BREAKING NEWS - PALESTINE
Israel pummeled the occupied Gaza Strip in more than a dozen strikes Wednesday night amid warnings from a United Nations official that hospitals in Gaza were about to run out of emergency fuel.
Gaza’s health ministry stated that Inas Muhammad Khamash, a pregnant 23-year-old, was killed by bombing in central Gaza along with her daughter Bayan, one and a half years old. The woman’s husband, Muhammad Khamash, was injured.
The assault followed a series of escalations beginning with the killing of two Gaza fighters identified as Ahmed Murjan and Abdel-Hafez al-Silawi, both 23 years old. Witnesses said the attack occurred in the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.Tuesday Morning.The Ma’an News Agency named the two men as Ahmad Murjan and Abd al-Hafiz al-Silawi, members of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
In that incident, Israel claimed that it hit a Hamas facility in response to fire from Gaza.
Hamas denied Israel’s claims and it later transpired that soldiers mistook gunfire during an exercise at a Hamas naval commando base for a sniper attack.
“Israeli troops mistakenly thought the gunfire was aimed at them and responded with tank fire,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
The shooting took place two kilometers away from where the soldiers, part of an engineering corps, were operating.
Palestinian groups fired dozens of rockets towards Israel – four of them hitting the southern Israeli town of Sderot – earlier in the evening on Wednesday after Israel attacked a “Hamas target” in northern Gaza.
The Israeli military claimed it launched the attacks late on Wednesday after about 150 rockets were fired from the coastal enclave in reataliation of the killings, injuring at least six people in Israel.
Israel's military on Thursday warned Hamas against a further escalation in violence, and Israeli media said officials were considering evacuating residents from areas near the Gaza border.
Then came the hasbara: "The way things continue to play out is significant. Hamas will understand in the coming hours, as in the past months, that this is not the direction it wants to choose," a senior military official was quoted as saying on the military's Twitter account.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA, citing health sources, reported at least 12 Palestinians were wounded. A member of the Hamas' armed wing was also killed.
The heavy exchange of fire comes as attempts to secure a ceasefire were reportedly making progress, but Israel's intentions were and are of a new heavy military operation to punish Gaza's civilians for their persistent will of living.
In the early 2000s, at the dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” – a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.
In truth, however, it was the Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that manufactured a more convenient version of reality.
Earlier this year, it emerged Israeli officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.
Israel’s deceptions have a long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become one of Israel’s most celebrated actors and human rights activist, was assigned the job of carrying a weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.
In one "incident", when soldiers playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the 12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their remains.
That occurred before the Palestinians’ first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late 1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later given a Hollywood-style makeover himself as a peacemaker – urged troops to “break the bones” of Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.
The desperate, and sometimes self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed in a night raid.
Back in December he was shot in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh. Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of skull missing.
Mohammed’s suffering made headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was shot, a video recorded his cousin, then 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapping a soldier nearby after he entered her home.
Ahed, who is in jail awaiting trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol too of Israel’s victimisation of children.
So, Israel began work on recrafting the narrative of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.
It emerged that a government minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to “make Israel look bad”. The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.
A couple of months ago events took a new turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a lawyer or parent.
Shortly afterwards, Israel produced a signed confession stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a bicycle crash.
Yoav Mordechai, the occupation’s top official, trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies and incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the Israeli media dutifully reported.
Deprived of a justification for slapping an occupation soldier, Ahed was locked away by military judges. Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital documentation, including brain scans, all prove that Mohammed was shot.
This was simply another of Israellywood’s endless productions to automatically confer guilt on Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s incarceration production line each year have to sign confessions – or plea bargains – to win jail-sentence reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.
It is more Franz Kafka than Hollywood.
A second army narrative unravelled later. CCTV showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank range during an invasion of Jericho, in the occupied West Bank, then savagely beaten by soldiers as he lay wounded, and left to bleed to death.
It was an unexceptional incident. A report by Amnesty International this year noted that many of the dozens of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of extra-judicial executions.
Before footage of Saradih’s killing surfaced, the army issued a series of false statements, including that he died from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid treatment and was armed with a knife. The video disproves all of that.
Over the past two years, dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been shot in similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army concludes that they were killed while attacking soldiers with a knife – Israel even named this period of unrest a “knife intifada”.
Given the Policy of deception of Israeli army, soldiers today are most likely carrying a “knife bag”, just as Juliano once carried a weapons bag.
A half-century of occupation has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed an industry of lies and self-deceptions to make sure the consciences of Israelis are never clouded by a moment of doubt – that, after all, their army is not moral at all.
For more than four months, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been protesting along the fence with Israel, demanding their right to return to the homes and land their families were expelled from 70 years ago.
The Geat March of Return rallies culminated on May 15 to mark what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe - a reference to the forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages to clear the way for Israel's establishment in 1948.
The mass Friday demonstrations have since continued.
Since the protests began on March 30, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least 153 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave and wounded more than 16,000 people, according to health officials in Gaza.
The "moral" IDF soldiers have orders to shoot to kill or at least disable Young Palestinians.
MUST WATCH!
A UN General Assembly resolution “deplore[d] the use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians,” while the UN Human Rights Council denounced Israel’s “disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force.” After Israeli snipers killed Razan al-Najjar, a twenty-one-year-old unarmed Palestinian paramedic, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process warned Israel that it “needs to calibrate its use of force.” In a devastating report, Human Rights Watch concluded that “Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip … against demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes.”
Welcome as these condemnations are, the question nonetheless remains whether they go far enough. Simply put, does Israel have the right to use any force under any circumstances against the people of Gaza?
The current legal debate has focused on a pair of interrelated questions:
Did Israeli snipers resort to “excessive” or “disproportionate” force against demonstrators (as critics allege), or was the amount of force they deployed necessary to prevent protesters from breaching the perimeter fence (as Israel alleges)?
Is Israel’s conduct toward the Gaza protests governed by human rights law (as critics allege) or by international humanitarian law (as Israel alleges)? International humanitarian law applies in situations of armed conflict, whereas human rights law regulates domestic law enforcement. The difference matters, as human rights law imposes more stringent constraints on the use of force.
All parties to both these controversies proceed from a common premise: that Israel has the right to use force in order to prevent Gazans from breaching the fence. The dispute comes down to: how much? Critics who allege “disproportionate” or “excessive” force tacitly legitimize Israel’s use of “proportionate” or “moderate” force, while those who insist upon the applicability of human rights law acknowledge that Israel’s resort to force is legitimate if demonstrators pose an “imminent threat” to a sniper’s life.
This presumption holds even at the most critical pole of the debate on Gaza. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned as “illegal” Israel’s resort to lethal force against unarmed persons “approaching the fence, damaging it, or attempting to cross it.” But it conceded that “[o]bviously, the military is allowed to prevent such actions, and even to detain individuals attempting to carry them out.” A senior Human Rights Watch official argued that Israel’s use of live ammunition in Gaza was “unlawful.” But she suggested that “nonlethal means, such as tear gas, skunk water, and rubber-coated steel pellets” would have passed legal muster. The International Committee of the Red Cross cautioned Israel that “lethal force only be used as a last resort and when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.” Even the major Palestinian human rights organizations characterized Israel’s use of force as “excessive,” “indiscriminate,” and “disproportionate” rather than inherently illegal.
But the fact is, Israel cannot claim a right to use any force in Gaza — whether moderate or excessive, proportionate or disproportionate; whether protesters are unarmed or armed, don’t or do pose an imminent threat to life. If it appears otherwise, that’s because the current debate ignores critical caveats in international law and abstracts from the specific situation in Gaza.
What International Law Says
To justify its use of force in Gaza, Israel claims the right to prevent alien intrusion into its sovereign territory. An Israeli legal commentator observes that this professed concern for the sanctity of the Gaza “border” is opportunistically selective. Israel invades Gaza at will; only when Palestinians seek to cross in the other direction does the fence become sacrosanct. Setting this hypocrisy aside, Israel’s purported right to self-defense still lacks any legal basis. On the contrary, Israel’s resort to force contravenes international law.
The Palestinian people in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza are struggling to achieve their internationally validated “right to self-determination” (International Court of Justice). As preeminent legal scholar James Crawford notes, international law prohibits the use of military force “by an administering power to suppress widespread popular insurrection in a self-determination unit,” whereas “the use of force by a non-State entity in exercise of a right of self-determination is legally neutral, that is, not regulated by international law at all.”
Demonstrators in Gaza have chosen to use nonviolence in pursuit of their internationally validated rights — a tactic that, of course, international law also does not prohibit. But this prudential decision is not a legal requirement. Even if Gazans opted to use weapons against Israeli snipers who obstruct their right to self-determination, Israel’s resort to military force would still be legally debarred.
The allocation of rights and obligations in standard Western discourse — which effectively accords Israel the right to use violent force in self-defense against Gazans, even as it obliges the people of Gaza to wage nonviolently their self-determination struggle — upends international law.
It might be objected that inasmuch as Israel is a belligerent occupier in Gaza, it has the right, under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, to use force in order to maintain public order. But this objection falls on three counts.
First, the Fourth Geneva Convention obliges a belligerent occupier to provide for and ensure the welfare of the occupied population. Indeed, “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War” is the convention’s raison d’etre. Israel, however, has subjected Gaza’s civilian population to a protracted siege that amounts to illegal “collective punishment,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that has rendered Gaza physically “unlivable,” according to the UN. The Fourth Geneva Convention does not sustain Israel’s right to preserve order in Gaza even as it flagrantly breaches its complementary obligation to guard the welfare of Gaza’s civilian population. In fact, the disorder Israel claims the right to suppress directly springs from the criminal blockade it has imposed.
Second, even if Israel qualified as a belligerent occupier in Gaza, the right of a people to self-determination is a peremptory norm (jus cogens) of international law from which no derogation is permissible. If, as in this case, the law of belligerent occupation overlaps with the right to self-determination, then Gaza’s right to self-determination trumps Israel’s right to maintain order; and if, as in this case, the struggle for self-determination is being waged nonviolently, then Israel’s purported right to use armed force to maintain order is manifestly ill-founded.
Third, in point of fact, Israel’s occupation of Gaza has by now become illegal, and it has consequently forfeited its rights as a belligerent occupier. The International Court of Justice ruled in 1971 that since South Africa had refused to conduct good-faith negotiations to end its occupation of Namibia, that occupation had become illegal. Israel’s refusal over a full half-century to conduct good-faith negotiations on the basis of international law to withdraw from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza has likewise delegitimized its occupation.
There is also another critical legal dimension that has been ignored. It is a fundamental principle of international law that no state may resort to forceful measures unless “peaceful means” have been exhausted (UN Charter, Article 2). This principle is as sacred to the rule of law as the analogous Hippocratic oath, primum non nocere (first, do no harm), is to medicine. The impetus behind the protests at Gaza’s perimeter fence is Israel’s illegal siege, and their objective is to end it. Even Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded: “They’re suffocating economically, and therefore, they decided to crash into the fence.”
If Israel wants to protect its border, it need not resort to either lethal or nonlethal coercion. It merely has to lift the siege. US president Donald Trump’s A-Team on Middle East diplomacy — son-in-law Jared Kushner, former bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, former Trump Organization legal advisor Jason Greenblatt, and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — allege, on the contrary, that it is Hamas that “is holding the Palestinians of Gaza captive” and bears “primary responsibility … in perpetuating the suffering of the people of Gaza.” But if they’ve tumbled down Alice’s rabbit hole, it’s not incumbent on the rest of us to follow them. “Israel, as the occupying power,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs authoritatively observed, “must lift the blockade, which contravenes … the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting collective penalties and prevents the realization of a broad range of human rights.”
Hamas has also consistently offered Israel a long-term truce (hudna) in exchange for an end to the siege, and it reiterated this proposal throughout the current demonstrations. On May 7, a week before Israel shot dead more than sixty protesters in Gaza, Ha’aretz reported that “Hamas leaders” had “conveyed to Israel messages indicating their willingness to negotiate a long term cease-fire” in exchange for, among other things, “easing … the siege.” “Hamas keeps relaying messages to the defense establishment that it’s still interested in a ‘hudna,’” a veteran Israeli military correspondent revealed several days later. “Hamas itself has conveyed to Israel in the past year different versions of a restricted or wider hudna, which include not only Gaza but the West Bank as well.”
The Israeli military took these cease-fire offers seriously: “Hamas, according to the intelligence services, is willing to reach an agreement.” Indeed, a senior army officer urged that “now is the time to reach an agreement with Hamas” in order to “prevent further rounds of fighting.” But Israel’s government was uninterested: Hamas’s “demands and conditions have never been discussed, as Israel refuses to talk to Hamas.” Israel’s rejection of this preliminary peaceful step puts it in double breach of international law: the imposition of an illegal blockade and the unlawful resort to armed force when peaceful means have not been exhausted.
A Right to Poison Children?
It is a tenet of law that no rights can be derived from illegal acts (ex injuria non oritur jus), and it is obvious that a right to self-defense does not obtain in all situations. A rapist cannot claim a right to self-defense if the victim pummels him. A theater owner has no right to self-defense if patrons attack him after he sets the building ablaze and impedes their flight. Israel’s conduct vis-à-vis Gaza falls in this category of acts that render null and void the right to self-defense. Were it otherwise, it would amount to the right to use military force in order to maintain an illegal occupation compounded by an illegal siege.
If it’s nonetheless widely held that Israel has the right to use force to prevent Gazans from breaching its “border fence,” that’s because learned disquisitions on the technicalities of law have obscured the human stakes at play.
What is Gaza?
The narrow coastal strip is among the most densely populated areas on the planet. More than 70 percent of its two million residents are refugees, while more than half — one million — are children under the age of eighteen. For over a decade, Israel has placed this speck of land under a devastating siege. Fifty percent of Gaza’s workforce is now unemployed, 80 percent depend on international food aid, and 96 percent of the tap water is contaminated.
In early July, Israel tightened still further its restrictions on goods allowed into Gaza and prohibited exports altogether; and subsequently it blocked the entry of fuel, causing a medical emergency as hospitals, already overwhelmed, had to shut down. According to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, this “sweeping measure of collective punishment” constituted a return to “the harshest periods of the closure” and amounted to “outright economic warfare on Gaza’s civilian population.” This was followed in mid July by Israeli aerial assaults on dozens of targets in Gaza.
Israel justified the tightened siege and aerial attacks as a response to flammable kites floated across the perimeter fence by Gazan protesters. But these so-called “terror kites” have caused property destruction estimated at all of $2 million and, according to Israeli military sources, “do not pose an immediate or serious threat.” As an Israeli military correspondent understatedly reported, “the psychological damage the fires cause along the border is worse than any actual damage done.” “All the whining about the kites drives me crazy,” a senior Israeli officer fending off the kites groused. “It’s also the complete opposite of what you hear from most of the people who live here … People say openly: We like it here, we want to live here, despite the fires.”
“We’re not terrorists,” a kite flier on the other side of the fence pled. “We’re a generation with no hope and no horizon that lives under a suffocating siege, and that’s the message we’re trying to send the world. In Israel, they cry over the fields and forests that burned up. What about us, who are dying every day?” The mostly teenage kite-activists vowed to “continue . . . until . . . the demands of the Palestinian people to remove the blockade” were met.
By the end of July a partial return to the status quo ante was restored, as Israel allowed a trickle of goods to enter Gaza while Hamas reined in the kites. But there’s a strong likelihood of a replay of recent events — nonviolent Gaza protests, violent Israeli provocations, Hamas retaliation, tightened siege — culminating in another major Israeli military assault, which Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman threatens will be “more painful than Operation Protective Edge.”
If and when the new conflagration comes to pass, and Israel proclaims it is merely defending its border, the rhetorically correct riposte is, the fence separating Gaza from Israel is no more a “border” than Gaza is a state. Distinguished Hebrew University professor Baruch Kimmerling called Gaza a “concentration camp,” while former UK prime minister David Cameron called it an “open-air prison.” The Ha’aretz editorial board called it a “ghetto,” the Economist — a “human rubbish heap,” the International Committee of the Red Cross — a “sinking ship.” Gaza is what the UN human rights chief called a “toxic slum,” in which an entire civilian population is “caged … from birth to death.”
Does Israel have the right to use force to encage Gaza’s one million children in a “ghetto” or a “toxic slum”? Don’t the people of Gaza have the right to break free from a “concentration camp”?
Does anyone now debate whether or not Nazi Germany used “excessive” and disproportionate” force to suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Who now ponders whether Nazi Germany had a “right to self-defense” against the Jewish Fighting Organization — which resisted arms in hand? Are such questions even conceivable?
It might be said that Gaza is not the Warsaw Ghetto. But as an Israeli journalist who served in Gaza during the First Intifada reflected, “the problem is not in the similarity … but that there isn’t enough lack of similarity.” The World Health Organization has stated that “over 1 million people in the Gaza Strip are at risk of contracting waterborne diseases,” while an Israeli expert predicts that Gaza will soon be overrun by typhus and cholera epidemics like those that decimated Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The principal objective of international humanitarian law is to protect civilians from the ravages of war. The principal objective of international human rights law is to protect the dignity of persons. How then can either of these bodies of law possibly be used to justify the use of force — any force — that is designed to entrap civilians in an inferno in which they are being degraded, tormented, and killed?
If, for argument’s sake, it were granted that Israel has the legal right to use force to prevent the people of Gaza from escaping their “prison,” this would simply expose the profound inadequacy of the law.
In his dissent to the 1996 International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, Judge Weeramantry noted the irony that, whereas the law condemns use of the “dum-dum” bullet, the ICJ recoiled at condemning the use of nuclear weapons. “It would seem passing strange,” he wrote, “that the expansion within the body of a single soldier of a single bullet is an excessive cruelty which international law has been unable to tolerate since 1899; and that the incineration in one second of a hundred thousand civilians is not.” Judge Weeramantry proceeded to opine:
Every branch of knowledge benefits from a process of occasionally stepping back from itself and scrutinizing itself objectively for anomalies and absurdities. If a glaring anomaly or absurdity becomes apparent and remains unquestioned, that discipline is in danger of being seen as floundering in the midst of its own technicalities.
The notion that Israel has the right to forcibly encage one million children in an unlivable space is an absurdity, and the lawyers debating whether or not Israel used “excessive” force to prevent Gazans from escaping their ghetto are floundering in the midst of technicalities.
“Innocent human beings, most of them young,” Sara Roy of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies has observed, “are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink, and likely by the soil in which they plant.”
The only morally sane question presented by the situation in Gaza is, Does Israel have the right in the name of “self-defense” to poison one million children?
It is a sad commentary that this simple question has not just been sidestepped, but is not even visible in the current debate.
Norman G. Finkelstein; An Inquest Into its Martyrdom. Jamie Stern-Weiner: Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine’s Toughest Questions.
PALESTINA
A few weeks ago I posted here an article on Human Rights Watch’s Sari Bashi. She had advised Israel not to use lethal force against Gaza protesters, but instead to use nonlethal means such as “skunk water” to throw back the assembled crowd.
Here’s Gershon Baskin’s first-hand account of the “skunk water” recommended by Bashi: Then came the skunk. This is something that no human being should ever experience. A giant water cannon shot the most putrid smelling liquid I have ever smelled in my life. They sprayed directly at people. They sprayed the main square. They sprayed a house where about 15 people were seeking shelter from the tear gas and being treated by a family that was serving endless cups of coffee, tea and water. About 30 minutes after the housed was ”skunked,” the smell was too intense to stay inside. I felt totally nauseous. Everyone went outside and about 10 people gathered with soapy water and brooms to try to clean the house and get rid of the smell. It didn’t really work. People told me that it takes about two weeks for the smell to dissipate.
Distinguished Hebrew University professor Baruch Kimmerling called Gaza a “concentration camp,” while former UK prime minister David Cameron called it an “open-air prison.” The Ha’aretz editorial board called it a “ghetto,” The Economist—a “human rubbish heap,” the International Committee of the Red Cross—a “sinking ship.” Gaza is what the UN human rights chief called a “toxic slum,” in which an entire civilian population is “caged . . . from birth to death.”
It is a very sad day indeed when the representative of a reputable human rights organization counsels Israel to use skunk water against a population, half of whom are children, protesting their protracted confinement in an inferno.
UPFRONT (20/07/2018): Gaza's Killing, who is to blame?
#StopTheWar is a hashtag coming from many activists in #Gaza who urge the international community to hinder Israel’s attempts to launch another large-scale aggression against the occupied, blockaded, unlivable, and exhausted Gaza Strip. #GazaUnderAttack
Great March of Return: Dreaming of Freedom
FREE GAZA NOW!
The people of Gaza have been subjected to decades of expulsion, occupation, siege and massacre. They have now seized control of their Fate. They are risking life and limb as they protest nonviolently to reclaim their basic rights. It takes just one minute to send a video showing your support for Gaza in its moment of truth. Do it now! Send your videos to METOOGAZA.COM
SAUDI ARABIA
The reason for the ongoing diplomatic flare-up between Saudi Arabia and Canada is not about the Canada statements, but rather, it's the latest attempt by Riyadh to warn other countries of the consequences of speaking out against the kingdom's human rights record.
It's pretty clear that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is using Canada to send a message to the rest of the world that if you want to trade with Saudi Arabia, then you need to shut up on human rights. The root cause of the diplomatic crisis with Canada is bin Salman himself.
The crown prince, commonly referred to as MBS, is drunk on power and arrogant and suffers from a deep dose of youthful naivete and believes that he has [US President] Donald Trump in his back pocket and can do whatever he wants", Hashemi told Al Jazeera.
Since coming to power in 2015, MBS has sought to be portrayed as a reformist at home, while at the same time instituting more aggressive policies abroad. He is responsible for the devastating war in Yemen that has led to a humanitarian crisis, enforced a blockade on Qatar, arrested ozens of members of the Saudi royal family, and confined and reportedly forced Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to resign.
The conflict with Canada is bin Salman's way of establishing new rules for how countries deal with Saudi Arabia. MBS has drawn a line in the sand.
MBS is evil. No wonder he gets along so well with Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
Listening Post (26/05/18): Image versus reality
SAUDI ARABIA versus CANADA
Inside Story: Why is Saudi Arabia angry at Canada?
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