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State thuggery and illegality escalate in Iran… no, wait, in the US, Israel, and the UK

We’re seeing an escalation of open state violence and illegality right now. But it’s not Iran or another Western establishment bogeyman responsible. It’s in the heart of the Western political order – in the US, Israel and, yes, the UK too.

US soldiers in the streets, Israeli occupiers abduct international civilians as genocide continues

In recent days, the US government has ramped up its violent and highly controversial attacks on immigrant communities. And its actions have sparked mass protests in Los Angeles. The Donald Trump administration has responded by unnecessarily and provocatively sending in thousands of National Guard soldiers and hundreds of Marines. So far, authorities have engaged in open shows of brutality, shooting at both Australian and British journalists. Protests are now spreading around the country against Trump’s repression.

Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in occupied Gaza, meanwhile, continues to face resistance. And its most recent challenge to international law has come with its illegal abduction of civilians from an aid boat in international waters which was heading to Gaza. After the kidnapping, Israeli occupation forces unlawfully held the international volunteers offshore with no outside contact for almost a day before taking them to the mainland. The Adalah legal centre says four crew members of the Madleen Freedom Flotilla accepted deportation and “left or are on their way to their home countries”. It added:

The remaining eight are still detained and will contest their deportation before an Israeli tribunal

Since 2023, Israel’s genocide and Western support for it have seen the masks of ‘democracy, international law, and freedom’ slip. The world has seen the establishment’s true face of elite control, repression of dissent, and flouting of international norms. Even academics from Israel have joined the global scholarly consensus that the apartheid state has been committing genocide. And as the United States once again vote against a ceasefire amid a brutal starvation campaign in Gaza, it was clearer than ever for most that it is also a US genocide.

US, Israeli, and UK masks are off

Israeli occupiers, meanwhile, have long documented their war crimes, fully expecting to benefit from ongoing impunity. And the Israeli state is so confident about this that it has even admitted to backing criminals with links to Daesh (Isis) in Gaza. Now, even though Israel illegally abducted Western civilians – including prize-winning climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and European Parliament member Rima Hassan – from international waters, their governments have overwhelmingly failed to hold the settler-colonial power to account. Chief among those was the UK, whose shipping flag the aid vessel carried.

British inaction, however, is unsurprising. Because around the time Israeli thugs attacked the civilian ship, a UK plane was actually heading towards Gaza from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus – as has become routine during the genocide. The base has indeed been “a foundational asset” for Israel’s criminal assault on the occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, as the British government tries to defend its complicity in court, more and more reports have shown how arms have continued to flow from Britain to Israel. Evidence of the influence the Israel lobby has over Keir Starmer’s cabinet also keeps coming in. And the Foreign Office has told hundreds of staff members that, if they’re unhappy about all this, they should just resign.

The disdain for humanity and international law in the halls of British power are clear also in the raiding of journalists’ homes, the repression of anti-genocide activism, and former prime minister David Cameron’s attempts to bully the International Criminal Court into not issuing arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals.

The US and its junior partners in the UK and Israel have long flouted international law, but rarely so openly and defiantly as today.

The media can’t hide this anymore

The mainstream media – like British state propaganda outlet the BBC – have tried to cover for Western crimes while keeping a veneer of respectability. But the livestreaming of the US-Israeli genocide has made that near-impossible. As actor Liam Cunningham put it recently, ongoing media platforming of Israeli war criminals is like “contacting Heinrich Himmler for his take on the genocide” after discovering “the horrors of Auschwitz” back in the mid-1940s.

Social media makes it a lot harder for establishment propagandists to hide the truth. And the truth the world is seeing is that it’s not Iran, or the Houthis, or even Hamas that are committing countless war crimes (and self-documenting them) – it’s Israel, with Western backing. It’s not the West’s Middle-Eastern bogeymen routinely bombing hospitals, assassinating media workers, or killing thousands of children before starving the rest to death. It’s Israel.

More and more people can now see through the hypocrisy.

 

We see the truth. And we’re not having it!

As Israeli occupation thugs stopped civilians getting aid to Gaza, politicians may have stayed quiet, but ordinary people didn’t. Throughout Europe, people took to the streets in solidarity:

The movement to take aid to Gaza by land, meanwhile, is quickly growing:

And as Donald Trump tries to scapegoat immigrant communities in order to militarise the streets and crush dissent, one message bears repeating over and over again:

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.