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Category: Militarism

  • Israel kills children, damages infrastructure in West Bank

    Mourners carry the body of Saqr Abed, an Islamic Jihad militant killed in a raid by Israeli forces in the village of Kafr Dan, near the West Bank city of Jenin, Wednesday, June 12, 2024.  (Mohammed Nasser APA images)

    A warning on 4 June from the UN human rights commissioner that “unprecedented bloodshed” in the occupied West Bank must come to an end has gone unheeded.

    The Israeli military, at times in collaboration with Israel’s Border Police and Israel’s domestic secret police Shin Bet, has continued to conduct deadly raids into the occupied West Bank, wreaking havoc to private Palestinian property and civilian infrastructure in the process.

    An Israeli military raid into Kafr Dan village west of Jenin in the northern West Bank killed six Palestinians earlier this week.

    The invading Israeli forces used Energa anti-tank rifle grenades against a home belonging to the Abed family, killing three, Saqr Aref Abed, Mustafa Allam Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Abu Obeid.

    Others killed during the Israeli attack and confrontations in the village include Ayman Abu Fadalah, Muhammad Hazza Mirie and Ahmad Muhammad Samoudi, 17.

    On 11 June, Ahmad was with another child, allegedly carrying homemade explosive devices as they waited for Israeli armored vehicles to pass by on a road in the center of Kafr Dan.

    An Israeli sniper shot at the two children from a distance of 100 to 150 meters with six bullets, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine.

    One bullet hit Ahmad in his leg, and he collapsed and started pleading for help. The other child was able to flee though he was injured in the thigh.

    The Israeli sniper shot towards Ahmad again, striking him in his chest and head.

    An Israeli military vehicle then approached Ahmad, and the Israeli driver stepped out and shot the child three more times.

    The driver of the military vehicle remained near him for a few minutes as Israeli forces blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Ahmad as he lay wounded on the ground.

    “Israeli forces shot Ahmad, waited until he fell to the ground, then shot him several more times, then blocked paramedics from reaching him until they were confident he bled out,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.

    “The United States must stop sending weapons to the Israeli military that are used to kill Palestinian children without restraint, whether in Gaza or the West Bank.”

    Ahmad is the older brother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot, and later succumbed to his wounds, during an Israeli raid in Jenin in September 2022.

    Mahmoud Muhammad Samoudi had allegedly thrown stones at Israeli vehicles when Israeli forces opened fire at the group of youths he was a part of.

    Elsewhere on 10 June, Israeli occupation forces raided the village of Kafr Nimeh, west of Ramallah, and shot and killed four Palestinian men and injured others.

    Israeli armored vehicles invaded the Kafr Nimeh village, raided homes and commercial stores, confiscated surveillance cameras and set up a checkpoint at the village’s entrance.

    Israeli authorities had been pursuing two Palestinians suspected of setting fire to a vehicle and its trailer in the Sde Ephraim settlement “outpost” in the occupied West Bank overnight on 9 June.

    Sde Ephraim was established on a hilltop belonging to the nearby Palestinian village of Ras Karkar.

    While all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law and building them is a war crime, what Israel refers to as “outposts” are often built without even Israel’s permission and are considered illegal under Israeli law.

    The men killed were identified as Muhammad Raslan Abdo, Muhammad Jaber Abdo and Rashdi Samih Ataya, according to the Palestinian Authority civil affairs department, which did not name the fourth Palestinian who was killed.

    Local news sources named him as Wasim Bisam Zidan.

    Israeli forces had previously detained Muhammad Jaber Abdo for two decades, and he was released in 2022. He was a member of Hamas’ armed wing operating in the occupied West Bank.

    Israeli forces claimed to have found a makeshift sub-machine gun and other weapons in the vehicle.

    Israeli forces then barred Palestine Red Crescent Society medics from reaching and evacuating the injured for at least two hours.

    When one ambulance tried to reach, Israeli forces fired at it with live ammunition, puncturing its tires.

    Israeli forces also opened fire on Palestinians gathered in the area, injuring eight with live ammunition, including a child.

    Israel is now withholding the bodies of all four Palestinians its forces killed in Kafr Nimeh, UN monitoring group OCHA said. Israel withholds the remains of Palestinians killed during what it claims were attacks, intending to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations.

    A governorate-wide strike on Ramallah and al-Bireh was reportedly declared the next day, on 11 June, in mourning.

    Wreaking havoc on a refugee camp

    Israeli forces invaded the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank accompanied with military bulldozers in the late hours of 9 June. Israeli forces briefly withdrew from the camp at dawn the next day but stormed it later with large reinforcements.

    Israeli forces also invaded several other neighborhoods in nearby Tubas, before withdrawing completely on the afternoon of 10 June after a 16-hour operation, which saw armed Palestinians defend the camp from the Israeli invaders.

    Soldiers raided homes in the refugee camp and used them as sniper and observation points. Bulldozers partially damaged some homes.

    A 16-year-old Palestinian child, Mahmoud Ibrahim Nabrisi, was walking out of an alley that led to the refugee camp’s main square when he saw Israeli soldiers stationed in a community center for disabled people in the camp, according to a field investigation by DCIP.

    Mahmoud tried to warn people in the area of the presence of the Israeli forces. That’s when an Israeli sniper hiding behind a small hole in the building’s wall that the military created to observe and shoot from, fired at Mahmoud from a distance of 120 to 150 meters. Three bullets hit Mahmoud, one near his eye, one behind his ear and another in his leg.

    Palestinian youth transferred Mahmoud to an ambulance, which took him to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.

    As has often been the case with Israeli military raids in the occupied West Bank, which include highly destructive attacks on infrastructure, Israeli bulldozers damaged sewage, electricity and water networks during their invasion of al-Faraa refugee camp. Israeli forces also destroyed and bulldozed the refugee camp’s main square and road.

    Israeli forces also surrounded the camp, preventing Palestinian residents from going in or leaving.

    Soldiers burned three houses, partially destroyed two and burned four vehicles and destroyed another during their invasion of the camp.

    Local media circulated pictures of a home in the camp after it was bombed by the Israeli army, as well as damaged and destroyed vehicles:

    The Israeli military’s widespread destruction of civilian and public infrastructures leads residents to believe that the Israeli army is taking revenge on the camp by destroying it, Wafa news agency reported.

    The Israeli military has conducted four major raids into the al-Faraa refugee camp since 7 October, killing 17 Palestinians, the news agency reported.

    “Unprecedented bloodshed”

    Earlier this month, the UN high commissioner for human rights Volker Türk said Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were “being subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed.”

    More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, including at least 504 by Israeli forces, according to OCHA.

    Israeli settlers have killed at least 10 Palestinians, and another seven were killed by either Israeli army or settler fire.

    Of those killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October, 132 were children.

    Israeli forces and settlers have injured over 5,200 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, at least 800 of them children. One third of all injuries were by live ammunition.

    Israeli forces and settlers have killed 51 Palestinian children since the beginning of the year, including two US citizens, according to documentation by DCIP.

    • This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Israel kills children, damages infrastructure in West Bank first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible

    We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • G7 Countries Spend 62 Times More on Military Than Humanitarian Aid

    Despite historic levels of forced displacement due to armed conflict, Group of Seven member countries have increased their military expenditures to record highs while they slash spending on humanitarian aid for people affected by wars that these powerful nations often started or stoked, an analysis published Friday revealed. According to Birmingham, England-based Islamic Relief Worldwide…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Diamonds and Cold Dust: Slaughter at Nuseirat

    The ashes had barely settled on a Rafah tent camp incinerated by an Israeli airstrike before the next, gorged massacre presented itself for posterity’s gloomy archive.  It was intended as a golden operation and had been months in the making.  The rescue of four Israeli hostages, the killing of three others (bound to happen for the expertly inclined), and the massacre of over 274 Palestinians at the Nuseirat refugee camp were the end result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post Diamonds and Cold Dust: Slaughter at Nuseirat first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO Using AI against Russia – Top Official

    NATO using AI against Russia – top official FILE PHOTO. David van Weel. ©  Getty Images / Anadolu Agency / Omer Taha Cetin

    NATO is utilizing artificial intelligence to track Russian aircraft and fueling stations, the US-led bloc’s Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber, David van Weel, has revealed.

    Speaking at the NATO-Ukraine Defense Innovators Forum at AGH University of Krakow, Poland, the top official pledged to deepen cooperation with Kiev, with a new agreement on “battlefield innovation” already in sight.

    “The energy for more collaboration between Ukrainian and Allied innovation ecosystems was contagious, and is exactly why Allies and Ukraine are working together on a new innovation agreement in the NATO-Ukraine Council,” van Weel stated.

    As an example of the integration of various AI solutions, he said the bloc utilizes it to analyze satellite imagery in order to track and count Russian aircraft and fueling stations. The assistant secretary general said that using AI in such a manner was in accord with NATO’s principles on ethical Al use.

    “It’s low-risk,” van Weel said. “Nobody gets killed if you get the number off.”

    In recent months, Ukraine has reportedly ramped up its effort to strike Russian airfields, both those close to the combat zone and deep inside the country’s territory. Moscow appears to have significantly expanded its use of frontline aviation as well, primarily to launch aerial bombs fitted with UMPK (Universal Glide and Correction Module) winged guidance kits.

    Various Ukrainian military sources have noted the growing use of UMPK-fitted bombs by Russia, attributing frontline setbacks to the effectiveness of the weapon.

    UMPK modules, widely regarded as an analogue of US-made Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, fit most freefall bombs in Russia’s arsenal. They are frequently upgraded with thermobaric and cluster munitions, which have already been observed being used on the frontline.

    The post NATO Using AI against Russia – Top Official first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3

    This is about the U.S. Government’s lie to the naive Gorbachev, which fooled him to accept the U.S. empire’s proposal that East Germany become a part of West Germany, and that the Soviet Union and its one-Party rule end, and that its Warsaw Pact military alliance end while America’s NATO military alliance wouldn’t. In other words: it’s about how the Cold War on America’s side continued secretly (and now again brings America and Russia to the very brink of WW3), after the Cold War on Russia’s side ended in 1991 — ended on the basis of America’s lie and Russia’s trust in that lie:

    On 10 September 2015, I documented this lie because so many U.S.-and-allied ‘historians’ were alleging it not to have happened but to be mere ‘Russian propaganda’ (and, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, some have even alleged that “European security has in fact benefited significantly from NATO’s enlargement” — a lie on top of the basic one). I also quoted there ‘historians’ who denied this basic lie, so that a reader could see not only the truth but the regime’s agents’ lies denying that it (the West’s Big Lie) had actually happened or that it was important. But then, on 12 December 2017, the U.S. National Security Archives at George Washington University released even fuller documentation of the lie that had occurred by the U.S. Government, and here are highlights from their documentation of it, so that this continuing Big Lie will be recognized by every sane person as being what it is, the Big Lie that might end up producing World War Three:

    Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.

    Memcon from 2/9/90 meeting w/USSR Prem. Gorbachev & FM Shevardnaze, Moscow, USSR

    Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: “The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process” of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Later in the conversation, Baker poses the same position as a question, “would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?” The declassifiers of this memcon actually redacted Gorbachev’s response that indeed such an expansion would be “unacceptable” – but Baker’s letter to Kohl the next day, published in 1998 by the Germans, gives the quote.

    Source: U.S. Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38).

    *****

    Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner

    Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).

    The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels. …

    The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)

    *****

    In addition, there is this: On 11 August 2014, Mary Elise Sarotte headlined at the U.S. empire’s own Foreign Affairs journal, “A Broken Promise?” as-if there still had been any doubt that it was that, and so an honest title for her article would have been “A Broken Promise” or even “A Broken Promise!” Because there’s no question about it. She reported not only that it definitely was a lie, and one by the U.S. Government itself; and that U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush told America’s stooge leaders, starting on 24 February 1990, that it was going to be a broken promise because “‘TO HELL WITH THAT! [promise]’ HE [Bush] SAID. ‘WE PREVAILED, THEY DIDN’T.’” In other words: on the night of 24 February 1990, Bush started secretly ordering his vassals to continue forward with the intention for the U.S. alliance ultimately to swallow-up not only the rest of the USSR but all of the Warsaw Pact and finally Russia itself. And this has been precisely what the U.S. regime and its colonies have been doing, up until 24 February 2022, when Russia finally put its foot down, to stop NATO’s coming within around a mere 300 miles of The Kremlin.

    Consequently, even if NATO served a constructive purpose during 1945-1991, it has afterward only endangered the world — including especially Europe, making Europe be again the main battlefield if another World War occurs — and thus its continuance after 1991 can reasonably be considered a massive international crime by the U.S. Government.

    NATO is an extension of the will of the U.S. Government, and this is so blatant a fact so that Article 13, which is the only portion of NATO’s charter, the North Atlantic Treaty, that says anything about how a member-nation may either quit NATO or be expelled from NATO, places the U.S. Government in charge of processing a “denunciation” (voluntary withdrawal) — the Charter’s term for resigning from NATO. This term “denunciation” (instead of “withdrawal”) clearly means that if any member does quit, then that will be interpreted by NATO as constituting a hostile act, which will have consequences (the resigning member will be placed onto NATO’s unspoken list of enemies). NATO’s charter has no provision by which a member can be expelled. Moreover, it fails to include any provision by which the charter can be amended or changed in any manner. No charter or constitution that fails to include a provision by which it may be amended can reasonably be acceptable to a democracy: it is so rigid as to be 100% brittle, impossible to adapt to changing challenges. The NATO charter itself is a dictatorial never a democratic document. It takes up, for the U.S. regime after 1945, the function that the Nazi Party had held prior to that in and for Germany: after Hitler died, America took up and has held high his torch for global dictatorship. In fact, “the Government of the United States of America” is also stated in Article 10 as the entity to process applications to join NATO, and, in Article 11, as being the processor of “ratifications” of applications to join.

    This Treaty is an imperial document, of the U.S. empire, none other. And, after 1991, its continuation is based only on lies, including the one that now is coming to a head in Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, though Biden said it is — he said recently of Ukraine, that “they are part of NATO.” Tyrants imagine that what they want can simply be willed into existence, and they don’t care about the essential needs of others. Such individuals are driven by their own hatreds. That is what stands at the very top of NATO.

    And this is why we are now at the nuclear brink, because of an organization that ought to have ended in 1991.

    The post America’s Chief Deceit Against Russia That Has Led the World to the Brink of WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be

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

    Here’s what happened:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Conviction Papers Over Much Bigger Crimes that He (and Every Other Recent US President) Has Committed in While Office

    As practically everyone on planet Earth must now know, Donald Trump has become the first former US president to be convicted of felonies after leaving office. The response to the outcome of the trial from Democrats and Republicans has been predictably binary. Democrats have been reveling in the outcome and seem to think that the trial’s conclusion has delivered a final blow to Trump’s credibility and, in turn, his chances of winning the upcoming election. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, are largely condemning the trial as politically motivated “lawfare” waged by the “radical left” in order to derail Trump’s chances of winning the upcoming election, which might end up galvanizing his base.

    For those of us on the independent left, however, focusing on whether Trump is guilty in this case or whether the trial was politically motivated misses a much bigger point. Either way, the crimes he has been convicted of are small fry compared to the crimes of state that he committed while in office. And these crimes are, at most, only marginally worse than those committed by every US president in living memory, irrespective of which of the two major parties they have belonged to. And the fact that he, all his recent predecessors and, indeed, his successor to the White House, have committed these crimes in an atmosphere of complete impunity is the real issue that the public should be focusing on.

    Of course, documenting the crimes of state committed by Trump and all of his predecessors in the White House would take up volumes. But surveying just his most recent four predecessors shows a consistent record of creating chaos, destruction and lawlessness across the world for the sole purpose of advancing Washington’s geostrategic and economic interests.

    Foreign policy: Illegal wars, self-interested interventions, and support for destabilizing coups

    In terms of foreign policy, Trump’s crimes of state include launching a coup attempt in Venezuela that drastically destabilized the country and exacerbated an economic crisis that itself had been caused in large part by Washington-imposed sanctions. During Trump’s time in office, Washington also increased sanctions against Nicaragua, added new sanctions to the economic blockade against Cuba, and reimposed sanctions on Iran by unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known colloquially as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’). These unilateral sanctions are illegal under international law and have overwhelmingly had the effect of harming these countries’ civilian populations.

    But Trump’s predecessors were hardly much better. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, for example, failed to end the war in Afghanistan and increased Bush’s drone assassination program by a factor of ten. The Obama administration also played a hand in the illegal coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and intervened in Libya, which turned the once-stable North African nation into a medieval throwback with slave markets operating out in the open.

    Readers will hardly need to be reminded of George W. Bush’s own foreign policy antics. In addition to launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration also played a hand in the 2001 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and hypocritically imposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program – in spite of scant evidence that Iran seeks nuclear weapons and even though Israel, the US’s major ally in the Middle East, already holds such weapons in violation of non-proliferation treaties.

    As for Bill Clinton, his administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and launched a disastrous intervention in the Balkans. George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, invaded Panama, launched the First Gulf War, and began expanding NATO ominously close to Russia’s borders – a process that ultimately became a major factor in the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

    Israel: Only marginally worse servility to the US’s Middle East proxy state

    With respect to the conflict in Palestine, Trump did take US toadying to the Zionist state to previously unseen heights, in particular with his administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and legitimization of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights. But again, previous administrations were hardly much better.

    Obama, for instance, failed to issue any punitive measure against Israel during the three major massacres that it committed in Gaza during his time in office (Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). On the contrary, throughout this time the US continued supplying Israel with weapons via lucrative arms contracts.

    Needless to say, as Israel’s military operations in Gaza have unfolded since the October 7 attack, Trump’s successor in the White House (who, of course, served as Obama’s vice president) has taken US enabling of Israel’s crimes to a new low of outright complicity in genocide. Current US President Joe Biden also failed to take any action against Israel following its storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in May 2021 and subsequent brutality against Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

    George W. Bush’s policy toward Palestine included enabling Israel’s human rights abuses throughout the Second Intifada and during its reckless war against Lebanon in 2006. The Bush administration also played a hand in Hamas’s eclipsing of Fatah in Gaza by insisting that the election go ahead, and that the Islamist group participate as part of its policy of so-called “democracy promotion.”

    During Bill Clinton’s time in the White House, he launched the shambolic Camp David summit, which culminated in no agreement whatsoever between the two sides and whose failure was a factor in the outbreak of the Second Intifada. While George H. W. Bush was slightly better on policy toward Israel than his successors by imposing consequences on Israel for bad behavior, he nonetheless oversaw the Madrid Conference and subsequent signing of the first Oslo Accord, which has had the effect of subcontracting out the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to a collaborationist Palestinian Authority.

    And of course, just as during Trump’s time in office, throughout the Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations as well, Washington has continually used its veto power at the UN to block resolutions that condemn, let alone take meaningful action against, Israel’s crimes.

    Civil Liberties: Bipartisan support for authoritarianism and trampling over legal norms

    After leaving the White House, Obama publicly denounced Trump for his authoritarian tendencies. But while Obama didn’t engage in the brazen authoritarianism of Trump – such as threatening the press, pledging to jail political opponents, airing the idea of delaying elections, or stating he is “not going to be beholden to courts” – Obama was hardly a paragon of civil liberties during his time in office either. A 2013 Washington Post exposé, for example, documented the National Security Agency’s repeated abuses of power under Obama’s watch, including deliberate interception of emails and phone calls as well as illegal surveillance of both foreign and domestic intelligence targets.

    Despite promises to shut it down during his presidential campaign, Obama also failed to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where torture, rendition and indefinite incarceration (in flagrant breach of international law) continue to this day. While president, Obama also declined to repeal the Patriot Act (again, after promising to do so as a presidential candidate) and even renewed some of the law’s major provisions, such as roving wire taps.

    It was, of course, his predecessor, George W. Bush, who first introduced the Patriot Act – which has undermined some of the most core modern legal principles such as habeas corpus – and opened the Guantanamo Bay detention center in 2002 as part of his so-called “War on Terror.” Since then, nine detainees have died while incarcerated there and an unknown number have been subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – known in common parlance as torture.

    During Clinton’s time in the White House, he signed the so-called ‘Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996,’, which like the Patriot Act also undermines the legal principle of habeas corpus.

    George H. W. Bush, meanwhile, in the 1970s served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), an organization that is notorious for its civil liberties violations including wiretapping, illegally monitoring postal correspondence, and interrogating people against their will. At that time, it was notorious for its role in Operation Condor in which right-wing governments throughout South America engaged in political repression campaigns against perceived enemies. Bush remained close to the CIA as vice president in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, when it became embroiled in the Iran-Contra Affair, and as president in the early 1990s, when it faced accusations of involvement in drug trafficking.

    Time to stop singularizing Trump as uniquely evil

    Clearly, it is time we take a step back from the narrow focus on Trump’s latest legal wranglings. Focusing on his shady business dealings committed when out of office obscures the fact that, if there were any justice in this world, Trump as well as all his recent predecessors would be tried for much bigger crimes of state that dwarf in severity anything about hush money payments or falsifying business records.

    The post Trump’s Conviction Papers Over Much Bigger Crimes that He (and Every Other Recent US President) Has Committed in While Office first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Brighton Council caves into pressure over Israel-supplying arms manufacturer on its doorstep

    A council has pulled the plug on an arms manufacturer’s planning permission; one that has been complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Brighton and Hove City Council’s Planning Committee met on Wednesday 5 June to consider the permanent retention of a temporary extension to a building owned by arms manufacturer L3Harris at Home Farm Business Centre.

    Stop L3Harris are pleased the council have unanimously opted to vote with their conscience and deny this extension.

    Brighton stops L3Harris

    Planning permission for the site in Home Farm Road was temporarily given for five years from 2018, but it expired in September 2023.

    While L3Harris has been operating without planning consent, Israel has killed over 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza alone, including more than 15,000 children. The actual number killed is much much higher – many people have not been included in the death count due to being either under the rubble or unidentifiable.

    Brighton’s Campaign Against the Arms Trade has evidenced that many of these deaths are directly linked to indiscriminate bombing made possible by the use of the bomb release mechanisms made in Brighton.  This is contributing to residents of all denominations and none feeling unsafe and the Council has upheld its duty to protect its citizens and their right to family life.

    In a deputation inside the meeting, Maude Casey, a representative of Brighton Migrant Solidarity and the Stop L3Harris campaign shared statements from a Palestinian member of the community and a Jewish member of the community, both of whom have loved ones in Gaza.

    A demonstration attended by over 100 people took place outside Hove Town Hall during the Planning Committee council meeting to show support for the representative speaking. This also includes an art installation of hundreds of names of children written on ribbons who have been killed in Gaza since October 7.

    Complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza

    Herbie, a Jewish Palestinian activist and Moulsecoomb resident, said:

    I can see L3Harris factory on Home Farm Road from my house. Living across the road from a factory that’s profiting from the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza has contributed to my declining mental health over the last 8 months.

    It haunts me knowing that my Gazan friends’ families could be killed at any moment, by weapons made in a factory in eyesight from my kitchen. I feel powerless and hopeless and have had to go on antidepressants to cope with my plummeting mental health. Please, shut it down.

    Nidaa, a Palestinian Brighton constituent said:

    I’m a Palestinian woman living in Brighton with my family. It deeply saddens me knowing there’s an arms manufacturer on our doorstep. This mustn’t be normalised and they need to shut down immediately.

    My family in Gaza have been deeply affected by the use of chemical weapons by the occupation. They killed a four year old girl and her dad in front of her mum and six year old sister. The little girl can’t forget what happened to her sister and her dad. Lots of sad stories in Gaza. All of them have been told to stay in the safe places they asked them to move to and after they bomb the place.

    Strong opposition in Brighton

    The application was open to public consultation from December 2023, and received 655 comments – 651 objections, and only two in support. A petition with over 1,400 signatures was submitted. Originally, the extension was to be reviewed in March, but the committee was delayed while councillors sought legal advice.

    Members of the local community have been protesting outside of Brighton and Hove City Council’s Planning Committee Meeting every month since March. They have also taken action at the factory on Home Farm Road, held a Peace Camp for five weeks at the bottom of Home Farm Road and disrupted the last council meeting demanding that Brighton and Hove City Council.

    L3Harris is the 12th largest arms manufacturer in the world, and is making huge profits from Israel’s war on Palestinians, supplying Israel with bomb release mechanisms for its F-35 and F-15 fighter jets.

    Lucy from the Stop L3Harris Campaign said:

    The decision is a landmark victory, sending the message that people in Brighton and Hove will not be complicit in genocide – but there is much more to be done to shut down L3Harris in our city for good, and to end the UK’s wider support of Israel’s massacre of Palestinian civilians.

    This is a small and important first step taken by our council, the next will be to ensure they work with Paxton, the landlords of L3Harris to evict L3Harris immediately for undertaking activity which is illegal under international humanitarian law.

    Featured image via Brighton Against The Arms Trade

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • D-Day 80th anniversary has once again been romanticised into a celebration of war

    The following article is a comment piece from the Peace Pledge Union

    On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, peace campaigners have called for remembrance of all victims of war in a spirit of reflection, rather than celebration.

    D-Day: romanticised by politicians and charities

    Events to mark the anniversary are happening around the UK, with official commemorations in Portsmouth and Normandy. The Royal British Legion has encouraged people to ‘celebrate the legacy’ of those involved. Further events on Armed Forces Day later this month (29 June) will mark the anniversary with 1940s-style entertainment, including music and games aimed at children.

    White poppy wearers and members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), have called on event organisers not to glorify or simplify the history of D-Day and the events that followed. They will join others in remembering the Allied casualties, whilst also insisting on the importance of remembering civilians and people of all nationalities killed.

    The PPU accused politicians including Rishi Sunak and Grant Shapps of romanticising D-Day through constant references to heroism and sacrifice, with little reference to the widespread suffering caused by the fighting.

    The Normandy landings on 6 June are often characterised as a turning point in the struggle against tyranny. King Charles, speaking in Portsmouth, said the Allied troops:

    liberated France and ultimately the whole of Europe from the stranglehold of a brutal totalitarianism.

    PPU members have pointed out that, although some parts of Europe were liberated, others were immediately reoccupied by the Soviet Union, while in other places, such as Greece, British forces violently repressed left-wing movements to prevent them taking power, sometimes with the help of Nazi supporters.

    They also commented that D-Day marked the beginning of a period of brutal fighting across Europe that killed thousands of French civilians and hundreds of thousands of Allied troops. German military and civilian casualties escalated sharply too, with millions killed between D-Day and the end of the war.

    We can’t view Normandy in isolation

    The PPU, founded in 1934, is one of the UK’s oldest pacifist organisations. It referred to the Allied advance at the time as ‘liberation through devastation’, pointing out the scale of the destruction and civilian deaths in France.

    During WWII the PPU campaigned against the Allied bombing of German towns and cities, offered support to victims of German bombing raids in Britain, and called for measures to end the mass starvation in Europe caused by the war.

    Geoff Tibbs, the PPU’s Remembrance project manager, said:

    D-Day is often viewed in isolation, as the moment that turned the tide. But it was only the beginning of a period of intense fighting across Europe, from both the West and the East, which left cities in ruins and millions dead, injured, raped or homeless.

    Far from advertising the virtues of a just war, D-Day and the events that followed show the intolerable human cost of war. This anniversary should renew our commitment to the struggle for a world without war today.

    D-Day: promoting the wrong message about war

    The PPU promotes the white poppy in the run up to Remembrance Day each year. In contrast to the red poppy, which commemorates British and allied military victims of war, the white poppy stands for remembrance of all victims of war, including civilians and people of all nationalities. It also symbolises an opposition to militarism and an active commitment to peace.

    PPU members will protest Armed Forces Day on 29 June, in order to challenge the simplistic image it promotes of war and armed force. As well as D-Day commemorations, Armed Forces Day will feature ‘family fun days’, inviting children to handle real weapons.

    Featured image via the Peace Pledge Union

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The BBC’s political editor just accidently exposed how the broadcaster manipulates the public

    BBC political editor Chris Mason is just another in a long line of establishment shills at the broadcaster – following on from his infamous predecessor Laura Kuenssberg. However, at least the latter was a bit better at covering up the fact she was little more than a mouthpiece for the state. Mason inadvertently exposed during BBC News at Ten how corporate journalists like him help push the establishment’s line (and manipulate the rest of us into voting for its politicians) – even when it comes to war, armageddon, Keir Starmer, and the general election.

    Push the button for the general election, Starmer

    On Monday 3 June, BBC News at Ten host Fiona Bruce was presenting a segment on the Labour Party campaign. She said:

    Keir Starmer says if he becomes PM he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend the UK.

    We can hear you collectively groaning. This is because the ‘if I was PM I would of course kill us all by firing our nuclear weapons’ is becoming a mainstay of general and party leadership elections in recent years. Theresa May did it in 2017. Liz Truss did it in 2022. They all wheel it out thinking it makes them look patriotic – when in fact it makes them look idiotic.

    However, on 3 June Mason actually exposed all these politicians as being even more idiotic; something he probably didn’t mean to do.

    Mason was at the press conference where Starmer said:

    [Nuclear weapons] a vital part of our defence, and of course that means we have to be prepared to use it.

    But Starmer didn’t say this off the cuff.

    Mason: stenographer for the state

    Oh no, he didn’t. It was Mason who asked the question in the first place – giving the BBC its headline. He said, all the while looking down at his pre-prepared notes:

    Keir Starmer, you could be prime minister next month. If circumstances necessitated it, would you authorise the firing of nuclear weapons, yes or no?

    So Starmer seemingly wasn’t going to mention ‘pressing the button’, until Mason asked him.

    This is not the first time the Labour leader has said this. But notice the pattern. Because as World Socialist Web Site documented, every time Starmer says ‘yes, I’ll push the button’, it’s in response to the question from a corporate journalist.

    You would be forgiven for thinking ‘well, maybe it’s Labour briefing these hacks to ask this’. However, casting our minds back to the last decade appears to show different.

    Of course, it was the same for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. A journalist asked him in 2016. Corbyn said no, setting in motion a ferocious backlash from the right of the party. Fast forward to the 2017 general election, and another one of Mason’s equally state-servile predecessors, Andrew Marr, asked Corbyn again. However, this time the then-Labour leader dodged answering properly.

    So, establishment lickspittles like Mason are just as war-mongering as the politicians they perform metaphoric fellatio on. However, there is an ironic twist with all of this.

    Whose nuclear weapons?

    For years, corporate hacks (or stenographers, depending on who we’re talking about) have pushed, pushed, and pushed some more on pushing the button. In reality, though, it’s been well documented that the UK’s nuclear weapons are reliant on the US for their production and maintenance.

    This makes the UK using them a grey area, due to the ‘politics and diplomacy’ of it all. While the UK technically has independent control over its nuclear weapons, as a Defence Select Committee report noted, the only time we’d probably fire ours would be to:

    give legitimacy to a US nuclear attack by participating in it.

    Second invasion of Iraq, anyone?

    Starmer: my dick is the biggest and I can wave it the hardest

    The point being, Mason and his ilk know full well the geopolitics of the UK’s nuclear weapons. But instead, they choose to manipulate the public into voting for which establishment politician in a suit can wave their dick the hardest – all in the name of some colonial-era notion of patriotism, and some easy headlines.

    Maybe Starmer should just press the button when he becomes PM, and put us all out of our misery.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Let’s Dismantle the Existential Threat Known as the Military-Industrial Complex

    We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy. Bombs also make people rich. When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestine Action hit two Barclays branches – annihilating one and redecorating the other

    On Monday 3 June Palestine Action upped the ante over genocide-enabling Barclays – by targetting two locations of the Israel-complicit bank.

    Palestine Action: going after Barclays again

    Overnight, Palestine Action activists targeted the Bradford and Bolton branches of Barclays, investors in Israel’s largest weapons firm – Elbit Systems. This was Bolton:

    Activists left windows smashed and sprayed the banks red, marking them with a symbol of Palestinian bloodshed. This was Bradford:

    Barclays Bank holds over £1bn in shares and provides over £3bn in loans and underwriting to nine companies whose weapons, components, and military technology are being used by Israel in its genocidal attacks on Palestinians.

    Complicit in Israel’s genocide

    This includes General Dynamics, which produces the gun systems that arm the fighter jets used by Israel to bombard Gaza, and Elbit Systems, which produces armoured drones, munitions, and artillery weapons used by the Israeli military.

    Amongst Barclays £3bn investments and loans in companies facilitating the Gaza genocide, the bank holds shares in Elbit Systems which is the primary target of Palestine Action’s campaign. Elbit Systems provide 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, as well as bombs, missiles and other weaponry.

    The Israeli weapons maker market their weapons as “battle-tested” after they are developed during bombardments on occupied Palestine. Palestine Action’s campaign of direct action has seen hundreds of occupations, redecorations and other disruptive actions against Elbit Systems directly, forcing two of their weapons factories permanently shut.

    The direct action network has also undertaken to ensure that firms which facilitate Elbit operations are exposed and undermined, with Elbit investors targeted alongside landlords, suppliers, and other collaborators. To date, several companies including recruiters and an international law firm have all ended ties following a relentless campaign by the group.

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    Broken windows and red paint is incomparable to the Palestinian blood spilt and the destruction of Gaza, which Barclays continues to profit from. Banks can not get away with murder and when all else fails, it’s up to the people to ensure humanity is upheld. Palestine Action will continue to act until the bank divests from Israel’s biggest weapons firm, Elbit Systems.

    Featured image and additional images via Neil Terry and Palestine Action

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Indigenous People of Guam Are Fighting US Militarism and Environmental Ruin

    The Indigenous Pacific Islander community in Guam — known as CHamorus — has long called out the United States military for the environmental and cultural damage enacted on their homeland. This process of occupation and destruction began when Guam was colonized in 1898 and continues to this day, as nearly one-third of the 30-mile long island remains occupied by the U.S. military. Several years ago…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3

    On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

    The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

    “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

    Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

    In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

    It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

    What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

    The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

    One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

    If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

    Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

    In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.

    The post U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Genocide Joe and Sunak commit war crimes in Yemen under cover of Trump’s guilty verdict

    Former president and likely Republican presidential-nominee Donald Trump is now, finally, a convicted felon. So, with the corporate media forcing all eyes on Trump’s conviction, what better time for Butcher Biden to rack up some war crimes? Because, not to be outdone, as the Trump news dropped, Genocide Joe was busy bombing the hell out of Yemen.

    Naturally, the US’s imperial lackey the UK jumped in on the colonial chest-thumping, to prop up their genocidal axis of evil with Israel in the Middle East.

    Bombing Yemen as Trump found guilty

    On Thursday 30 May, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 charges of election fraud. As Reuters reported, the former president had falsified:

    documents to cover up a payment to silence a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.

    That very same day however, the US and UK rained bombs down on Yemen in the middle of the night:

    The US and UK military claimed to have targeted thirteen locations where they had identified buildings:

    housing drone ground control facilities and providing storage for very long range drones, as well as surface to air weapons

    To many, the uncanny timing, with Trump’s conviction swallowing up the media’s attention, was glaringly obvious:

    War criminals all round

    Consequently, an orange jumpsuit might match Trump’s complexion, but he’s not the only one who’d wear it well:

    Because of course, Trump too committed atrocious war crimes against people in Yemen:

    Essentially then, courts have convicted Trump for hush money to a porn star, but blatant murderous war crimes? Nah. Naturally, this suits Butcher Biden and his drone-strike-happy presidential predecessor Barrack Obama down to the ground.

    What’s more, that barely scratches the surface of US and UK war crime complicity. Even now, the duopoly of dying colonial empires are abetting war criminal Netanyahu in his brutal ethnic extermination of Palestinians. I’m old enough to remember when Israel used US-made munitions to burn 45 Gazans to death in a Rafah refugee camp.

    Unsurprisingly, the pair are gearing up to obstruct Netanyahu’s arrest after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for it. As the Canary’s James Wright wrote:

    In other words, Western leaders are arguing that international law does not apply to the West or its allies.

    To date, evidently so.

    Election season: nationalistic imperialism on steroids

    Rancid displays of toxic imperialism? Now election season really is in full swing:

    In short, buckle up for a self-aggrandising spiel of jingoistic imperial impulses from small men in suits for the next six months. Right on cue, here’s Sunak cracking out the ol’ “self defence” chestnut:

    Of course, for the chef’s kiss of timing – parliament – you know, that institution of elected representatives meant for holding government to account, is now dissolved. Naturally, this was the same day Sunak was getting in bed with Butcher Biden to rain terror and death down on people in Yemen:

    Some on X highlighted the attack on Yemen in the context of Sunak’s gross theatre of nationalistic pride-come-election stunt:

    Bombing Yemen to propping up Israel’s genocide in Gaza

    Ultimately however, despite Biden and Sunak’s best PR obfuscation tactics, the reasons for their criminal bombardment didn’t escape peoples’ notice. Specifically: sustaining Israel’s genocide in Gaza:

    Because despite the bullshit pretexts, at the heart of this is Palestine. Notably, the US and UK airstrikes are retaliation to Yemen blockading Israel-bound vessels fueling its genocide:

    Another poster highlighted the appalling racist double-standards at play in the Western corporate media and political establishment:

    At the end of the day, the US and UK can talk big on international law, but the majority world knows, the Zionist apologist war-mongers, with ally Israel, are the biggest war criminals going.

    Feature image via the White House/Wikimedia, in the public domain

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • UK government facing questions over British spy planes’ involvement in Israel’s war crimes

    The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has written a letter to the UK government seeking “urgent clarification” on British spy planes flying over Gaza during Israel’s genocidal assault. Crucially, it raises vital questions over potential UK complicity in Israeli war crimes in Palestine.

    UK Spy planes over Gaza

    An investigation by Declassified UK revealed on 8 May that the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted 200 surveillance flights over Gaza since 3 December. As the investigative news outlet reported:

    All the British spy flights have taken off from RAF Akrotiri, the UK’s sprawling air base on Cyprus, and have been in the air for around six hours.

    Gaza sits around 30 minutes flight time from the base so it is likely the RAF has gathered around 1,000 hours of surveillance footage over Gaza.

    What’s more, Declassified identified that the RAF were operating a spy flight over Gaza at the time Israel assassinated seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers.

    Since its investigation, the RAF has continued these reconnaissance flights. This included a RAF aircraft flying over Gaza on 26 May. Of course, this was the same day Israel brutally massacred 45 displaced Gazans in a Rafah refugee camp in the so-called ‘safe zone’.

    In its statement in December, the MoD claimed it was conducting these flights in “support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity”. Moreover, it said that:

    Only information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant authorities responsible for hostage rescue.

    However, Declassified’s findings has brought these claims into question.

    Now, a new Declassified investigation has additionally unearthed more prospective evidence of UK complicity in Israel’s genocidal siege. In tandem with these spy flights, it found that the British military has flown 60 aircraft to Israel since it started its genocide in Gaza. Notably, while it acknowledged the purpose of the visits remained “unclear”, it identified these as cargo planes capable of carrying over 100 soldiers, as well as weaponry.

    Israel commits war crimes as UK aircraft look on

    Given all this, on 30 May, the IJCP sent a letter to the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO).

    Specifically, the letter argues that the government must disclose certain information to the UK public. Firstly, this concerns if the RAF is sharing intelligence from these reconnaissance flights with the Israeli military. In particular it states that in light of Israel’s WCK and Rafah refugee camp strikes:

    The public urgently requires information about these and other incidents, to establish whether British intelligence was in Israeli hands at the time of the strikes, including intelligence potentially used for target acquisition.

    On top of this, it seeks to establish if the UK is sharing information from these missions with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The IJCP wrote:

    It is also imperative to know whether footage captured of these apparent war crimes will be shared with the Hague. In Parliament, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps declined five times to confirm or deny whether such intelligence will be shared with the ICC. This is despite the fact that the UK, as a State Party to the Rome Statute, has committed to support the ICC’s mandate to prosecute individuals for international crimes.

    Echoing this, ICJP legal officer Zaki Sarraf stated:

    The government has provided the public with little-to-any information on the nature or volume of intel shared with Israel, nor whether it will be shared with the ICC. On both counts, it is imperative that the public knows. British spy planes flying over Gaza whilst Israel commits brutal war crimes against the Palestinians is deeply concerning, particularly considering the UK government’s opacity on the issue.

    Feature image via EGCC Aviation – Youtube

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • If The Wars Go On

    I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

    Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

    It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:

    (Verse 1)

    Come, you masters of war
    You that build the big guns
    You that build the death planes
    You that build all the bombs
    You that hide behind walls
    You that hide behind desks
    I just want you to know
    I can see through your masks

    (Verse 3)

    Like Judas of old
    You lie and deceive
    A world war can be won
    You want me to believe
    But I see through your eyes
    And I see through your brain
    Like I see through the water
    That runs down my drain

    Indeed there is a system of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked.  It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency.  Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession.  It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.

    These wars have their cold and hot phases.  There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game.  That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state.  Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold.  Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT.  It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.

    The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

    The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult.  Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.”  It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down.  It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.

    And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day.  Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.

    Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.

    In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear.  That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East.  That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power.  In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

    Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure.  That they can butcher and badger the world into submission.  The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.

    Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of  U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war.  He is not alone in this warning.

    There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line.  Russia has made it very clear they will respond.  As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines –  “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but  since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations.  They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything.  Just a wasteland.

    Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.

    Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous.  Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level.  Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.” 

    It doesn’t get any stupider.  But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same.  Crooke writes:

    The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

    President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

    The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

    More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by The New York Times and its ilk.  It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell.  Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.

    Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:

    Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

    Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.”  And so?  More of the same?

    Ray McGovern suggest what is more likely:

    Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.

    Desperadoes do desperate things.  In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes.  These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:

    If the World Goes On.

    The post If The Wars Go On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Unbecoming American: Bombs of August

    The idea that the Anglo-American Empire wages war by mistake is not new. Nor are the kinds of mistake novel. There appears to be an entire school of historical literature based on the premise that when the paragons of benevolence among the English-speaking peoples go forth to war then it is almost entirely unintentional. Apologist from down under, Christopher Clark, made a great impression with his slightly Germanophilic addition to the literature ten years ago. Belligerence is conceded occasionally, like when some functionary pronounces that the mainly brown people on the planet need to be regularly instructed in obedience. However, all the really messy wars are attributed to miscalculation. In other words, failing in subterfuge, the regime(s) are compelled to slaughter millions to adjust for their errors of judgement.

    I was a high school student when an Anglophone South African, on whose daughter I had a crush at the time, recommended to me The Guns of August, a historical novel by Barbara Tuchman. Subsequently I read her The Zimmermann Telegram too. Tuchman was a good writer, in the sense that it was a pleasure to read her books. Probably she was also a good historian in the sense of propagandist for national stories. A daughter of the Wertheim and Morgenthau banking dynasty, one need not cast aspersions to contemplate a particular bias in recounting an epoch of immense importance to family fortunes.  In any event, both accounts present the Great War (WWI) in the style of British pageantry, a blood-drenched coronation for the world to come. It is not enough that the history of the twentieth century is told by the victors, a careful genealogy indicates that it is also narrated with the greatest literary skill by the merchant-adventurers (aka bankers) that have funded or plundered along the way.

    Summer approaches. This August 110 years will have lapsed since the general mobilization with which four years of murderous class war commenced. The Great War was not the end of an era of peace. It was the regurgitation of the blood splashed by the Maxim and Hotchkiss guns throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. This August 79 years ago, the US Empire incinerated two Japanese cities with atomic bombs— other cities, including Tokyo, had already been burned to the ground with conventional incendiaries. In February of 1945, more than 3,900 tons of HE and incendiary were dropped on civilians in the city of Dresden before the one-bomb solution had been perfected. Summer approaches with rumours of F-16 V “Fighting Falcons”, atomic bomb platforms, to be delivered to the Ukraine theatre of the Empire’s barely undeclared war against the Russian Federation. The triggers are already being shrink-wrapped in the polystyrene of official apology. With the forward deployment of Pfizer, Moderna, and the regiments of the medical-pharmament in 2020, the decks have been cleared. If “the big one” comes, nearly a billion people will not be able to tell whether they are dying from genetic-engineering injections or radioactive force projection.

    In 2016, a good friend of mine joined me for a nine-hour performance of The Last Days of Humanity (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) by Karl Kraus, on the stage of Teatro Nacional de São João in Porto. Kraus called it a “Mars play”. Written between 1915 and 1922, this play is some five-hundred pages long. It dramatizes all the insidious and infuriating aspects of the war — including especially the mendacity and perversion of language — that began in August 1914 (also the title of a 1971 Solzhenitsyn novel). When we left the theatre, I said to my friend essentially, “they know not what they do”. Of course I meant the theatre company that had prepared and performed this marathon drama. Last year, I met the theatre director in the rua Santa Catarina and repeated to him those very words. He smiled and acknowledged my appreciation of the grand performance. However it was clear he did not understand my reference to prophesy.

    We wait irradiated by the mirages of the “phony war” in our partially personal digital devices for the moment when violent fantasies are no longer virtual. Satiated by malignant narcissism and stimulated by transhuman lust, the switches and circuits inflame as we anticipate August infame.

    The post Unbecoming American: Bombs of August first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin

    Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.

    The post The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A new campaign will stop a UK/US/Australian joint military plan in Wales – and it’s a phoenix of one from the 90s

    A new campaign calling itself PARC Against DARC has announced its official launch on Wednesday 29 May, aiming to stop UK/US/Australia militaries’ plans to create a 27-dish ‘Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept’ – ‘DARC’ high-power radar station at Cawdor Barracks, Brawdy, Pembrokeshire, in the heart of the St. David’s peninsula.

    PARC Against DARC

    Their brand new website, www.parcagainstdarc.com comes as part of the launch and states that the proposals are:

    One of the most health-hazardous, tourism-ruining, skyline blighting military installations ever proposed anywhere in the UK.

    As part of ‘AUKUS’ – the three-way security pact between Australia, the UK, and the US – the military plans are to build three DARC radar installations around the world, one in each of the three countries. The radars would track foreign countries’ communications and military satellites in space, so that British, US, and Australian aircraft could then destroy them with anti-satellite missiles at will.

    This prompts the question on the PARC Against DARC website:

    When did Dewisland, Pembrokeshire or humankind ever vote for the US military to control all of space?

    A scoping report was submitted to Pembrokeshire County Council last year and in attempts to sell the project in a press release the US/UK Military made claims that the project would create one hundred new jobs. However, campaigners say these jobs would be mostly for American specialists and not locals, so in real terms this equates to a massive 300 job loss at the existing site.

    PARC Against DARC is launching what it describes as an “extremely robust campaign website, ‘ram-packed’ with calls to action” along with social media pages, a petition, a campaign crowdfunder as well as lobbying tools.

    Multiple arguments against DARC

    The website outlines several key arguments against DARC including the a security argument, an environmental argument and a health argument, in which it describes “a litany of potential health risks”, stating:

    The science is crystal clear, and decades of research show it: The higher incidence rates of cancers and other health complications experienced by residential populations in the closest vicinity of some particularly higher-powered, long range broadcast-capable radiofrequency installations are undeniable.

    The campaign launch comes in response to announcements from the UK government’s defence minister Grant Shapps last December that St David’s is their ‘preferred UK site’ for the DARC radar array.

    Campaigners point out that while the Ministry of Defence (MoD) might usually be shrouded in secrecy, it simply wouldn’t be right for it to use this lack of transparency to push through dangerous and potentially hazardous plans such as these. Therefore the onus and responsibility is squarely on the MoD to prove the safety of such a vast and environmentally impactful infrastructure proposal. They have a duty of care to do so.

    PARC Against DARC will host a public launch meeting at Solva Memorial Hall at 7pm on Thursday 27 June where speakers and experts will update on the unfolding situation.

    There will also be an open discussion at the meeting where all concerned parties can discuss plans to oppose the proposals and to get involved in the campaign. Organisers invite all residents, local businesses and elected representatives who have concerns about DARC to attend the meeting and make their voice heard.

    Second time around for PARC

    This isn’t the first time this battle has been fought.

    PARC (Pembrokeshire Against Radar Campaign) was originally set up back in 1990 when the US Military attempted to build a similar radar installation on the Dewisland peninsula back then.

    However, the PARC Campaign was so successful and achieved such strong support both locally and nationally that in 1991, Margaret Thatcher (the then-UK prime minister) was forced to publicly announce cancellation of the project in parliament.

    Campaigners say that the strength of public opposition to the radar also led to the sitting Conservative MP Nicholas Bennett losing his seat in parliament.

    The revamped 2024 operation already boasts an impressive and formidable level of support ranging from local, Welsh and UK organisations such as CND and Stop the War Coalition, as well as individual supporters such as Leanne Wood, Labour’s Beth Winter (MP for Cynon Valley), and Plaid Cymru’s Heledd Fychan MS for South Wales Central.

    Campaigners say they especially encourage local businesses organisations and individuals to add their name to the growing list of supporters, highlighting that this support will be vital to demonstrate a vast and diverse range of opposition to the proposals.

    Making Wales vulnerable

    Anthony Slaughter, leader of Wales Green Party, said:

    Wales Green Party fully supports the PARC campaign and will work together with them and others to resist the proposed Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept (DARC) being built in Pembrokeshire.

    The proposed facility will make this part of Wales vulnerable to future attacks as part of any resulting conflict triggered by its use and represents an unacceptable militarisation of space. In an increasingly unstable world with multiple conflicts raging across the globe and impacting heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

    The UK government should not be cooperating in this drive to extend these wars into space. Governments at every level have a duty to work towards creating a fairer, more equal and peaceful world for future generations and should play no part in this dangerous escalation of warmongering.

    We also note the potential health risks and environmental damage that this project would cause which also underline the urgent need for this campaign to be supported at both local and national levels.

    Stop the DARC

    A spokesperson from PARC Against DARC concluded:

    The fight is on! We fully intend to win the battle to stop the radar as they did in the 90’s. The MOD are making out as if it’s just a formality to gain planning permission for this huge project, even insinuating in their press that they just need to ‘run it past the local parish council’ or such like.

    This is simply not the case; we know that major infrastructure projects like these require specialist planning permission which can only be granted by Pembrokeshire County Council, and that there will be several environmental impact assessment stages they’d have to clear long before they could ever begin building.”

    Our plan is to fight them at every level and on every front to make absolutely sure that these proposals are never passed by our elected representatives in County Hall. We will build on the strong history of the previously victorious campaign and echo all of its strengths & successes.

    Last time there were huge rallies, marches and demonstrations and ultimately the entire county stood strong together to fight off the proposals. We are absolutely confident that we will create this avalanche of opposition once again so that these plans will never see the light of day.

    Featured image via PARC Against DARC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Profiteering Military Will Praise War and Parade During America’s Memorial Day of Solemn Mourning


    U.S. Memorial Day, originally intended as a solemn day of mourning for families of dead veterans has long become an opportunity for jingoistic war celebration, deceiving politicians and recruiting officers to parade and glorify warfare as a means to entrap young volunteers for future wars.

    Instead of solemn mourning, on Memorial Day, war promoting corporate media, having tricked so many Americans into fighting and dying in unjust, murderous wars based on lies, now hypes our loved ones’ inglorious death as beautiful military service to entice recruits for their continuing wars.

    We need a memorial day to commemorate all victims of war, especially the civilians. That way people will become aware of the true effect of war and be more ready to oppose war when politicians call for it.

    How many tens of thousands of conscience stricken veterans of US wars in small countries can forget faces of ‘enemy’ dead? – finding smiling photos of beautiful children and wives in the caps or pockets of their clothes? How many American veterans were ashamed to be murdering guys defending their country against our bombing and invasion. Remembering them with love officially on Memorial Day would shake up the war mongers and challenge lies past and present about our wars.

    Let’s not limit those Memorial Day moments of silent mourning solely for Americans, who ‘gave’ their lives in far away places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia just to name a few of the nations invaded by Americans. 

    To honor only US military dead is to glorify the military mindset. Not only that, but all around the world via satellite TV, families still mourning their children’s deaths or maiming, watch clips of Americans publicly honoring US military who fell attacking their countries.

    A pretty slick suckering-in, that military use of the word “honor,” as indiscriminate praise for killing designated enemies of the corporatist governed US, as if they were enemies of the American people. Honoring them as heroes draws a boy in to prove his manhood. Mourning dead military is a turn-off for boys considering enlisting. Mourning is anti-war! Bad for war profits. “Honoring” is pro-war! War is good for the stock market and the profit margins of U.S. weapons manufacturing corporations, conversantly profitable for the American war investing community suspected of criminal insanity.

    The U.S. corporation Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms-producing and military services company, with arms sales of nearly $60 billion. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing, and General Dynamics Corp. are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th largest in the world.

    Let’s have U.S. Memorial Day become “Victims of War Day” to foster war prevention

    Americans should no longer participate in selective mourning only America’s war dead, and instead mourn all victims of war, the millions of civilians, the hundreds of thousands of our designated enemies fallen in their motherlands, and only then, having put others first, as in common humility, will we have the right to mourn the tens of thousands of our very own fellow citizens who sacrificed their lives for, or thinking it was for, the good of our nation.

    Mourn — Not Honour — Americans Who Died in Dishonourable “Mistaken” Wars for GOP, DEMS and the Wall Street Deep State.

    Humankind is in an ugly period of suffering in the bloody hands of imbecilic investors in war, who own the American government and media and who cannot stop themselves from planning war, even terminal nuclear war, since they know that wars make money. Their funded elected politicians and media praise war on Memorial Day.

    Memorial Day! Mourn US Soldiers Killed in Criminally Dishonorable Wars in Other Peoples’ Countries! Imagining what many GIs who lost their lives might be saying on Memorial Day if they could speak from their graves: “While our family and friends mourn our absence, conglomerate owned media, after having used our patriotism to have us fight criminally unjust wars based on lies, now hypes our inglorious death as beautiful military service, blacking out our senseless massacres of millions over the last 60 years and more.”

    Knowledgeable, informed, really patriotic Americans mourn firstly the millions that Americans have slaughtered and only then mourn U.S. soldiers.

    A Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Press Release might say that VFP, or at least many if not all VFP, first mourn the patriots of US invaded countries that fell fighting against overwhelming odds, and their civilian countrymen and children who fell in harms way of those US invading forces. Nothing less than this can dent the Memorial Day adulation for dying for what Martin Luther King called “atrocity wars to maintain predatory investments.”

    What Dead GIs Would Say to the World on Memorial Day about Being Praised as Heroes. If they could speak from their graves, GIs who died shamefully killing, maiming and destroying civilian populations, would appeal to Majority Humanity in the ever targeted and plundered Global South, to effect the same level of solidarity that the racist neocolonial investment banker-driven imperialists of the First World, of mostly Caucasian population display, and bring their five centuries of brutal genocidal Western domination to an end.

    A growing number of Americans are now able to include mourning the billions who have suffered under U.S. led permanent war hegemony, and this writer agrees with those peoples historians who understand that America has become weakened by having self-destroyed it’s economic advantage through spending wildly, unintelligently and massively on its military,* and China will come to be in financial position to offer U.S. a deal better than war, and bring about war investors’ military industrial complex failure to keep power in a war weary U.S.A.

    Post Script:

    This encouraging the honouring and remembering all victims of war on Memorial Day is not new idea. Its long been the hope, plan and fervent desire of peace activists.

    …as in 2022, the Memorial Day Massachusetts Peace Action Society announced, “Today, Memorial Day, activists will gather to honor and remember all victims of war.”

    The post Profiteering Military Will Praise War and Parade During America’s Memorial Day of Solemn Mourning first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden Continues to Provide Israel Billions for War Crimes

    As Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes in Gaza, the United States has seen growing popular opposition to military aid to Israel’s far right government. Since the Nixon administration, the United States has been sending over $2 billion in taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel every year. Starting in 2016, it was raised to $3.8 billion annually, supplemented by an additional $14.1…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pacifists already pledge to resist National Service plans from the desperate Tories

    British pacifists have said they will refuse to join or in any way support the military under the Tories’ plans to reintroduce National Service ahead of the general election, if the scheme is ever implemented.

    National Service: the backlash begins

    In the first major announcement of his general election campaign, Rishi Sunak said a future Tory government would introduce the scheme in 2025, forcing 18-year-olds either to join the military for 12 months full-time or to work one weekend per month in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.

    Labour have called the scheme ‘unfunded’ and criticised the Tories for cutting military spending, without raising any objection to the principle of reintroducing national service.

    Members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), the UK’s leading pacifist organisation, have lambasted the plans, pointing out that they are designed to whip up support for the armed forces and an increasingly aggressive UK foreign policy.

    Although the Tories claim that the plan does not amount to conscription, the PPU has accused them of attempting to introduce ‘conscription by stealth’.

    The PPU has pledged to resist National Service and to support future conscientious objectors, warning the government that the scheme would be met by waves of resistance from young people.

    In anticipation of the backlash, the home secretary James Cleverly has said 18-year-olds who refuse to participate would not be sent to prison.

    Earlier in the year, the head of the British Army called for a ‘citizen army’ to prepare for a future land war with Russia and referred to the British public as a ‘pre-war generation’, provoking speculation about a return of conscription.

    At the time, the Tory government were quick to deny any possibility that conscription would be reintroduced.

    A general election gimmick, or a dangerous policy shift?

    Geoff Tibbs from the PPU said:

    Sunak’s announcement signals a dangerous shift in politics. Conscription has quickly turned from a distant historical memory into a very real possibility, which we need to resist at every turn.

    This is a transparent attempt by the government to whip up everyday militarism and nationalist fervour in support of their reckless foreign policy, ahead of the general election. With the UK’s military spending and nuclear arsenal growing fast, this move sends another provocative signal to Russia and China, which can only make the world more unsafe.

    The PPU, founded in 1934, has opposed conscription in the UK and around the world for ninety years. Many of its original members were conscientious objectors in the First World War and many went on to become conscientious objectors in WWII.

    As the British section of War Resisters’ International (WRI), the PPU stands in solidarity with people refusing National Service in the many countries worldwide where conscription is in force, including in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel.

    The PPU recently marked International Conscientious Objectors’ Day (15 May), along with many other peace organisations in the UK and around the world, to raise awareness of the struggles of conscientious objectors and to send them a message of solidarity.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In Hoc Signo Vinces


    The Son of God Goes Forth to War

    In 1812, need I say more, Reginald Heber composed the hymn of the Church Militant, the text of which bears citation in full:

    The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain; his blood red banner streams afar: who follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain, who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train.

    That martyr first, whose eagle eye could pierce beyond the grave; who saw his Master in the sky, and called on him to save. Like him, with pardon on his tongue, in midst of mortal pain, he prayed for them that did the wrong: who follows in his train?

    A glorious band, the chosen few, on whom the Spirit came, twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew, and mocked the cross and flame. They met the tyrant’s brandished steel, the lion’s gory mane; they bowed their heads the death to feel: who follows in their train?

    O noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid, around the Savior’s thrown rejoice, in robes of light arrayed. They climbed the steep ascent of heaven, through peril, toil and pain; O God, to us may grace be given, to follow in their train.

    According to the astute analyst Mr Mike Whitney, Mr Richard Haass (I wonder whether the name originally meant hate i.e. Hass or hare i.e. Haase), a reverend brother of the Rhodes-Rothschild congregation for the propagation of the faith, has arrived at the same conclusions of his brethren in uniform that the battlefield triumph of the legacy SS battalions and reconstituted Ukrainian military product (Kiever Velveeta) is beyond achievement. As Mr Whitney points out, not only outliers like Scott Ritter, Douglas MacGregor or Larry Wilkerson have stopped singing hymns of immanent victory over the reincarnation of Ivan and Stalin, but members of the general staff have changed their tunes.

    Whereas the professionals cautiously suggest, if not request, disengagement, the real government for whom Richard Haass is a representative “influencer” complacently advises that the West in NATO assembled must and will now shift gears. If an M1 Abrams cannot manage a 15 degree incline in snow or mud, then it is just a matter of firing more rocketry. That is to the extent that overt military support is relevant.

    Clearly Mr Haass also has the strategy of Brzezinski in Afghanistan in mind. Recall the latter’s offensive pronouncement that creating the pseudo-Islamic terrorist forces in Afghanistan (actually the beginning of “America’s own Ghurka regiments”) was justified as a means of destroying the Soviet Union.

    Instead of faux-Muslims, Ukraine is run by crypto-Zionist terrorists who operate Ukraine just like Hamid Karzai ran Afghanistan.

    Depopulating Ukraine also benefits the criminal cashflow underlying the plunder of the territory still known by that name.

    As we have both argued to different degrees, this was war against Russia from the beginning.

    Paul Craig Roberts has insisted from the beginning that Putin failed to see the obvious, thus prolonging the campaign to the brink. I disagree. In real politics it makes a difference what you say too. The tacit avoidance of the obvious (and here Stalin was compelled to act the same) has been necessary to prepare and force the other side to escalate in language first.

    Of course this is not 1938 and Putin is not leading a state out of civil war. Germany’s role has been muted because the “Nazis” are already in the Ukraine. From current reports they are engaged in clearing the corridor for a vain but violent missile cruise to Moscow and Sevastapol. Moreover a great deal of Western war preparation was accomplished by the COVID-19 campaign, whose effects on the Western mass psychology and economy are far from dissipated (as they too are entering a new only vaguely perceivable phase).

    Yet one can see that the Istanbul format was an attempt to reach something equivalent to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. That failed – showing that the West learned from its mistake in the last war against Russia.

    Why is there such an obvious discrepancy between official US military assessments and those of the Establishment? Let us recall that the notorious Pentagon Papers reported the warrior’s pessimistic appraisal of US efforts in Indochina. The late Daniel Ellsberg adroitly “neglected” to include the crucial CIA chapters in his conscientious exposure. Vietnam was a CIA (corporate) war with military cover. The same applies to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin surely knows that. However there are also rules in covert warfare. One of them is that the general public must remain confused or ignorant of the underlying business driving the visible and tangible hostilities. Mr Putin has repeated that all wars end with negotiation. Hence his refusal to table demands or assertions that could render the malicious incapable of concessions demonstrates a profound belief in diplomacy foreign not only to perfidious Albion but to its genotypes in the Anglo-American Empire.

    Therefore, the professional soldiers (as opposed to paramilitary party cadres in cabinet of general staff) can honestly say what they have been educated to see while the political commissariat repeats the substance of their daily briefings.

    For the US, WW2 became desperate only once it was clear that the Wehrmacht was on the retreat. The panic of 1944 that precipitated Normandy and the formal abandonment of fascist (Vichy) and occupied France was triggered by a similar adjustment. 1945 delivered Germany and Japan to US occupation where they have remained ever since. [Except for the interregnum of an East Germany state from 1949 to 1990 — DV ed] It also initiated the kind of war that international financial functionary Bernard Baruch was credited with calling “cold”.

    The physical space has not changed. The strategic objectives remain more or less the same as in the Fourth Crusade (including the sack of major Near Eastern population centers). However, there has been an enormous compression of time and lethality.

    The inhabitants of Western Eurasia aka Europe are supposed to be simultaneously impoverished and enlisted as Crusaders, think of the 1212 “Children‘s Crusade”. The masses of psychologically maimed since 2020 are to find their salvation in vicarious battle with the “Ivan”. The rabinnical-papal absolutism on the Tiber has long been a patron of perdition. However, there is some irony in the regnal name blessing the slaughter on the Bosporus and elsewhere East. Innocent III was anything but. However innocence and purity, like hygiene and solidarity have become the highest virtues among the quick and the dead of the dissolving Western Empire.

    Salvation is just over the rainbow, as the popularity of those banners demonstrates.

    In Hoc Signo…

    The post In Hoc Signo Vinces first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    For Prabir, who is now out of jail.

    On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the implications of its lyrics – much like Donald Trump, who, to Young’s irritation, used the chorus in his 2015–2016 presidential campaign.

    In February 1989, the day after Young received the news that his band’s tour in the USSR fell through, he penned the song’s lyrics, resting on his criticisms of the Reagan years and the first month of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. While it sounds patriotic on the surface, that song – like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – is deeply critical of the hierarchies and humiliations of capitalist society.

    The three verses of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ paint a picture of despair (‘people shufflin’ their feet/ people sleepin’ in their shoes’) defined by the drug epidemic plaguing the poor (a woman ‘puts the kid away/ and she’s gone to get a hit’), the collapse of educational opportunities (‘there’s one more kid/ that will never go to school’), and a growing population that lives on the street (‘we got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man’). Springsteen’s song, written in the shadow of the US war on Vietnam (‘so they put a rifle in my hand/ sent me off to a foreign land/ to go and kill the yellow man’), also captured the strangulation of the working class in the US, many of whom were unable to get a job after returning from a war they did not want (‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/ out by the gas fires of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go’).

    These are songs of anguish, not anthems of war. To chant ‘born in the USA’ or ‘keep on rockin’ in the free world’ does not evoke a sense of pride in the Global North but a fierce criticism of its ruthless wars. ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’ is pickled in irony. Blinken did not get it, nor did Trump. They want the allure of rock and roll, but not the acidity of its lyrics. They do not understand that Neil Young’s 1989 song is the soundtrack of the resistance to the US wars that followed against Panama (1989–1999), Iraq (1990–1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011), and many more.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIII Death of the American Prisoners of War, 1971, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Blinken went to Kiev to celebrate the passing of three bills in the US House of Representatives that appropriate $95.3 billion for the militaries of Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. This is in addition to the more than $1.5 trillion that the US spends on its military every year. It is obscene that the US continues to supply Israel with deadly munitions for its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including the $26.4 billion it promised to Israel in the new bills while feigning concern for the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. It is ghastly that the US continues to prevent peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while funding the former’s demoralised military (including $60.8 billion for weapons in the new bills alone) as the US seeks to use the conflict to ‘see Russia weakened’.

    At the other end of Eurasia, the US has, similarly, used the issue of Taiwan in its efforts to see China ‘weakened’. That is why this supplemental appropriation allots $8.1 billion for ‘Indo-Pacific security’, including $3.9 billion in armaments for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for submarine construction in the US. Taiwan is not alone as a potential frontline state in this pressure campaign against China: the newly formed Squad, made up of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the US, uses solvable conflicts between the Philippines and China as opportunities to weaponise dangerous manoeuvres with the hope of provoking a reaction from China that would give the US an excuse to attack it.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIV Crows, 1972, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Our new dossier, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors Through Northeast Asia, published in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea) and No Cold War, argues that ‘the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines as part of a broader militarisation campaign that extends from Japan and South Korea, through the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, all the way to Australia and the Pacific Islands’. The bogeyman for this build-up in what the US calls the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (a term developed to draw India into the alliance to encircle China) is North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programmes are used to justify asymmetrical mobilisation along the Pacific edge of Asia. That South Korea’s military budget in 2023 ($47.9 billion) was more than twice North Korea’s GDP ($20.6 billion) in the same year is just one example that highlights this imbalance. This use of North Korea, the dossier argues, ‘has always been a fig leaf for US containment strategies – first against the Soviet Union and today against China’. (You can read the dossier in Korean here).


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XII Floating Lanterns, 1968, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    In the early years of the US development of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Chinese scholars such as Hu Bo, Chen Jimin, and Feng Zhennan argued that the term was merely conceptual, limited by the contradictions between the countries involved in the development of the Chinese containment strategy. Over the past few years, however, a new view has developed that these shifts in the Pacific pose a serious threat to China and that the Chinese must respond with bluntness to prevent any provocation. It is this situation, characterised by the US’s creation of alliances that are designed to threaten China (the Quad, AUKUS, JAKUS, and the Squad) alongside China’s refusal to bend before the hyper-imperialism of the Global North, that creates a serious threat in Asia.

    The last section of the dossier, ‘A Path to Peace in Northeast Asia’, offers a window into the hopes of the people’s movements in Okinawa (Japan), the Korean peninsula, and China to find a pathway to peace. Five simple principles anchor this path: end the dangerous alliances, US-led war games in the region, and US intervention into the region, and support unity across struggles in the region as well as frontline struggles to end militarisation in Asia. The latter point is being fought on several fronts by those living near Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base and Henoko Bay as well as South Korea’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence installation and Jeju Naval Base, to name a few.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, X Petition, 1955, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Several years ago, I visited the Maruki Gallery outside Higashi-Matsuyama city in Saitama, where I saw the remarkable murals made by Ira Maruki (1901–1995) and Toshi Maruki (1912–2000) to remember the terrible violence of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These murals, in the traditional Japanese ink wash style sumi-e, depict the immense human toll of the ugliness of modern warfare. Thanks to the chief curator Yukinori Okamura and the international coordinator Yumi Iwasaki, we were able to include some of these murals in our dossier and in this newsletter.

    In 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship arrested Kim Nam-ju (1945–1994) and thirty-five other leftists on the grounds that they were involved in the National Liberation Front Preparation Committee. Kim was a poet and a translator who brought Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ho Chi Minh’s writings into Korean. While in Gwangju Prison for eight years, Kim wrote a range of powerful poetry, which he was able to smuggle out for publication. One of those poems, ‘Things Have Really Changed’, is about the suffocation of the ambitions of the Korean people over their own peninsula.

    Under Japanese imperialism, if Joseon people
    shouted ‘Long Live Independence!’,
    Japanese policemen came and took them away,
    Japanese prosecutors interrogated them,
    Japanese judges put them on trial.

    Japan withdrew and the US stepped in.
    Now if Koreans
    say ‘Yankee Go Home’,
    Korean police come and take them away,
    Korean prosecutors interrogate them,
    Korean judges put them on trial.

    Things have really changed after liberation.
    Because I shouted ‘Drive out the foreign invaders!’,
    people from my own country
    arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial.

    The post Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby

    Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle, and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war.  Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court’s meddlesome ways.  Best for Australia, he suggested, to cut ties to the body to show its solidarity for Israel.

    Dutton had taken strong issue with the announcement on May 20 by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan that requests for five arrest warrants had been sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War. They included Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, the commander-in-chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades Mohammed Al-Masri, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant.

    The measure was roundly condemned by Israel’s closest ally, the United States.  US President Joe Biden’s statement called the inclusion of Israeli leaders “outrageous”.  There was “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”  US lawmakers are debating steps to sanction ICC officials, while the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has promised to cooperate with the measure.

    The United Kingdom also struck the same note,  “There is no moral equivalence between a democratically elected government exercising its lawful right to self-defence and the actions of a terrorist group,” declared UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ) session in the House of Commons.  When asked if he would, in the event of the warrants being issued, comply with the ICC and arrest the named individuals, a cold reply followed.  “When it comes to the ICC, this is a deeply unhelpful development … which of course is still subject to final decision.”

    Australia, despite being a close ally of Israel, has adopted a somewhat confused official response, one more of tepid caution rather than profound conviction.  Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thought it unwise to even take a formal stance.  “I don’t comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally, that which Australia is not a party,” he told journalists.

    In light of what seemed like a fudge, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thought it appropriate to issue a clarifying statement that “there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”  Treasurer Jim Chalmers followed suit.  “There is no equivalence between Hamas the terrorist organisation and Israel, we have it really clear in condemning the actions of Hamas on October 7, we have made it clear we want to see hostages released, and we want to see the Israeli response comply completely with international humanitarian law.”

    Albanese’s opposite number preferred a punchier formula, coming out firmly on the side of Israel and donning gloves against the ICC and its “anti-Semitic stance”.  The PM had “squibbed it”, while his response had tarnished and damaged Australia’s “international relationships with like-minded nations”.  “The ICC,” Dutton insisted on May 23, “should reverse their decision and the prime minister should come out today to call for that instead of continuing to remain in hiding or continuing to dig a deeper hole for himself.”

    Opposition Liberal MP and former Australian ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma, is also of the view that Australia examine “our options and our future co-operation with the court” if the arrest warrants were issued.  Swallowing whole the conventional argument that Israel was waging a principled war, he told Sky News that everything he had seen “indicates to me Israel is doing its utmost to comply with the principles of international humanitarian law”.

    The ears of Israeli officials duly pricked up.  Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister and Observer of its War Cabinet, Ron Dermer, was delighted to hear about Dutton’s views.  “I didn’t know the head of your opposition had said that,” Dermer told 7.30, “I applaud him for doing it.”

    In a sense, Dutton and his conservative colleague are expressing, with an unintended, brute honesty, Australia’s at times troubled relationship with international law and human rights.  Despite being an enthusiastic signatory and ratifier of conventions, Canberra has tended to blot its copybook over the years in various key respects.  Take for instance, the brazen contempt shown for protections guaranteed by the UN Refugee Convention, one evidenced by its savage “Turn Back the Boats” policy, the creation of concentration camps of violence and torture in sweltering Pacific outposts and breaching the principle of non-refoulement.

    On the subject of genocide, Australian governments had no appetite to domestically criminalise it till 2002, despite ratifying the UN Genocide Convention in 1949.  And as for the ICC itself, wariness was expressed by the Howard government about what the body would actually mean for Australian sovereignty.  Despite eventually ratifying the Rome Statute establishing the court, the sceptics proved a querulous bunch.  As then Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd noted, “John Howard is neither Arthur nor Martha on ratification of the International Criminal Court.”

    While serving as Home Affairs minister, Dutton preferred to treat his department as an annex of selective law and order indifferent to the rights and liberties of the human subject. For him, bodies like the ICC exist like a troublesome reminder that human rights do exist and should be the subject of protection, even at the international level.

    The post Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law

    The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law.  Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.

    In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest.  Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.

    From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected.  Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”

    Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts.  US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.  And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”

    The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.  Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”?  (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)

    The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim.  There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.”  As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target.  Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US.  To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.

    The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”

    From the outset, such statements do two things.  The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application.  The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them.  The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe.  The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence.  That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.

    Such arguments echo an old trope.  The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror.  Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections.  Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.

    Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power.  Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law.  The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.

    The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine Action hit back at John Woodcock after they had to lawyer-up over his new report

    The following article is a comment piece from Palestine Action

    On Tuesday 21 May, secretary of state James Cleverly will present former Labour MP John Woodcock (otherwise known as Lord Walney)’s 240-page review on disruptive protest to the House of Commons. The report’s release, initially set to be on Wednesday 15 May (Nakba Day) was delayed, after Palestine Action’s lawyers pointed out Woodcock’s failure to meet his legal obligations as an independent advisor to the government.

    Namely, he did not consult Palestine Action and the other groups mentioned in his report on its contents, nor provided the opportunity to ask for clarifications or a right to reply.  

    Woodcock: avoiding accountability via parliament

    Cleverly will now lay the document before MPs following the ‘Motion for Unopposed Return’ procedure, under the pretext that it was written by an independent advisor.

    This enables the report to be published as a House of Commons paper, which means it comes with the protection of parliamentary privilege — a form of legal immunity that prevents any group named in the report from claiming defamation.

    By publishing the review in this manner, Cleverly and Woodcock are using procedure in a deliberate attempt to avoid accountability – described by Shami Chakrabarti in a recent news article published by the Guardian as an ‘abuse of parliamentary privilege.’  

    John Woodcock, the so-called independent advisor responsible for writing the report, claimed to apply an “objective standard” throughout — though it was only in October 2023 that he referred to Palestine Action in a tweet as “Hamas’s little helpers.”

    Far from impartial

    This assertion of impartiality seems even more dubious, when one considers his ties to the arms industry and long-standing connections with the Israel lobby group “Labour Friends of Israel” — where he acted as chair of the organisation from July 2011 to January 2013. He also makes frequent visits to Israel, with his most recent trip taking place between 2-7 January 2024. Described as a “solidarity visit,” Woodcock’s flights and accommodation were paid for by the European Leadership Network (ElNet UK) – all amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

    Currently, Woodcock is advisor to the “Purpose Business Coalition”.

    One of its clients is Leonardo UK, which has worked with the Purpose Coalition since March 2022. Palestine Action identifies Leonardo UK as an arms company that is facilitating Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

    The weapons manufacturer has been a key focus of the group’s direct-action campaign to shut Elbit down and all its affiliates, with sites across the country repeatedly targeted — from activists occupying one of Leonardo’s factories in Edinburgh, to spray painting the London HQ.  

    Shilling for arms manufacturers and the West

    Whilst Woodcock registered his interest as chair of the Purpose Business Coalition, he excluded his role as chair for the Purpose of Defence Coalition (PDC) – a distinct entity from the Purpose Business Coalition.

    The PDC website was promptly removed, alongside a page on Leonardo and the Purpose Coalition, over the weekend after Woodcock was questioned on it. At the PDC’s launch event on 18 July 2023 in Parliament, which was “powered by Leonardo UK”, Woodcock said the following [emphasis added]:

    Russia’s war on Ukraine has caused a seismic shift in the world. It has highlighted the crucial nature of defence in upholding our values and the need for a vibrant, well-regulated defence industry. The best defence companies have always acted with high ethical standards but their central role in helping the Ukrainian people to defend their sovereignty, and the significant investment they make in the communities where they operate, is rightly prompting ESG investors to look again at the sector. 

    That is why I am proud to launch the Purpose Defence Coalition, part of the wider Purpose Coalition, to bring together the defence sector’s most innovative leaders and businesses to share best practice and develop policy solutions.

    Featured image via Palestine Action and Wikimedia

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tories slammed over “ineffective” response to Israel AND for not stopping arms sale – by their OWN watchdog

    On Tuesday 21 May the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) has released its rapid review on UK aid to Gaza. It has criticised the UK government’s “ineffective” response regarding humanitarian aid. However, ICAI also highlights the fact that the UK has still not suspended arms sales to Israel.

    Israel: UK response not fit for purpose

    ICAI’s review finds that UK aid to Gaza is still largely blocked from entering Gaza despite efforts to improve access.

    The UK aid watchdog has also found that diplomatic efforts have so far been ineffective in securing access to get enough aid into Gaza to address the mounting humanitarian catastrophe, worsening as Israel’s invasion of Rafah progresses.

    So far, Israel has killed over 35,500 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan has submitted his case to ICC judges that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant should face arrest for war crimes. However, there is every possibility countries like the UK could give them diplomatic protection.

    As the Southend Echo reported, ICAI chief commissioner Tamsyn Barton said:

    While the UK has significantly increased aid to Gaza in response to the crisis it’s clear that very little is reaching those who urgently need it, with restrictions on land access – the only way to move enough aid – increasing and the situation for aid workers increasingly perilous.

    She also noted that “the UK and other donors’ diplomatic attempts to improve access and save lives have so far been ineffective shows how fragile the system underpinning international humanitarian law is, confronting a hugely complex crisis such as this”.

    Where is the suspension of arms sales?

    The ICAI report also notes that the US, Spain, Canada, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands have all paused arms licenses or shipments to Israel over fears that they may be used in violation of international humanitarian law.

    While, at the time of writing, the government has declined to publish their assessment of whether international humanitarian law has been breached but the foreign secretary stated in April that he expected Israel to “abide by international humanitarian law, even when challenged”.

    In reaction to the ICAI review Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at Bond, the network for UK NGOs, said:

    The UK’s diplomatic efforts to halt the Rafah offensive and rapidly increase humanitarian assistance in Gaza have been ineffective and ignored. As 1.4 million displaced civilians shelter in Rafah, the UK government must increase pressure and not be afraid to enforce strong diplomatic action to urgently prevent any further assault on Rafah and demand an immediate lasting ceasefire.

    The UK must also set out when it will resume funding to UNRWA, and suspend arms sales to Israel for as long as there is a risk they may be used to violate international law.

    Featured image via Wikimedia

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.