The recent article in the Guardian which notes that the world has the “worst cascade of human rights setbacks in our lifetimes’, focuses on a rather selective set of human rights abuses. While no-one in the West at least, can argue that Russia is a ‘selective’ democracy and the Chinese Communist Party (while supported by the vast majority of mainland Chinese) rules the country with a strong and often repressive hand, those excesses pale into insignificance when we look at the human rights abuses perpetrated by many Western states across the globe.
Wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen (let alone their unconditional support for Israel’s slow genocide of the Palestinian people), by the West are indisputably gross human rights transgressions which require the U.N. to demand , on behalf of those populations, compensation from the aggressor. The U.N. is silent….
While Uighur ‘re-education’ camps, which significantly impact on some Uighurs’ human rights, certainly exist in Xinyang (China says these are to reduce the risk of Uighur Muslim extremism and terrorism promoted by Turkey, the Saudis and Western intelligence groups); current evidence tends to suggest that statements about genocide are a fabrication by those very groups.
The Uighur genocide stories can perhaps be likened to the U.S. state political propaganda theatre of American POWs captured by the Koreans and Vietnamese in the United States’ genocidal colonial wars against those two countries. No solid evidence exists of genocide of Uighurs, but we can make up a really good story with ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘statistics’ and newspaper headlines …..
In response to U.N. criticisms of Navalny’s political party in Russia being forcibly disbanded, and Hong Kong protesters and their Western funded protests militantly arguing for separatism from mainland China, we may yet have to see how Western countries respond to foreign countries funding political parties advocating separatism and sanctions of their own countrymen, on their own patch….
Indeed the continuing and increasing use of sanctions by Western countries against those countries they wish to destabilise is surely another key example of breaches of human rights of those populations. Cutting off access to food, energy and medical supplies and ‘withholding’ ( i.e stealing) money in state bank accounts from countries like Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are blatant abuses of those populations ‘ human rights.
As Telesure notes about Nicaragua: Human Rights Watch… has been notorious for taking a pro-State Department line on Latin America and even contains former State Department personnel on its board of directors. The former (the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation ) , meanwhile, is led by an anti-government partisan who supports imperialist sanctions on her own country. As The Canary reported in December 2018, Jagger has not only expressed support for the crippling US sanctions already in place but even called for the European Union, Canada, and other Latin American nations to issue their own set of sanctions as well.
And perhaps we could look at the multiple and gross human rights violations committed by the West’s ‘colonial’ troops in Africa in the past decade, or the ongoing catastrophe in South and Central America caused by the United States’ brutal Monroe Doctrine tactics.
Western led statements supporting greater freedom and democracy in Russia and China and other autocratic states that don’t kneel to Western business interests, should indeed be a wonderful ideal and a catalyst for freedom for all, were it not for that fact that those very Western governments- particularly the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and some other Western European countries, are also the countries that have waged savage wars across the third world to promote their own ‘interests’ ( i.e. money).
For some unknown reason, those countless wars of aggression by Western and predominantly ‘white’ countries; along with indiscriminant sanctions, torture, drone murders and the promotion of extremism in other countries, do not appear on the list by the U.N. advocate for human rights- one might wonder why that is?
As a result of the backlash against Israel from Western media and human rights organisations as a result of the recent bombing and shelling of Gaza, Israeli supporters are going into overdrive in the United States, Germany, the U.K. and elsewhere to portray any criticism of Israel’s apartheid system against the Palestinians as antisemitisim.
One assumes that ‘antisemitism’ in this case applies to supporting the 70 odd year Palestinian struggle for the return of their homeland – and an end to the murder, brutality, dispossession and terror inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli state and its settler shock troops.
Even now we are told by mainstream media that the continuation of the bombing and shelling of the Israeli prison that is Gaza, is “in response” to incendiary balloons send from Gaza into Israel. The Israeli is just a little disproportionate as Activist Post notes: It is, unfortunately, always the case that no matter what Israel does, even when Hamas does not fire rockets, the story always starts with “but the Palestinians”. To say that a valid response to a balloon with a flaming object being sent to land and perhaps start a fire in lands stolen from Palestinians in Gaza, is an F-16 dropping tons of explosives on one of the most densely populated civilian areas on earth (half of which are children) is a tad ridiculous to say the least. That is kind of like your neighbor flicking a cigarette in your back garden and so you decide to blow up his home with a ton of C-4.
Strangely we are never told what Hamas and its allies in Gaza are ‘responding to’ from the Israeli side- 70 years of a savage brutality that occurs each and every day for Palestinians purposely trapped in that hell by the Israeli regime, where the majority of Israelis (just like ‘white’ South Africans before them) have incorporated sickening personal and systemic racism against Palestinians into their ‘culture’,in an attempt to absolve themselves of the crimes of the Israeli state machine and its settler terrorist groups.
Here is what Israeli stands for……
Chants from yesterday’s state-sanctioned nationalist march through Jerusalem:
“Death to Arabs!”
“The 2nd Nakba is coming. You will end up in refugee camps.”
Or perhaps you might like to read about the daily endless accounts of murder, brutality, theft and savagery conducted by everyday Israelis and their state machine against Palestinians, in a weekly report of the countless Palestinian sufferings every day at the hands of Israelis, by the International Middle East Media Center
THIS is what our so reasonable and democratic allies in the Western world continue to unconditionally support……
This ‘unconditional support’ by the West for Israel’s long-term barbarity is not an accident or simply ignorance of the realities in Palestine. These are deliberate policies of support for the slow genocide of the Palestinian people, because it suits “our interests’.
Since 1948, (over 70 years) Israel and its vanguard army- the “settlers”, have brutalised, killed, tortured, intimidated and stolen the land of the Palestinian people. For over 70 years Western media have assisted the Israeli regime in portraying Palestinians as terrorists and that every Israeli action against Palestinians is a ‘response’ to some terrorist act by the Arabs.
In this latest round of the Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinian resistance to 70 years of brutality and theft, we are told that Israeli military action is a ‘response’ to Hamas in Gaza firing rockets into Israel. In reality this latest round of hostilities is inextricably connected to the Nakba – the catastrophe of 1948 when Israeli settlers and an Israeli military , murdered thousands of Palestinians and displaced many more to refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and beyond, simply to steal their land.
Palestinians expelled from their homes at gunpoint during the Nakba; from bsdsmovement.net
As the Discourse Blog notes: “This is not a ‘clash’ between two equal sides. This is a straightforward attack by Israel on Palestinians. For days, the Israeli government has been systematically assaulting Palestinians worshipping at one of the holiest sites in Islam, during Ramadan, all while enforcing a move to ethnically cleanse a Jerusalem neighborhood of its Palestinian residents. Israeli forces have fired rubber bullets and stun grenades, injuring hundreds of people. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem has been filmed lamenting that Palestinian activists weren’t shot in the head“.
Ramzy Baroud of Common Dreams has a more detailed analysis of the attempted Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Sheik Jarrah community which sparked this latest response from Hamas. This ‘legalised theft’ of Palestinian property is beautifully outlined in this paragraph from Ramzy Baroud:
‘Last February, the Israeli Supreme Court awarded Jewish settlers the right to many Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Following a Palestinian and international backlash, it offered Palestinians a ‘compromise’, whereby Palestinian families relinquished ownership rights to their homes and agreed to continue to live there as tenants, paying rents to the very illegal Jewish settlers who have stolen their homes in the first place, but who are now armed with a court decision.‘
Human Rights Watch have finally decided in the past few weeks that only now is Israel guilty of crimes against humanity, of persecution of Palestinians and is an apartheid state – something that has been indisputable for 70 years!
Is this how people should be treated? How can you, how can we, accept this day to day 70 year humiliation of a people simply because others want their lands?
Ironically, Israeli settlers’ and the Israeli regime’s constant ‘acquisition’ of Palestinian land over the past 70 years means that an Israeli/Palestinian two state solution is no longer a viable solution.
The United States has for much of those 70 years since the Nakba, pretended to act as the independent arbiter between Palestine and Israel in various peace agreements- peace agreements that all sides knew were a farce and had no possibility of ever happening because Israel had overwhelming force and had no intention of stopping its acquisition of Palestinian land. Perhaps President Biden will in reality finally show some moral backbone and force the Israelis to agree to a full and fair settlement with its Palestinian population and the Palestinian enclaves it controls. However, given Biden’s latest response to Israeli atrocities is to say ‘the ‘Israeli bombardment of Gaza is not significant’, we can get a clear sense of Biden’s moral and ethical framework. (Note that the U.K., Germany and Austria have now (15/5/21), once again, also acknowledged their ongoing support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people)
The only solution now for Israel and Palestine is a single state where all its residents have equal rights and where dispossessed Palestinians have the inalienable right of return and compensation for the lives, properties and olive groves confiscated or destroyed by the Israeli state. This apartheid nuclear-armed regime will hopefully depart peacefully.
Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American activist and diarist. A member of the pro-Palestinian group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), she was crushed to death by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) armored bulldozer in southern Gaza in 2003 as she tried to block it from destroying Palestinian homes in Gaza .
You can read the weekly list of casual mindless brutal war-crimes committed by the Israeli regime and its settler groups here at the International Middle East Media Center.
Postscript
With the Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces now (as of 14/5/21) using their $3.8 billion dollars worth of gifted latest military hardware from the United States to bomb and shell Gaza, it is time to acknowledge that this rogue state must be controlled. An extensive United Nations neutral peace force must be put in place across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank to ensure safety for all of its populations, and Hamas and Israeli armed forces and settler terrorists must be immediately disarmed. Where I wonder is the West’s much vaunted “Responsibility to Protect” now?
The West’s ongoing support for the Israeli regime, and its slow genocide of the Palestinian people (that Israel has a responsibility to protect as the occupier of those territories), puts the lie to the West’s vaunted statements about supporting democracy freedom and human rights across the world.
There is no justification for Israel and its Western backers to use the horrors of the Holocaust to justify and legalise its horrific 70 year abuse of Palestinians.
Thankfully an Egyptian brokered ceasefire was declared between Israeli forces and Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 20th May. The message from Biden to Netanyahu in Israel was undoubtedly -‘stop the blitzgrieg, you’re damaging our and your international reputation’. Biden’s pledge to help restore Gaza but ensure no money went to Hamas, who are the legitimately elected government of the West Bank and Gaza, was assuredly a hollow one. The money will instead go to “President” Abbas from the Palestinian Authority, a venal entity who illegitimately govern the West Bank with the full support of the West and the Israeli regime.
Those in Gaza are thankful for this temporary ceasefire, but they know the Israeli war against them will continue regardless; the humanitarian blockades, the limiting of access to essential health services, clean water and sewage services, and the ongoing harrassment, murder and humiliation of Palestinians by the Israeli entity.
As Craig Murray notes in his summary of the proposal, the Kushner plan, and the responses to it from Western governments, underscore the long-term hypocrisy of Western nations and particularly the United States ( as the ‘honest’ broker) in pretending to support the much brutalized Palestinian people into believing there could ever be such a thing as a viable ‘two state solution”.
Mountains & Cliffs
If it were not for the fact that successive Israeli governments since 1948, have terrorized, stolen, destroyed houses, lands and property, tortured and imprisoned many thousands of Palestinians (including many children) for the crime of wanting to retain their own homes and lands, then this could almost be some stupid farce; a joke by puerile amateurs who know nothing of history, and certainly nothing about human rights or even compassion.
If you have the stomach for it, read the daily litany of extreme abuse, racism and terror inflicted by Israeli army soldiers and “settlers” on the Palestinian people at https://imemc.org/
The news outlet IPSNews, notes: The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has described the much-ballyhooed US Middle East peace plan as “more like Swiss cheese– with the cheese being offered to the Israelis and the holes to the Palestinians”.
There is now only one solution; and that is a single state entity which recognizes all peoples in the lands of what is now Israel/Gaza and the West Bank as having equal rights: which recognises the right of return of those millions of Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and liberty since 1948 by the Israeli machine, and which provides appropriate compensation for those losses….
Lieutenant-General Soleimani; leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, was, as Soleimani himself expected, assassinated by United States drone or helicopter rockets on the morning of Friday 3rd January 2020, while leaving Baghdad Airport by car after a civilian flight in to Baghdad from Tehran to meet with the Iraqi prime minister.
Soleimani was revered by many Shiite Muslims around the world for his military successes in helping Shiite Hezbollah protect and defeat an Israeli invasion of Lebanon (part of Israel’s ‘grand’ strategy of building a mythic “Greater Israel”), but more importantly, for his work in both Iraq and Syria coordinating the largely successful battle against Al Qaeda in Syria (or HTS) and ISIS (otherwise known as Daesh).
As Iran has consistently and publicly stated, and the evidence confirms, both Al Qaeda and ISIS, were not only funded and supported by the lunatic Wahhabist Saudis, but also by the United States and other Western countries, particularly the U.K. (long a mercenary supporter of the Wahhabist Saudi tribe since Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War. Also note the very apt comment from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that Soleimani was a ‘threat to our interests”.
The Wahhabist Muslim sect believes that all non Sunni Muslims are ‘heretics’ and should either be forcibly converted or killed . General Soleimani was therefore following the lineage of the great Shiite Imams of medieval times, in protecting all Shiites -this time from the scourge of Wahhabism.
In collaboration with the Russians, a revitalized Syrian Arab Army (Assad’s forces), a re-armed Iraqi Army, and Shi-ite militias under his command, Soleimani had at the time of his death largely succeeded in defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The jaws are rapidly closing in on the remnants of Al Qaeda, HTS, ISIS and other Saudi and Western backed jihadists in Idlib in Northern Syria and Iraq. There is real fear in Washington “intelligence” circles that mainstream media will finally be forced to expose the direct linkage between Washington and the head-chopping jihadists.
The recent death in Ankara of James Le Mesurier, leader of the White Helmets, supposedly humanitarian aid workers in Syria, but in reality well funded propaganda units for the jihadist groups and their backers, is likely to be directly linked to the imminent exposure of the White Helmets as fakes, and the revelation of Western governments’ manipulation and likely bribery of senior staff at the OPCW to create a ‘scientific finding” that the Assad government had gassed civilians. Western governments will consequently be finally forced to acknowledge their appalling collaboration and support of pyschopathic jihadist killers in the Middle East- all in the name of oil and support for the Israeli entity.
American intelligence agencies consequently panicked and reasoned that a decisive provocation against Iran, would ensure that Iran would ‘over-react”, and could thus be seen by the world as the crazed religious pariah state that the United States has always tried to portray Iran as being since the Islamic revolution.
It might be useful at this point to list just some of the legitimate grievances Iran has against the United States.
The arming and support for Saddam Hussein’s attempted invasion of Iran which cost at least a million Iranian lives (and in which ferocious war, Soleimani learnt his battle skills)
The shooting down of a civilian Iranian Airbus A300 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf , with 290 resultant deaths. There was no official apology from the United States although some compensation was paid out belatedly.
Ongoing promotion of Iran as a pariah state at the UN and with other Western governments, which resulted in severe sanctions and the deaths of many innocent Iranians because of Iran’s non existent nuclear weapons programme.
Unconditional support by the United States of the Wahhabist Saudi clan who have funded and managed Sunni jihadist groups, killing many Shi-ite across the world, but particularly in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
United States unconditional support for the Israeli entity, in their desire to create a “Greater Israel” by the theft and extremely brutal occupation of land from (largely Sunni) Palestinians, Shi-ite Lebanese and Syrians.
Perhaps it might therefore be understandable why Iran’s leadership calls the United States, the “Great Satan”.
Iran is, unlike many of the United States’ allies in the Middle East, a democracy of sorts. However the rules for democracy are managed and controlled at a central level by its Shi-ite Islamist leaders, and democratic choice is very limited (not too dissimilar in fact to the U.S. presidential election process).
While there are undoubtedly many in Iran who long for what Western democracy appears to promise, most are also fiercely patriotic; proud of their many thousands of year’s history as Persians. Faced with ‘existential” external threats, as Iranians have been since the Islamist revolution in 1979, few Iranians would support an overthrow of their current government.
Soleimani’s death was mourned by hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq and Iran. Memorials in Tehran had to be postponed because of the size of the crowds mourning him in other cities in Iran, but the most crucial memorial was held for him in the Iranian city of Qom . “Qom is considered holy by ShiʿaIslam, as it is the site of the shrine of Fatimah bint Musa, sister of Imam Ali ibn Musa Rida[6] (Persian Imam Reza, 789–816 CE). The city is the largest center for Shiʿa scholarship in the world, and is a significant destination of pilgrimage, with around twenty million pilgrims visiting the city every year..” -Wikipedia.
The red Shi-ite flag of the blood of the martyrs and revenge, was raised in Qom at his funeral procession. According to local reports it is the first time in the Qom mosque’s history – a holy site since the Middle Ages – that the red flag has been raised over the building.
It should be noted that the raising of the red-flag over Qom is not simply an Iranian government contrivance, but a religious appeal to all Shi-ite believers around the world to avenge Soleimani’s death -one who battled with the forces of evil to save Shi-ites.
Albawaba .com notes that ‘Last night Khamanei and Rouhani consoled Soleimani’s family.
‘Who is going to avenge my father’s blood?’ One of the commander’s daughters asked.
In response, Rouhani promised her that ‘everyone will take revenge’ and assured her as she wept, ‘we will, we will avenge his blood, you don’t worry.’
‘The Americans did not realize what a grave mistake they have made. They will suffer the consequences of such criminal measure not only today, but also throughout the years to come,’ Rouhani said.
‘This crime committed by the US will go down in history as one of their unforgettable crimes against the Iranian nation.’
Is it possible that United States intelligence officials were unaware of the paramount importance of Soleimani to the 112 million people in the Shiite world? Did they not understand that his killing would provoke a desire for revenge against the United States which would be unstoppable?
No matter whether President Trump carries out his threats to bomb 52 targets in Iran including “cultural sites”. (which would of course be a war crime, but nothing new to the United States, which has been guilty of horrendous war crimes and genocide in so many parts of the world since the U.S began: see our blog article; America’s Exceptional Interest in Wars) or whether the United States might lose its residual sanity and nuke Tehran, the revenge would continue .
The United State’s only option now is to seek forgiveness from the Iranians and negotiate a deal which allows their soldiers to leave safely from their many many bases circling Iran.
In just one example, the United State’s main military base in the Persian Gulf is located on the island of Bahrain. Bahrain is ruled by an autocratic and brutal Sunni ‘prince” over a population which is 62% Shi-ite. It would not require any intervention on the part of the Iranians for a rebellion to once again boil over to depose the Bahrain Al Khalifa royal family and for Shi-ites in Bahrain to destroy the U.S. base there and its occupants.
While Western media choose to portray any actions by Shi-ite groups around the world as being by “Iranian proxies”, Shi-ite groups, whether military of otherwise, will seek to avenge the death of Soleimani; they have now been called to do so.
It would be timely for someone in Washington who is sane, and with more than the level of intelligence currently displayed, to seek the mediation skills of someone with credibility to both sides, like Russian Federation Foreign Minister Lavrov- who may be able to help forestall what currently looks like the inevitable tragedy for the 60,000 plus United States soldiers stationed in the Middle East, as a result of General Soleimani’s killing.
We have witnessed the incredible barbarity shown by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinian protesters in the last few weeks of the “Day of Rage” and the marking of 70 years of theft and violence by the Israeli population against Palestinians since the Nabka: 70 years of murder, terror, torture and imprisonment, for the crime of not giving away the lands of their ancestors to the settler invaders.
Penned in Palestinians who are , as one journalist put it, “like sheep for the slaughter”.
Despite the dictatorial behaviours of the Turkish President, and his many other shortcomings , President Erdogan is quite specifically accurate in calling Israel an ‘apartheid state”. Israel has, over the past 70 years, progressively ‘acquired’ former Palestinian land and walled in those remaining who dared to stand up to the U.S. funded military might of Israel. Arabs in Israel, (who have the exactly the same genes as the original Jewish inhabitants of Israel); are discriminated against in a very systematic and ‘legal’ way by the Israeli state. Settler extremism, violence and bigotry reinforce those laws. We only need to look at the extreme racist rants of Israelis in leadership positions in Israel, to convince ourselves of the obscenity of their stance. Or perhaps you might like to endure this list of disgusting anti-Palestininan behaviours and statements from a series of Israeli ‘leaders” by the Angry Arab
Thus the latest targeted killings of largely defenceless ( apart from stones and a few molotov cocktails) Palestinians protesting their illegal walling in by Israel, are just one more example of the barbarism that is the state of Israel. A systematic, crude and vicious attempt to destroy the Palestinian people in order to acquire their lands. The extraordinary bravery and tenaciousness of generations of Palestinians since the Nabka , should never be forgotten.
As Jonathan Cook notes: the Wests’ direct and implicit endorsement of Israeli very literal terrorism towards Palestinians over the past 70 years , will result in further atrocities by Israeli troops and settlers.
And as the former UN Rapporteur for Palestine puts it ‘The feeble Israeli claims of its right of self-defense or attributing Palestinian martyrdom to Hamas are so shallow and lacking in credibility as to discredit further rather than provide justifications for this exhibition of homicidal violence on a massive scale not as isolated incident but as a series of arrogant reenactments.”
Negotiated via U.N. auspices, the Iran deal limited Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium and thus limit any potential for Iran to develop nuclear weapons; something it has always said is has not intended nor planned to do. UN inspections prove that Iran has indeed complied with the JCPOA in full since its inception in 2015. The deal in no way prohibits Iran’s develop of missile technology, which would be seen by any state as a sovereign right to protect itself from aggressors.
And Iran has many threatening states to protect itself from. These include Israel, who sees Iran as its major spoiler to the ongoing expansion of Israeli territory in the Middle East; particularly because of Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, who roundly defeated Israel in its last attempt to occupy Lebanon in 2006 . Then there is Saudi Arabia, the despotic regime which pretends to be a ‘monarchy” who actively supports protects and funds the Salafist terrorists across the Middle East and beyond. Salafists believe that all other Islamic and other religious beliefs other than their own are ‘heretical”, and therefore those people who hold such beliefs need to be either forcibly converted or disposed of. Hence the millions of Shiite peoples of Iran and its Shi-ite theocracy are anathema to the Saudi ‘princes’. Iran is a large country of over 80 million people, and while its economy has been made vulnerable by years of U.S. and other Western countries sanctions, it has managed to develop a wide range of responses to those sanctions, and particularly a home grown defence industry.
Iran is therefore not significantly vulnerable to attack by Saudi Arabia , despite S.A.s huge defence spending ($76 billion in 2017 – third highest in the world after the U.S. and China) , as opposed to Iran’s approximately $14 billion), largely because of its very effective home grown ballistic missile systems. (it is always amusing to note that U.S. military ‘specialists always attribute this or that countries’ home grown military capabilities to some other country – implying in some way that the specific country does not have the technology , research capability and technical know-how that only the great and exceptional U.S. has!)
And finally, Iran’s perhaps most significant threat comes from the United States, who has desperately tried to destabilize Iran’s theocracy in every way possible way since its inception in 1979, after overthrowing the U.S. and and U.K. installed despot, the ‘Shah’ of Iran .
The U.K. has also played a supporting role to the U.S. since 1953 in supporting the salafist regimes in the Persian Gulf and encouraging the export of Saudi and Qatari jihadist terrorists to Middle East states which are not active supporters of Western colonialism or Israeli expansionism.
Thus the latest move by the Trump administration to undermine the U.N. JCPOA agreement and threaten sanctions against countries and companies that do not comply with its renewed sanctions against Iran, is simply part of the ongoing war by the United States against Iran that had its inception in the overthrow of its brutal dictator , the Shah.
The drivers for this ongoing war against Iran are largely economic: primarily re-acquisition of the huge Iranian oil market by American oil companies will buffer the U.S. against the imminent collapse of the local shale oil market, whilst ensuring that Iranian owned oil and gas is not pipe-lined through to Europe and Turkey.
However the other major U.S. impetus for Iranian destabilisation and overthrow of its independent theocracy is the role of Israel and its Zionist lobbyists in Washington. Now that Saudi Arabia has been bought into the Zionist fold and accepts the Israeli theft of Palestinian lands since 1948 as legitimate, there is only Iran as a significant power player in the Middle East who is able to confront Israeli expansionism. A tame Iranian regime that supported both Israel and U.S. colonial policy in the Middle East would mean Chinese and Russian commercial and strategic ambitions there could be thwarted, and U.S. and U.K. (and to a smaller degree, French) companies could make billions exploiting the region. With the truly psychopathic John Bolton now as Trumps defence advisor, drooling for war with Iran, and Israel’s Netanyahu frothing at the mouth for the U.S. to bomb Iran, all options are truly on the table.
While Iran does not have an effective airforce, due to the long-standing sanctions against it; it’s ballistic missile capacity is indeed formidable, although largely deprecated by U.S. defence analysts . Should the U.S. launch an attack on Iran’s infrastructure, as it has continually threatened to do over the years, the U.S. would undoubtedly be able to , over time, obliterate much of Tehran and its key urban centres as it has done in North Korea, Vietnam Libya and Iraq in the past, along with the consequent huge suffering and civilian casualties that entails. However in the first days and weeks of such a war, Iran’s widely dispersed military units, and particularly its missile and anti-ship units, will be able to inflict massive damage on U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers in the Gulf because of their close proximity to Iran. An ongoing guerilla war against U.S. economic and military interests in the Middle East could well last for years. In comparison to the U.S. war against Iraq, Iran’s military capabilities cannot be under-rated as American defence analysts are wont to do in their arrogance. This would not be the “cake-walk” that the neocons pretended the Iraqi invasion would be!
Should Israel also enter the war, as it has often promised to, then Tel Aviv is now well within missile striking distance by Iran’s Lebanese allies. Hezbollah.
One would hope that the crazies like Netanyahu and John Bolton will finally be locked away somewhere safe for the rest of humanity’s sake , and the fools like Donald Trump fade into quiet oblivion, but sadly it seems , that may not be the case…
Nine-year-old Mohammed Jaber remembers how he took his pocket money and went out with his 5-year-old sister Ghina, as the long summer day of fasting came to an end, in the month of Ramadan. “My parents try to keep me indoors, but I was bored, so we went to buy jellybeans and chips,” he says. Once on the street, in the densely populated al-Bureij refugee camp, he heard that the neighbours had received a call warning of an air strike. Mohammed rushed back home. There are no shelters in Gaza, so his parents and their six children took cover in a bedroom.
“Mohammed remembers the last war two years ago. He knew what was going to happen,” his mother Mariam explains, recalling how the child, white with fear, ran and picked up a pillow to cover his face and ears. “I thought he was going to suffocate himself,” she says. Suddenly, the deafening explosion sent pieces of shrapnel and glass flying through the room. “All my children started screaming. I managed to calm them down, but after that they were in shock; they would not speak.
“Since then, Mohammed has started bedwetting again, and my 5-year-old daughter Ghina keeps saying, ‘Mama, people will bomb our house.’ Whenever her father goes out, she clings to him. She thinks he will not come back if she lets him go.” Mariam does not know what to tell her young children. “I cannot tell them the truth, that there is no safe place, and we cannot leave.”
With specific demeaning laws for ‘Arabs” as opposed to Jewish settlers. With walls constructed to keep out the rightful Arab occupiers of their own lands in Palestine. With the evil brutality of Israeli settlers against the people and children they have stolen their lands from ( and Israeli laws which allow that brutality to be wiped away) – with the ongoing imprisonment of children without trial (or a “Military” ( read show-trial) trial for those Arab adult and children captured or killed or tortured for their ‘misbehaviour’ against Israeli troops on their own lands -it is small wonder Palestinians remain angry against their oppressors.
One day soon perhaps, the Israeli population will begin to understand that their continued oppression of the rightful owners of Palestinian lands can only lead to the destruction of Israel. Continued fictional presentations of Arabs as lesser beings by a bigoted society only exacerbate the inevitability of that end.
Only negotiation with real truth and honesty by the Israeli entity with Palestinians, and and an acknowledgment and compensation for the dreadful wrongs committed by that entity over the last 70 years , will allow a one state solution to occur ( the only viable solution) , where Jews and Arabs can once more live harmoniously together in Palestine/Israel.
In the last few months we have seen the Trump administration reeling from one extraordinarily stupid move in foreign policy, to another.
Firstly we have the tragedy and farce of the declaration that the US will ‘accept’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; somewhere that all Western nations have been loathe to go (officially) whilst fully accepting and unconditionally supporting the reality of the triumphalism of the apartheid racist Israeli entity. A two state solution has, since 1948, been known to all parties as a totally non-viable option, and will never happen.
It is of course possible that the Israelis finally realise that the nation of Israel has no future in the long term , unless it grants full right of return to all Palestinian and full compensation for lands stolen since 1948 and lives destroyed… The alternative for Israel does not bear thinking about.
It is not that Trump’s declaration changes anything; what is upsetting for the West and for China and Russia, is that it makes plain that there never was a two state option- and that the United States has always been the Dishonest Broker in the ‘peace process’ .
Now we can start to face reality in Palestine- and it is not a pretty picture for the Israelis.
The ludicrous aspect of this, is that for those modern day Israelis whose ancestors came from the Levant; they are of exactly the same ethnic Semitic lineage as the ‘dirty Arabs’ they despise . We have seen more than 60 years of completely farcical “peace’ negotiations; the Israelis have never had any intention of returning any of the lands stolen by war or genocide, and both the ‘disinterested” broker and the Palestinian negotiators have always known that.
Then we have the ongoing playground bully tactics to North Korea by the United States president and his policy advisors and chiefs of staff. A country that knows full well the epic scale of barbarity the American nation is capable of; having endured American genocide in the Korean War and the continuous threats from various U.S. presidents and US generals since that time to blast them back into the stone-age. With its back against the wall, North Korea has only one option- to continue to develop enough nuclear ICBMs to substantially debilitate the American economy ( Given that of course from the American side, there will be no negotiations with North Korea until they ‘behave’ )
And then we have dear Nikki Haley the United States ambassador to the United Nations displaying bits of what are supposedly Iranian made missiles launched by the Yemenese Houthis against their Saudi aggressors ,who are currently killing thousands of Yemen citizens with cholera and millions through starvation…
But hey Nikki!- what ‘s more important? -the lives of a few million Yemenese? Or the need to destroy Iran to serve the interests of the Israeli supporters and Saudis who pay Congress and the Washington ‘think-tanks’ ? One hopes that karma is not for real:- Nikki’s future lives are not going to be exactly pretty…nor will it be in this life should true international justice be finally served.
The facade has been removed…We have seen a dramatic transition from a President able to so plausibly lie through his teeth (and win a Nobel peace prize for it), to one who seems to say (or tweet) whatever fleeting thought is on his mind at the time , but whose sole immediate directive for decision-making is money and power, rather than a longer term strategy of deceit to reach the desired same end.
It is disturbing to think that these great leaders of the ‘Free World’ are supposedly the best of humankind- a sad indictment on us all
As Christopher Davidson makes clear in his 2016 book ‘The Shadow Wars’; the extremist ideology of wahhabism – an ‘offshoot’ of Islam, is deeply imbedded in the Saudi regime. That sectarian brutal regime could not have come to power and retained its military domination over the Arabian peninsula, without the unconditonal support of first the British and latterly the United States. Their Wahhabist dogma states that all who don’t believe in their version of Islam are heretics and should be forcibly converted or put to death.
This dogma is the foundation of Al Qaeda and ISIS ; and these groups, along with fanatical wahhabist ideology promoted in many Saudi funded Sunni mosques around the world, has been actively promoted by those in power in Riyadh since they were effectively installed by the British in the First World War to counter the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s reach..
As Davidson meticulously notes in his book, the support of the British and then the Americans for this fanatical regime, has never wavered; even after the 9/11 terror attack and now the genocide occuring in Yemen. The ongoing U.S. and British support for wahhabist terror to further Western agendas can be taken as a given.
As Human Rights Watch notes (2017) Saudi Arabia does not tolerate public worship by adherents of religions other than Islam and systematically discriminates against Muslim religious minorities, notably Twelver Shia and Ismailis, including in public education, the justice system, religious freedom, and employment. Government-affiliated religious authorities continued to disparage Shia Islam in public statements and documents.
And now we see a Saudi attempt to completely eliminate any Shia influence within the ‘kingdom’ in their ongoing brutal crackdown of the minority Shia population in Awamiya on the Arabian peninsula.
Because of the huge amounts of money flowing from the Saudis into Washington and other Western ‘think-tanks’ ( ie propaganda outlets) , both Western media mainstream media and the Washington and London ‘intelligence’ communities are largely uncritical of this despotic regime and its outpourings of hatred and violence to any Muslims and other Middle Eastern religions who do not espouse their Wahhabist ideology. As long as the Wahhabists remain useful in the cause of eliminating any threats to Israel, countering an independent Iran or eliminating other Middle Eastern states critical of the United States or the United Kingdom- then that is all good!- regardless of the loss of lives or the devastation left behind…The destruction of the Shi-ite state of Iran is a priority of both the Saudis, Israel, as well as the U.S. and U.K. The re-appropriation of Iranian assets and oil by Western interests is looked upon longingly.
Saudi Arabia funds many wahhabist sect mosques throughout the Western world; whose aim is to preach hate and sectarian discord and promote the killing of others who do not accept their extremist views. Given that this sectarian dialogue is visible open and blatant, how is it that those western mosques have not been closed and the Saudi funnelling of money towards Wahhabists has not been blocked?
Or is this ‘minor’ irritant of localised terrorism and hate in Western states ‘worth it’, when the majority of the mosques’ gullible and disenfranchised indoctrinated young adherents can be shunted off to the Middle East with the assistance of Western intelligence agencies, so that Shi-ite or non secular non U.S. aligned states can be destroyed?
We have reached a rather surrealist situation where the previously hidden long term ‘agreement’ to divide the Middle East according to their respective spheres of influence between Israel and Saudi Arabia has now become completely visible, and now means that ISIS has needed to apologise to Israel for their unintended attack on Israeli ‘Defence’ forces. For many Arabs this apology is a clear signal of the betrayal by the Saudis of the Palestinians and their 60 year brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel military forces. Taken in conjunction with their genocidal war against the impoverished Yemen people by massive Saudi military forces, and with the total support of the U.K. and U.S., Saudi credibility has reached an all time low amongst Arab populations across the Middle East.
Once can only hope that the end of the brutal ‘reign’ of the House of Saud is nigh.
