USA & Israel vs Palestina: Accomplices in Ethnic Cleansing

Another Palestinian human being was murdered by the IDF, Israeli occupation army, on May 11^th 2022 in the Palestinian city of Jenin. This time the victim of the occupation and apartheid was a famous Palestinian, Shireen Abu Akleh, a face, personality and presence, that had told the Palestinian story and daily struggle with bravery and integrity on TV screens for over 25 years. It was a face and voice I have watched and listened to through her reports for Al Jazeera, a media organisation that has been targeted a number of times by Israel previously. I was shocked and upset and raging with the rest of those affected, over what had been inflicted upon yet another Palestinian, with overwhelming brutality, for daring just to exist and speak.

As soon as the Israeli state apparatus started to speak about the event, everyone sensible was able to conclude there were lies being told. The fellow Palestinian journalists with Shireen, who are corroborating eyewitnesses, one of whom was also shot, Producer Ali Al-Samoudi, clearly explained what had happened to them. They had been targeted by clearly visible Israeli soldiers, who identified themselves, to which the Palestinian journalists identified themselves back, and the Israeli soldiers continued to shoot at them anyway, shot Shireen in the head and then at anyone who came to her aide. There is tragic and upsetting video footage of this from just after Shireen is shot dead. Shatha Hanaysha is the fellow Palestinian journalist pinned down by the gunfire in the video, as her friend, mentor and colleague lay maimed next to her. B’Tselem, and Bellingcat, have already concluded in the preliminary that Palestinian gunfire directed against the Israeli security forces raid in Jenin, as initially claimed by the Israeli government as the cause of Shireen’s death, did not have line of sight on Shireen and her team and was very unlikely to have been the cause of her death.

Was she targeted because she was a journalist?

Without doubt.

Dozens of Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli security forces since 2000 and dozens of foreign correspondents have been harassed and harmed. It is Israel's policy.

Was Shireen targeted because she was a Palestinian? 

Always.

Thousands of Palestinians, children, women, men, the elderly and infirm have been killed and murdered by Israeli security forces in the same time period.

It. Is. The. Policy. Of. An. Apartheid. State.

The Israeli occupation army that was raiding Jenin in the West Bank of Palestine was illegitimately and unlawfully upholding the occupation and apartheid of Palestinian land and lives. Policies and actions that have again and again and again and again, for decades, been agreed by the vast majority of world governments, Human Rights organisations, international law experts and the majority of the opinion of citizens of the world to be wrong, immoral and breaking international law.

The enablers of the Israeli occupation & apartheid & eethnic cleansing in the ‘west’, mostly the USA and the UK, were quick to condemn the attack on Shireen, her team and the free press, but there is nothing tangible behind these words.

There will be no real consequences.

As Russia is sanctioned to the hilt for their illegal invasion of Ukraine, including targeting standard Russians through these sanctions,

Israel’s supporters cannot even bring themselves to support or accept the legitimacy of the Palestinian-led call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

Instead claiming it is antisemitic in its aims in simply calling for the holding to account the state and private apparatus in Israel which is linked to the grinding decades long occupation and apartheid of the Palestinian people and their land.

I lit a candle to commemorate Shireen Abu Akleh’s name and memory. This candle must continue to burn in all of our minds, in our voices and through our actions as the global citizenry in supporting the Palestinian moral and lawful right to peace and justice.

Free, Free Palestine! 

End Israel's impunity!

USA and Israel, stop the ethnic cleansing!

BDS MOVEMENT - Statement:

On 11 May 2022, apartheid Israeli forces killed the beloved and highly respected Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, in the occupied Palestinian city of Jenin. She was wearing a press flak jacket and helmet. #JusticeForShireen demands ending complicity in maintaining Israel’s apartheid regime and holding those responsible for her murder accountable.

This murder is part of a consistent pattern of Israeli violent attacks against journalists revealing to the world the brutalities of its 74-year-old regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. 

Urge the ICC to investigate Shireen’s murder and hold those responsible accountable
   

It is also an attempt to instill a deep sense of fear and insecurity among all Palestinians struggling for freedom, justice and equality. Yet Shireen’s courage was reflected in the inspiring courage and commitment of the tens of thousands of Palestinians participating in her long funeral procession across the occupied Palestinian territory, especially in Jerusalem, where many Palestinian flags were waved in defiance of apartheid Israel’s violent attempt to prevent them.

Forensic evidence and investigations of the murder by Al-Haq and B’Tselem have all forced apartheid Israel, known for its compulsive lies in attempting to whitewash the murder of its Palestinian victims, to finally admit that the fatal shot that extinguished Shireen’s precious life was indeed fired by one of its snipers. This amounts to willful killing, a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC must fully investigate this murder and hold those who perpetrated the crime, those who issued the orders, and the entire political leadership of apartheid Israel accountable.

Though Israel killed Shireen Abu Akleh, her blood is also on the hands of the enablers, funders and defenders of apartheid, primarily the US, EU, UK, Canada and Australia. We call for public BDS pressure to end the West’s colonial hypocrisy and shameless complicity in Israeli crimes and ongoing Nakba against Indigenous Palestinians.

It’s high time for the UN to investigate Israeli apartheid and to impose proportional, legal and targeted sanctions to dismantle it, as was done against apartheid South Africa. 

Many journalist syndicates have condemned the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, including the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and PEN International. Yet mainstream media coverage remains as biased to the colonizers and dehumanizing to the colonized as ever.

In response to Israel’s attempts to silence Palestinian voices like Shireen’s, urge local/national journalist syndicates and federations to take concrete action, including:

• Ending ties with complicit Israeli institutions.
• Pledging to refuse junkets to Israel funded by the Israeli government, complicit Israeli institutions and Israel lobby groups.
• Supporting journalists who refuse to cover assignments in Israel on ethical grounds.
• Supporting the IFJ case before the ICC on Israel’s systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists.
• Pledging to respect the ethical and professional journalistic guidelines developed by the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate and the Palestinian BDS National Committee. 
• Pledging to center Palestinian voices and eyewitnesses instead of centering Israeli government spokespersons.

Urge media studies and journalism faculties and departments to:

• Respect the Palestinian BDS call by ending ties with complicit Israeli institutions.
• Refuse to host official representatives of complicit Israeli institutions.

Palestinians do not need charity. We need meaningful solidarity, and we demand accountability.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are justifiably worried that the mandate granted to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, might be coming to an end. UNRWA’s mission, which has been in effect since 1949, has done more than provide urgent aid and support to millions of refugees. It was also a political platform that protected and preserved the rights of several generations of Palestinians.

Though UNRWA was not established as a political or legal platform per se, the context of its mandate was largely political, since Palestinians became refugees as a result of military and political events – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel and the latter’s refusal to respect the Right of Return for Palestinians as enshrined in UN resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948.

“UNRWA has a humanitarian and development mandate to provide assistance and protection to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight,” the UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of December 8, 1949 read. Alas, neither a ‘lasting solution’ to the plight of the refugees, nor even a political horizon has been achieved. Instead of using this realization as a way to revisit the international community’s failure to bring justice to Palestine and to hold Israel and its US benefactors accountable, it is UNRWA and, by extension, the refugees that are being punished.

In a stern warning on April 24, the head of the political committee at the Palestinian National Council (PNC), Saleh Nasser said that UNRWA’s mandate might be coming to an end. Nasser referenced a recent statement by the UN body’s Commissioner-General, Philippe Lazzarini, about the future of the organization.

Lazzarini’s statement, published a day earlier, left room for some interpretation, though it was clear that something fundamental regarding the status, mandate and work of UNRWA is about to change. “We can admit that the current situation is untenable and will inevitably result in the erosion of the quality of the UNRWA services or, worse, to their interruption,” Lazzarini said.

Commenting on the statement, Nasser said that this “is a prelude to donors stopping their funding for UNRWA.”

The subject of UNRWA’s future is now a priority within the Palestinian, but also Arab political discourse. Any attempts at canceling or redefining UNRWA’s mission will pose a serious, if not an unprecedented challenge for Palestinians. UNRWA provides educational, health and other support for 5.6 million Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. At an annual budget of $1.6 billion, this support, and the massive network that has been created by the organization, cannot be easily replaced.

Equally important is the political nature of the organization. The very existence of UNRWA means that there is a political issue that must be addressed regarding the plight and future of Palestinian refugees. In fact, it is not the mere lack of enthusiasm to finance the organization that has caused the current crisis. It is something bigger, and far more sinister.

In June 2018, Jared Kushner, son-in-law and advisor to former US President Donald Trump, visited Amman, Jordan, where he, according to the US Foreign Policy magazine, tried to persuade Jordan’s King Abdullah to remove the refugee status from 2 million Palestinians currently living in the country.

This and other attempts have failed. In September 2018, Washington, under the Trump administration, decided to cease its financial support of UNRWA. As the organization’s main funder, the American decision was devastating, because about 30 percent of UNRWA’s money comes from the US alone. Yet, UNRWA hobbled along by increasing its reliance on the private sector and individual donations.

Though the Palestinian leadership celebrated the Biden Administration’s decision to resume UNRWA’s funding on April 7, 2021, a little caveat in Washington’s move was largely kept secret. Washington only agreed to fund UNRWA after the latter agreed to sign a two-year plan, known as Framework for Cooperation. In essence, the plan effectively turned UNRWA into a platform for Israel and American policies in Palestine, whereby the UN body consented to US – thus Israeli – demands to ensure that no aid would reach any Palestinian refugee who has received military training “as a member of the so-called Palestinian Liberation Army”, other organizations or “has engaged in any act of terrorism”. Moreover, the Framework expects UNRWA to monitor “Palestinian curriculum content”.

By entering into an agrement with the US Department of State, “UNRWA has effectively transformed itself from a humanitarian agency that provides assistance and relief to Palestinian refugees, to a security agency furthering the security and political agenda of the US, and ultimately Israel,” BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights noted.

Palestinian protests, however, did not change the new reality, which effectively altered the entire mandate granted to UNRWA by the international community nearly 73 years ago. Worse, European countries followed suit when, last September, the European parliament advanced an amendment that would condition EU support of UNRWA on the editing and rewriting of Palestinian school text books that, supposedly, ‘incite violence’ against Israel.

Instead of focusing solely on shutting down UNRWA immediately, the US, Israel and their supporters are working to change the nature of the organization’s mission and to entirely rewrite its original mandate. The agency that was established to protect the rights of the refugees, is now expected to protect Israeli, American and western interests in Palestine.

Though UNRWA was never an ideal organization, it has indeed succeeded in helping millions of Palestinians throughout the years, while preserving the political nature of their plight.

Though the Palestinian Authority, various poltical factions, Arab governments and others have protested the Israeli-American designs against UNRWA, such protestations are unlikely to make much difference, considering that UNRWA itself is surrendering to outside pressures. While Palestinians, Arabs and their allies must continue to fight for UNRWA’s original mission, they must urgently develop alternative plans and platforms that would shield Palestinian refugees and their Right of Return from becoming marginal and, eventually, forgotten.

If Palestinian refugees are removed from the list of political priorities concerning the future of a just peace in Palestine, neither justice nor peace can possibly be attained.

Israel vs Palestine: Endless Brutal Unpunished Occupation

As corporate media keeps calling for Putin's trial as a war criminal while it carries on its propaganda against Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, nothing is said about Israel's long brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Now that the Palestinians are uprising, once again, Western press keeps siding with the oppressor, although in Ukraine, they don't even show Russia's side. 

There is a reason why Israel is insistent on linking the series of attacks carried out by Palestinians recently to a specific location, namely the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. By doing so, the embattled Naftali Bennett’s government can simply order another deadly military operation in Jenin to reassure its citizens that the situation is under control.

Indeed, on April 9, the Israeli army has stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing a Palestinian and wounding ten others. However, Israel’s problem is much bigger than Jenin.

If we examine the events starting with the March 22 stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba (Bir Al Saba’) – which resulted in the death of four – and ending with the killing of three Israelis in Tel Aviv – including two army officers – we will reach an obvious conclusion: these attacks must have been, to some extent, coordinated.

Spontaneous Palestinian retaliation to the violence of the Israeli occupation rarely follows this pattern in terms of timing or style. All the attacks, with the exception of Beersheba, were carried out using firearms. The shooters, as indicated by the amateur videos of some of the events and statements by Israeli eyewitnesses, were well-trained and were acting with great composure.

An example was the March 27 Hadera event, carried out by two cousins, Ayman and Ibrahim Ighbariah, from the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, inside Israel. Israeli media reported of the unmistakable skills of the attackers, armed with weapons that, according to the Israeli news agency, Tazpit Press Service, cost more than $30,000.

Unlike Palestinian attacks carried out during the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-05) in response to Israeli violence in the occupied territories, the latest attacks are generally more pinpointed, seek police and military personnel and clearly aimed at shaking Israel’s false sense of security and undermining the country’s intelligence services. In the Bnei Brak attack, on March 29, for example, an Israeli woman who was at the scene told reporters that “the militant asked us to move away from the place because he did not want to target women or children.”

While Israeli intelligence reports have recently warned of a “wave of terrorism” ahead of the holy month of Ramadan, they clearly had little conception of what type of violence, or where and how Palestinians would strike.

Following the Beersheba attack, Israeli officials referred to Daesh’s responsibility, a convenient claim considering that Daesh had also claimed responsibility. This theory was quickly marginalized, as it became obvious that the other Palestinian attackers had other political affiliations or, as in the Bnei Brak case, no known affiliation at all.

The confusion and misinformation continued for days. Shortly after the Tel Aviv attack, Israeli media, citing official sources, spoke of two attackers, alleging that one was trapped in a nearby building. This was untrue as there was only one attacker and he was killed, though hours later in a different city.

A number of Palestinian workers were quickly rounded up in Tel Aviv on suspicion of being the attackers simply because they looked Arab, evidence of the chaotic Israeli approach. Indeed, following each event, total mayhem ensued, with large mobs of armed Israelis taking to the streets looking for anyone with Arab features to apprehend or to beat senseless.

Israeli officials contributed to the frenzy, with far-right politicians, such as the extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, leading hordes of other extremists in rampages in occupied Jerusalem.

Instead of urging calm and displaying confidence, the country’s own Prime Minister called, on March 30, on ordinary Israelis to arm themselves. “Whoever has a gun license, this is the time to carry it,” he said in a video statement. However, if Israel’s solution to any form of Palestinian resistance was more guns, Palestinians would have been pacified long ago.

To placate angry Israelis, the Israeli military raided the city and refugee camp of Jenin on many occasions, each time leaving several dead and wounded Palestinians behind, including many civilians. They include the child Imad Hashash, 15, killed on August 24 while filming the invasion on his mobile phone. The exact same scenario played out on April 9.

However, it was an exercise in futility, as it was Israeli violence in Jenin throughout the years that led to the armed resistance that continues to emanate from the camp. Palestinians, whether in Jenin or elsewhere, fight back because they are denied basic human rights, have no political horizon, live in extreme poverty, have no true leadership and feel abandoned by the so-called international community.

The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas seems to be entirely removed from the masses. Statements by Abbas reflect his detachment from the reality of Israeli violence, military occupation and apartheid throughout Palestine. True to form, Abbas quickly condemned the Tel Aviv attack, as he did the previous ones, making the same reference every time regarding the need to maintain “stability” and to prevent “further deterioration of the situation”,  according to the official Wafa news agency.

What stability is Abbas referring to, when Palestinian suffering has been compounded by growing settler violence, illegal settlement expansion, land theft, and, thanks to recent international events, food insecurity as well?

Israeli officials and media are, once again, conveniently placing the blame largely on Jenin, a tiny stretch of an overpopulated area. By doing so, Israel wants to give the impression that the new phenomenon of Palestinian retaliatory attacks is confined to a single place, one that is adjacent to the Israeli border and can be easily ‘dealt with’.

An Israeli military operation in the camp may serve Bennett’s political agenda, convey a sense of strength, and win back some in his disenchanted political constituency. But it is all a temporary fix. Attacking Jenin now will make no difference in the long run. After all, the camp rose from the ashes of its near-total destruction by the Israeli military in April 2002.

The renewed Palestinian defensive attacks speak of a much wider geography: Naqab, Umm Al Fahm, the West Bank. The seeds of this territorial connectivity are linked to the Israeli war of last May and the subsequent Palestinian rebellion, which erupted in every part of Palestine, including Palestinian communities inside Israel.

Israel’s problem is its insistence on providing short-term military solutions to a long-term problem, itself resulting from these very ‘military solutions’. If Israel continues to commit war crimes subjugating and brutalizing the Palestinian people under the current system of military occupation and deepening apartheid, Palestinians will surely continue to respond until their oppressive reality is changed. No amount of Israeli violence can alter this truth.

Even though the USA & OTAN condone Israel's unforgivable recurrent War Crimes.

Israel vs Palestine: Rachel Corrie, a Western Victim of Zionism

Had she not been murdered in Gaza by the IDF Israeli Occupation Forces on March 13, 2003, today Rachel Corrie would have been 43 years old.

Born on April 10, 1979, in Olympia, Washington, USA, Rachel Corrie, a liberal arts major, a peace activist, and a human rights volunteer/observer was brutally murdered by IDF (Israeli Occupation Army) in Gaza on March 16, 2003.

A graduate of The Evergreen State College, Rachel’s brief life will go down in the annals of history as an exemplary testament to that rare human spirit of preached and lived by Jesus Christ, the Jewish born Palestinian who preached  sacrifice, altruism, loving one’s neighbor,  standing up for injustice, sharing one’s resources, and  giving up one’s life in defense of the dispossessed, the weak, and the oppressed.

Rachel was killed [at the age of 24] on March 16, 2003, in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, when she was crushed to death under an armored Caterpillar D-9R bulldozer operated by members of Israeli amoral Army.

Attempts to seek justice in Israeli and American courts (Caterpillar) did not go anywhere. Further, American politicians, including Washington State Congressmen, did, as they usually do when it comes to Israeli criminal behavior, swept the matter under the rug.

Alaska composer Philip Munger wrote a cantata  (The Skies are Weeping) in 2004 to honor Rachel’s memory. The performance was scheduled for an April 27, 2004 presentation at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  “After objections to the upcoming performance were received, including from members of the Jewish community, a forum was held co-chaired by Munger and a local rabbi who claimed the work ‘romanticized terrorism.’

How tragic it is that any and all supporters of Palestinian rights are labelled terrorists?   And, “after the forum ‘disintegrate[d]’, Munger announced, ‘I cannot subject 16 students … to any possibility of physical harm or to the type of character assassination some of us are already undergoing. Hence, ‘Performance of The Skies are Weeping at this time and place is withdrawn for the safety of the student performers.’” And later “Munger related that he had received threatening e-mails whose content he considered was [just] ‘short of what you’d take to the troopers’, and that some of his students had received similar communications. The cantata was eventually performed at the Hackney Empire theatre in London, premiering on November 1, 2005.” (Anchorage Daily News)

Other tributes to Rachel Corrie included My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play based on Rachel’s diary of her life In Gaza. The play was presented in London with  scheduled follow up performances in New York. As usual, politics interfered and the play was postponed indefinitely, a decision denounced by the British producers.  Singer Billy Bragg wrote The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie, a song styled after Bob Dylan’s The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. In early 2005, My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play composed from Corrie’s journals and emails from Gaza and compiled by actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner, in a production directed by Rickman, was presented in London. The play was to be transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop, but when it was postponed indefinitely, the British producers denounced the decision as censorship and withdrew the show.  It finally opened Off-Broadway on October 15, 2006, for an initial run of 48 performances. In the same year, My Name is Rachel Corrie was shown at the Pleasance theatre as part of the Edinburgh (Fringe) Festival. The play has also been published as a  paperback, and performed in ten countries, including Israel. (Rachel Foundation for Peace and Justice).

Since 2004 there have been three deadly Israeli assaults on Gaza, each one more brutal and heinous than the previous ones. And, while the world has condemned Putin’s assault on Ukraine, precious little has been uttered about the Yemenis and Palestinians, victims of Saudi Arabian and Israeli recurrent brutalities.

Albeit tragic, please read the beautifully illustrated book by Rachel Corrie.  Let Me Stand Alone ». It surely is a treasured addition to every library.

And please observe one minute of silence to honor Rachel Corrie’s memory and the memory of all the Rachel Corries of this world who’ve stood up for human decency in the service of Justice and the cause of Peace.

USA&NATO vs Russia in Ukraine: Double Standards Worsen the Situation

The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same.

We know who America’s, Europe’s and Israel’s most recent war criminals are, among others: Tony Blair, Binyamin Netanyahu, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed.

WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth.

If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by US invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them?

Every effort to hold OTAN members’ war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by the courts, by the media and by the ruling political parties.

In the US, the Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib.

Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold US war criminals to account, to atone for their war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinkin said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.”

This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies they tell themselves about themselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. Tjhe US have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about the the Palestinians who fight and the Iraqis and Afghans who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was even more savage than Russia?

Why weren’t they lionized?

Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States or in Israel?

Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, mainly Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t the U Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them?

Well, we know why. War crimes of the USA & ISRAAEL &OTAN don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible.

This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards the USA have left across the globe for decades. But they wan their adversaries to do the same.

The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukranian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blocades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved.

War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Mulsims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminlized as terrorists.

Putin has been ruthless with the press. But worse has been US’s ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and collague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people conivicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media.

World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated.

It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals.

Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay.

“LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”

LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period.

Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media.

Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within.

Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States, and they are weak, disposable.

There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the UK & US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of US industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen.

The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold US & OTAN members to account, to see their own face in the war criminals they condemn, will have ominous consequences.

Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation.

USA & OTAN have become captives to their machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are the modern idols. They worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice.

He/she who has no innocent blood in his hands, let them cast stones at Putin.

USA & Israel & OTAN, stop adding fuel to the fire.

The evil is not Putin. It's the arm industry and USA's fight to control the world..

Horror is not THIS war in Ukraine in particular. It is ALL wars.