, the lives of 2.3 million innocent, incarcerated Gazan cannot be left in the hands of a psychopath like Netanyahu. Nor can the Israelis be allowed to dictate the wider future of the Holy Land they have defiled.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor

For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.

The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.

Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.

Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.

Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.

Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.

Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.

War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.

The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.

News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.

If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.

Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor

For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.

The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.

Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.

Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.

Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.

Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.

Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.

War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.

The tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home. The horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, the American-run prison in Iraq, involved “US military personnel humiliating, hurting and abusing Iraqi prisoners in a myriad of perverse ways. While American servicemen and women smiled and gave thumbs up, naked men were threatened by dogs, or were hooded, forced into sexual positions, placed standing with wires attached to their bodies, or left bleeding on prison floors.” Adding to the descent into moral depravity, the United States government legalized the use of torture, including waterboarding, in violation of international law and in the so-called pursuit of national security. The ramifications have been far-reaching, with domestic police mirroring a battlefield mindset in their encounters with American citizens, including the use of torture tactics at secret locations such as Homan Square in Chicago.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.

News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.

If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.

Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 22 years after the USA Patriot Act was unleashed on a vulnerable nation, we are still reeling from the destruction it has wrought on our freedoms.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Last Friday foreign affairs minister Mélanie Joly tweeted, “I spoke with Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism Irwin Cotler today, where I congratulated him on his Israel Presidential Medal of Honour. Irwin, Canada is stronger because of your work to advance human rights everywhere.”

Cotler was one of 13 individuals recently given a prize by President Isaac Herzog for making “an extraordinary contribution to the State of Israel, the Jewish people, and all humanity.”

The apartheid state is right to celebrate Cotler. Married to a “close confidant” of Likud founder Menachem Begin, Cotler has committed his adult life to promoting colonialism. The former Liberal justice minister continues this work even as fascistic, Jewish supremacist extremists, have taken the reins of power in Israel.

In a sign of his devotion to apartheid, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism recently co-wrote a National Post commentary in support of blocking the World Court from releasing a legal opinion on Palestine. In “Canada must continue to defend Israel against baseless United Nations attack”, Cotler responded (indirectly) to criticism of the Trudeau government submitting a statement opposing an International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion as per a UN General Assembly resolution titled “Israeli Practices Affecting the Human rights of the Palestinian People in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”. The resolution requested the UN legal authority deliver an advisory opinion on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” Cotler and the Trudeau government don’t believe the ICJ should assent to the General Assembly’s request to provide its legal opinion!

Previously, Cotler pressed the International Criminal Court to ignore Israeli war crimes and for Ottawa to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem. He’s attended events put on by the racist Jewish National Fund and met with far-right colonists seeking to cleanse occupied East Jerusalem of Palestinians. In May 2021 the former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress rallied behind Israel’s violence and earlier defended its shooting of ‘march of return’ protesters in Gaza as well as the 2014 and 2009 attacks on Gaza that left nearly 4,000 dead. Just after Israel killed 1,200 Lebanese in the summer of 2006 Cotler spoke to a conference of top Israeli military officials on the importance of managing the message in modern war.

As part of his government’s multifaceted contribution to Palestinian dispossession, Justin Trudeau made Cotler Canada’s inaugural special envoy three years ago. The envoy has $1.1 million to spend annually promoting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism and protecting Israel from growing criticism. (A recent Ekos poll found that 38 per cent of Canadians with an opinion believe Israel maintains a system “similar to apartheid” and 20 percent labelled it a state that “restricted minority rights” while only 11 per cent consider it a “vibrant democracy.”). In a sign of his comfort with crying victimhood to enable supremacism, Cotler took on probably the only Canadian named by an official university inquiry to have fabricated claims of antisemitism to smear Palestine solidarity activists. Despite a 2017 McGill University inquiry concluding as much about Noah Lew, Cotler hired Lew as a policy and program analyst.

A Canadian Jewish News article about Cotler receiving the Israeli presidential prize offers some insight into Cotler’s commitment to denouncing human rights violations by enemies of the US empire. “I am feeling delighted at the recognition of my father for his tremendous work advancing human rights and doing so while making it very clear that it is synonymous with upholding the right of the State of Israel”, said Michal Cotler-Wunsh, a former member of the Israeli Knesset. Recently made Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, Cotler-Wunsh’s comment suggests her father’s human rights campaigning is designed to build establishment credibility to better promote Jewish supremacy in Israel.

In a concrete example, Cotler’s Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights invited the new Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to deliver its 2023 Elie Wiesel Distinguished Lectureship in Human Rights. According to the information available online, the May meeting wasn’t specifically about Israel. But does anybody believe the lecture wasn’t partly designed to influence the ICC prosecutor as part of the apartheid lobby’s aggressive campaign to have the court ignore Israel’s war crimes?

Another example of Cotler using his ‘human rights’ standing to advance Jewish supremacy is his response to calling Israel an apartheid state. Prior to all the major human rights groups finding that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, Cotler repeatedly responded to activists’ claims that Israel was an apartheid state by invoking his role in challenging the “real” version in South Africa.

Cotler has succeeded in getting the dominant media to relay the idea he was central to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s lawyer, which is a distortion well detailed in “Irwin Cotler And The Mandela Effect”. As being against South African apartheid has taken on greater mainstream status, Cotler has increasingly sought to identify as a leader in that struggle despite the fact he has a well-known association with the party that refused a House of Commons request to condemn Mandela’s imprisonment (Lester Pearson in 1964) and opposed taking action to lessen Canadian complicity with the racist regime (Pierre Trudeau 1968 – 84).

Cotler’s tale about struggling to oppose South African apartheid garners him moral standing to deflect criticism of Israeli apartheid. It also helps obscure the links/similarities between Israel and the South African regime.

When Cotler received the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice prize – named after arch Zionist former Democrat Congressman Tom Lantos who promoted both US invasions of Iraq – the Globe and Mail published a story headlined “Canadian Irwin Cotler, who helped free Mandela, given prestigious human-rights award.” Even though the August article had nothing explicitly to do with the Middle East, Canadian for Justice and Peace in the Middle East pushed the Globe to correct their headline. CJPME understands that Cotler’s Mandela tale serves his anti-Palestinian agenda.

Israel has great interest in developing ‘human rights’ activists and groups that defend it (or at least ignore its crimes). Liberal minded supporters of Israel don’t want to feel that they are backing oppression and Cotler is among those who help do that.

Objectively, Cotler’s human rights campaigning in service of US imperial aims has helped defend Israeli apartheid. Any honest person who agrees that all human beings have equal rights, including Palestinians, will understand that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yves Engler.

Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.

Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.

Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation, which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardment in 2011.

Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), My Last Meal, 2019.

The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy, the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000 Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’, said Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.

The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised. Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in 24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said, ‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk’.

Faiza Ramadan (Libya), The Meeting, 2011.

Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In 2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and 1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company, but the company left the country during the war. The project was never completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work was simply not carried out.

Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970 (February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on the country and resolution 1973 (March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed to the ceasefire, a proposal he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index (the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower on any such list.

Tewa Barnosa (Libya), War Love, 2016.

Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’. There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to understanding the carnage in Derna.

NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger. This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.

Najla Shawkat Fitouri (Libya), Sea Wounded, 2021.

Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last week.

A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10 September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote, ‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace; and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented. Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.

The rain
Exposes the drenched streets,
the cheating contractor,
and the failed state.
It washes everything,
bird wings
and cats’ fur.
Reminds the poor
of their fragile roofs
and ragged clothes.
It awakens the valleys,
shakes off their yawning dust
and dry crusts.
The rain
a sign of goodness,
a promise of help,
an alarm bell.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by NedMedia.

Israeli Human Rights organization, B’Tselem,  describes how the Israeli government encourages the settlements

Most of the settlements in the West Bank are defined as national priority areas. Accordingly, the settlers and other Israeli citizens working or investing in the settlements are entitled to significant financial benefits. These benefits are provided by six government ministries: the Ministry of Construction and Housing (generous loans for the purchase of apartments, part of which is converted to a grant); the Israel Lands Administration (significant price reductions in leasing land); the Ministry of Education (incentives for teachers, exemption from tuition fees in kindergartens, and free transportation to school); the Ministry of Industry and Trade (grants for investors, infrastructure for industrial zones, etc.); the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (incentives for social workers); and the Ministry of Finance (reductions in income tax for individuals and companies).

Benefits are an inducement and not an excuse to acquire stolen property and are no reason to harass neighbors in an extreme and violent manner. Criminally attacking innocent Palestinians in adjacent villages gives the settlers a feeling of being all-powerful, all-commanding, all-authoritative, and having the right to murder, rob, and torch anyone they want.

The world treats the settlers as ultra-nationalists, as people with overzealous prophecies who are eager to fulfill a commitment to their God. They run amok because their beliefs are amok. Their violence must be stopped and, hopefully, legal and moral forces will subdue them. The word, as usual, is naive.

These hilltop villains arrive with a twisted mission — to bring their select group back to a land they fanatically believe God has given to them. People are entitled to their myths and ahistorical stories as a central focus to hold their ethnicity together; they are not entitled to take fantasy, pose it as a reality, and use the subverted reality for diabolical purposes. The settlers’ existence depends upon denying existence to others. The settlers’ principal purpose in life is to disturb the lives of others. They have often operated as a murderous contingent, completely unattached to reality, and finding pleasure in dominating their victims.

Not wanting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a euphemism for the Israel Offensive Forces (IOF), to be identified with the intended genocide of the Palestinian people, the Israeli government has purposely selected and conveniently installed the Orthodox Jews to play the role of shock troops for the government, commit the mayhem and carry out the vicious deeds. The ever-alert and just-around-the-corner police and military forces always arrive too late to halt the crimes committed against Palestinian villagers. No matter how severe the crime, the criminals are rarely apprehended, and if apprehended, never severely punished.

After decades of suffering under extreme oppression, with no end in sight, with oppressors who could live as well in other places, the destruction of the Palestinian people has unique qualities that defy rational thought. Particularly unique is the Western world’s assistance to the destruction, where, for the first time in history, external forces support and encourage mass violence against an established community, done in solicitation from Israel and in cooperation with foreign groups.

Examine the attacks from the promotions by the underwriters to the actions of the perpetrators and we learn that the attacks are a conspiracy of the unsettled and the deadly strikes on the Palestinians reverberate throughout the world; we are all menacingly affected and do not realize it.

Religious Right evangelists, multitudes of Jewish organizations, compromised political hacks, and the easily deluded, without compunction and without care of the damage they do to others, actively assist Israel in its deliberate repression of the Palestinians. The calamities that these partners in crime inflict upon the Palestinians are identifiable; their effect upon much of the rest of the world’s population is not understood. Political and policy subversion, financial corruption, moral degradation, harmful machinations against individuals that feature false charges of anti-Semitism, indoctrination, and unnecessary military actions are some of the calamities perpetrated against American citizens.

Military Action

In the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government fooled its population and Americans suffered casualties from the treachery. The “intelligence assessment” that Sadaam Hussein was prepared to finalize the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and attack the United States proved false and the reasons for the invasion became a hoax. Not revealed was that the hoax was a hoax. The George W. Bush administration’s reason for the invasion was not due to its fear of Hussein acquiring advanced weapons of mass destruction, it was due to the Israel-friendly neoconservatives — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, and Elliot Abrams — convincing the administration that a strong Iraq could become the central military power of the Middle East, be able to confront Israel, and should be defeated. How do we know this

It is ridiculous to assume that a government and its intelligence agencies could believe that Sadaam Hussein was “secretly creating biological agents using mobile laboratories in “road-trailer units and rail cars.” Laboratories for biological agents are fixed in tightly controlled and specifically designed buildings to maintain clean air and prevent escape of the deadly agents. How was this “secret operation” discovered? It wasn’t; it came from a supposed interview by German intelligence with one person, an Iraqi dissident, Rafid Alwan, known as Curveball. CNN investigated Curveball.

Subsequent U.S. investigations into the intelligence failure around the claims found that German intelligence considered the defector “crazy” and “out of control,” while friends said he was a “liar.” Just days after Powell’s presentation, U.N. weapons inspectors presented evidence they said disproved those claims. But six weeks later, on March 20, 2003, the United States launched its invasion, toppling Hussein’s government in three weeks but locking itself in a war against an insurgency that has cost more than 4,000 American lives. No biological weapons, no germ labs, no weapons of mass destruction of any kind were found in Iraq after the invasion.

Did Saddam Hussein try to acquire uranium yellowcake or aluminum tubes for developing nuclear weapons? He did not, but even if he did, the Iraqi leader did not have the equipment for enriching the uranium. What did he need and how long would it take to enrich the yellowcake? Iran claimed to have converted a few tons of yellowcake in 2004 and they still do not have sufficient uranium for a nuclear weapon.

Why did the U.S. government and its expert intelligence agencies believe Hussein was manufacturing biological weapons and seeking material for making a nuclear weapon? They could not and they did not believe the ridiculous propositions; it was just a way to trick the populace into thinking evidence was available that proved Hussein sought weapons of mass destruction and to justify the invasion without disclosing the real reason.

The neocons were intimately involved with Israel and promoted Israel’s interests. They had already produced a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the document recommended the removal of Saddam Hussein. Couple the fact that the United States had no reason to attack Iraq with the constant urgings by the influential neocons in the Bush administration to topple Hussein and we have the reason for the unreasonable invasion of Iraq.

International Terrorism

International terrorism has caused havoc to Americans. This violent phenomenon would exist apart from Israel, but Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians has strengthened the terrorist ranks. How has Israel contributed to international terrorism? Osama bin Laden clarified that conjecture

Osama Bin Laden Warns America, CBS News by Joel Arak, October 30, 2004

He (bin-Laden) said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.
“While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women,” he said.

From Lawfare

Recently declassified information from the first-ever interrogation of someone presumed to be a senior al-Qaeda operative captured after 9/11 provides dramatic new insights into Osama bin Laden’s plans for a follow-up attack to Sept. 11. Specifically, bin Laden was plotting a major attack in Israel, a move consistent with his obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. support for Israel. The attack was thwarted at the last minute.

The Middle East Institute connects Israel to the rise of Jihadists.

A number of jihadist groups have made Palestine a central tenet of their political goals. Over the years, Al Qaeda, one of the most powerful global jihadist outfits, has often mentioned Palestine in its various communications.
Consequently, the [ISIS} narratives target the United States, as a key ally of Israel and a direct contributor to the plight of the Ummah. Several European nations, along with Australia and Canada are also criticized for their recent calls to boycott the United Nations conference on racism — aimed at demonstrating Israel’s apartheid on Palestinians.

Financial

The American public rebels at swollen government budgets, huge government deficit spending, and punishing government debt, all intended to help the American nation, and refrains from voicing anger at the unnecessary government contributions to the foreign nation of Israel and its people.

As part of an agreement, signed by former president Barack Obama in 2016, the U.S. taxpayers pledged to give the Israel war machine $3.8 billion annually until 2029. The agreement releases Israel from budgeting funds for its military and diverts those funds to build settlements. In effect, Obama told Netanyahu, “You build the settlements and we’ll supply the weapons for militarizing them.”

As of March 1, 2023, the Congressional Research Service documents that the “United States has provided Israel $158 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.” The Jewish Virtual Library has a similar figure of $152 billion until the year 2022.

Unknown to most of the American public is how it subsidizes the settlements. The Washington Post had  a revealing opinion story on the subject

From 2009 to 2013, more than $220 million was sent across the ocean and into schools, synagogues and playgrounds dotting the hills of Judea and Samaria. Millions of tax-subsidized dollars have gone to Jewish settlements in Hebron, helping to sustain a grim reality in the segregated part of the city, where Palestinian movement is sharply restricted and their economic life has been suffocated.

Political System

In 2020, 28% of voters referred to themselves as white evangelicals. Overwhelmingly, they cast their votes for Republican candidates. The two most important issues for these churchgoers are Right to Life and support for Israel. The former is more talk than walk; candidates who run on a platform that includes women’s rights to abortion have done well. The latter issue, which is losing adherents in a younger bloc of the “saved,” serves Israel; many politicos have lost the evangelical vote and elections because they lacked unwavering support for Israel. Trump would be in Nowheresville if he defied the evangelicals and criticized Israel.

Led by Pastor John Hagee, founder and chairperson of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), dozens of spokespersons for the evangelical community spend prime time praising Israel to the faithful. In 2013, a Pew poll showed that 82 percent of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Israel was given by God to the Jews.”

Former Israel Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, courted the American evangelicals and Benjamin Netanyahu solidified the courtship after meetings with the most popular evangelical personalities, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Each July, thousands of conservative evangelicals gather in Washington, DC for an annual summit of CUFI. Besides voting massively for candidates who support Israel, estimates have the conservative evangelical community contributing between $175 and $200 million annually to the apartheid state.

The evangelist community votes are insufficient to assure Israel gets its chosen candidates into office. Individual Political Action Committees (PAC) operating under the umbrella of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), pro-Israel groups, such as United Democracy Project (UDP), Democratic Majority for Israel, Republican Jewish Coalition, and Pro-Israel America, and wealthy Jewish individuals supply campaign contributions in big numbers. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, gambling casino operator, “Sheldon Adelson, and his wife, Miriam, spent $123 million on the 2018 midterm elections, all of it benefiting Republicans.”

PACs allied with AIPAC “poured more than $24m into defeating Democratic primary candidates critical of Israel. …it celebrated defeating former congresswoman Donna Edwards, who was the favorite to win a Maryland seat until the UDP spent $7m to unleash an advertising blitz against her.” In the 2022 Democratic primary for a congressional seat in northwestern Detroit, the UDP spent more than $4m to defeat Andy Levin, an Israel supporter who “dissented from AIPAC’s support for hardline Israeli policies.”

No argument with individuals and PACs legally contributing to the campaigns of candidates they favor and feel will propose policies benefiting the American people. AIPAC and its allied Jewish organizations and individuals contribute to the campaigns of candidates that favor the policies that benefit a foreign government, Israel, and, often, purposely steer elections for one narrow reason — to defeat candidates who may be rewarding to the American electorate but criticize Israel.

Reshaping U.S. policies

In 2010, the FBI uncovered 10 unregistered Russian agents living in the U.S. as ordinary citizens, engaged in harmless activities, such as meeting people in high places in order to influence their attitudes and reporting American views on foreign and domestic affairs to Moscow. Multiply the number of discovered Russian agents by thousands and you will have the number of Israeli expatriates in the U.S. who do the same for Israel and more; by becoming U.S. citizens they vote for Israel-friendly candidates.

In 2014, the Israeli government ministries and the Los Angeles-based Israeli American Council, which represents Israelis across the United States and promotes their interests, estimated between 500,000 and 800,000 Israelis lived in the U.S., about 150,000 living in the New York area, 120,000 in Los Angeles, and 80,000 in Miami. What are the more important voting areas in the United States? New York, California, and Florida are significant. Enough dual-citizen American-Israelis can shape the ballot in those regions and may have done that in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Has Israel purposely selected citizens to emigrate to the United States and influence voters? I have known Israelis living and working in the United States who have invited people into their homes and propagandized for Israel, persuaded synagogues to display the Israeli flag, and collected statistical information for Israel. Others went to Israel, became allied with a known Israeli institute, returned with a grant from a Jewish institution, and, due to previous ties with a recognized Israeli institute, became scholars at recognized think tanks.

In addition to its allied PACS’ efforts to steer American elections, AIPAC functions as a Congressional lobby. Funding annual trips to Israel for senators and representatives is an essential part of the “wooing” of Congress. According to Legistorm, “AIPAC’s charity arm has spent $15.7 million on congressional visits to Israel since 2000. On gift travel disclosures, AIPAC says the purpose of these trips is ‘educating policymakers about the U.S.-Israel relationship.’”

Important congressional leaders attend its annual convention in Washington, where AIPAC displays its influence in shaping the federal government and its policies. During the Covid epidemic in 2020, AIPAC convention speakers included Vice President Mike Pence, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker, Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. These influential political figures must have a reason (getting elected?) for paying homage to the Lobby for Israel group.

Harmful machinations against individuals

Unable to respond to the obvious reality of an Israel built upon the theft of Palestinian lands and oppression of the Palestinian people, Israel’s supporters resort to slander and vicious attacks on Americans to deter the population from understanding the Middle East crisis.

Canary Mission, AMCHA Initiative, anti-Defamation League, and other Jewish organizations ferret out groups and persons that support the Palestinians and harass and defame them with the usual charge of anti-Semitism. The attacks lead to the proposition that Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism, an identity that has become the final resting place of the word “anti-Semitism.”

Stealing another community’s lands, ethnically cleansing a population, and instituting a severe repression that terrorizes the community — controls their daily life, purposely denies agriculture, water rights, and fishing rights, willfully ruins cherished olive and orange groves, interferes in acquiring livelihood and employment, and reduces their ontological security — describes the Zionist intrusion into the land of Palestine and is a Goddamn awful way to behave. Being against Zionism is a positive and meritorious action. No sound person can argue with that recommendation.

If anti-Zionism is a positive and meritorious action, then the equation anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism indicates that anti-Semitism is a positive and meritorious action. Can that be? No, it cannot be, and Israel’s supporters are guilty of defaming Jews and should be reproached for their insistence that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. Or, maybe this shows the unworthiness of the word anti-Semitism, that it is not a word to describe hate; it is a hateful word used to prevent debate and harm people.

Conclusion

Pro-Israel organizations have used nefarious methods to skew voting patterns, manipulate the American mindset, and prevent legitimate debate. They have made a mockery of American democracy and allied Americans as partners in an intended destruction of the Palestinian people.

The manner in which the Israeli settlers have inflicted their deadly operations on the Palestinians characterizes the happenings in an insane world. Imagine someone running through the streets, injuring innocent pedestrians and onlookers saying, “That’s not nice, you shouldn’t be doing that and others saying, “How can I help? And, when you’re finished, come over for a cup of coffee.”

Everything should be done to stop this madness; too little has been done and that little has been ineffective. The reason for this deficiency is obvious, a thought exists that bringing Israel to the Court of Justice harms the Jewish people. Just as anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, “bringing Israel to the Court of Justice harms the Jewish people” is also a contradiction. The Jewish people have already harmed themselves. Helping other people is a high priority in a moral world. Helping the Palestinians to escape destruction is one of the high priorities. Accomplishing that task will not harm the Jewish people; it will prevent an eventual moral and physical destruction of the people of the book, a win-win proposition for all participants in the crisis.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Atrocities and the disinformation surrounding them is the subject of an important book by AB Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Clarity Press, 2023). It is an important book because it delivers an incisive account on how hegemony is systematically conducted by the US Empire. It cuts through the disinformation used to foment wars by the US, backed by its allies. What the US is engaged in is aggression, what the Nuremberg Tribunal deemed “the supreme international crime”; therefore, it undermines the US Constitution. It also creates a pretext for the US to attempt an overthrow of governments it doesn’t like, killing and displacing people, destroying infrastructure and economies, and leaving devastated lands to rebuild (often with treasuries and resources looted by the US).

The table of contents is a lead-in to how Atrocity Fabrication reveals the systematic nature of hegemony: Cuba and Viet Nam, the US war in Korea, the disinformation about a massacre in Tiananmen Square, the first US war in the Gulf (i.e., war on Iraq), the US war on Yugoslavia, the second US war on Iraq, creating conflict with North Korea, the NATO-Libyan war, the western-backed insurgency in Syria, and the demonization of the rising economy of China.

In each of these ten chapters, Abrams adumbrates some historical background, and a pattern of what is inimical to Empire is spelled out: anti-communism, control of resources wherever they may be, and instilling and maintaining obedience to Empire.

Abrams makes clear what the rules-based order is: rules decided by the US for other countries; however, the US is above the law. The order is enforced by the US as it sees fit.

It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission. (p 241)

Yet, the US usually does not openly flout the laws. It will create pretexts, surround itself with supportive international actors, and call upon its stenographic media. This is one stage of atrocity fabrication. For instance, Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq and the purported genocide in Xinjiang. Abrams brings this sleazy tactic to the fore.

Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unimaginable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted. (p 455)

Perhaps the worst of all fabrications is the false flag. This is when a massacre is perpetrated and the perpetrator lays the blame laid elsewhere, thereby creating a false casus belli. Such an atrocity fabrication may willfully sacrifice innocent people to attain a foreign policy objective. One example of this was the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. The West seized upon this to vilify Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. Or the warmaker will use the fabrication to justify one’s own hand in mass killing by blaming the other side. This Madeleine Albright did when she infamously said the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth achieving US policy objectives.

Demonizing the leader of a country that the US identifies as an enemy state (i.e., a state that is not sufficiently obedient) is another important weapon in the arsenal of Empire. Thus Assad, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Miloševic, the Kims in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Muammar Gaddafi are all caricatured along the lines of the WWII boogeyman, Adolf Hitler. Today, the US excoriates Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, and anyone else who does not bend to Empire.

U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. (p 163)

The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $ 2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, … (p 215)

In attaining its objectives, the US will stoop to whatever means it deems necessary. Atrocity Fabrication is replete with the most sordid acts of criminality: massacres, rapes and violent sexual indecencies, torture, burying people alive, brutalizing prisoners-of-war, using cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium. The book must be read to grasp the inhumanity and perversion of warmakers.

Whatever and whoever, thus, the US will ally with Islamic terrorist groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), al Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS) — and even retract the designations of groups formerly held to be terrorist, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). In other words, the terrorist enemy of a US enemy is no longer a terrorist. Too often, it is those actors wielding the term terrorist that may be the biggest terrorist. As the noted linguist Noam Chomsky stated in the film Power and Terror (2002): “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

The US-aligned world has regularly resorted to propping up defectors and encouraging false narratives. Along with this is the often insidious role played by NGOs to bring down governments.

This is the third book that I have read by AB Abrams, so I am aware of the depth of research, the substantiated factuality, the logic, and the implicit morality that led to these books being written. Books by Abrams are critical reading.

It is clear that there is a rogue entity beholden to its oligarchic class and that this lawless class seeks full spectrum domination through whatever means. That Empire and hegemony persist in the 23rd century is condemnatory; enlightened and morally centered people must relegate such criminality to an atavistic past.

Don’t be deceived by the warmaking demagogues. Refuse to be an accomplice to killing. Life is meant for all humans to live together in peace.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

When I joined the CIA, I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book.

Enrique Prado’s book, Black Ops: The Life of a Shadow CIA Warrior (St. Martins Press, 2022), is written for the opposite purpose from Philip Agee. Prado says, “This book is my attempt to correct the misperceptions that make the Agency one of the least understood and most mistrusted institutions in America today. The reality we faced on the ground in places from Muslim Africa to East Asia, to our own streets here at home, is one of persistent threats that must be countered to keep our people safe.”

Prado’s memoirs were approved for publication by the CIA. They are self-laudatory and highly critical of restraints on the CIA. They confirm that while the ability to assassinate at will was temporarily restricted, CIA sabotage and paramilitary operations against other nations have continued nonstop.

Background

Enrique (Ric) Prado’s father lost his business in the Cuban revolution and Ric came to the US as a youth in the early 60’s. He grew up in greater Miami. The Vietnam war was raging and his “dream was to go to Vietnam”.

After high school, Ric enlisted in the US Air Force and received training in rescue operations including parachute jumping and scuba diving. Prado’s dream was dashed because the Vietnam war was winding down and the US military downsizing.

Prado alludes to his involvement with Cuban American gangs and some troubled years. Then, starting with contract work, Prado began to perform assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Prado and the Contras

Prado’s timing was late for Vietnam but just right for Central America. In 1979 the Sandinista revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. As a Spanish speaking Latino, Prado was not a typical Anglo American. He was recruited as a CIA officer responsible for overseeing the development of the Contra army based in Honduras and conducting cross border attacks on communities in Nicaragua.

He writes, “In these early days, there were only five CIA officers who interfaced directly with the Contras in Tegucigalpa; none were yet in the field.” There were “ten camps that lay scattered along the Honduran Nicaraguan border.” Ric Prado became the CIA officer responsible for going to the camps to coordinate support and conduct weapons training.

Prado admits the Contra leadership came from the corrupt Somoza regime: “Others who had been part of Somoza’s military …. formed the core leadership of the Contras.” Initially, Washington subcontracted the job of mobilizing the Contras to Argentinian military officers who had experience from their own dirty war and death squads. Prado is extremely critical of the Argentinian military trainers, calling them a “den of snakes” and “To a man, I found them to be useless parasites.” The Argentinian military trainers were supplanted by CIA personnel with Ric Prado playing a leading role overseeing Contra operations from Honduras and later in the “southern front” in Costa Rica.

The CIA is funded by Congress and acutely aware of their public image. Whether it is creating negative press for “enemies” such Nicaragua, Cuba or Russia, or creating positive press for itself, manipulating the media is an important part of their work. Prado talks about the political benefits of recruiting indigenous Miskitos to the Contras: “Miskitos were popular with several US political sectors. Among Native Americans and some prominent liberals, the Miskitos were considered to be the oppressed, indigenous forces untainted by association with Somoza. That political viability back in the States with elements often hostile to the Agency helped us enormously.”

The unofficial war on Nicaragua included attacks on infrastructure which echo today with the US sabotage of the Nordstream gas pipelines. Prado proudly documents their attack on the Puerto Cabezas pier and underwater gas pipeline. “The dock included an integrated fuel pipeline for faster transfer of oil from tankers. If we could destroy this…. we’d make a big statement by blowing up the key link between the Sandinistas and their communist allies …. We received exactly what we needed: a specialized underwater demolition charge that combined compactness with tremendous blast power….. the charge exploded … the blast was so large it destroyed the fuel pipeline.”

Prado documents the failed attempt to blow up a bridge at Corinto on the Pacific coast. For unknown reasons, Prado was re-assigned and left Honduras in March of 1984 after four years managing the Contras. He returns to the Contra campaign in the summer of 1986. They had safe houses and secret bases in ranches along the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border. It was more difficult because the Costa Rica government did not support the Contras as Honduras did.

Prado briefly describes the sensational events in October 1986 when a CIA plane dropping supplies and weapons to Contras was shot down. The pilot and two others on the flight died, but ex Marine Eugene Hasenfus survived and was captured. Unmentioned in the book, this was a sensational news event at the time. Beyond the drama of an American plane being shot down over Nicaragua and an American captured and taken prisoner, it revealed the CIA was violating the Congressional Boland Amendment prohibiting military support for overthrowing the Nicaragua government.

The Reagan administration denied responsibility. Elliot Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs said, “The flight in which Mr. Hasenfus took part was a private initiative … It was not organized, directed or financed by the U.S. Government.” The counter evidence was overwhelming and the CIA was caught red handed violating the Congressional resolution and then lying about it. This is unmentioned in the book. Instead, Prado criticizes Hasenfus for having personal identification papers in his possession.

Prado’s Pride

In 1990, after ten years of terrorist attacks by the Contras combined with economic and political attacks from Washington, Nicaraguans cried “Uncle” and voted the Sandinistas out of power.

Prado says, “Our Contra program was a definitively successful black op carried out solely by key personnel from the CIA.” and “That Cuban kid who lost his native country to revolutionaries now helped cut off some of the communist tentacles that threatened to engulf Latin America.”

Prado believes the use of a proxy army to fight against a perceived enemy was an important victory and re-established the credibility of the CIA. He says, “The Contras resuscitated the post-Vietnam decimated CIA back to relevance.”

Prado is annoyed at negative media portrayals of the CIA Contra program. The movie American Made, depicting the story of an American pilot taking guns to the Contras and bringing cocaine back into the US, is especially annoying to Prado. He ignores the fact that tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died and cocaine inundated some US cities as a byproduct of the Contra program.

Prado believes they are the “good guys”. The International Court of Justice thought otherwise. In 1986 the court ruled the US attacks on Nicaragua were violations of international law. The Reagan administration and media largely ignored the ruling. Later, journalist Gary Webb documented the catastrophic social damage inside the US caused by the cheap cocaine flooding some US cities. Webb was attacked by establishment media. In 1998 the CIA Inspector General acknowledged, “There are instances where C.I.A. did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”

The 2014 movie Kill the Messenger, based on the true and tragic story of Gary Webb, was undoubtedly another movie that irritated Rico Prado.

Justifying Terrorism and Sabotage

Prado’s justification for CIA crimes against other countries is US national security. He says, “The spread of communism through Central and South America became a direct threat to the security of the United States.” He compares the war against “communism” to the WW2 fight against Nazi Germany. He says, “The Sandinistas quickly consolidated their power through Nazi-like pogrom and oppression.” Prado says that training the Contras was like “being an OSS officer trying to train and supply the French resistance to the Germans in WW2.”

The US deployed Nicaraguans, Afghans and extremist Arab recruits in proxy wars across the globe. Prado assesses this a great success: The Mujahedin in Afghanistan and Contras in Nicaragua “played crucial roles in the Cold War’s final act.”

Prado does not mention the fact that the Sandinistas were voted back into power in Nicaragua in 2006 after sixteen years of neoliberal rule. The country was in very poor shape with privatized education, little healthcare, and terrible infrastructure. Since being voted back, the Sandinistas have won increasing levels of support because they have substantially improved the lives of most Nicaraguans. As in the 19980s, Nicaragua is on the US enemy list and western media portrayals are universally negative.

Prado in other countries

The “CIA Shadow Warrior” went on to conduct operations in Peru, the Philippines, South Korea and an African country, probably the Central African Republic. “We were the leadership cadre, spearheading America’s effort against global terrorism.”

Prado says, “Radical Islamic terrorism at the turn of the century morphed into a deadly new enemy.” With the attacks of 9-11, the US homeland was suddenly the victim of a real attack. The timing was very convenient for war hawks and those who wanted a “new American Century”. From being a president who took office under highly contested circumstances, Bush became a “war President”. The 9-11 attack provided a Pearl Harbor moment justifying US military aggression in the Middle East.

Prado describes the fervor and intensity with which the CIA responded. CIA agents worked long hours to identify, capture and sometimes kill those deemed to be “enemy combatants.” Some of these suspects were tortured in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which US is a signatory to. The “CIA shadow warrior” is dismissive of the critics. The “much maligned enhanced interrogations (were) sparingly performed on known terrorists.”

“Jungle of Criminality”

Prado views the world as “A jungle of criminality, corruption, betrayals, and atrocious human rights abuses we were determined to help eradicate.” There are numerous allusions to the “good guys” fighting the “bad guys”.

Prado does not attempt to argue with critics who say some CIA actions are violations of international law and human rights. It is estimated that 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the Contra War. This is ten times more than died in the attacks of 9-11 in a country that only had 3.3 million people at the time.

Prado’s claim that Sandinista Nicaragua posed a threat to US “national security” is preposterous. The CIA actions not only violated international law; they violated US law.

Prado never questions why some people around the world hate the US government. For him, they are simply the “bad guys”. This is much more convenient than looking at the real causes. In the introduction to his book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnston put it succinctly:

The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever clandestine operation – the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujaheddin) to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world.

The results in Afghanistan were disastrous. They toppled a popular government, creating decades of chaos and extremism. With the Soviets gone, the US dumped Afghanistan and moved on to attack Iraq and place troops in Saudi Arabia. As Johnson says, “The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not ‘attack America,’ as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy.”

Intelligence serving the war machine

In the 1960s and 1970s, CIA officers Phil Agree and John Stockwell, author of In Search of Enemies, came to realize that US foreign policy is not in the national interest. Performing coups, destabilizing foreign governments and promoting death squads (as documented in the new book The Jakarta Method) is not only against international law and the UN Charter, it is against what the US claims to be for. They spoke out courageously. Rick Prado is far from this realization.

No doubt there are many hard working and dedicated analysts and officers at the CIA. No doubt they come up with real intelligence. But given the biases and delusions, they can also be wildly inaccurate. Prado writes,

Threats America faced that summer came from many quarters, but two in particular were seen as significant threats. Hezbollah was considered among the most dangerous. They had carried out operations all over the world that had killed thousands of people …Danger lurks from seemingly innocuous sources. You’ll find Hezbollah sleeper cells in your own town… Terrorists lurking and lying in wait.

Prado says that when 9-11 happened, one CIA officer was certain that Hezbollah was behind it. This suggests they have poor analysis because Hezbollah is very different than Al Qaeda. Hezbollah is a Lebanese resistance movement, much demonized by Israel because they successfully expelled the Israelis from southern Lebanon. They are a substantial part of the Lebanese government and oppose extremist Al Qaeda ideology and actions.

Prado’s comments about President JF Kennedy exemplify the hatred of Kennedy in the CIA. According to him, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961 was due to “betrayal and broken promises of the Kennedy Administration.” The dislike was mutual. In reaction to the poorly planned and unrealistic invasion of Cuba for which has administration was blamed, JFK wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and cast it to the winds.” In recent years, important new evidence on the assassination has been revealed in several books including JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters and Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.

As a sign of the times, Rick Prado transitioned from the CIA to a private security company, Blackwater. The “revolution in military affairs” proposed by neocons in the 1990’s has been realized as US intelligence and “black ops” are increasingly performed by private contractors. There are clear advantages: they do not have the same constraints and accountability. Prado documents how he has recruited other CIA leaders for the infamous private company.

The CIA and US Foreign Policy

Ric Prado is very proud of his work at the CIA and pours praise on his CIA leaders and fellow officers. He is intensely critical of constraints on the CIA.

“Our nation’s leadership often failed to measure up. When you have pit bulls ready and willing to go after America’s enemies, only to be chained in the yard by career-obsessed managers, you cannot win a war. It only gets prolonged.”

Prado admits “Our job was to break the laws of other nations without getting caught to defend ours. It is dark and murky work.”

For the past several decades, much of the propaganda and disinformation has been guided by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Agency for International Development (USAID) and individual western billionaires. In Nicaragua, US AID funded dozens of organizations for “regime change” in Spring 2018. Today, as the Ukraine proxy war continues and threatens to become civilization ending WW3, the western public is again being misled and misinformed. Supposedly “independent” Ukrainian media sources are funded (and sometimes created) by the same NED and USAID.

Meanwhile the CIA is still conducting and managing “Black Ops” around the world.

In the postscript Prado says “confronting China “is now one the Agency’s primary tasks. He recommends, “The CIA needs to be led by vigorous, aggressive, and fearless leaders willing to take the fight to the enemy on their turf, wherever that turf may be.”

This is clearly a recipe for new conflicts even as the war with Russia escalates. Ric Prado has learned nothing from past failures and blowback. Judging by the positive reviews of his book, neither have the Washington foreign policy establishment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

The Irgun and Lehi

The Haganah was a paramilitary group active between 1920-1948 to protect Jews from Arab attacks and rioting. Poorly organized and composed mainly of farmers in its infancy, the group became better equipped and structured after the 1929 riots as well as the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. Until the end of WWII, the Haganah was moderate in its approach according to its policy of havlaga (self-restraint). The group was ordered not to attack Arabs indiscriminately and cooperated heavily with the British security forces in Mandatory Palestine. Such moderation, however, irked some members of the group which later led to splintering and the creation of the more indiscriminately violent Irgun (or Etzel) and Lehi (or Stern Gang).

Akin to many militant organizations, the Irgun evolved from a rudimentary group to a proper fighting force over time complete with a chain of command. The Irgun was formed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionism leader. Throughout the years it also battled an inward ideological tug of war – i.e. the debate of self-restraint versus actively attacking the Arabs and British.

In response to dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance, Zionist land purchases, dispossession, and debt, the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 erupted in Palestine. Instances of Arab violence and terrorism against the Jews heightened in this period, which saw Irgun’s policy of self-restraint waning. In 1936, the Irgun unofficially ended this policy and began attacking Arabs in response to Arab attacks on Jews. In July 1937, Irgun’s self-restraint policy officially ended as even Jabotinsky, who had been opposed to retaliatory actions, ceded to the growing demands to attack Arabs. On 14 November 1937, or Black Sunday, a massive indiscriminate campaign was launched against the Arabs (details later).

The British White Paper in 1939 was a watershed moment as it restricted Jewish migration to Palestine which subsequently invited the vehemence of the Irgun. The Irgun and Haganah in retaliation illegally brought thousands of Jews to Palestine.

World War II saw increased terrorist attacks by the Irgun primarily against the British administration to coerce them into reverting the 1939 White Paper. The war also allowed the Jewish militias to arm themselves more effectively. However, there was again an internal rift, which had been festering before the war, that caused another split. Avraham Stern, once the political head of the Irgun, disagreed with Jabotinsky on certain matters. When World War II broke out, Stern wanted to leverage the Irgun and attack the British as he discerned them, not the Arabs, as the principal antithesis to the Jewish state. Conversely, Jabotinsky opined that the Irgun must cease anti-British activities and that the British could be convinced that the Jews could safeguard their interests in the region. The schism led to the creation of the Lehi on 17 July 1940. Although the Lehi were far inferior in numbers (less than 300 members), their assassinations and terrorist attacks not only shook Palestine but also the world.

From 1944 until Israel’s independence, a Jewish insurgency led primarily by the Irgun and Lehi against British rule engulfed Palestine with hundreds of British security personnel dying. After independence, the terrorists from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah were either disbanded or integrated into the IDF.

Terrorist Activities of the Irgun and Lehi

Although there are too many terrorist attacks to form an exhaustive list here, the article will highlight the more devastating ones. The Irgun conducted over 60 attacks on the Arabs during the Arab Revolt 1936-1939. The group used four different tactics: 1) Assassinations 2) Attacking transportation routes 3) Shootings 4) Using explosive devices. One of their most infamous attacks, called Black Sunday, was where 10 Arabs were killed and many wounded by Irgun units around Jerusalem. The Irgun commemorated the day by brazenly asserting “the Day of the Breaking of the Havlagah.”

On June 19, 1938, 18 Arabs were killed – including 6 women and 3 children – and 24 injured in Haifa by an Irgun bomb that was ignominiously detonated in a crowded Arab marketplace.

In July 1938, the group planted a mine in a Haifa market, which tragically resulted in over 70 Arab deaths.

In February 1939, 33 Arabs were killed in multiple attacks – a bomb that killed 24 in Haifa and another that killed 4 in Jerusalem.

In 1939, the Irgun shifted its animus toward the British authorities. In August 1939, the British administration’s broadcast center in Jerusalem was blown up and a few days later, a high-ranking British officer was killed.

In December 1945, 3 British policemen and 4 Sotho soldiers were killed when a British CID HQ was bombed in Jerusalem.

One of the most infamous of these terrorist attacks was the one conducted in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was the British Mandatory authority’s central office. A bomb was placed in the basement by Irgun members and the resulting explosion “killed over a hundred people, including many civilian employees, Arab, British, and Jewish.”

As for Lehi, it too conducted many reprehensible attacks in Palestine. One such was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, as he was seen as a model of Britain’s intransigence. He was gunned down in Cairo in November 1944.

On 4 January 1948, the Lehi introduced a new form of terror to the world – the car bomb. Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami, the pioneers of this evil, targeted the Saraya building in Jaffa. The explosion killed 28 Arabs including many civilians as well as injuring hundreds more. Not only was the car bomb used commonly in pre-independence Israel against the Palestinians but was later adopted by other militant groups primarily in the Middle East.

The most detestable terrorist attack however was the Deir Yassin Massacare. On 9 April 1948, around 120 Lehi and Irgun fighters in cooperation with the Haganah attacked Deir Yassin village and massacred hundreds of Arab civilians, many of whom were women and children. This incident was so heinous that it was condemned by Jewish authorities, the chief Rabbinate, as well as Ben-Gurion. Condemnation, however, was not enough as no one was ever punished for the tragedy that befell the Arabs. According to Benny Morris, Deir Yassin was not an isolated incident. He says, “The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)…. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.”

Legacy

Labeling and admonishing the Irgun and Lehi as terrorists is neither controversial nor hyperbolic. To the British leaders, the Jewish Agency, prominent Jews including Albert Einstein, and most importantly, the Palestinian Arabs, the members of the Irgun and Lehi were nothing less than terrorists.

Perhaps the most monolithic of Israel’s sins was permitting these terrorists to become soldiers in the new IDF as well as allowing the Irgun and Lehi’s leadership to segue, without culpability, from terrorism into politics. For example, Menachem Begin, an Irgun leader in 1944, later founded the Likud party and became Israel’s 6th PM. Yitzhak Shamir, leader of Lehi in 1943, served in the Mossad and became Israel’s 7th PM. One of Lehi’s members, Yaakov Heruti, who pioneered the car bomb, later founded the right wing political parties Tehiya and Tsomet – and was responsible for helping settlers buy land in the occupied territories. Due to this this post-independence apathy, the Irgun and Lehi’s terrorist proclivities still permeate within Israel’s political and security power corridors.

This is evidenced by Israel’s perennial war crimes and human rights abuses against the Palestinians. In the last 4 conflicts in Gaza (from 2008 to May 2021), 18,992 Palestinian casualties (civilians and combatants) occurred compared to 1,563 Israeli casualties (civilians and combatants) – 92% of the casualties were Palestinian.

On May 11, 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately killed by the IDF. Despite Israel rebuffing this, independent investigations from many organizations including CNN and Forensic Architecture assert otherwise. The latter stating that the IDF deliberately targeted Shireen “with the intention to kill.”

Violence in the occupied West Bank has also surged in the past year with Israel conducting “near-daily raids over the last year, killing hundreds of Palestinians.” The recent Huwara riots or “pogroms” as many are calling it also traumatized the world, which saw hundreds of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank ravaging Huwara by torching buildings and cars. The violence led to one Palestinian’s death and hundreds injured. Commentators rebuked the settlers, the IDF for its inaction, as well as ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich who stated that Huwara should be “wiped out.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sarmad Ishfaq.

The Irgun and Lehi

The Haganah was a paramilitary group active between 1920-1948 to protect Jews from Arab attacks and rioting. Poorly organized and composed mainly of farmers in its infancy, the group became better equipped and structured after the 1929 riots as well as the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. Until the end of WWII, the Haganah was moderate in its approach according to its policy of havlaga (self-restraint). The group was ordered not to attack Arabs indiscriminately and cooperated heavily with the British security forces in Mandatory Palestine. Such moderation, however, irked some members of the group which later led to splintering and the creation of the more indiscriminately violent Irgun (or Etzel) and Lehi (or Stern Gang).

Akin to many militant organizations, the Irgun evolved from a rudimentary group to a proper fighting force over time complete with a chain of command. The Irgun was formed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a Revisionist Zionism leader. Throughout the years it also battled an inward ideological tug of war – i.e. the debate of self-restraint versus actively attacking the Arabs and British.

In response to dissatisfaction with Britain’s governance, Zionist land purchases, dispossession, and debt, the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 erupted in Palestine. Instances of Arab violence and terrorism against the Jews heightened in this period, which saw Irgun’s policy of self-restraint waning. In 1936, the Irgun unofficially ended this policy and began attacking Arabs in response to Arab attacks on Jews. In July 1937, Irgun’s self-restraint policy officially ended as even Jabotinsky, who had been opposed to retaliatory actions, ceded to the growing demands to attack Arabs. On 14 November 1937, or Black Sunday, a massive indiscriminate campaign was launched against the Arabs (details later).

The British White Paper in 1939 was a watershed moment as it restricted Jewish migration to Palestine which subsequently invited the vehemence of the Irgun. The Irgun and Haganah in retaliation illegally brought thousands of Jews to Palestine.

World War II saw increased terrorist attacks by the Irgun primarily against the British administration to coerce them into reverting the 1939 White Paper. The war also allowed the Jewish militias to arm themselves more effectively. However, there was again an internal rift, which had been festering before the war, that caused another split. Avraham Stern, once the political head of the Irgun, disagreed with Jabotinsky on certain matters. When World War II broke out, Stern wanted to leverage the Irgun and attack the British as he discerned them, not the Arabs, as the principal antithesis to the Jewish state. Conversely, Jabotinsky opined that the Irgun must cease anti-British activities and that the British could be convinced that the Jews could safeguard their interests in the region. The schism led to the creation of the Lehi on 17 July 1940. Although the Lehi were far inferior in numbers (less than 300 members), their assassinations and terrorist attacks not only shook Palestine but also the world.

From 1944 until Israel’s independence, a Jewish insurgency led primarily by the Irgun and Lehi against British rule engulfed Palestine with hundreds of British security personnel dying. After independence, the terrorists from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah were either disbanded or integrated into the IDF.

Terrorist Activities of the Irgun and Lehi

Although there are too many terrorist attacks to form an exhaustive list here, the article will highlight the more devastating ones. The Irgun conducted over 60 attacks on the Arabs during the Arab Revolt 1936-1939. The group used four different tactics: 1) Assassinations 2) Attacking transportation routes 3) Shootings 4) Using explosive devices. One of their most infamous attacks, called Black Sunday, was where 10 Arabs were killed and many wounded by Irgun units around Jerusalem. The Irgun commemorated the day by brazenly asserting “the Day of the Breaking of the Havlagah.”

On June 19, 1938, 18 Arabs were killed – including 6 women and 3 children – and 24 injured in Haifa by an Irgun bomb that was ignominiously detonated in a crowded Arab marketplace.

In July 1938, the group planted a mine in a Haifa market, which tragically resulted in over 70 Arab deaths.

In February 1939, 33 Arabs were killed in multiple attacks – a bomb that killed 24 in Haifa and another that killed 4 in Jerusalem.

In 1939, the Irgun shifted its animus toward the British authorities. In August 1939, the British administration’s broadcast center in Jerusalem was blown up and a few days later, a high-ranking British officer was killed.

In December 1945, 3 British policemen and 4 Sotho soldiers were killed when a British CID HQ was bombed in Jerusalem.

One of the most infamous of these terrorist attacks was the one conducted in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The hotel was the British Mandatory authority’s central office. A bomb was placed in the basement by Irgun members and the resulting explosion “killed over a hundred people, including many civilian employees, Arab, British, and Jewish.”

As for Lehi, it too conducted many reprehensible attacks in Palestine. One such was the assassination of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, as he was seen as a model of Britain’s intransigence. He was gunned down in Cairo in November 1944.

On 4 January 1948, the Lehi introduced a new form of terror to the world – the car bomb. Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami, the pioneers of this evil, targeted the Saraya building in Jaffa. The explosion killed 28 Arabs including many civilians as well as injuring hundreds more. Not only was the car bomb used commonly in pre-independence Israel against the Palestinians but was later adopted by other militant groups primarily in the Middle East.

The most detestable terrorist attack however was the Deir Yassin Massacare. On 9 April 1948, around 120 Lehi and Irgun fighters in cooperation with the Haganah attacked Deir Yassin village and massacred hundreds of Arab civilians, many of whom were women and children. This incident was so heinous that it was condemned by Jewish authorities, the chief Rabbinate, as well as Ben-Gurion. Condemnation, however, was not enough as no one was ever punished for the tragedy that befell the Arabs. According to Benny Morris, Deir Yassin was not an isolated incident. He says, “The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70)…. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres.”

Legacy

Labeling and admonishing the Irgun and Lehi as terrorists is neither controversial nor hyperbolic. To the British leaders, the Jewish Agency, prominent Jews including Albert Einstein, and most importantly, the Palestinian Arabs, the members of the Irgun and Lehi were nothing less than terrorists.

Perhaps the most monolithic of Israel’s sins was permitting these terrorists to become soldiers in the new IDF as well as allowing the Irgun and Lehi’s leadership to segue, without culpability, from terrorism into politics. For example, Menachem Begin, an Irgun leader in 1944, later founded the Likud party and became Israel’s 6th PM. Yitzhak Shamir, leader of Lehi in 1943, served in the Mossad and became Israel’s 7th PM. One of Lehi’s members, Yaakov Heruti, who pioneered the car bomb, later founded the right wing political parties Tehiya and Tsomet – and was responsible for helping settlers buy land in the occupied territories. Due to this this post-independence apathy, the Irgun and Lehi’s terrorist proclivities still permeate within Israel’s political and security power corridors.

This is evidenced by Israel’s perennial war crimes and human rights abuses against the Palestinians. In the last 4 conflicts in Gaza (from 2008 to May 2021), 18,992 Palestinian casualties (civilians and combatants) occurred compared to 1,563 Israeli casualties (civilians and combatants) – 92% of the casualties were Palestinian.

On May 11, 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was deliberately killed by the IDF. Despite Israel rebuffing this, independent investigations from many organizations including CNN and Forensic Architecture assert otherwise. The latter stating that the IDF deliberately targeted Shireen “with the intention to kill.”

Violence in the occupied West Bank has also surged in the past year with Israel conducting “near-daily raids over the last year, killing hundreds of Palestinians.” The recent Huwara riots or “pogroms” as many are calling it also traumatized the world, which saw hundreds of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank ravaging Huwara by torching buildings and cars. The violence led to one Palestinian’s death and hundreds injured. Commentators rebuked the settlers, the IDF for its inaction, as well as ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich who stated that Huwara should be “wiped out.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sarmad Ishfaq.

The great tragedy is that fighting could have ended months ago, saving thousands of lives, had the TPLF grasped the hand of peace repeatedly extended by the government since the conflict started. Instead of responding to an open invitation to talk “anywhere anytime”, the TPLF set impossible conditions for engagement; used ceasefire time to rearm and recruit fighters – forcing men and children to leave their families (‘join up or we will kill your family’ type recruitment), take up arms and risk their lives for the ambitions of a few greedy men.

Engagement and inclusion have been central to the approach of the Abiy Ahmed government since they took office in April 2018. And, to the outrage of many, this included reaching out to the former regime officials. But the TPLF leaders (and their US backers), have never wanted peace or national unity for Ethiopia, and certainly did not want Abiy to succeed. From the moment they were ousted, it seems the TPLF have been plotting and scheming, gauging the level of US support – which was, it appears a good deal weaker under President Trump – and waiting, discussing when to emerge from the shadows and act.

That moment came on 3/4 November 2020 (coincidentally the very day Biden became president), when the TPLF launched a cowardly coordinated attack on the ENDF Northern Command in Mekelle, and bases in Adigrat, Agula, Dansha and Sero in Tigray. This heinous act of treason resulted in the deaths of unsuspecting ENDF soldiers and the theft of military equipment. PM Abiy Ahmed said that extrajudicial killings had occurred during the attacks. He stated that the “TPLF identified and separated hundreds of unarmed Ethiopian soldiers of non Tigrayan origin, tied their hands and feet together, massacred them in cold blood, and left their bodies lying in open air.”

It was this despicable act that triggered the war, something that is routinely overlooked by western governments, media and commentators alike; an act of terror by anyone’s definition (imagine a similar attack taking place in a Western nation – outrage there would be), for which – and, of course, the TPLF knew this – the Ethiopian government had no choice but to respond with force. So they, the TPLF leadership, had the war they had been longing for, and had been preparing for. The propaganda campaign started, favors were called in, sympathizers mobilized, money spent. Their aim was to either overthrow the government, or if that failed, and they made this plain, cause chaos in the country, fragment it totally and make it virtually ungovernable.

But despite US support in their vile plans they failed resolutely, for now at least. Sadly, we must add this restraining condition because as long as the TPLF exists as an organization, the threat of violence and disorder will hover over the country. And one of the most troubling details contained within the peace agreement signed in Pretoria is that the government shall (Article 7 paragraph 3b), “Facilitate the lifting of the terrorist designation of the TPLF by the House of Peoples’ Representatives.”

Looking for justice

There is a list of key points within the African Union led agreement, including: “The Parties commit to and declare an immediate and Permanent Cessation of Hostilities, and undertake to disengage forces or armed groups under their control” (article 3 paragraph 1); The recognition and “Respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and unity of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE)” (article 2 paragraph 1); i.e., that Ethiopia is one integrated nation; Parties sign up to “Agree and recognize that the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has only one defence force” (Article 6 paragraph 1); and that the TPLF will disarm. TPLF combatants will then be integrated into the ENDF.

Within Article 10, ‘Transitional Matters’, it is made clear that elections in Tigray will be held; however, no time frame is given, and until then an “inclusive Interim Regional Administration will be settled through political dialogue between the Parties [TPLF and Government].” The TPLF is not banned from taking part in this transitional body, or from standing in any future elections; so the organization, with existing personnel, is not only allowed to persist, but it seems will continue as a political group. Where, then, is the accountability, the justice?

Compromise within such talks is inevitable, but given the fact that the TPLF had committed an act of treason and widespread atrocities throughout the war, the level of Government concessions appears over generous; this was clearly the result of US pressure, threats amounting to intimidation. Despite such external meddling the TPLF has been forced to disarm, to recognize the (democratically elected) Ethiopian government and told to stop undermining the country “including [via] unconstitutional correspondence and relations with foreign powers” (article 7 paragraph 2). But TPLF bosses were responsible for the conflict (and 28 years of terrorizing the populace when they were in power), and widespread atrocities, and they should, at some point, face justice.

The agreement does contain the objective to “Provide a framework to ensure accountability for matters arising out of the conflict” (article 1 paragraph 7). And to this end, Article 10 (paragraph 3) states that the government “shall implement a comprehensive national transitional justice policy aimed at accountability, ascertaining the truth, redress for victims, reconciliation, and healing, consistent with the Constitution of FDRE and the African Union Transitional Justice Policy Framework …developed with inputs from all stakeholders, and civil society groups through public consultations and formal national policy-making processes.” Sounds positive, but such investigations tend to take an age, result in broad general findings, and all too often allow the individuals responsible (the leaders) to get off scot-free.

So, flawed (as all such processes are) but tremendously positive, the agreement is an important step in the transition to peace and away not only from the TPLF initiated war, but from ethnic fragmentation and unrest more broadly. To this end the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), which has been carrying out atrocities in Amhara for some time, must also be disarmed and broken up.

It is also significant that the Ethiopian government turned to the African Union, which has as its principle vision the creation of: “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa,  driven by its own citizens”. Ethiopia was a founding voice of The African Union (AU), the AU headquarters are located in Addis Ababa, and as African nations increasingly turn to one another and the momentum for Pan-Africanism grows, the AU will become more important.

War is chaotic, and no doubt atrocities were committed and mistakes made on both sides, but the Government should be commended for their patient resolute approach: For resisting foreign intervention and repeatedly and powerfully exposing it; for consistently calling for and working for peace, and in the end, reaching an agreement.

Rebuilding re-imagining

This is an important moment for the country, a time for healing, reflection and collective action. There is much to be done, a massive program of reconstruction is urgently needed; if this is delayed, for whatever reason, there is a risk that people affected by the fighting, will begin to feel angry, allowing for criticism of the government to surface, and social splinters to appear and be exploited. Homes, schools, health facilities etc, all need to be reconstructed, repaired and refurbished. This creates a wonderful opportunity to mobilize one of Ethiopia’s greatest assets, its young people; a youthful army of workers could be assembled from within affected neighborhoods, creating work and generating a sense of purpose and community responsibility.

In addition to the essential work of rebuilding, this time also presents the opportunity for debate and creative discussion around a variety of issues: Development. The western model of development is unjust, environmentally destructive and in many ways, broken. Let development be re-defined, based not on economic markers, but on social harmony, collective happiness and group integration; how to develop in a just and inclusive way that creates opportunities for everyone and does not create/increase inequality could be explored. Democracy; the nature of democracy in a country made up of many ethnic groups; the importance of civil society/independent institutions, and the observation/monitoring of human rights; how to maximize participation and involve people from all backgrounds and regions in the governance of their area and the overall direction of the country.

In addition, and importantly, the Federal Constitution needs to be looked at. There has been a great deal of criticism of the existing Constitution, written in 1994 by the former TPLF dominated regime, with many people believing that lasting peace and stability is impossible until the treatise has been reformed, and the pervasive, and highly divisive ideology of ethnic federalism, which shapes its direction, is removed. In a nation the size of Ethiopia, with dozens of ethnic groups, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with federal governance, but when power is disproportionately held, injustices rooted in ethnicity (jobs, university places, housing etc) either perpetrated or perceived to have occurred, and ethnic differences are emphasized over national unity, there is a danger of social divisions, anger and conflict. The system of ‘ethnic federalism’ was utilized by the EPRDF as a mechanism of control; competition over land/resources/government support was encouraged, divisions exploited, ethnic identities strengthened.

The notion of ethnic conflict was, and remains, a common construct of the war widely presented by western voices allied to the TPLF. The image presented – false and unfounded – is of a repressed and threatened ethnic group (Tigrayans) under attack by a genocidal government, protected by a courageous rebel force – the TPLF. Utter nonsense; the government was fighting the TPLF, not the people of Tigray. And the TPLF, as has been said many times, is an insurgent force, a terrorist group that started the war and was intent on overthrowing the democratically elected government and stealing power. This false narrative forms an intrinsic part of the dis/misinformation campaign carefully designed by the TPLF, no doubt with foreign input, taken up and delivered by media, the US and her puppets, certain voices within the United Nations (Dr Tedros at the WHO e.g.) and various international bodies – e.g. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International.

The aim was to undermine the Ethiopian government, engender international support and provide justification for TPLF violence and US sanctions/criticisms. Confusion about actual events and belief in the fantasy was created, but as more and more details of what actually happened emerges, this will be shattered. From the outset, however, the effect of such propaganda on Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia at home and abroad has been to unify and galvanize them. Powerfully united against what are widely regarded as common enemies: the TPLF, America, and western media; a renewed sense of nationhood has been fostered, and hands of love and friendship extended to people from all groups, including, of course, Tigrayans.

In light of the way certain powers (US, UK, Ireland, EU), not only responded to the terror attack on the State, but facilitated it, relations with foreign governments will no doubt be re-examined. Ethiopia was betrayed by these nations and many people feel deeply hurt, bemused and angry at the actions taken and the lies perpetrated. Ethiopia is the Mother of Africa and the betrayal has been felt across the region and the continent. The undermining of a democratically elected government and the meddling in a nation’s affairs reveal once again that these dried-up colonialists, arrogant and devious, continue to believe that they can control, exploit and manipulate Sub-Sharan African nations.

Ethiopia has stood strong against such interference and emerged more united than ever. A peaceful, integrated Ethiopia is key to the health, stability and prosperity, not only of the country itself, but of the Horn of Africa region. All must work now to support those most affected by the conflict, ensure the agreement reached in Pretoria is fully honored, and a lasting and robust peace  is created throughout the country.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

America is widely understood to be a key instigator behind conflict in Ukraine that has pitted brother against brother

Smeared, stigmatized, and lied about in Western media propaganda, the mostly Russian-speaking people of the Donbass region were being slaughtered by the thousands in a brutal war of “ethnic cleansing” launched against them by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which the U.S. installed after the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legally elected president in a 2014 coup.

Although the Donbass people had been pleading for Russian military aid to defend them against the increasingly murderous military assaults by the Ukraine government forces, which killed more than 14,000 of their people, Russian President Vladimir Putin declined to intervene. Instead, he tried to broker a peace agreement between the warring parties.

But the U.S. and Britain secretly colluded to sabotage peace negotiations, persuading president Zelenksy to ignore the Minsk II peace agreement that the Ukraine government had previously signed, and which had been countersigned by Russia, France and Germany.

Realizing that the U.S. and its NATO allies would never permit peace negotiations to succeed, Putin finally invaded Ukraine on February 24. Russian troops went in to support and reinforce the outnumbered and outgunned Donbass Special Forces who had been defending their land against attacks by the Kyiv government for nearly eight years.

Voices From the Frontlines of Eastern Ukraine

In the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in October, I went to a frontline outpost 70 meters from Ukrainian forces in Avdeevka (north and west of Donetsk), according to the Donbass commanders I spoke with there.

To reach that position, I went with two other journalists to a meeting point with two commanders of Pyatnashka—volunteer fighters, including Abkhazi, Slovak, Russian, Ossetian and other nationalities, including locals from Donbass.

From there, they drove us to a point as far as they could drive before walking the rest of the way, several minutes through brush and trenches, eventually coming to their sandbagged wood and cement fortified outpost.

It has changed hands over the years, Ukrainian forces sometimes occupying it, Donbass forces now controlling it.

One soldier, a unit commander who goes by the call sign “Vydra” (Otter), was formerly a miner from the DPR who had been living in Russia with his family. In 2014, he returned to the Donbass to defend his mother and relatives still there. He spoke of the outpost.

We dug and built this with our hands. Several times over the years, the Ukrainians have taken these positions. We pushed them back, they stormed us…Well, we have been fighting each other for eight years.

There, artillery fire is the biggest danger they face. “You can hide from a sniper, but not from artillery, and they’re using large caliber.”

“Vydra,” a unit commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]

His living quarters is a dank, cramped, room with a tiny improvised bed, with another small room and bed for others at the outpost.

A sign reads: “If shelling occurs, go to the shelter.” The kind of sign you see all over Donetsk and cities of the Donbass, due to Ukraine’s incessant shelling of civilian, residential areas. In a frontline outpost where incoming artillery is the norm, the sign is slightly absurd, clearly a joke.

An Orthodox icon sits atop the sign. Ukrainian nationalists hang and spray Nazi graffiti and slogans of death; these fighters revere their faith.

A poster, with the DPR flag, reads: “We have never known defeat, and it’s clear that this has been decided from above. Donbas has never been forced to its knees, and no one will ever be allowed to.”

The only things decorating the space are tins of tuna and canned meat, instant noodles, and washing powder. Their existence is bare minimum, nothing glamorous about it; they volunteer because, as they told me, this is their land and they will protect it.

Perhaps surprising to some, when Vydra was asked whether he hates Ukrainians, he replied emphatically no, he has friends and relatives in Ukraine.

“We have no hatred for Ukraine. We hate those nationalists who came to power. But ordinary Ukrainians? Why? Many of us speak Ukrainian. We understand them, they understand us. Many of them speak Russian.

I’ve been involved in sports a lot of time, wrestling. So, I’ve got a lot of friends in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Odessa, Lvov, Ivano-Frankivsk, Transcarpathia.

I have relatives in western Ukraine, and we still communicate. Yes, they say one thing on the street, but when we talk to each other, they say, ‘Well, you have to, because the SBU is listening.’

Ukraine shouts about democracy, then puts people in handcuffs for no reason. My aunt got in trouble because they found my photo on her Skype.

And I’m on the Myrotvorets [kill list] website.” [As is the author, see this article.]

He spoke of Ukraine’s shelling from 2014, when the people of the Donbass were unarmed and not expecting to be bombed by their own country.

When the artillery hit the city of Yenakievo, east of Gorlovka, we were defenseless. We went with hunting rifles and torches to fight them. Most of the weapons we had later were captured from them. We had to go to the battlefield without weapons in order to get the weapons.

When asked if he was concerned that Ukrainian forces might take Donetsk he replied no, of course not, they didn’t succeed in 2014, they won’t now.

When asked whether he had a message for soldiers of the Ukrainian army, Vydra replied without hesitating,

Go home! We’ve been saying that since 2014: Go home. Unequivocally, we don’t want them here, but we don’t want to kill them. I’m not speaking about nationalists, I’m speaking about Ukrainian soldiers, who are drafted or forcefully employed in the Ukrainian army. Guys, go home, either surrender or go. This is our land. We’re not leaving, we’re not going anywhere.

I asked how he felt to be treated and described as sub-human, to be called dehumanizing names, a part of the Ukrainian nationalists’ brainwashing propaganda. As I wrote previously:

“Ukrainian nationalists openly declare they view Russians as sub-human. School books teach this warped ideology. Videos show the extent of this mentality: Teaching children not only to also hate Russians and see them as not humans, but also brainwashing them to believe killing Donbas residents is acceptable. The Ukrainian government itself funds neo-Nazi-run indoctrination camps for youths.”

“It’s offensive,” Vydra said, “We are saddened: There are sick people. We need to heal them, slowly.”

I asked whether he thought friendship between Ukrainians and Russians would be possible.

“It will take years for any friendship. Take Chechnya, one region of Russia, it was at war. But slowly, slowly…We must all live together. We are one people.” Indeed, now Chechen fighters are one of the most effective forces fighting alongside Donbass and Russian soldiers to liberate Donbass areas from Ukrainian forces.

He opened a zippered trousers pocket and proudly brandished a small plastic sleeve containing children’s drawings, also containing icons of saints and Christ, and prayers…

“This is very personal, it’s like my guardian angel. I put it in plastic, I don’t even keep my ID in plastic. I’ve been carrying this one in my pocket since February. I’ve been in all sorts of hot spots. A child drew this, we receive letters from children. It’s very nice to look at them when it’s hard and we are under fire.”

He read one letter:

“We are waiting for you. Thank you for risking your lives to defend Donbas. Yulia and Ira.”

“I don’t even know who are Yulia and Ira,” he said smiling.

Showing the icons, he said, “This is Saint Ushakov, our great commander. This is Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Protector. This Abkhazi icon was given to me by the guys. This is a prayer book. And here is a prayer,” he said of one page prayer.

These words are to support when times are very hard. When there is heavy shelling, it can go on for hours. So, while you’re sitting there, you can read this.

Especially for the younger guys, 22, 23 years old, just finished college. This is new to them.

Commanders Speak of Geopolitical Reasons for Ukraine’s War

Outside, sitting in front of an Orthodox banner and a collection of collected munitions—including Western ones—two platoon commanders, “Kabar” and “Kamaz,” spoke of the bigger geopolitical picture. [See video]

“America is running the show here,” Kabar said. “It builds foreign policy on the basis of how its domestic policy is built, which is through conflicts with external countries. They are accustomed to proving their power to their people through terrorism around the world, inciting fires in Syria, in the east. They played the card of radical Islam there.

And now they are playing the card of fascism. They do not see themselves on the other side of good. They need wars, blood, cruelty, and they signed Europe up for this.

However, they’ve missed one point: Russia, since the days of the Soviet Union, has never retreated in large scale wars. They took Europe and pushed it to slaughter Russia, and they put Russia in such a position that it must secure its national interests. Europe needs to understand this, to pay attention to history, to stop being led by the United States.”

“Kabar,” a commander of the Pyatnashka fighters. [Source: Photo courtesy of Eva Bartlett]

When asked about his feeling regarding Ukrainians, “Kabar” replied similarly to Vydra.

We don’t blame the whole Ukrainian people. Ukrainians are our friends, they are our relatives. They’ve been struck by evil, and it’s not their fault, ordinary people are not to blame for this. We will liberate them from fascism, we’ll show them brotherhood, and we’ll make friends.

This is a good opportunity for us to defeat evil. God has honored us with this right to fight evil.

Kamaz, when asked why he is fighting, replied that this is his homeland, he was born here, and that he has a son who he doesn’t want to inherit Ukraine’s war on the Donbass.

I myself am Greek by nationality. Ukrainians are Slavs, they are our brothers, their grandfathers fought together shoulder to shoulder with our grandfathers against Nazism and fascism. We are here to finish it, so that our children live a normal happy life. We are fighting for the future.

He spoke of America’s continuous need for war.

We’ve seen it in Syria and Yugoslavia, where they destroyed everything and then set everything up their own way, so the people must submit, almost like slaves.

I asked whether he thought peace between Ukraine and Russia is possible.

Yes, possibly, why not? But at the moment, the President of Ukraine said there will be no negotiations.

Negotiations are possible, but I think not with this president. When he comes to his senses, he will not be able to negotiate, because he took a lot of money.

Before leaving the outpost, we chatted a bit with the commanders. A puppy sought the attention of a young soldier. Another puppy ran around our feet. The outpost commanders and soldiers take care of the dogs. Their presence added a somewhat surreal touch to the scene: an outpost which is routinely shelled, where life can cease to exist at any moment, and these happy, well-cared for puppies running around like dogs anywhere.

Western Media Inverted Reality, Lauding Nazis and Demonizing Defenders

While many in the West think that this conflict started in February 2022, those following events since 2014 are aware that, following the Maidan coup and Odessa massacre, and the rise of fascism in Ukraine against the Ukrainian people, the Donbass republics wanted to distance themselves from Ukraine’s Nazis and fascism.

The sacrifices which the people of the Donbass republics have endured, particularly those fighting to protect their families and loved ones, have been and continue to be immense.

Just as the heroes of the Syrian Arab Army were maligned, so too have Donbass forces have been maligned by Western media, though both are defending their homelands from terrorist forces trained and funded by the West. Terrorists given the freedom to commit endless atrocities against Donbass civilians.

These defenders, many living in dank trench conditions didn’t choose war, they responded to it, to protect their loved ones and their future. In spite of more than eight years of being warred upon by Ukraine, they retain their humanity.

• First published at CovertAction Magazine

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eva Bartlett.

Holding hands with the TPLF men at, or more likely, under the table — out of sight — are US/UN ‘observers’. The reason for their attendance is, one assumes, to ensure TPLF bosses are kept out of prison and allowed to slip away in the night and find amnesty somewhere. Canada has been mentioned as a possible destination, although why the Canadians (or anyone else, in fact) would want them is a mystery. A cell in the Hague would be my choice as they eke out their days waiting to be tried in the International Criminal Court.

In the days and weeks leading up to the negotiations, the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) has taken control of remaining towns in Tigray, has surrounded the capital Mekelle, and, for the time being at least, fighting appears to have subsided. The only thing left to negotiate, then, is what to do with the TPLF leaders; this is not a difficult conundrum that requires hours or diplomatic chit-chat, and foreign advisers. They, the TPLF, are terrorists, and should be treated in the same way that say, ISIS commanders would be; i.e., like criminals — arrested, imprisoned and tried. Their foreign assets (they stole an estimated $30 billion when in office) frozen and seized, and the monies utilized to fund rebuilding work.

The TPLF may have a few members of the “international community” rubbing up against them in Pretoria, but the Ethiopian government sits proud with millions and millions of Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia packed into the room, and they are roaring! Wide-ranging support for the government, and love for their countrymen and women, of all ethnic backgrounds, was displayed on 22 October, when, in cities throughout the land people, young and old, assembled, marched, sang and danced. Massive crowds demanded an end to foreign intervention in the internal affairs of the nation, and wrapped their arms around the government as it prepared for the African Union convened ‘peace talks’.

No US support no war

Throughout their destructive 27 year reign, the TPLF worked relentlessly to divide communities; systematically setting ethnic groups, that had for generations lived together harmoniously, against one another. But nothing unites a nation more than a shared enemy, and Ethiopia has had two since November 2020 – the TPLF and America/The West, three if we include corporate media. The people are now united, and that sense of fellowship includes the people of Tigray – all are Ethiopians, all share the pain of the nation and all long for peace. The TPLF is the enemy, the US is the enemy, corporate media is the enemy, not Tigrayans.

Without US support — militarily and politically — the TPLF would have been unable to wage war on the Ethiopian State; no war, no death, no rape, no displacement of persons, no destruction of property burning of land, killing of livestock, no national trauma. The US is not simply complicit in the terrorism carried out by the TPLF over the last two years, and indeed during their 27 years in office, they are the enabler. The US Policy of Aggression and Derision directed against the Ethiopian government and the people, the economic sanctions, against one of the poorest nations in the world, the conspiring and duplicity, the misleading briefings and media dis/misinformation campaign emboldened the TPLF and granted them false legitimacy.

And where the US goes her allies and puppets, follow, including corporate media, which has been integral to the mis-dis information campaign, as have, somewhat bizarrely, the US Holocaust Museum, which has recently joined the party. And as talks go on these forces of duplicity and confusion continue to treat the TPLF as if they were an equivalent party to the government, rather than the monsters they are. It is shameful, but when truth and facts become a matter of opinion to be spun according to motive and self-interest it is extremely dangerous. Groups like the TPLF can only exist in the shadows, within Caves of Deceit; throw the light of truth upon them, and like the Many Headed Hydra, they shrivel up and die.

Looking for real friends

The US-supported war in Ethiopia has revealed, if demonstration were needed, in the most vivid manner, the fabric of US foreign policy and where American/Western loyalties lie. Unsurprisingly it’s with their own vested interests, or what they perceive these to be; geo-political reach, regional power, no matter the cost — human, environmental and/or social.

So, the lesson loud and clear, and perhaps this is something worth articulating in Pretoria, is the realization that, the US and ‘the West’ more broadly, including media and some institution are not to be trusted. This fact and the hurt caused by what Ethiopians rightly regard as a betrayal, will no doubt influence how Ethiopia moves forward, who it sees as ‘friends’ and allies, where it looks for support, and who it can trust and depend on.

Outrage has been felt, not just in Ethiopia but across Africa, both at the terrorist attack on their neighbour, and the response of the US/West. This will strengthen pre-existing suspicions and further energise Pan Africanism, already strengthened in recent years, and foster greater unity across the region and continent.

African nations have long been exploited by colonial powers, post-colonial institutions — the International Monetary Fund, World Bank etc, and imposed financial systems (the scandalous Structural Adjustment Programmes e.g.), which, while masquerading as ‘aid’ and/or ‘development programmes’, have ensured countries remain more or less poor, dependent and therefore malleable.

Former colonial bodies of repression and violence (US, European countries, UK), are now in crisis themselves. Economic and political instability, ideological failure and cultural insecurity abound. And as the socio-economic model that has dominated policy making (including foreign affairs) for decades disintegrates in front of our eyes, politicians, lacking humility and vision, wedded to the past, have no answers and continually stack failure upon failure.

The legacy of the global Neo-Liberal experiment is deeply divided societies of largely unhealthy people, and a man-made environmental catastrophe. Mental health illness is at epidemic proportions and climate change/ecological breakdown caused by reckless consumerism threatens the very survival of the race.

A development model, shaped around the same socio-economic paradigm that has caused the chaos has been forced on Ethiopia and all Sub-Sharan African nations. Countries are not seen as nation states with rich individual cultures, but potential marketplaces and natural resource banks.

The model is inherently unjust, benefitting a few at the expense of the many, and is made more so when applied to so-called developing nations (such terms, like the ideals they refer to and the divisions they strengthen should be consigned to the past). It is a corrupt model that, as Ethiopia moves forward and African nations look increasingly towards one another, needs to be closely examined, and in the light of need, not exploitation and profit, re-defined.

Discussions around theses issues, as well as the nature of development, democracy, environmental concerns and regional/continental unity can slowly begin to be taken up, nationally and regionally. Platforms for debate and participation established throughout the country and a vibrant space created in which people from all ethnic groups can contribute. For now though, as Ethiopia gently emerges from the violent shadow of the TPLF, united but scarred, the focus must firstly be on healing and re-construction.

Many will be traumatized and recovery will take time; the rebuilding work will be immense (construction/repair of schools, health services, housing etc), and government will require substantial support, both financial, technical and practical.

But there is no limit to what can be achieved by a united populace, building upon a platform of peace and brotherhood. The people are resolute, weary yes, but strong, supportive of one another and deeply kind, and this is potentially (we must add that caveat), the beginning of a new chapter in the life of the country. An ancient nation with a rich diverse culture that has suffered much and for far too long; a new day, quiet and full of joy let us pray, a time free from conflict and the vile poison of the TPLF.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

They started the war in November 2020, were forced to retreat just over a year later, but not content with the level of human suffering resulting from their initial barbarism, they are, it seems, determined to kill and kill again; to rape and beat their Ethiopian brethren; to once more destroy property, burn farmland, slaughter livestock, sending fear through communities, deepening the pain of a nation in their frenzied quest for power.

This latest offensive was launched on 24 August, violating the humanitarian truce agreed with the Ethiopian government, and shattering the temporary peace. A Government statement relayed that, “Ignoring all of the peace alternatives presented by the government, the terrorist group TPLF…. continued its recent provocations and launched an attack this morning at 5 am (0200 GMT)”

The TPLF used the months of peace, not to enter unto constructive dialogue with the government, to address the needs of people in Tigray impacted by the war and beg for forgiveness, but to actively re-arm and rebuild its forces. The Crisis Group relate that they have “solid evidence” of at least 10 Antonov planes making deliveries (of arms it is assumed) “to two airports in Tigray,” almost certainly from Sudan. One such aircraft, en route from Sudan and loaded with weapons, was recently shot down by the Ethiopian air force.

The government has known about these aerial shipments for some time, but failed to clamp down on them. This lack of decisive action, particularly in relation to law and order issues has been a feature of the Abiy premiership, and is something that needs to change.

Whilst TPLF thugs lit the fuse of renewed conflict in Tigray’s southern border, other misguided fighters, many little more than children, raided a World Food Program (WFP) warehouse in Mekelle (capital of Tigray region). “12 full fuel tankers with 570,000 litres of fuel” were taken, and UN staff detained, reported, Stephane Dujarric, chief spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “These fuel stocks were to be used solely for humanitarian purposes, for the distribution of food, fertilizer and other emergency relief items. This loss of fuel will impact humanitarian operations supporting communities in all of northern Ethiopia.”

Stealing from the UN to enable war is nothing new for the TPLF; From July-September 2021 the WFP state that, “445 contracted non-WFP trucks entered Tigray, but only 38 ….returned,” – 407 were stolen by the TPLF. The lack of vehicles the agency said, was “the primary impediment to ramping up the humanitarian response” within Tigray. The inability of UN agencies to deliver humanitarian aid is of no concern whatsoever to the TPLF leadership, who care not a jot for the people of Tigray, and even less for other ethnic groups throughout Ethiopia.

Alongside the declaration of a humanitarian truce, the March 24 agreement initiated by the Government, allowed for unfettered humanitarian access to Tigray, and created a platform for peace talks. But the TPLF do not want peace, have never wanted peace and have no intention of working for it. They failed to engage with the Main Peace Committee – established to “peacefully resolve the conflict in the northern part of the country”, or the National Dialogue Commission, set up by the government on 29 December 2021, to “facilitate “inclusive dialogue on national issues for the creation of national consensus and establishment of common grounds.” From the beginning of the conflict the government has repeatedly looked for a peaceful resolution, but the TPLF have erected obstacle after excuse after condition to scupper any progress; for its part the government has consistently said it will talk to TPLF representatives anytime, “without precondition, at any venue.”

This accommodating approach, however, is wasted on the TPLF: their aim is clear, to fracture Ethiopia, inject discord, hopefully overthrow the government (with western nations’ support) – the first government to be democratically elected by the way – and regain power. They will fail totally; they are hated and despised throughout the country (including within Tigray) and by Ethiopians and friends of Ethiopia everywhere, and with every Ethiopian that they kill, rape and abuse that hate deepens a little further.

Western support: arms and credibility

The TPLF have been a malignant force in Ethiopia for decades. They dominated the previous EPRDF government (a coalition in name only) for 27 years (1991-2018), stealing election after election. Ruling through fear, enflaming division, agitating ethnic disagreements, violently crushing human rights and committing state terrorism in various parts of Ethiopia. Throughout their time in office and since their overthrow Western powers, to the bewilderment of many, have consistently supported them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their addiction to regional meddling, the main sponsor of TPLF terror is the US government. Successive administrations, together with the UK, and to a lesser degree the European Union, have backed the TPLF, empowering them financially, politically, and throughout their war on the Ethiopian State, it is widely believed, militarily.

With western political support and lasting TPLF influence in Washington, London, New York and Geneva, has come media collusion. CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, New York Times etc, all have been guilty of mis/dis-information; biased or just poorly researched stories ranging from outright lies to nauseating bothsidesism as with Voice of America (VOA) reporting of the recent theft of WFP fuel by TPLF fighters, witnessed by UN staff. VOA state that Tigrayan forces are condemned for “allegedly stealing” the fuel: allegedly!

The extent to which western politicians were, and given the recent attacks, appear to remain, involved in the TPLF’s terror war was revealed by a video that was leaked in November 2021. The footage shows a Zoom meeting between Berhane Gebre-Christos, referred to as “a “chief representative of the TPLF,” and top US, UK and European Union diplomats with long-standing connections to Ethiopia, including US Ambassador to Somalia Donald Yamamoto. The group reportedly celebrated the TPLF’s advance on Addis Ababa (which never actually transpired) and discussed how the TPLF could form a post-Abiy government.

It is geopolitics at its most ugly and menacing; these ex-colonial/imperialist political powers have no interest in seeing Ethiopians or indeed anyone in Sub-Saharan Africa prosper and are still trying to install puppet regimes wherever possible. As long as the TPLF continue to receive support from ‘foreign powers’ the terrorists will continue to wage war on the Ethiopian people. The ‘international community’, which equates in this case primarily to the US, needs to stop feeding the dogs of war and start compelling the TPLF, a cancer within the nation and the wider region, to engage meaningfully in peace talks with the government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Graham Peebles.

In contrast, consider the relative lack of outrage to Biden’s statement after the latest criminal Israeli attack on Gaza that began on August 5th. This air bombardment by Israel, a nuclear power with one of the world’s strongest militaries and the occupier of Palestinian land, was against a mostly defenseless people. During this attack, 49 Palestinians, including 17 children, were killed and 360 Palestinians including 151 children were wounded. In contrast, reports suggest that 13 Israelis had minor injuries. Biden said: “My support for Israel’s security is long-standing and unwavering – including its right to defend itself against attacks. …  I commend Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his government’s steady leadership throughout the crisis.”

Biden’s comment ignores reality. Israel wasn’t attacked, but it had attacked Gaza. Palestinians responded to the attack by Israel. In addition, note the large number of Palestinian children who were killed or wounded. This Israeli war crime clearly did not spare Palestinian civilians. This is the leadership that Biden and many other politicians commended. Wow — this says a lot! Even worse, Biden doesn’t seem to think Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israel’s state terrorism.

Besides the immeasurable human cost of the Israeli attack, the damage Israel did to Palestinian infrastructure and housing makes life in Gaza ever more difficult. Just as in numerous previous horrific and devastating Israeli attacks, there is no talk of Israel paying reparations for the widespread devastation it inflicted on Gaza. Rebuilding is difficult given that Israel has maintained, with US and Egyptian support, an illegal siege on Gaza since 2007.

The US corporate dominated media plays a role in enabling these Israeli crimes by its biased coverage. For example, it downplays the fact that Israel is an apartheid state. The US media also fails to consistently point out that Israel is occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. There are well over 600,000 Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian land in the West Bank. The media doesn’t stress that Israel routinely violates international law, particularly the 1949 Geneva Conventions on occupation, with impunity. The media also seldom mentions that the US has cast over 40 vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions regarding problematic Israeli behavior. These vetoes or threats of vetoes by the US enable Israel to escape accountability.

In addition, given how the US praises Ukrainians who resist the Russian military in Ukraine, it is appalling to see the US commending Israel even though it has been occupying Palestinian land for decades. Ukrainians who resist Russian forces are touted as heroes in the US corporate media whereas Palestinians who legitimately resist cruel and illegal Israeli policies are called terrorists. As this latest attack shows, Palestinians who are simply trying to live their lives are killed with impunity for the killers due to the US preventing any sanctions against Israel.

Unfortunately, this US hypocrisy regarding Israel is of long standing. For example, before the Partition Plan for Palestine was approved by the UN General Assembly in 1947, Loy Henderson, director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, warned: “The UNSCOP [U.N. Special Committee on Palestine] Majority Plan is not only unworkable; if adopted, it would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.”

Henderson added: “The proposals contained in the UNSCOP plan … are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.

“These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race against persons outside of Palestine.”

This US hypocrisy strongly undercuts the idea that the US cares about the rule of law. For example, the courageous South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, recently made this point in a press conference with the US Secretary of State. She said: “With respect to the role that multilateral bodies such as the United Nations should play, we believe that all principles that are germane to the United Nations Charter and international humanitarian law must be upheld for all countries, not just some Just as much as the people of Ukraine deserve their territory and freedom, the people of Palestine deserve their territory and freedom. And we should be equally concerned at what is happening to the people of Palestine as we are with what is happening to the people of Ukraine.”

Blatant US hypocrisy regarding its own war crimes as well as its hypocrisy regarding Israel are complicating its relations with non-aligned nations. The US desire to remain a leader is running into problems as more non-aligned nations don’t see the militaristic, economically predatory and hypocritical US as worthy of being their leader.

• First published in Boulder Daily Camera

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ron Forthofer.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Pedro’s running mate, the environmental activist and human rights lawyer Francia Márquez, is now the first Afro-Colombian woman to ever become Vice-President. This report will therefore contextualize this impressive achievement in the broader history of Colombia’s black minority—a people who endured and continue to endure incalculable misery.

Frederick Bowser says African slaves with melancholy-scarred faces and bodies riddled with scurvy or broken bones first arrived in Colombia in 1529. Conscripted to work in gold mines, slaves faced the wrath of Spain’s Inquisitorial Tribunals if they displayed the slightest hint of disobedience. Runaway “maroons” fled deep into the jungle or mountains and founded free communities and villages known as palenques.

Three centuries later, in the early 1810s, Spain’s colonial empire in Latin America began to crumble under the weight of internal pressures (Créole elites seeking self-determination to defend a favorable economic system) and external crises (Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion and occupation of mainland Spain).

Historian Leonardo Reales writes that Royalist armies, stranded far away from the metropole and desperate to stem the rising tide of revolutionary fervour, saw free and enslaved black populations as expendable cannon fodder. The Spanish Crown offered freedom to slaves in exchange for military service against republican rebels.

Simón Bolívar, still revered today as a great Liberator for shattering Spanish rule in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, ordered his underlings in 1820 to free thousands of slaves not out of humanitarian concern, but to preempt another Haitian Revolution that would imperil Latin American independence and, above all, endanger white economic interests.

Moreover, Bolívar assured his nervous comrades that numerous Africans would perish in battle anyway and not live long enough to become threats: “Will it not be useful that they acquire their rights in the battlefield, and their dangerous number shall be decreased through a powerful and legitimate manner?”

Bolívar’s Gran Colombia, and the Republic of New Granada following the former’s dissolution in 1831, took their time to abolish slavery. Yesenia Barragan says the ubiquity of small-scale slaveholding, combined with the influx of foreign slaveholders into the Chocó region, ensured that wealthy anti-abolitionists postponed full emancipation until 1852.

The Law of the Free Womb decreed that children born to female slaves after 1821 would be freed at the age of 18 (later extended to 25 in 1842) after a period of temporary bondage, while slaveholders were legally obliged to “tutor” the children until they reached the age of majority.

Barragan says the law effectively retained traditional slave trading practices at a local level. Non-kin patrons could still purchase and sell Free Womb children separately from their mothers. This compromise satisfied slaveholders convinced that hasty emancipation amounted to releasing “a multitude of furious tigers from their chains…”

Disappointed slaves, yearning to be repaid for their hefty sacrifices during the Wars of Independence, knew they would likely die before being free. Eduardo Carbó estimated the average life expectancy of men and women in early 19th century Colombia was barely 26.5 years. Grueling working conditions guaranteed an even lower life expectancy for the enslaved.

In a last ditched effort to prevent the inevitable, anti-abolitionists, invoking the “black menace” boogeyman and the sanctity of private property, rebelled in southern Colombia. The Liberal government under José Hilario López promptly crushed the insurgents, and on the 1st January 1852, slaves finally enjoyed the same rights and duties bestowed upon fellow Colombians at birth.

This fateful day arrived much too late for the likes of Justo, Magdalena, Alonsa, and countless anonymous slaves savagely whipped, tortured, maimed, crippled, incapacitated, raped, or murdered by their masters. Court proceedings reveal that slaveholders often paid a measly fine for their crimes.

Yet Nancy Appelbaum says the mere sight of Afro-Colombians free to toil for “the few luxuries their simple natures crave”, to quote an American mining prospector, sent shivers down the spines of Colombian and transnational capitalists itching to exert complete control over pliant work forces. Strict vagrancy laws, constant surveillance, and brutal policemen bound black populations to forced labor in the Pacific lowlands long after slavery ended.

The specter of the “black menace” never dissipated either. It returned to haunt elites shaken by blatant US meddling in Colombian internal affairs, the independence of Panama in 1903, and the seemingly irreversible social and moral decline of the nation due to industrialization.

James Henderson argues Colombian physicians, ethnographers, sociologists, scientists, and psychiatrists in the early 20th century, many of whom obsessed with eugenic theories imported from France and Britain, lamented that widespread destitution and disease were symptoms of “racial decay”.

The scholar and politician López de Mesa, dreading that further “population darkening” would forever banish Colombia from the civilized world, wrote a widely distributed report called The Ethnic Factor in 1927. Therein, he warned government and clerical officials of the grave dangers of miscegenation, especially between black and indigenous citizens: “This mix of impoverished bloods, from inferior cultures, creates subjects…who are subject to nervous disorders, mental disease, madness, epilepsy, and crime”.

Laureano Gómez, a rabid anti-Semite, borderline fascist sympathizer, and leader of the Conservative Party in the 1930s, dared imply that Afro-Colombians had to disappear if Colombia ever hoped to compete with advanced nations in Latin America or Europe.

Scholars like Melba Meza, José Lacasta-Zabalza, and Angie Reyes amply demonstrated that Gómez was enamored with the authoritarian and reactionary Catholicism espoused by General Francisco Franco in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. For example, in 1942, Gómez launched an unhinged anti-Freemason, anti-communist, and anti-Jewish  campaign to discredit his liberal opponents. These baseless conspiracy theories bore a disturbing resemblance to the massive disinformation campaigns extreme nationalists unleashed before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Furthermore, upon becoming President in 1950 at the height of La Violencia, a civil-war which claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 Colombians over a decade, Gómez planned to implement constitutional reforms that would have granted immense power to the Church and military, curbed press freedoms, and imposed restrictions on electoral suffrage.

Considering his enthusiasm for Iberian dictatorships and Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish Nuremburg Laws, as Carlos Páramo Bonilla mentioned previously, one can only imagine what ominous solutions Gómez had in mind to get rid of Afro-Colombians: “The black is a plague. In the countries where he has disappeared, as in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, it has been possible to establish an economic and political organization with a strong and stable basis”.

Nominally “progressive” groups also subscribed to racist beliefs. Jaime Arocha argues that Colombia’s Socialist Revolutionary Party envisioned a nationalist utopia whereby white and indigenous peoples lived in perfect harmony, yet Afro-Colombians were often excluded from these dreams of a brighter future.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the charismatic lawyer, Liberal Party leader, and life-long advocate of the working-classes, was not above embracing or legitimizing repugnant stereotypes as well.

In an infamous trial, Gaitán defended Jorge Zawadsky, a journalist of Jewish descent who murdered a doctor for having an affair with his wife. With the help of psychiatrist Jiménez López, Gaitán tried to prove that his client’s actions could be explained by examining, in the words of Carlos Páramo Bonilla,“the ancestral pressures of racial temperament”: since his family tree contained “a considerable amount of black blood, of African blood”, Zawadsky, consumed by primordial rage in a momentary lapse of reason, succumbed to the corrupt, primitive, irrational, and violent impulses he inherited from his African ancestors. In other words, the black blood coursing through Zawadsky’s veins compelled him to commit this crime of passion.

Yet, in 1991, Colombia’s new constitution marked a radical departure from Bogotá’s decades-long indifference, prejudice, or hostility to Afro-Colombian communities along the Pacific coast. Article 55 stressed that as a distinct minority in a multi-ethnic society, Afro-Colombians had the right to preserve their culture and maintain collective ownership of ancestral lands. Two years later, Law 70 intended to broaden Afro-Colombian participation in the political process and even promoted the inclusion of Afro-Colombian history in school curriculums.

However, this empowering legislation rankled multinational corporations determined to exploit Afro-Colombian territories rich in timber and gold without interference or resistance from black activists. Ulrich Oslender wrote that Bogotá quickly bowed to corporate pressure and abandoned conservation strategies in Pacific regions by the mid-1990s.

Thereafter, state and paramilitary forces, acting on behalf of insatiable national and transnational companies, evicted Afro-Colombians from their homes and villages with ruthless efficiency. Hit lists in hand, killers systematically cleansed uncooperative locals and brought in laborers to replace them and work for African Palm plantations.

Human Rights Watch reported in 1996 that the Colombian army, in collaboration with paramilitaries, used the pretext of eliminating leftist guerrillas like the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) to launch devastating offensives against civilians in the Chocó department.

An Afro-Colombian community leader vividly remembered the aftermath of air raids in Riosucio: “… they bombed all the surrounding rivers…when someone went down, there was not a single soul along the banks of the Salaquí river.”

In 2013, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Colombian authorities for their complicity in the murder of 80 victims and forced displacement of 4,000 people during Operation Génesis in 1997. For Peace Presence added that courts eventually sentenced US-trained General Rito Alejo Del Río to twenty-five years in jail for orchestrating the killing of farmer Marino López. El Espectador reported that paramilitaries barged into López’s home, slit his throat, dismembered his body, and used his head as a football.

These corporate-backed rampages pushed enraged Afro-Colombians into the arms of violent militias. Daniel Martínez says the Marxist ELN (National Liberation Army) took full advantage of the escalating chaos in Pacific regions to covertly arm and sponsor black “self-defence” regiments like the mysterious Benkos Biohó.

Benkos Biohó was a West African prince born and raised in present-day Guinea-Bissau. Portuguese colonists had him captured and shipped-off to Colombia as a slave. Undaunted, Biohó amassed many followers, led a slave rebellion, fled to the mountains, founded one of the most resilient “free black” towns in the New World, and waged relentless guerrilla warfare against his former masters.

Wesley Tomaselli says Spanish Governor Géronimo de Suazo eventually signed a peace treaty with the West African Spartacus, yet his successor broke the agreement, lured Biohó into a trap, and had him executed. Biohó was decapitated and dismembered in the central plaza of Cartagena, then one of the most important slave markets in Spanish America.

This shameless betrayal and Biohó’s gruesome demise served as warnings to any other African captives tempted to break free from bondage. Over three centuries later, Afro-Colombians keen to protect their autonomy from rapacious corporations and barbaric paramilitaries, like the beheaded farmer Marino López, still suffer a similar fate.

Yet the Benkos Biohó guerrillas in the nineties never gained the popularity, respect, or notoriety their namesake acquired in the 17th century. Instead of helping to channel endemic discontent among Afro-Colombians into a productive and peaceful mass movement, the Biohós alienated people the EPL (Popular Liberation Army) and other groups indiscriminately attacked by becoming terrorists themselves.

In August 1994, Biohós ambushed a bus and slaughtered the eighteen soldiers and civilians inside. This disastrous assault tarnished the Biohós reputation among the public, crippled its recruitment drive, and precipitated the militia’s disintegration. Following the death of their leader, the Biohós degenerated into a criminal organisation known for kidnapping people and training child soldiers.

Moreover, Martínez writes that laws awarding land ownership titles to Afro-Colombians, for territories black and indigenous peoples administered together for centuries, dealt a hammer blow to inter-ethnic solidarity. Land disputes devolved into bloody turf wars as the emergence of indigenous guerrillas tore communities apart. Factions affiliated with the FARC, like the FARIP (Armed Indigenous Forces of the Pacific), contributed to the region’s descent into chaos.

Francia Márquez ‘s election as Vice-President is a momentous accomplishment worthy of celebration. However, this victory cannot disguise the damning fact that, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, Colombia is home to the world’s third largest internally displaced population. The UN Refugee Agency added that at least 740,000 out of 7.4 million IDPs are Afro-Colombian.

President Pedro and VP Márquez, if they truly intend to make a definitive break with the past, must devote all their energy and resources to implement the 2016 Peace Agreement, which ended nearly 50 years of war between Bogota and the FARC. Demilitarization on an enormous scale would allow Afro-Colombians to return to their homes. Only then can they start rebuilding the autonomy various regimes so cruelly denied them for so long.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-Philippe Stone.

There is much misinformation and deceit about the Bab al Hawa crossing in Idlib province, Syria. First, Western media rarely mention that after the aid crosses the border, it is effectively controlled by Syria’s version of Al Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS). Second, they fail to explain that HTS hoards much of the aid for its fighters. When Aleppo was liberated by the Syrian Army, reporters found large stashes of medicines and food in their headquarters that were set aside for the use of the militia. Third, HTS makes millions of dollars by taxing the aid that it distributes to the rest of the population under its control.

In May 2018, HTS was added to the US State Department’s list as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). HTS’s 15000 fighters are able to manipulate the numbers by including their names and the names of their accompanying families as civilians, thus receiving huge amounts of aid from UN agencies such as the World Food Program.  It is rarely mentioned that thousands of these civilians are not Syrian. They are Uyghurs and Turkmen supporters of Al Qaeda, from Turkey, China and elsewhere.

The Bab al Hawa crossing is also an entry point for weapons and sectarian fighters smuggled in with the copious aid. This is not new. In 2014, legendary journalist Serena Shim reported how she witnessed fighters and weapons entering Syria using World Food Organization trucks at Bab al Hawa. She was killed in Turkey two days after her report.

It is claimed over 4 million persons are in Idlib. That is a huge exaggeration. Before the conflict began in 2011 there were 1.5 million. When sectarian militants seized control, many civilians fled for Aleppo or Latakia. Even including fighters coming from other areas, the population is much LESS than before the conflict. The number of civilians in Idlib is grossly inflated for political and economic reasons. 

The media also fail to mention that the aid across Bab al Hawa serves only the Al Qaeda-controlled area (the northern green section of the map) and not the rest of Syria. While western states send massive amounts of aid to this minority, the vast majority of Syrians suffer with little aid. Moreover, they are under the extreme US “Caesar” sanctions designed by the US to crush the economy by outlawing the Syrian Central Bank, make it impossible for Syrians to rebuild infrastructure, and punish Syrians and anyone who would trade or assist them.

Russian, Chinese and other representatives on the UN Security Council have pointed out that aid to Syria should be going through the UN recognized government in Damascus. Aid to civilians in Idlib should be distributed via the Syrian Red Crescent or a comparable neutral organization.

Providing aid through Bab al Hawa via hostile Turkey to an officially designated terrorist organization should be prohibited.  It is a clear violation of Syrian sovereignty. In December 2022, when the authorization again comes to a UN Security Council vote, the crossing may finally be shut down. At that point, the legitimate aid to civilians in Idlib province can be delivered from within Syria as it should be.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Syria Support Movement.