Tag: perpetual war

Biden’s Destructive Legacy

As President Biden’s term approaches its end, the US and several parts of the rest of the world are significantly worse off than they were when he took office. While the president is frequently lauded by members of the foreign policy establishment as a successful foreign policy leader, his tenure has been marked for the most part by deepening US involvement in foreign conflicts that show no signs of ending anytime soon. US policies under Biden have served only to stoke destabilizing conflict, and the president has shown no inclination to bring any of the wars currently backed by Washington to an end. Biden’s presidency showed the world just how extensive the rot in US foreign policy is, and most other nations will not soon forget what restored American “leadership” wrought.

Biden ran on the promise of ending America’s forever wars, but after the withdrawal from Afghanistan he then spent most of his presidency going out of his way to involve US in conflicts where no vital American interests were at stake. The risk of great power conflict has also risen under Biden as he has pursued a China policy of containment and rivalry that the US can ill afford while US-Russian relations have sunk to new lows over Ukraine. In the Middle East, Biden has enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, backed their invasion of Lebanon, and supported their attacks on Iran. He has helped Israel sow chaos across the region, and he committed the US to a new open-ended and illegal war in Yemen. The president’s extreme ideological attachment to Israel led him to pursue an indefensible policy of unconditional support that has fueled the slaughter of civilians and created one of the worst man-made famines in modern times.

Keep reading

Israel’s War on Journalism

There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas.

They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors.

Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.

And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.

The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination.

At least 134 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992. 

Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.  

Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza.

Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.

Keep reading

South Africa Files ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence of Genocide

South Africa filed 750 pages of “overwhelming” proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Monday, the deadline for submitting final evidence in the ongoing trial.

South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusi Madonsela delivered the legal document — known as a memorial — to the ICJ headquarters in the Dutch city. Under the court’s rules, the contents of the memorial cannot be made public at this time.

According to a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the memorial is a “comprehensive presentation of the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza.”

The office said the document “contains evidence which shows how the government of Israel has violated the Genocide Convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction, and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war and to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”

“The evidence will show that undergirding Israel’s genocidal acts is the special intent to commit genocide, a failure by Israel to prevent incitement to genocide, to prevent genocide itself, and its failure to punish those inciting and committing acts of genocide,” Ramaphosa’s office added.

South Africa’s filing comes amid Israel’s ongoing 387-day assault on Gaza, which according to Palestinian and international agencies has killed at least 43,020 people — most of them women and children. At least 101,110 others have been wounded and over 10,000 Gazans are missing and believed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed homes and other structures. Millions more Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened by Israel’s invasion and “complete siege” of Gaza.

The filing also comes one week after senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet and national lawmakers spoke at a conference advocating the ethnic cleansing and recolonization of Gaza.

Ramaphosa’s office lamented that “Israel has been granted unprecedented impunity to breach international law and norms for as long as the United Nations Charter has been in existence.”

Keep reading

The Ukraine War is Lost. Three Options Remain.

I started listening to George Beebe a few years ago when he was warning about tensions in Ukraine, the real risk of escalation to nuclear war and the dangers of groupthink.  Back in 2021 he assessed that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine given the combination of the US’s determination to bring the country into NATO and the fact that it was a “now-or-never moment” for Moscow to stop this happening.  Years earlier, US Ambassador to Moscow, and now CIA director, William Burns had urgently cabled Washington to warn that the Russians regarded Ukraine as ‘the reddest of red lines’:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” Ambassador Burns wrote. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

I quote all this because if Ukraine, all of Europe, and quite possibly all of us, are to be spared worse, we have to get past one very unhelpful word: “unprovoked”.

It stands in the way of doing what is utterly essential: deep, constructive and ongoing discussions between Russia and the West to create a security framework for all of Europe that is acceptable to all parties.

Since February 2022 Western propaganda has drummed into people’s minds that the invasion was “unprovoked”.  Very few outside the West, however, share this perspective.  George Beebe doesn’t support the invasion, estimates that Russia has a lot to answer for, but rejects this kind of simplistic rhetoric as unhelpful and potentially disastrous.  He was interviewed this past week by Professor Glenn Diesen and Alexander Mercouris on The Duran and, in my estimation, gave a masterclass in responsible statecraft.

“There has been a lot of narrative management, a lot of policing of public discourse.” Beebe said. “Anybody who suggested that there may have been some element of provocation that affected Russian decisions on this was immediately anathematized.”

Beebe says the West has an erroneous idea as to the very nature of the conflict. The US and the Europeans defined the Russian invasion as a “deterrence model problem” rather than a “spiral model problem”.   In the former, the adversary is a kind of Hitler that must be stopped at all costs.

Keep reading

Einstein Opposed Zionist Colonization in Palestine and Predicted the Current Catastrophe

A few weeks before the creation of the State of Israel, Shepard Rifkin, executive director of the Stern Group, requested that representatives of the group meet with Albert Einstein in the United States, “the greatest Jewish figure of the time” according to I.F. Stone. Einstein’s response was unequivocal:

“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”[2]

To grasp Einstein’s prescience, one need only replace “the British” with “the Americans” and “terrorist organizations” such as the Stern Group and the Irgun group with the Netanyahu government, the political descendants of the leaders of these groups, Menachem Begin and Yihtzak Shamir.

Einstein said that his “life was divided between equations and politics.” Yet, among his biographers—there are hundreds of them—and in the mainstream media, his extensive political writings on Israel and Zionism have been, at best, swept under the rug, at worst, completely distorted making him a supporter of the State of Israel.

That is, until the late Fred Jerome sought them out, found them, had them translated, mostly from German, and published them in the book Einstein on Israel and Zionism. Unfortunately, the first edition of this book, published by a New York publishing house, had a very small print run, was never promoted or made into an e-book, and sold out in no time, the publisher having bowed to enormous pressure from the Zionists. That is why Baraka Books has published a new edition with the agreement of Jocelyn Jerome, the author’s widow.

It was in Germany in the 1920s, a time of rampant anti-Semitism when the theory of relativity was attacked as “Jewish science,” that Einstein was drawn to the Zionist movement. It was not until 1914, when he arrived in Germany, that he “discovered for the first time that he was a Jew,” a discovery he attributed more to “Gentiles than Jews.” Before that, he had seen himself as a member of the human species.

Keep reading

Israel’s Extremists Have a Plan for the Day after the Genocide 

Under the slogan ‘Gaza is Ours, Forever’, a large number of Israeli extremists and right-wing politicians met in the settlement of Be’eri, near the Gaza border region, on October 20-21.

The group represented the who’s who in the Israeli right, far right and ultranationalists. They included Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, May Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as ten MKs of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

The event, entitled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, was organized by one of Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the notorious Daniella Weiss.

To appreciate how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: on June 27, the Canadian government, though one of the most stalwart supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions on her, due to her “role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians.”

The hate-filled conference, however, was but a culmination of a year-long effort to build a case of why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Strip and re-establish illegal settlements.

Keep reading

Failure of U.S. Leaders Should Precipitate More Efforts at People’s Diplomacy—Like in the Vietnam War Era

On September 19, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee hosted a webinar focused on the significant impact of women in the Vietnam era anti-war movement.

The first speaker, Vivian Rothstein, who was drawn to anti-war activism after participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, spoke about her participation in a conference in 1967 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, with 40 other American peace activists who met with members of the resistance in North and South Vietnam, including Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a top official with the southern-based National Liberation Front (NLF).

The Bratislava conference was co-organized by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and provided an opportunity for U.S. peace activists to learn directly from Vietnamese about what the U.S. government was doing.

Rothstein said that the Vietnamese women asked to meet separately with the American women who were part of the delegation. They told them about horrific rapes being carried out by U.S. soldiers, bombing of villages, and parachuting of Vietnamese women onto U.S. military bases to serve as sexual playthings for U.S. GIs.

The Vietnamese women hoped that the American women would go back to their communities to tell people what was really going on, with the belief that they would pressure the U.S. government to end the war.

Rothstein said that the Bratislava conference was very meaningful for everyone who participated in it and a good example of people’s diplomacy—citizens getting together, independent of their government, to build ties and work toward peace.

Keep reading

Trump vows no more foreign wars – Kamala, he says, will “gamble with the lives of millions”

If reelected as president in November, Donald Trump is promising to not send any more Americans to fight and die in foreign wars.

At a recent campaign stop in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the Republican candidate told a crowd that he and only he is able to prevent another world war, arguing that his Democrat rival, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III, guaranteed, because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.”

“To make her president would be to gamble with the lives of millions of people,” the former president continued. “Sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to fight in a war in a country you’ve never heard of.”

Earlier this year in his nomination acceptance speech, Trump vowed to “end every single international crisis that the current administration has created,” including both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.

Trump has yet to reveal any specific plans for making this happen, but is sure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are not the types to vote for because they want to continue supporting and financing “other people’s wars.”

“… if Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames, and your kids will be going off to war,” Trump wrote in a screed last week on his Truth Social platform.

“But I will not send you to fight and die in a foolish, never-ending foreign war,” Trump reiterated most recently at his Pennsylvania rally.

Keep reading

Israel is acting with the same tools against Gaza, Lebanon and now starting in Syria

Because of the time limits I have at the moment, I will provide shorter posts until I can get internet and computer usage for long enough to follow up with a full article. This section of an article by the editor of Lebanese media outlet Al Akhbar, Ibrahim Al Amin provides a succinct and accurate description of what Israel’s agenda is in the region:

“Yesterday the clown Hochstein returned from a new show. To be honest, the problem is not with the man who does what is good for him or what is required of him, but with those who still listen to him and take him seriously, With those who believe that the Americans are in a position to pressure Israel to stop the war in Lebanon.”

“In practice we are facing one truth and that is that Israel is acting with the same tools against Gaza and against Lebanon. It started the same thing in Syria and is preparing to move to Iraq and then to Yemen. Netanyahu does not hide his continued preparations to strike Iran. Those who demand to separate the arenas do not want to understand that what Israel is doing with the support of the United States, Britain, Germany, and with the partnership of several Arab countries, is the unification of the arenas by force.”

“Since this is the case, the resistance project is the only option and the alternative is life or death by starvation in oppression and humiliation. And anyone who continues to accuse the resistance (Hezbollah) of being responsible for what is happening should know that from now on he is a partner in this aggression.”

Keep reading

How Israel is trying to beat the ‘Axis of Resistance’ by dominating the regional supply chain

I am republishing an article published yesterday by Mondoweiss because it confirms so much of what I have been saying since October 7th. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said quite clearly – Israel is important to the US as a prevention strategy against China, Russia, Iran and a free “Global South”. The article is written by Ahmed Alqarout.

The article in full:

In a recent public address on October 4, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei highlighted for the first time what he described as U.S. and Israeli plans to control the region’s natural resources. He stated that Israel’s current war campaign aims to position Israel as a hub for exporting energy to Europe and importing technology to ensure its survival. Khamenei called for resistance against the so-called India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a proposed land bridge connecting India, Saudi, the UAE, Jordan, Israel, and Europe. 

Days after his call, the Iranian parliament discussed introducing a bill for a defensive alliance with the countries belonging to the “Axis of Resistance.” Khamenei further elaborated on this vision on October 27, calling for the establishment of “a global political and economic alliance, and if necessary a military one” to confront Israel and stop its ongoing crimes against the peoples of the region. This signals a clash of markets might be the next phase of the war. At the heart of this clash is the conflict over dominance in regional and global supply chains. 

Supply chain disruptions have become a recurring global issue since the outbreak of COVID-19, which caused countries to implement stringent controls over imports and exports. The concept of supply chain security swiftly became a central concern. The U.S. government adopted protectionist measures, particularly regarding vaccine exports, while Russia and India imposed restrictions on food imports and exports, and China limited the export of protective equipment and medicines. This experience highlighted the importance of supply chain security for many nations.

The emphasis on supply chain security was not solely driven by pandemic-related concerns but also by the escalating geopolitical competition between the West and the BRICS nations. The U.S., in particular, began wielding supply chains as a strategic tool against China and Russia, especially in light of the semiconductor and Ukraine wars. The U.S. imposed restrictions on Chinese companies’ access to critical semiconductors produced using American technology, affecting major firms like Huawei and ZTE. In the aftermath of the Ukraine war, the U.S. led a Western coalition in imposing broad sanctions on Russia’s supply chains, attempting to isolate the country from the global economy. In response, Russia and China retaliated by limiting critical exports of rare earth minerals and uranium to the West.

The global supply chain conflict extended to the MENA region. In the context of its war on Gaza in 2023, Israel sought to exploit its integration within global and regional supply chains to achieve its military objectives. By weaponizing its position within these supply networks, Israel aimed to further its strategic goals. 

Keep reading