How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?
Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?
In the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden seemed to have been everything that President Obama could have wished for with his battle for a second term on the immediate horizon. Raucous celebrations hit the US streets and Obama’s approval rating shot up by 9 per cent. A more reflective mood seems to be taking hold in the US at the cold blooded military execution of an unarmed and untried man.
Few people would want to defend Bin Laden, but anyone concerned with the application of proper democratic and civilized principles, especially in a violent cultural competition with those constantly accused of the opposite, his extrajudicial killing without trial by marines dropped illegally into a foreign country without permission are now starting to brood about the consequences of the operation. Slamming through anyone’s home shooting unarmed residents including women and children cannot advance the cause of law and justice. Even supposing the house had been under surveillance for some time, the marines could not have been sure whom they might have killed.
The initial infantile bogeyman propaganda soon began being revised into its opposite. Bin Laden did not use his wife as a human shield. She rushed spontaneously at a US gunman who shot her in the leg. The armed resistance of Bin Laden was false, he was unarmed and defenceless, as were everyone in the main building. The resistance came from a guard outside in the compound.
This execution has revived arguments about the illegality of the war on terror and has raised all the issues that made it such a controversial and unacceptable policy. Summary justice reflects the disregard for law that the US has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, at Guantanamo Bay, and continually with Iran, the Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is the conduct of a state that has no regard for the rights of others where its own interests are concerned.
The point of justice is that the evidence for and against someone can be heard, and people are judged by their peers, not their enemies. The USA nominally subscribes to that form of justice. Bin Laden was a human being and deserved the same right to justice as anyone else, a trial, establishment of identity, a plea, presentation of the evidence for and against, examination of it, and a fair judgement. Failure to follow the rules of law, the due process of law, is ultimately a danger to everyone. It damages our claims to be a superior civilisation to that of our enemies and detractors, the terrorists. The Nazis were surely far worse criminals than any modern terrorist but were accorded the right to defend themselves at Nuremburg. Besides sending illegal hit squads to assassinate people abroad, the rulers of the USA feel free to start wars of imperial conquest, to set up concentration camps, to torture people, and to murder of foreigners, most of whom are innocent, in distant countries by robot aircraft armed with missiles.
Eight missiles from a US Predator drone led to the destruction of a vehicle carrying “foreign militants” in Datta Khel in north Waziristan, Pakistan, killing 15 people as it approached a roadside restaurant, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. The restaurant and a nearby house were hit and at least one civilian was among the dead. Barack Obama’s administration has favored the use of CIA unmanned drones because no American can be killed or injured while feeding the dogs of war in the US. Nor does the US government publicly acknowledge its responsibility for these attacks though it is the only force able to deploy them. The US Brookings Institute estimates that the drones kill 10 civilians for every alleged terrorist killed. The Conflict Monitoring Centre says at least 900 Pakistanis were killed by drones in 2010, “the vast majority” of whom being civilians.
Another US drone fired a missile at a car in Yemen’s Shabwa province killing two brothers suspected of being Al Qaida militants, the first in Yemen since 2002. The Defence Ministry confirmed the deaths. Shabwa provincial officials identified the two as Abdullah and Mosaad Mubarak. The Yemeni foreign minister had already said the government would no longer allow missile strikes by pilotless aircraft because of the high rate of civilians killed and injured by them.
These were within days of the death of Bin Laden. The USA is beginning to sound worryingly Nazi itself! Where is the barrier to stop some administration from acting with equal arbitrariness at home. All they need is some suitable atrocity to blame on whoever they want to attack. The Nazis burnt the Reichstag building as an excuse to set up martial law. How long can the rule of law last in the USA when it is so easily abrogated elsewhere? The fact that there seems to be pretty general approval for the violation of law in the USA, and the added fact that few have the nerve to contest it, does not bode well. The USA is rushing like lemmings to their own destruction while gloating smugly over their power to destroy others.
Political commentators, academics and some terror experts are now speaking out that Osama has been dead since 13 December 2001. Bin Laden tapes made since that date are fakes concocted by Bush and Blair's secret agents to offer oxygen for the wars on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan. Some videos show him with a Semitic, aquiline nose, others show him with a shorter, broad nose. On one video, Bin Laden wears golden rings on his fingers, an adornment banned among Wahhabis. According to the UK Daily Mail, former US foreign intelligence officer, Angelo M Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, had said before the recent news:
All the evidence suggests Elvis Presley is more alive today than Osama Bin Laden.
Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, former emeritus professor at California's Claremont School of Theology, says Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on 13 December, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan. He was buried in an unmarked grave, a Wahhabi custom, within 24 hours, according to Muslim tradition.
Bin Laden had already insisted four times in official Al Qaeda statements made to the Arab press that he played no role in 9/11. On September 28, a fortnight after the atrocity, he declared emphatically:
I have already said I am not involved. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge… nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.
Then on 13 December, 2001, the date Bin Laden really died, the US Government released a new Bin Laden video in which he contradicted his previous denials, admitting his involvement in 9/11. Moreover, in this film, Bin Laden looks quite different. Previously he had looked pale, thin and ill because he had a serious kidney condition and had been in a hospital in Dubai for treatment only weeks before 9/11. Now he was a weighty man with a black beard, not a grey one, with dark skin not pale skin, and with a different shaped nose. His original slender fingers had become those of a boxer. He also looked healthy. Lastly, he was writing with his right hand—he was left handed. Griffin adds:
A reason to suspect that all of the post-2001 Bin Laden tapes are fabrications is that they often appeared at times that boosted the Bush presidency or supported a claim by its chief “war on terror” ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
News of Bin Laden's kidney failure, or death, appeared on 19 January, 2002, four months after 9/11. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told CNN:
I think now, frankly, he is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. The images of him show he is extremely weak.
Benazir Bhutto also remarked in an Al Jazeera interview with Frost before she was killed that Bin laden was dead. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd reported a prominent official of the Afghan Taliban as saying that Osama Bin Laden had been buried on or about 13 December:
He suffered serious complications and died a natural, quiet death. He was buried in Tora Bora, a funeral attended by 30 Al Qaeda fighters, close members of his family and friends from the Taliban. By the Wahhabi tradition, no mark was left on the grave.
His last will and testament was carried by a London based Arab newspaper in 2001.
Blair and Bush lied to us perhaps more even than anyone suspected. Why are they not being arrested?
We found out last night that the British parliament is not a coalition of the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats, it includes the Labour Party. When it comes to warfare, the UK has only one party—the Gang of Three. The House of Commons voted by 557 to 13 to support the UN resolution 1973 on Libya. The thirteen MPs with the principle to vote against were:
John Baron (C: Basildon & Billericay), Graham Allen (L: Nottingham North), Ronnie Campbell (L: NBlyth Valley), Jeremy Corbyn (L: NIslington North), Barry Gardiner (L: NBrent North), Roger Godsiff (L: NBirmingham Hall Green), John McDonnell (L: NHayes and Harlington), Linda Riordan (L: NHalifax), Dennis Skinner (L: NBolsover), Mike Wood (L: NBatley and Spen), Katy Clark (L: NNorth Ayrshire and Arran), Yasmin Qureshi (L: NBolton South-East), Caroline Lucas (Green: Brighton Pavilion), Mark Durkan (SDLP: Foyle), Margaret Ritchie (SDLP: Down South).
The rest either abstained, showing they are good for nothing, or voted for yet another middle eastern war. These people have no excuse. They have seen what Blair and Bush did in Iraq and what is happening in Afghanistan, but they are so lacking in principle and dripping in opportunistic self satisfaction that they ignored what they know… for self advancement. They are not fit to be MPs. They are not fit to be in Parliament. Parliament requires an opposition or it is as much a dictatorship as Libya. What is the point of choosing a representative when all of them vote according to the script that suits the MP and not what the citizens they represent want.
These people have killed democracy as we know it. As we know it it is pointless, and it needs now to be re-thought. The present system is a careerist gravy train for crooks, who, on this vote, outnumber principled MPs 43 to 1. We cannot expect Parliament to reform itself, so we, the people, will have to reform it as we have had to do in the seventeenth century, and twice in the nineteenth century by revolution and the threat of revolution. Britons died on these occasions, and doubtless the same will again be true. To achieve fairness and justice ordinary people always die.
Will the French, Americans and Arabs be organizing a humanitarian “No Fly Zone” over the UK when our government turns the troops against its people? No chance! If anything, they will do the same as in Libya. The “No Fly Zone” over Libya is obviously… obviously… not a humanitarian venture.
Just how do you save people from being killed by bombing them? It is exactly the same in Afghanistan where even Karzai, the US stooge, now wants the US and its lapdogs out, after a series of mass murders of civilians, often by US drones. It shows the poltroonery of the US and its allies. They are doing their best to engage the enemy by robots in case they might get killed themselves, so they sent pilotless aircraft to target schools and weddings, anywhere where there seems to be a gathering of people on the assumption that it is a troop of rebels.
And to what purpose? How does an ordinary Briton or American benefit from this wanton brutality? We do not. A few people employed servicing the military will briefly enjoy secure employment, but the rest of us will have to pay for this adventure, as we paid for the previous ones, by job losses and tax hikes. The beneficiaries are the rich, not us. And, when we choose to rebel against our rich dictators, the rich will use the technology they are perfecting abroad against us.
Perhaps something will come out of it. It is wishful thinking, but goes like this.
Since all these MPs think it proper to support the bombing of nations that they claim a humanitarian reason for doing, they ought now to be willing to support the bombing of Israel, a rogue state which has different laws for Jews and Arabs among its own citizenry, and frequently raids Gaza, a small patch of land packed with millions of Arabs who are not Israeli citizens. Israel’s “democratic” authorities have even revoked the residency permit of the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem. Despite efforts by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary and the British ambassador, the Israelis have not relented.
After maintaining a deafening silence about Israel’s atrocities against civilians, Britain suddenly wants a “day of reckoning” for war criminals—as long as they are Libyan.Stuart Littlewood
The UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, promised retribution for Gaddafi’s crimes, and to refer Libya to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court:
That sends a clear message to all involved, in the regime and any other groups that if they commit crimes and atrocities there will be a day of reckoning for them.
Crimes will not go unpunished and will not be forgotten. There will be a day of reckoning and the reach of international justice is long.
British diplomats expressed the ConDem coalition’s policy as taking whatever steps were necessary…
…to ensure that those responsible for the awful human rights violations that are currently occurring in Libya are held to account… [because] we are appalled by the levels of violence… [so] The United Kingdom will do everything we can to make sure those responsible in the Libyan regime are held accountable for their actions…
Why then did we not hear this highly principled, humanitarian Foreign Secretary call for a reckoning with the Israeli regime? It murdered 1400 of Gaza’s civilians, including hundreds of children, two years ago, at Christmas! Besides the murder, the attacks left thousands maimed and myriads homeless, having to live in rubble. One UN resolution was sufficient for the bombing of Libya, but very many UN resolutions have been passed regarding Israeli oppression of Palestinians with absolutely no response at all from these humanitarian leaders of ours.
HMS York instantly appeared unloading medical supplies for the Benghazi Medical Centre, donated by the Swedish government, but nothing was available to assist when Gaza was under attack from Israeli bombers, or when Israeli soldiers acted as pirates on the high seas hijacking a Turkish ship carrying similar humanitarian aid to Gazans who are oppressed, humiliated, and impoverished every day by Israeli attacks.
Instead of seeking justice for Israeli crimes the Foreign Office is trying to change international law to let the Israeli criminals who authorized and justified them, like Tzipi Livni, Avigdor Lieberman, Ehud Barak and Binyamin Netanyahu, to move freely in the west.
Prominent Zionist Jews, who are knee jerk supporters of Israel, whatever atrocities they commit, are among the supporters of western political parties, and western leaders pander to these Zionists because they will finance them. David Cameron told a Jewish dinner, according to the Jerusalem Post:
With me you have a prime minister whose belief in Israel is indestructible… I will always be a strong defender of the Jewish people. I will always be an advocate for the State of Israel.
Cameron promises to support the Zionist state of Israel “always”—whatever crimes it commits! And then he cynically equates “the Jewish people” with Israel, so is it any wonder that some people do the same and attack Jews wherever they are for the crimes of Zionist Israel? Anti-Semitic attacks are on the increase, the Chief Rabbi of the UK tells us, as if it should be surprising when so many of them are Zionists—Jewish fascists! But all Jews are not Zionists, and all Jews do not support the racialist attitude of Israel, including some Israeli Jews.
Western uncritical support of Zionism is why Israel gets away with what Gaddafi cannot, why anti-Semitism is increasing, and why also the megarich oil sheiks of the Arabian peninsula can oppress their own people without a word of criticism from western leaders like Hague, Cameron, Obama and Clinton, all of whom get more two faced and slimy by the second. If you are an Arab rebel make sure you choose who you are rebelling against. If it is Gaddafi—OK, you are a democrat. If the king of Saudi Arabia—bad news, you are a terrorist.
War is a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.Paul Valery
Invading foreign countries is for the benefit of a narrow class of megarich people, who like to steal other people’s assets and benefit from war bucks whatever else happens.
In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.
Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:
Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.
The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:
There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.
Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.
The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:
Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.
International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.
Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.
This man along with his master, George Bush, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people, and disrupting and destroying what had been a stable country, albeit under a dictator supported for decades by the US. He has reaped his reward addressing conventions of rich Republicans, advising banks and businesses, getting unknown expenses and no one knows what other rewards as a so called Middle East ambassador for Israel the United Nations, and now getting an advance on his memoirs of around £5 million. This latter sum and any additional royalties from the book, he has donated to a military charity for damaged servicemen, of which there are quite a number to add to those who are dead. Some of the families of dead soldiers say this is blood money.
Charles Taylor, a petty but cruel dictator of another country, Liberia, is standing trial for much lesser crimes than Blair and Bush, supporting the bloody rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone, financed allegedly by “blood diamonds”, where Blair, attempting to imitate his heroine, petit bourgeois Tory shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher, by sending in a British battalion, got his first taste for military glory.
If this petty murderer is standing trial, then why isn’t Blair and his puppet master G W Bush. Impeach the War Criminals and have them face a judge and jury too.
The Palestinians, who have lived in Palestine for 2000 years, are no closer to having their own state than they ever were. Israel’s desire to push forward with the peace process is not clear. It refuses to countenance either withdrawal from the occupied territories or the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under US pressure, did join his predecessors in endorsing Palestinian statehood, albeit grudgingly and with caveats. The idea is not popular with the right wing members of his coalition, and efforts to coax Israel into halting all settlement construction in the West Bank have not succeeded.
The illegal apartheid wall snakes through the West Bank. Illegal Israeli settlement colonies, still being expanded, on the West Bank are for Jews only, as are the specially constructed roads. Gaza is still being illegally blockaded. Palestinians in their homeland are confronted by a plethora of checkpoints and barriers that divide families and keep people from their homes, farms and workplaces. What red blooded Yankee would stand for it? Moreover, the international community’s failure to hold Israel to account for war crimes gives it virtual carte blanche to launch attacks with the best modern weaponry, supplied by Uncle Sam, on the virtually defenseless Arabs.
To cover up their criminal complicity, Israeli's and their western sponsor, the US, blame the victims, claiming that Hamas’s resistance to recognizing the current gains of their oppressors stands in the way of a just settlement. Avigdor Lieberman demands the execution as traitors of Arab members of the Knesset who have met Hamas, and the expulsion of Arab citizens who do not sign a loyalty oath to Israel “as a Jewish state”. Such ideas are plainly racist—a form of apartheid. Anti-Arab racism is woven into the fabric of Israeli society. Lieberman is an example.
Palestinians who were born on land inhabited by their forebears for centuries, were driven out by the Jewish terrorist groups that became the core of the Israeli Defense Force after Israel’s foundation, and have no right of return. But Lieberman was born in Chisinau in Moldova, a place totally foreign to Palestine and its Arab people. Yet his status as a Jew qualified him to emigrate to Israel with full civic rights and the ability to travel and to settle anywhere in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
At the root of this mess is the protective umbrella with which America unconditionally shields its Middle East ally. As long as the US has the power of veto within the UN Security Council, Israel can do what it pleases. At the same time, Britain cannot hold Israelis to account without risking its special relationship with Washington.
Britain, which has always prided itself on its legal system and respect for human rights, actually colludes with Israel to ensure its officials escape prosecution. The British Foreign Office engaged in diplomatic shenanigans so that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak could receive immunity from prosecution while on a private visit to London with his wife. British justice does not extend to Israeli war criminals being held to account for their atrocities.
Those who believed that President Obama would make a difference are disappointed. He now seems a man of fine words and little action, certainly in foreign affairs. Like his predecessors, he is perpetuating US double standards. He calls for a nuclear free Middle East and wags his finger at Iran for enriching uranium, then blesses Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”.
Britain, kow-towing to the US and Israel and in common with the rest of the European Union, refuses to talk to Hamas, even though it was properly elected in the Palestinian election, but it is ready and willing to engage with war criminals and racists. So much for the sanctity of democracy.
Meanwhile, the United Nations ignores Israel’s flouting of Security Council Resolutions, and chooses to bin its own investigations into Israel’s crimes. The carefully compiled report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was shelved. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lobbied diplomatic support to back Israel’s objection to the report accusing Israel of war crimes. The report wanted its conclusions referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague, if the warring parties failed to conduct credible investigations within six months. The court at the Hague is not popular with the US either. Too many US leaders would be up for trial as war criminals, they fear.
Where does this sorry state of affairs leave the Palestinian people? Absolutely nowhere. They are constantly failed by international bodies and the international legal system. Is it any wonder that they have resorted to desperate methods? Who would not take them in the unjust situation Palestinians are in? Promises made that their own state is on the horizon are always broken.
When, in frustration, they turn to violence, they are branded as terrorists. The Islamist movement Hamas is regarded by Israel and the West as a terrorist organization after carrying out dozens of suicide attacks, but the invasion by Israel of Gaza on 27 December 2008, left 1,400 Palestinians, nearly all civilians, and 13 Israelis, nearly all soldiers, dead.
Surely something is seriously wrong with our world when a people who have been wronged for over a half century are treated as the criminals. Wherever the Palestinians turn, they find every door shut. Whatever they do to obtain a fraction of their rights, they face insurmountable obstacles. Time and again, they pursue international justice only to discover that it does not exist… for them! Recognized legal channels lead them nowhere.
Compiled from various sources.
When American POWs were shown on TV by the Iraqis, Donald (von) Rumsfeld suddenly became a spouter of international law, the Geneva Convention. Why then was he, and the US leadership not interested in international law when they ignored the rule of the UN and started the war? Are we supposed to admire or believe this hypocrisy? Saddam was not the only criminal. These men were too, and they know it. That is why the US still refuses to ratify the International Court of Justice.
Mr Blair boasted that the removal of Saddam was a good deed in itself, so it did not matter that he lied to Parliament and the country over WMDs. Saddam, he told us killed 300,000 of his own people and they were buried in mass graves, but the invasion led to more deaths, and that is justified in Blair”s perverted mind. In the Vietnam war, Blair’s ally in mutual sycophancy, the USA, had already killed 60,000 of its own soldiers fighting an unjust war, and killed two million Vietnamese, as well as destroying the country with defoliants and poisons, and damaging the genetic make up of the Vietnamese forever with horrific results. What does the selective Christian conscience say about all this?
Bush was not elected but twice defrauded the US electorate to get into power. Yet, the people of the US seem unabashed that this man should have led their sons into a mad adventure on the basis of hatred of Moslems, or greed for oil. The call among peace loving and democratic people now is to punish the crypto-Nazis and strengthen the democratic process so that the same disaster cannot happen again.
WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, feels threatened by US counterintelligence designs. It is reported in www.france24.com that WikiLeaks twittered:
If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our April 5 film. And you know who is responsible.
The film, Pentagon Murder Cover-up, apparently shows US military personnel killing civilians and journalists in Afghanistan. While the British media constantly publish propaganda featuring our “brave heroes” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in hearses, they say nothing about the many hundreds of Afghans being killed each month, most of whom are innocent. Weeping British mothers bewail their dead sons, but seem not to give a thought to the sons and mothers being killed daily by our heroes. WikiLeaks has a reputation for reliability, having been given a prize as Best New Media by The Economist in only 2008.
The US intelligence agency, in a classified document, described WikiLeaks as “a threat to US troops abroad”, but WikiLeaks published the report, forcing the Department of Justice to confirm the story was true. The report described ways to bring down the website. The report also lists embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq and violations in the attack on Fallujah, as well as human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
The Zionist Israelis it seems have now murdered an elected representative of a sovereign state on foreign soil. Is this terrorism? The neoconservative New Labour rulers of Britain have expressed no concern for the implications for democracy and terrorism elsewhere, particularly here. It is concerned only that British passports were forged to effect the assassination. You can imagine what the reaction in the West would have been if the assassins had been Iranians, and the victim an Israeli.
“Democratic” Israel has full or shared control of 97% of the Palestinian people’s land in the West Bank, where it is demolishing Palestinian homes to build Israeli settlements. It is also building a “security” wall through the West Bank—to secure Arab land and water supplies for the Israelis! Palestinians suffer. They are subjected to arbitrary arrests and torture, and live under conditions many describe as open-air prisons or apartheid.
The Palestinians have been divided by the US and Israel, with Fatah and Israel siding together against Hamas. Fatah controls the West Bank while Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority, under Fatah, has been bought off. Israel’s chosen governing partner, directly controls the other 3% of the West Bank.
Hamas is the party democratically and legitimately elected by the Palestinians. Fatah is unelected, known for corruption, torture and intimidation, and bankrolled by the US. Keith Dayton is the US security coordinator overseeing the training of Palestinian forces. He says the stated aim of the mission is to “preserve and protect the interests of the state of Israel”. Hamas is villified and has been boycotted since winning the 2006 election while Fatah—or the Palestinian Authority—receives money and training from the US to fight the party Palestinians have elected.
The ruling caste of the US in Washington, and our own in London, boast their democratic credentials until representatives are elected they do not like, then suddenly they prefer unelected but easily bribed crooks. They have always preferred local bullies to do their military dirty work for them, when they can get them to.
The money and training are being used by the Palestinian Authority to wage war against Hamas, and the Palestinian population of the Gaza strip, literally a completely isolated strip of land confined by the sea and Israel, with a short stretch adjacent to Egypt. The Israeli war on Gaza at the beginning of 2009 killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. The independent Goldstone report heavily criticized Israeli war crimes and attacks on UN buildings in Gaza. The Israeli justification of the war was to stop Hamas rocket attacks. These represent a token resistance to Israeli brutality. The rockets are home made, unguided and almost useless, having killed almost no one. And Hamas had kept a ceasefire until Israel provoked a reaction as an excuse to fight the one sided war.
Israel has the upper hand in every measure. Fatah stays in power by policing Israel’s enemies. There is no peace process. Israel has no interest in peace. It is a small boy under the protection of the big boy in the schoolyard. It enjoys kicking the other small boys, knowing they dare not retaliate. The big boy sadistically enjoys the small boys’ pain and humiliation.
People rightly ask why we are under attack by terrorists, but they never listen to the answer. We are assisting an occupying power in the middle East. We must be implicated in their torture and other abuses. Why does our government keep on siding with international criminals subject to a long list of UN resolutions for their terrorism against their neighbors? We persist in supporting the rogue nation causing all the trouble in the middle east. It is not Iran, but Israel!
Additional reporting from Adam Uppal, The Standard, Canada
Paradigms Lost at True Slant reports that in an interview with the Republican ex-vice President, Dick Cheney answered in the style we have come to expect of him. He said he questioned whether “this guy” is taking the war on terror seriously. The Religious Right always know what God wants, so it seems unbelievable to hear words of frustration:
“At the same time that American is engaged in a global fight against terror, in which thousands of American lives are at stake, God seems more concerned with setting snowfall records along the Eastern seaboard. Personally, I long for the days of fire and brimstone.”
God is not doing enough to fight terror, and he longed for the Rapture, the days when God let His will be known.
“I was a big advocate of waterboarding. I was a big advocate of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”
God is not supportive. Asked, “Didn’t Jesus say ‘love your enemies’? So torture in not at all Christian!”, Cheney replied:
“No one was tortured during the Bush Administration, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing it because it is absolutely essential in the war against terror.”
David Knowles at Paradigm Lost reports he repeatedly went after God. Mr Cheney approved of rescinding the military’s controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but said it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that his own daughter is a lesbian.
Asked whether the same logic held true for interrogating prisoners, seeing that the Bush administration overturned the Army field manual when it authorized the use of torture on enemy combatants, Mr Cheney’s reported reply was:
“Why don’t you ask God that question?”
Cheney has never got over no longer pulling God’s strings as he used to when he controlled Bush in the Whitehouse, a man who thought he was God. A former member of the Bush team said its like he wants God to fail, but it’s just Dick being Dick! Or was it a dick?
Paradigms Lost was unable to get God for a comment. Of course, they might be joking!
Dr M D Magee—You can add me to this list (below)! The neo-Nazi, pro-Zionist, New Labour party has added so many oppressive laws to the British Statute Book, that we have lost count, and will only remember them when they start being used against us, as all such laws eventually are. Here the aim is to let the Zionist ministers of the elitist, racist, neo-Nazi state of Israel, like Tzipi Livni, enter the UK without molestation from court orders drawing attention to her involvement in state terror and war crimes in Gaza, which might have led to her justified incarceration in a British jail.
This Labour Party leadership is devoid of any principle except self aggrandizement. Each of them expects to be repaid, just as Blair was, for involving us, against our will, in unjust and illegal warfare.
They bowed to the wishes of Zionist mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to get his support to win a series of elections in the nineties and the so-called noughties, but Murdoch has abandoned New Labour, so they want to suck up to the Israeli state directly.
We must all abandon New Labour, if we haven't already done so, and decide to support individual candidates of principle. The party system itself is bent and bankrupt.
The Labour MPs listed below evidently have some principles left, but the New Labour party as a whole is such a disgrace, it wants tipping down the drain. We must do so, and instead support individual candidates who will change the first past the post electoral system that has led us into mess after mess since the 1970s, and will also erase all the fascist Acts of Parliament Blair and Brown have legislated.
“We are shocked at suggestions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Ivan Lewis and foreign secretary David Miliband that Britain may consider changing its laws to avoid any future attempts to prosecute suspected war criminals, Israeli or otherwise. The UK must not renege on its international treaty obligations, particularly those under the fourth Geneva convention to seek out and prosecute persons suspected of war crimes wherever and whoever they are, whatever their status, rank or influence, against whom good prima facie evidence has been laid. We reject any attempt to undermine the judiciary's independence and integrity. A judge who finds sufficient evidence of a war crime must have power to order the arrest of a suspect, subject to the usual rights to bail and appeal.
The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with (Report, 6 January). Nor should the government succumb to pressure from any foreign power to alter this crucial aspect of the judicial process. We urge the government to state clearly that it will not alter the law on universal jurisdiction and will continue to allow victims of war crimes to seek justice in British courts.”
John Austin MP, Katy Clark MP, Frank Cook MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Ann Cryer MP, Paul Flynn MP, Neil Gerrard MP, John Hemming MP, Paul Holmes MP, Kelvin HopkinsMP, Brian Iddon MP, Lynne Jones MP, Tom Levitt MP, Martin Linton MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews MP, Gordon Prentice MP, Linda Riordan MP, Terry Rooney MP, Baroness Jenny Tonge, Baroness Lindsay Northover, Bob Russell MP, Clare Short MP, Phyllis Starkey MP, Sir David Steel, Sandra White MSP, Derek Wyatt MP, Tayab Ali, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas Solicitors, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Richard Burgon, solicitor, Daniel Carey, Public Interest Lawyers, Ian Cross, solicitor, Jim Duffy, Public Interest Lawyers, Shauna Gillan, barrister, 1 Pump Court, Andrew Gray, solicitor, Tessa Gregory, Public Interest Lawyers, Beth Handly, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Michael Hagan, solicitor, Michelle Harris, barrister, 1 Pump Court, Susan Harris, solicitor, Jane Hickman, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Sam Jacobs, Public Interest Lawyers, Salma Karmi-Ayyoub, barrister, Paul Kaufman, solicitor, Aonghus Kelly, Public Interest Lawyers, Daniel Machover, Chair of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Michael Mansfield QC, Anna Mazzola, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Sarah McSherry, Partner, Christian Khan solicitors, Clare Mellor, solicitor, Karen Mitchell, solicitor, Simon Natas, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas solicitors, Sophie Naftalin, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Mary Nazzal-Batayneh, Human Rights Legal Aid Fund, Henrietta Phillips, solicitor, William Seymour, solicitor, Navya Shekhar, solicitor, Phil Shiner, Public Interest Lawyers, David Thompson, solicitor, Paul Troop, barrister, Mohammed Abdul-Bari, Secretary-General, Muslim Council of Britain, Anas Altikriti, British Muslim Initiative, Lindsey German, Stop the War Campaign, John Hilary, Director, War on Want, Kate Hudson, Chair, CND, Betty Hunter, General Secretary, PalestineSolidarity Campaign, Dan Judelson, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Hugh Lanning, PCS Deputy General Secretary, John McHugo, Chair, Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine, Gerry Morrissey, General Secretary, BECTU, Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary, UNITE, Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK, Jackie Alsaid LLM, Rachel Bowles, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Dale Egee, Sarah El-Guindi, Deborah Fink, David Halpin, Sharif Hamadeh, Samira Hassassian, Professor Ted Honderich, Victor Kattan, Asad Khan, Miriam Margolyes, Professor Nur Masalha, Professor Steven Rose, Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, Andrew Sanger, Dr Aisha Sarwar, Tareq Shrouru…
